2011 — 28 August: Sunday
It being currently a cool and somewhat cloudy Bank Holiday weekend, it's obviously time to put on the new walking boots and saddle up for an outing to a local beer festival.1 But not on an empty tum, obviously.
I've been suffering from withdrawal symptoms — film critic Mark Kermode has been off in bucket and spade mode somewhere and thus absent from his Friday BBC Radio5 Live afternoon slot2 with Simon Mayo. There's a nice essay here (presumably an extract from his new book) in which he rants quite pleasantly (hardly the "highly charged polemic" that an Observer sub-editor describes) about how to make an intelligent blockbuster.
He mentions, among other films, "Braveheart". My good buddy Jeff Bezos sent me a free DVD copy of that as a reward for buying so much stuff from Amazon quite a few years ago. I passed it along, still shrink-wrapped, to a more appreciative viewer and fully intend to go to my grave without ever watching it.
I'm having trouble...
... wrapping my head round this Bank Holiday lark. It really doesn't feel like a Sunday despite the evidence of the programmes on my default BBC radio station. It's nice, though. I've been back at Technology Towers for a couple of hours; the laundry is laundering, the bod has been showered, heck I've even washed my little showerproof waistcoat (separately, in the bath tub, since the incident of the dull olive green grey T-shirts that used to be white as snow) and it's out on the washing line dripping quietly to itself in the last of the afternoon sunshine.
The walk was a delightful little stroll, albeit pretty well all down hill from Cheesefoot Head (out of Winchester on the A272) to the Flower Pots in Cheriton, for some 4.5 miles. Then lunch and a pint. Nice chats. And a walk back pretty well all up hill to the car. At no point did we actually get seriously rained on. Now (at 17:54) the sky is a cloudless blue.