2010 — 13 March: Saturday

Another midnight, after watching — and very much enjoying — "An Education". It should, perhaps, be illegal for Emma Thompson to do so little and yet still steal the film. Let alone Olivia Williams. And the period detail was pixel perfect, too. Wow.

G'night.

A sunny start...

... and a cuppa to sip, while listening to those Sounds of the 60s with amiable DJ Brian Matthew. Is there any other way to ease into consciousness on a Saturday morning? I'm not aware of one. His snippet about whether the 1963 Del Shannon track was "She's gonna be mine" or "She's gotta be mine" provoked the thought, what if it was "She's got a bee mine" (to ensure the honey supply, of course)?

Good grief... dept.

One of the comments attached to Mark Lawson's well-intentioned piece on "Writing a way through grief" rang particularly true with me:

I agree that writing about bereavement could well be cathartic for the writer, but as for the reader, I am not so sure...
Grief is so deeply personal that it really is all about how the bereaved person is feeling so that even the feelings of those who have been similarly bereaved are of little consequence. It may be a cliche but I have honestly found that 'time is the only healer', nothing else works.

"I'm no superman" in The Guardian


I can certainly vouch for the therapeutic benefits of writing in my case, of course. But equally, I wouldn't dream of prescribing it for anyone else. Time, however, really does take the raw edges off the damage — the only drawback being (of course!) that time takes its own bloody time to tick along sometimes :-)

Thanks, Mr Postie

Of course, the other therapy that smooths raw edges is of the "retail" kind. The other night, Mike and I stumbled across a trailer for this little oddity, but I was the one who succumbed:

DVD

I haven't yet been able to confirm if Randall Miller's1 original short film is entirely embedded in the 2005 variant (as Sean Ellis did with his Cashback) because the DVD has no menu structure, merely a sequence of chapters.

Before you know it...

... it's 19:27 with lunch having been lunched and tea, as it were, likewise. Two duck eggs hit the latter spot. So, what's next, Mrs Landingham? More data base pottering or relocate downstairs either to watch a movie or read a book? Decisions, decisions.

  

Footnote

1  Mr Miller directed one, memorable, episode of "Northern Exposure" — the one with Valerine Perrine, who did so well in the 1974 film "Lenny" as the wife of Lenny Bruce. (And if you don't know who Lenny Bruce was, or what he did, then keep that lack of knowledge to yourself.)