21st Century Gothic

I take you all the way back to 19 January 2013 when I praised to the hilt Pan's Labyrinth as part of my advent listing of great films. I have just watched it again this afternoon and can confirm that this is cinema at its most enthralling. Guillermo del Toro has never done anything better (in itself quite a recommendation) and Sergi Lopez's performance as the evil Captain Vidal is a terrifying treat. I won't let you know the plot since that would spoil the fun but I really do urge you to track down this film. If you can find it showing in a cinema, please let me know. I first saw it at Vue in Birmingham in a near empty theatre at the time of its first release. 95/100.

The Trap Of Certainty

I know, I know, You've long since got the message that I can't stand Donad Trump. I think he's vile and, in all but unimportant matters, pig ignorant. But his advent on the political scene (and to a lesser extent the scar on British politics that is the dissembling Boris Johnson) has taught me an important lesson - life is not merely about policy. It is also about decency. You should not want to be governed by someone you wouldn't want to share a dinnner table with. Sorry Donald, sorry Boris, you're not getting invited. 

And what has got me trundling down this philosophical by-way? It was a combination of watching the Tory leadership contenders making their respective pitches to the party conference and something I read. Of the contenders I will only say this - I don't like the cut of Robert Jenrick's jib. As for that thing that I read, it is from Pope Leo XIII in 1878. In my less moderate days I might have seized on this as a clinching argument. Now I merely offer it up as a stimulating contributor to life's puzzles. The subject His Holiness considers is that of socialism/communism:

Misled by greed for the goods of this world which is the source of all evil, and the desire for which has caused many to err in the faith, they [socialists] attack the right to property sanctioned by the natural law, and while they pretend to have at heart the needs of all men and claim to satisfy all their desires, they make a criminal attempt to seize all individual possessions whether acquired by legitimate inheritance, intellectual or manual work, or by economy, and to make them common property.

Makes you think, well does me anyway.

 

Carry On Richard Curtis

I have written before about feeling vaguely exploited when enjoying Curtis's Love Actually, a film full of strong performances that can mask its mildly dodgy sexual politics. In similar vein The Groupie and I enjoyed re-watching The Boat That Rocked the other day. Bill Nighy delivers his usual scene-stealing performance as, well, Bill Nighy. The lamented Philip Seymour Hoffman is excellent. So is Rhys Ifans. I could go on. Like the  more acclaimed parts of the Curtis oeuvre (Four Weddings and a Funeral; Notting Hill) Boat is at its strongest as an ensemble piece. The critics didn't like it and took issue with its perceived misogyny. I take their point on the misogyny although the Groupie (who should be a poster girl for feminism) was not offended. What I find hard to understand is that critics failed to find it funny. It is. And what a soundtrack!

As I pondered whether I should be feeling guilty at the pleasure I took in this cinematic confection, it came to me that Curtis films are the bigger budget, more refined successors to that peculiarly British filmic form, the Carry On film. Which leaves me to make the important point that if you can't laugh at Carry On Cleo and Carry On Up the Khyber, then there's a defect in your sense of humour. Or possibly in mine - take your pick. Conceivably we could both be right.

The Boat That Rocked. 68/100.   

Tommy

I try to keep at least one non-fiction book going at any one time, alongside a couple of fictions. In this, as in so much else, I find myself inadequately mimicking the learning habits of my late father. I have just finished Richard Holmes's Tommy: the British Soldier on the Western Front 1914-1918. I have just noticed that Dad had written a Christmas message inside the cover when he and Mum gave it to me. How he would have loved Helen's wedding last weekend.

I commend Tommy to you. It is compendious, seven-hundred plus pages, but never tedious. It is impossible to read of WW1 without wondering just how you might have responded if you had been called to arms. One-hundred-and-twenty-three of the Aston Old Edwardians who went to war would never return. To this day we play our rugby on the ground bought in their memory. My generation has been spared.

Holmes quotes C.E. Montague whose war memoir was tellingly titled Disenchantment, but the power of the quoted words is not in that disaffection but rather in that agnosticism that is a necessary shield for all but the most gifted/afflicted:

But the war had to be won: that was flat. It was like putting out houses on fire, or not letting children be killed; it did not even need to be proved; that we had got to win was now the one quite certain thing left in a world of shaken certainties. 

A Warm Little Hand - Love And Letting Go

Last Saturday at the Fitzrovia Chapel (beautiful) Helen Frances Eileen Roberts (better known to you as Daughter Number One/DN1) was married to Christopher William Larkin. It was an altogether splendid occasion - she, of course, looked beautiful; he, of course, looked proud as punch. God bless them.

It was a celebration to reaffirm your faith in the younger generation. Helen, Chris and their friends partied joyously but properly. The weather was kind, the venues (the aforementioned Chapel and, afterwards, The Coin Laundry) excellent, and all of this suffused with that mightiest of human emotions - love. 

Big Fat Proud Father Pig made a speech at the reception. Alongside the eulogy at my father's funeral, this rated as the public oration about which I was most nervous. It went well. I took as my Proustian trigger the cherished memory of DN1's warm little hand in mine: when she first came to the hospital to meet DN2; at her first visit to the cinema (the Regal in Wadebridge to see The Jungle Book); as we skimmed stones over a frozen tarn. Now that hand is released and entrusted to Chris. God bless them.

Please Pander To My Vanity

If you type 'Shakespeare and Bagehot' into Google, the top result will take you to my doctoral thesis, now deposited in the open access area of the BCU Library. If that sounds like too much work, don't worry, here is the link https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/15794/

Thank you and goodnight.

Epic As An Adjective And Other Exercises In Writing

A weekend of sunshine on the island as the Pig enjoyed a brief break at Plas Piggy. Now as you know, the Pig is well down with the kids and he therefore wants to describe the weekend as epic.

Those of you who have been paying attention for the decade and a half that the Pig has been writing this guff, will know that another adjective is also pretty important - 'precious', as in the Precious Jag, the Precious Petrol Mower, and the Precious Bike. Well here's another entry to the Piggy Hall of Fame - the Precious Drain Rods. These got an ultimately epic outing on Friday evening. The enjoyment of using rods is in direct proportion to the scale of the blockage under attack. Unless you have done it, you cannot comprehend the adrenaline rush that comes at the point of rodded release of a major shitberg - though prose of the same quality as what this sentence is, gives you a pretty good idea. The Pig even made a trip to Screwfix in Llangefni to add a new tool to his set of Precious Rods. Behold the Bailey drop scraper.

 

Pretty exciting I'm sure you'd agree. But there was more and here you will see how clever the Pig is being with his vocabulary - because as he enjoyed an epic high tea of tinned hot dogs in appropriate finger rolls, he watched a film that can accurately be described as an epic - you see that's a noun! The film in question is not epic in its artistic attainment but is epic in scale and ambition. Nicholas and Alexandra may be a tad plodding at points but as a dramatic primer on the retreat of Mother Russia from the divine right of kings it seves very well. 68/100. 

And on the way home the Pig listened to Steely Dan. Epic.