Apologies for the absence of updates on the Culture Club blog. The Culture Club has still been running strong (we’ve had two meetings since my last post here), but I’ve been unable to update the blog for the past few months.

This has been down to issues at work and home taking up lots of my time. I also found I lost the energy for a while, after my father (85) fell seriously ill, and two doctors told us he had very little time left to live. He went into hospital and happily has made a great recovery. He’s still too weak to be at home, so is now being cared for in a nursing home (which has brought its own stresses of course), but it looks like he’s continuing to stabilise and he is looking better.

In the meantime, we’ve had one Culture Club session which I haven’t been able to document. During May and June we looked at the following works, around themes of Spain and Bees:

• Beekeeper – James Barrett and Selima Hill (Opera Libretto
• The Spirit of the Beehive – Directed by Victor Erice (Movies)
• Pan’s Labyrinthe – Directed by Guillermo del Toro (Movies
• For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway (Fiction
• The Bee Poems – Sylvia Plath (Poetry)

The next session is underway, and I’ll post about that next.