Doc Barbara and the Bard

 Doc Barbara received a good education with plenty of emphasis on subjects that some consider to be of scant value in modern life. Yet, as she isn't truly a part of modern life, she disregards this snag. Naturally, she studied Shakespeare but has recently started to empathise with the wrong characters. In Macbeth her sympathy reaches out to the witches who hang about either on the blasted heath or in the wings of the stage waiting to come on again clutching the toe of a frog or the leg of a lizard. Do they draw lots, she wonders, for who has to hold the most grisly ingredient? Her grasp of the difference between art and reality is tenuous.

Gadzooks, but I am fed up of this blasted heath. I'm out!

This is her mental image of one witch getting so cheesed off with the blasted heath that she pops into the wings for a cuppa.

Once, during a performance of Cymbeline, (and what a performance that turned out to be!) she had totally lost the plot by Act 3 but kept awake, unlike the rest of the audience who were enjoying a quiet snooze, although less than silent in some cases. Her ancient hearing aids let her down at the line: "Thy mistress, Pisanio, hath played the strumpet in my bed". This is because she had had them expensively adapted to block all rude words which might offend her delicate sensibility, The result was perfect sense, however, much better than the original in her opinion. One letter can make all the difference.

Doc Barbara's new orchestra

 Doc Barbara, as we have heard, has an affinity with lowly creatures. Sceptics have been know to opine that this is because no-one else relates to her but this is not true: she has at least 3 friends: me, Belinda Twaddle from the days when her fabulous exploits were recorded in The Monmouthshire Mouthpiece, Professor Ramsbottom-Thrutch from that same era -and someone else who does not wish their name to be mentioned in connection with our heroine.

Her main love is invertebrates (as can be seen from the picture below when she forgives the worm his erroneous Italian) but she welcomes spurned creatures with spines because she feels at one with them. Recalling the myth of Orpheus (she received an excellent education and is fluent in Latin, with a particular love of the ablative absolute) she decided to reverse the ideology and teach animals to create spell-binding music.

There were, of course, teething problems, even with the toothless worm, but Doc Barbara soon licked them into shape (not literally, of course - even she has some boundaries) but they were soon adept and played for hours in the grandstand of the local park to the delight of all.

I cannot show you an image of the awestruck and rapt individuals, because they were so overcome with joy that they had to go home to lie down in a darkened room for several days, taking their unusually silent children and dogs with them.