Word: merula
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mother was a whore ? when she gave birth she called the bastard Guinness but my father was probably the bloody cook," is a jolt. It is also the first flash of his occasional viciousness, here darkly humorous, often plain nasty. According to Read, he often treated his wife, Merula, with disdain, putting her down in public and insisting she give up her own acting career. When this led to her breakdown, he left her alone in a suite at the Ritz Hotel to get through it. His relationship with his son, Matthew, was awkward and could also be cruel...
...anymore." He likes movies, but he loves the stage and is even now on the lookout for a good play. At the moment Alan Bennett (The Old Country) is his favorite English playwright; David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross), his favorite American. Between roles, Sir Alec and his wife Merula play country folk in a home 55 miles southwest of London, near Winchester. "Farmland round and about," he says. "It's a very simple house, and it's always untidy, always dusty and ill cared for, it seems to me. But we love...
...last September and put the old homestead on the market. But they quickly repented. "That is where half my life has been spent," he says, "and where my various pets are buried. Everything kind of spreads out from there." Now the new house is for sale, and he and Merula are comforting themselves with a wry, Guinness-style logic: "We're going to be so old and blind and deaf by the time the road gets there that maybe we won't notice it." Old age seems a long way off for such a quick mind, and those eyes...
...Clover) and a teen-aged parrot (Percy) in a pleasant "Westport modern" house that is the architectural scandal of Hampshire. Mornings at 7 the Bentley pulls up. "Good morning, Fred." "Good morning, sir." Evenings at 7 it brings him back. Occasionally there are guests-the close friends. Merula does her own cooking, and Alec is an expansive host. "I say, that plate's cracked!" "Oh dear, Guinness has boiled the wine again...
...generally evenings are quiet and bedtime is 11. Alec works on his sides for the next day, reads a little Dickens, has a go at mah-jongg with Merula-he is "mad for the game." Weekends he stuffs his pockets with patented French fuzees and stalks about the Guinness acres (there are ten of them) waging chemical warfare on the moles. Last week, as he jabbed a poison capsule into the ground with the point of a stout stick, he cocked a fiendish eyebrow and remarked: "I feel beastly, but one of us has to go." And then back...