The Trouble With Running Downhill

The trouble with running downhill is that, on the assumption that you are returning to your base, there is always a compensating uphill stretch. Back at Casa Piggy we are at the top of a hill so I always finish with an incline. Well we have decamped (Groupie and I) to drizzly (the forecast has it getting better as the week progresses) Cornwall, Padstow to be precise. And, what do you know, our accommodation (very nice) is at the top of the bloody great descent to the harbour. The think is that when you are on your hols and want to go running, you have to get down to the sea. There is no fun to be had in meandering around the sunlit uplands. Thus Big Fat Pig made his way down to the harbour this morning at his usual slow pace. That final push back up the hill was murderous and my thighs are protesting now. Do I feel righteous? Too bloody right. I view the whole process as generating an excuse to fill my face at every opportunity. It's my life, as Bon Jovi so rightly puts it.

Was Elizabeth Taylor the twentieth century's most attractive woman? Ava Gardner and Vivian Leigh might have something to say about that. And, yes, I do do know that the question itself betrays a shallowness on my part. It's my life. Anyway, the reason I raise the point is that I recently watched (for the umpteenth time) Cleopatra, a film that has long exercised a fascination for me, in fact ever since I read in my Christmas Guiness Book of Records about its status (long-since superseded) as the most costly movie ever made. As a spectacle it works. As serious art it does not. But who cares. Never mind Burton and Taylor, the best performance comes from Roddy McDowall as that mealiest-mouthed of mealy-mouthed pragmatists, Octavius. Best viewed at Christmas on the biggest screen you can find. 68/100. I eschew my usual  editorial practice and afford space for a larger edition of the film poster. 

In all seriousness, Taylor's physical allure raises a mildly interetsing academic point. Although the film owes nothing to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, the Taylor effect does have an effect on how a modern audience receives the play. The expectation of arresting looks (matching Shakespeare's poetry) is not a burden that Jacobean audiences would have to bear, the part of the matchless queen being played by a boy. I know, I know, I'm being all shallow again, But scratch back that shallow surface and there is a point that bears on reception theory. OK, I'll stop digging now.