Monday 16th August
Last night I watched Saving Private Ryan; for the first time since seeing it at the cinema actually.
The horrific, awful power of the prolonged opening sequence, and indeed the film as a whole, was diminished in its effect a liitle by being viewed on a TV - albeit 36" - instead of a large cinema screen. But what, to my mind, diminished it further, were the adverts for McCain potato wedges the Film Four sponsors; I found them to be distracting from the mood of the film.
These adverts were actually quite amusing, the premise of them being that the potato wedges were observing through the glass oven door/screen the 'action' in the kitchen and living room beyond. I confesss to rather liking the one where a guy comes up to the oven door and turns his head sideways to look into the oven at which the potato wedges all recoil and scream and jump out of their skins. Surely a nod to that scene in Jaws? We all know the one. And we all still jump don't we, no matter how many times we see the film and know it's coming.
So is there a case, just sometimes, with a film such as this, for the advertising to be more sombre in recognition of the movie and its message?
Or is it just me?
And how bloody lucky any of us born post 1945 are not to have endured a war like that Second World War; as combatant or civilian. Saving Private Ryan must be as close as we can get to the sheer pant-wetting terror and gut-wrenching, mind-numbing horror of what those brave men went through in that war. We can't get close to imagining it. It's a cliche I know but cliches become so because they are true; we can't begin to measure how much we owe them.
I've visited some of those Normandy beaches still with some of the landing craft there. And many of the cemeteries - for the fallen of both world wars - in that part of France and in Belgium too. They are eerily silent places. They are often by the side of a busy highway yet one doesn't hear the traffic at all. Nor even birds singing. Nothing but the wind in the trees whispering the magnitude of the loss.
They are profoundly peaceful, moving but tragic places. I defy the most cynical amongst us not to be moved by the sight of the massed rows of crosses and so many of them bearing only the words "Known only to God".
There aren't the words...
Monday 16 August 2010
Tuesday 10 August 2010
Solitaire - or Patience as it used to be called
I've been playing Patience on a new laptop with Vista on it. Apart from a lot of irritating gloopy noises it seems to be nigh on impossibe to win. 32 games before I got a win! Even allowing for me being a little bit crap 32 games seems a bit excessive. I reckon it's fixed. Yet another example of how I'm being persecuted! :-) I'm convinced I won more often on XP!
I'm off for a screwdriver now. A chocolate one. I've eaten the saw and the hammer already.
I'm off for a screwdriver now. A chocolate one. I've eaten the saw and the hammer already.
Sunday 8 August 2010
How Tickled I am!
I'm just listening to Pick of the Week on Radio 4; a clip of Ken Dodd telling a gag. Something along the lines of sticking a broom up Nigel Mansell's arse and saying to him "How about that for pole position?"
Great stuff! Bless Doddy and his tickling stick. Surely he should be a national treasure? Him and the Duke of Edinburgh. I'd vote for both of them to be National Treasures.
Great stuff! Bless Doddy and his tickling stick. Surely he should be a national treasure? Him and the Duke of Edinburgh. I'd vote for both of them to be National Treasures.
Just saw this on Twitter...
...made me laugh:
Not normally bothered by insects, but I don't like the sound of this Hepatitis Bee.
Love it!!
Not normally bothered by insects, but I don't like the sound of this Hepatitis Bee.
Love it!!
Persecution complex
Sunday 8th August 2010
Bastard ants have eaten one my ground cover plants at the root! Grr!!
What with ants eating my plants; a feral cat shitting on my plants; and bloody car owners whose parking would be unfavourably compared to that done by drivers that have been blind from birth, I'm feeling just a little bit persecuted!!! :-( Not to mention assaulted. And not particularly at one with the natural world!
Five times now drivers using the spare parking in my close that adjoins my front garden have damaged the corner; two kerbstones, two slabs and a bright orange post have ALL gone for a burton. I mean, I know there's hunger, disease and poverty in the world but surely 5 times damage would wind anybody up?!
Harrumph!
Friday 6 August 2010
Park Life
I started watching a new series recently on BBC 4, headed by the marvellous Dan Cruickshank, about the development of urban parks in this country.
Watching this programme and looking at the wonderful parks it featured triggered lots of memories about the parks we played in and visited when I was a child way back in the early sixties.
On Bakestone Moor (an adjunct to the village of Whitwell, Derbyshire) where I lived there was, just a few yards from our house, an area known as t'plantin' or Plantation. You'll recall from previous posts that the definite article was rarely, if ever, heard.
Now t'plantin' wasn't a park of the kind being examined in the TV programme but a park is what we called it. As in "Mam, I'm going t'park" or "Mam, can I go t'plantin'". The Canch in Worksop (our nearest town) and Queen's Park in Chesterfield (she of the Crooked Spire) were more akin to the urban parks with railings and flower beds and boating lakes that Dan was waxing lyrical about in his TV show.
Half of the Plantation was full of trees (I'm guessing that's where the name came from) and mounds and dips and made a natural adventure playground. The other half of it was open and housed the ubiquitous slide, swings - baby ones and the flat seat ones for older children - and a roundabout. All of them surrounded by concrete; this being the days before Health and Safety and child-friendly bouncy surfaces around such things. Many a graze and cut and contusion and, for some, broken bone was sustained on these items. But a lot of fun too for sure.
I remember how we used to go down the slide on the waxed paper that loaves of bread were wrapped in before the ubquitous menace of polythene bags were invented. But we were ignorant of that then. We used the bread paper to make the slide slippier as it got sticky at times. Probably due to the potent combination of soot, from the everyone's chimneys (this being a mining area everyone had coal fires and it wasn't smokeless fuel they burnt) and quarry dust that the air was aways thick with. It was like breathing gravy!! Is there any wonder I was always ill with asthma??? Furthermore I rather suspect the slide got piddled on from time to time. Anyway, the bread paper would make us go down that slide like we'd been shot out of a cannon. Whoosh we would go, then try to stand up as we got to the bottom or we'd have a BSA (bloody sore arse) from landing on the concrete.
T'plantin' often played host to the travelling fair; many is the warm summer evening I was unable to sleep for the strains of 'I can't get used to losing you' being delivered by Andy Williams at full blast from the Noah's Ark!
Down in the village (Whitwell) there was the Rec or Recreation ground. This was a big square field and was home to a couple of huts, one where the 1st Whitwell Cubs, Scouts, Brownies and Guides met and another for the St John Ambulance Brigade. There was of course more play equipment but with additions here of a seesaw and a Policeman's Helmet. But even more exotic than any of that was the paddling pool! The times we spent down there on those (no doubt mythical) long hot summer holidays in the early sixties.
Going a little further afield there was the Canch in Worksop and beyond that Langold Lakes both of which held other pleasures but I'll write about them in another post.
Watching this programme and looking at the wonderful parks it featured triggered lots of memories about the parks we played in and visited when I was a child way back in the early sixties.
On Bakestone Moor (an adjunct to the village of Whitwell, Derbyshire) where I lived there was, just a few yards from our house, an area known as t'plantin' or Plantation. You'll recall from previous posts that the definite article was rarely, if ever, heard.
Now t'plantin' wasn't a park of the kind being examined in the TV programme but a park is what we called it. As in "Mam, I'm going t'park" or "Mam, can I go t'plantin'". The Canch in Worksop (our nearest town) and Queen's Park in Chesterfield (she of the Crooked Spire) were more akin to the urban parks with railings and flower beds and boating lakes that Dan was waxing lyrical about in his TV show.
Half of the Plantation was full of trees (I'm guessing that's where the name came from) and mounds and dips and made a natural adventure playground. The other half of it was open and housed the ubiquitous slide, swings - baby ones and the flat seat ones for older children - and a roundabout. All of them surrounded by concrete; this being the days before Health and Safety and child-friendly bouncy surfaces around such things. Many a graze and cut and contusion and, for some, broken bone was sustained on these items. But a lot of fun too for sure.
I remember how we used to go down the slide on the waxed paper that loaves of bread were wrapped in before the ubquitous menace of polythene bags were invented. But we were ignorant of that then. We used the bread paper to make the slide slippier as it got sticky at times. Probably due to the potent combination of soot, from the everyone's chimneys (this being a mining area everyone had coal fires and it wasn't smokeless fuel they burnt) and quarry dust that the air was aways thick with. It was like breathing gravy!! Is there any wonder I was always ill with asthma??? Furthermore I rather suspect the slide got piddled on from time to time. Anyway, the bread paper would make us go down that slide like we'd been shot out of a cannon. Whoosh we would go, then try to stand up as we got to the bottom or we'd have a BSA (bloody sore arse) from landing on the concrete.
T'plantin' often played host to the travelling fair; many is the warm summer evening I was unable to sleep for the strains of 'I can't get used to losing you' being delivered by Andy Williams at full blast from the Noah's Ark!
Down in the village (Whitwell) there was the Rec or Recreation ground. This was a big square field and was home to a couple of huts, one where the 1st Whitwell Cubs, Scouts, Brownies and Guides met and another for the St John Ambulance Brigade. There was of course more play equipment but with additions here of a seesaw and a Policeman's Helmet. But even more exotic than any of that was the paddling pool! The times we spent down there on those (no doubt mythical) long hot summer holidays in the early sixties.
Going a little further afield there was the Canch in Worksop and beyond that Langold Lakes both of which held other pleasures but I'll write about them in another post.
Monday 2 August 2010
Tweet, tweeting across the universe...
...or maybe not.
Splitting my infinitives all the way, I decided to boldy go where Stephen Fry (amongst others) have gone before and have a look at Twitter.
Well, I've created an account but I'm not too sure yet what the point of it is. The 'tweet' box takes only a few characters so one's tweet can only be a sentence. How much of interest can one get in a sentence? Unless you've just bumped into Jordan perhaps. And really, if the space were small enough, one could hardly fail to bump into her...
"I just picked my nose and got a really big bogey out" - might be the highlight of my day which hardly makes for riveting reading or terrific tweeting. And isn't that what ones's Facebook wall is for? Not that I'm a Facebook expert. Most of that mystifies me.
So until I become rich and famous, either in my own right or vicariously by association with someone already in possession of those attributes, I don't think I'll be a dedicated twitterer. Well not on-line anyway! Verbal twittering I can mostly definitely manage.
Splitting my infinitives all the way, I decided to boldy go where Stephen Fry (amongst others) have gone before and have a look at Twitter.
Well, I've created an account but I'm not too sure yet what the point of it is. The 'tweet' box takes only a few characters so one's tweet can only be a sentence. How much of interest can one get in a sentence? Unless you've just bumped into Jordan perhaps. And really, if the space were small enough, one could hardly fail to bump into her...
"I just picked my nose and got a really big bogey out" - might be the highlight of my day which hardly makes for riveting reading or terrific tweeting. And isn't that what ones's Facebook wall is for? Not that I'm a Facebook expert. Most of that mystifies me.
So until I become rich and famous, either in my own right or vicariously by association with someone already in possession of those attributes, I don't think I'll be a dedicated twitterer. Well not on-line anyway! Verbal twittering I can mostly definitely manage.
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