on his 15th birthday we gave him the gift of a pregnant donkey
Back from holiday and back to work tomorrow. The last time I left work I remember jumping on a bus into town and thinking to myself that I had the next 17 days off- it seemed like an eternity. It really wasn't.
We had a week in Manchester and a week in Norn Iron. I hadn't been to Manchester for seven years. Kate's family home is in Didsbury, which I was very taken with. Villagey with a little library, war memorial and loads of specialist cheese shops and things; it's like Stoke Newington without the crackheads and psychopaths. And Manchester may have its faults but the efficiency of their bus service left me frothing with envy; more frequent than tubes. We visited the Lowry museum and saw an exhibition about "what the North means to you". My favourite quote came from Michael Winner ("the North begins after Hyde Park and Oxford St, anything North of Oxford St is ridiculous"). In the Northern Quarter, for the first time in my life I saw a shop selling both Vichy albums. Can't think why. It was very nice to go to the pub with David and Cay as well- afterwards I was introduced to something called the chip nan, and delighted to make its acquaintance I was too.
We flew to Belfast from the nauseating John Lennon airport. They have a grand piano in the departure lounge; and no pianists. Anyone who's good, of course, doesn't want to show off and you just get a load of kids banging away and torturing anyone in hearing distance. Belfast Oxfam had a sign up saying 'Please do not play our pianos unless YOU CAN ACTUALLY PLAY THE PIANO'. The other annoying thing about this airport was their confiscation of my sellotape. It was the smallest roll you can get, about two inches in diameter. The WH Smiths on the other side was selling huge rolls of masking tape. I think the guy had remembered it was his wife's birthday, and was also on the lookout for Milk Tray and wrapping paper.
Most of the time in Belfast was spent doing family stuff as it was my parents' 30th wedding anniversary, although we did get out to have a drink with Gareth on the last night. My mum & dad's favourite restaurant had a curry made of 'Oscar Wilde chicken' on the menu. We asked the waitress, who had no idea despite having worked there for 15 years. The Internet doesn't throw up anything either. The Ulster Museum is shut for three years so sightseeing opportunities were thin on the ground. My dad did take us to the Armagh Planetarium star show for a bit of nostalgia. The show was a history of the space race, which went a bit mad in the last five minutes- promising that soon, every one of us normal people will have the chance to be space tourists; and berating current governments for "forgetting to take risks" and spending their money on, oh, education, poverty, flood defences when they should be ploughing it all into the space industry.
The last couple of days were spent on the Antrim coast, at Kate's parents' cottage in Glenarm. That part of the world where everyone talks a bit funny; but christ, it was so refreshing to get away from big cities for once. Total quiet, fresh sea air, open space, stunning landscape views, no people about, plenty of wild raspberries and blackberries to pick. On the first day we walked over the hill to Carnlough and I bought dulse, which I hadn't had for years. I'd forgotten how great it is- and the look on Kate's face when she tasted it was perhaps the highlight of my trip. That night her folks sailed in from Scotland on a very impressive boat. We went on a long walk across these huge, terrifying Beachy Head-style cliffs the next day, and had a tour of the Bushmills distillery. That was amusing, they kept lecturing us on the processes that make their whisky superior to Scotch; and at the end we had a couple of 12-year-olds. Depressing but unsurprising to note that Bushmills is owned by Diageo (owners of Smirnoff, Bells, Baileys, Gordons, Tia Maria and pretty much any spirit that you can get in pubs). On the last night we were treated to an astonishing meal at a Chinese place in Ballymena. This was full-on Trimalchio stuff; the first course alone consisted of mussels, oysters cooked in ginger and langoustines (prawns the size of carrots).
Now we're back a contending with a mouse (again!), and the neighbours from hell who've moved into our basement. One of them manages some band called the Young Knives. They play their music so loud, it's like the band are live in your bedroom. The walls shake. You tell them to turn it down at midnight, and at 2am they wake you by turning it back up. What's worse is that at 7am, the mild-mannered chap above us has started retaliating by playing Heart FM's Top Ten four times louder than he usually would. I'd like to empty my ISA and, Larry David-style, get a full orchestra to play The Rite of Spring on their back lawn about 5am, but what's much likelier is that we'll phone the council, or the police station, and fuck all will happen.
Enfin, films recently seen; Private Fears in Public Places is the new offering from Ancien Vague giant Alain Resnais. It comes from an Alan Ayckbourn play and it is quite sitcom-ish, comdey of misunderstandings and so on. He's mellowed since his prime. It's soft and gentle and filled with lovelorn Parisians and constant picture-card snowfall. It all looks ravishing, very solid script/characters and there are a couple of flashes of brilliance, as well as moments of pure cheese, but without the audacity of a Marienbad. I do like this André Dussollier chap- seen him in quite a few films recently, none of them that great, but him I find endlessly watchable. He's only really got this one face, an anxious smile/grimace, but what a face it is. More Resnais than the Resnais is La Vie en Rose, a biopic of Edith Piaf that liberally jumps between her childhood, her prime and the last few years of her life. Jumbled-up deathbed remembrances, perhaps; there are pointers that we're being shown a selective memory, a few what-ifs amongst the painful episodes. Worth seeing, but by I felt it hit a slump by necessity, given the facts of her life. Raised in a brothel and then a circus, found singing for scraps by an impresario, once she makes it it's off to America and in love with a champion boxer who will never leave his wife, and as banal as that sounds. I wondered what Piaf died of, the actress looked in her 90s when she was meant to be half that.
My eternal gratitude, meanwhile, to whoever decided to put The Sleeping Tiger on the new Dirk Bogarde boxset. It's the first film Losey made in England. He had to pay some old bloke £100 to use his name for the director's credit, and they had to push him under the table when anyone from Hollywood came into the studio canteen. Film history; the film itself is crackling with nervous energy; quite cheap and a stupid, cliched script but that was often when JL worked his alchemy. The premise is as daft as Secret Ceremony- Bogarde is a crook who burgles Alexander Knox's shrink, is overpowered by him, and told that the police will be kept out of it if he agrees to move in and become Knox's psychoanalytical guinea pig. A contemporary of, and good companion-piece to, Hitchcock's Spellbound ensues. There's some glorious camerawork in a scene where Bogarde spirits Knox's wife off to a bacchanalian jazz club in Soho, and a very funny -and simultaneously enlightening- death scene. You also get generous helpings of the usual Oedipalism, cruelty, jealousy and homosexuality; it's The Servant, The Romantic Englishwoman, etc, but it's more stimulating and more fun than any cinema I can think of.
I'm quite glad, by the way, that my favourite directors have refrained from carking it for the meantime. Both Bergman and Antonioni popping off in the space of 24 hours was more than my feeble and delicate heart could bear.
We had a week in Manchester and a week in Norn Iron. I hadn't been to Manchester for seven years. Kate's family home is in Didsbury, which I was very taken with. Villagey with a little library, war memorial and loads of specialist cheese shops and things; it's like Stoke Newington without the crackheads and psychopaths. And Manchester may have its faults but the efficiency of their bus service left me frothing with envy; more frequent than tubes. We visited the Lowry museum and saw an exhibition about "what the North means to you". My favourite quote came from Michael Winner ("the North begins after Hyde Park and Oxford St, anything North of Oxford St is ridiculous"). In the Northern Quarter, for the first time in my life I saw a shop selling both Vichy albums. Can't think why. It was very nice to go to the pub with David and Cay as well- afterwards I was introduced to something called the chip nan, and delighted to make its acquaintance I was too.
We flew to Belfast from the nauseating John Lennon airport. They have a grand piano in the departure lounge; and no pianists. Anyone who's good, of course, doesn't want to show off and you just get a load of kids banging away and torturing anyone in hearing distance. Belfast Oxfam had a sign up saying 'Please do not play our pianos unless YOU CAN ACTUALLY PLAY THE PIANO'. The other annoying thing about this airport was their confiscation of my sellotape. It was the smallest roll you can get, about two inches in diameter. The WH Smiths on the other side was selling huge rolls of masking tape. I think the guy had remembered it was his wife's birthday, and was also on the lookout for Milk Tray and wrapping paper.
Most of the time in Belfast was spent doing family stuff as it was my parents' 30th wedding anniversary, although we did get out to have a drink with Gareth on the last night. My mum & dad's favourite restaurant had a curry made of 'Oscar Wilde chicken' on the menu. We asked the waitress, who had no idea despite having worked there for 15 years. The Internet doesn't throw up anything either. The Ulster Museum is shut for three years so sightseeing opportunities were thin on the ground. My dad did take us to the Armagh Planetarium star show for a bit of nostalgia. The show was a history of the space race, which went a bit mad in the last five minutes- promising that soon, every one of us normal people will have the chance to be space tourists; and berating current governments for "forgetting to take risks" and spending their money on, oh, education, poverty, flood defences when they should be ploughing it all into the space industry.
The last couple of days were spent on the Antrim coast, at Kate's parents' cottage in Glenarm. That part of the world where everyone talks a bit funny; but christ, it was so refreshing to get away from big cities for once. Total quiet, fresh sea air, open space, stunning landscape views, no people about, plenty of wild raspberries and blackberries to pick. On the first day we walked over the hill to Carnlough and I bought dulse, which I hadn't had for years. I'd forgotten how great it is- and the look on Kate's face when she tasted it was perhaps the highlight of my trip. That night her folks sailed in from Scotland on a very impressive boat. We went on a long walk across these huge, terrifying Beachy Head-style cliffs the next day, and had a tour of the Bushmills distillery. That was amusing, they kept lecturing us on the processes that make their whisky superior to Scotch; and at the end we had a couple of 12-year-olds. Depressing but unsurprising to note that Bushmills is owned by Diageo (owners of Smirnoff, Bells, Baileys, Gordons, Tia Maria and pretty much any spirit that you can get in pubs). On the last night we were treated to an astonishing meal at a Chinese place in Ballymena. This was full-on Trimalchio stuff; the first course alone consisted of mussels, oysters cooked in ginger and langoustines (prawns the size of carrots).
Now we're back a contending with a mouse (again!), and the neighbours from hell who've moved into our basement. One of them manages some band called the Young Knives. They play their music so loud, it's like the band are live in your bedroom. The walls shake. You tell them to turn it down at midnight, and at 2am they wake you by turning it back up. What's worse is that at 7am, the mild-mannered chap above us has started retaliating by playing Heart FM's Top Ten four times louder than he usually would. I'd like to empty my ISA and, Larry David-style, get a full orchestra to play The Rite of Spring on their back lawn about 5am, but what's much likelier is that we'll phone the council, or the police station, and fuck all will happen.
Enfin, films recently seen; Private Fears in Public Places is the new offering from Ancien Vague giant Alain Resnais. It comes from an Alan Ayckbourn play and it is quite sitcom-ish, comdey of misunderstandings and so on. He's mellowed since his prime. It's soft and gentle and filled with lovelorn Parisians and constant picture-card snowfall. It all looks ravishing, very solid script/characters and there are a couple of flashes of brilliance, as well as moments of pure cheese, but without the audacity of a Marienbad. I do like this André Dussollier chap- seen him in quite a few films recently, none of them that great, but him I find endlessly watchable. He's only really got this one face, an anxious smile/grimace, but what a face it is. More Resnais than the Resnais is La Vie en Rose, a biopic of Edith Piaf that liberally jumps between her childhood, her prime and the last few years of her life. Jumbled-up deathbed remembrances, perhaps; there are pointers that we're being shown a selective memory, a few what-ifs amongst the painful episodes. Worth seeing, but by I felt it hit a slump by necessity, given the facts of her life. Raised in a brothel and then a circus, found singing for scraps by an impresario, once she makes it it's off to America and in love with a champion boxer who will never leave his wife, and as banal as that sounds. I wondered what Piaf died of, the actress looked in her 90s when she was meant to be half that.
My eternal gratitude, meanwhile, to whoever decided to put The Sleeping Tiger on the new Dirk Bogarde boxset. It's the first film Losey made in England. He had to pay some old bloke £100 to use his name for the director's credit, and they had to push him under the table when anyone from Hollywood came into the studio canteen. Film history; the film itself is crackling with nervous energy; quite cheap and a stupid, cliched script but that was often when JL worked his alchemy. The premise is as daft as Secret Ceremony- Bogarde is a crook who burgles Alexander Knox's shrink, is overpowered by him, and told that the police will be kept out of it if he agrees to move in and become Knox's psychoanalytical guinea pig. A contemporary of, and good companion-piece to, Hitchcock's Spellbound ensues. There's some glorious camerawork in a scene where Bogarde spirits Knox's wife off to a bacchanalian jazz club in Soho, and a very funny -and simultaneously enlightening- death scene. You also get generous helpings of the usual Oedipalism, cruelty, jealousy and homosexuality; it's The Servant, The Romantic Englishwoman, etc, but it's more stimulating and more fun than any cinema I can think of.
I'm quite glad, by the way, that my favourite directors have refrained from carking it for the meantime. Both Bergman and Antonioni popping off in the space of 24 hours was more than my feeble and delicate heart could bear.