Life in the land of the strange

I put on the film, Journey to the Center of the Earth. The 1957 version, with James Mason and all. I've called it Film Studies, on the basis that it gives me two hours free while the gritlets are goggling at the dimetrodons, so you can call it treatment for depression.

I last watched this film aged about eight, and cherish fond memories of James Mason running about in a plastic tunnel with a giant mushroom. Then I thought it possibly one of the finest, most magical films ever to have been made, and probably credit this film for pointing me towards literature and inspiring me to read the children's editions of the Jules Verne collection in the local library.

So today I watch a bit too, or as much as I can before I go and beat myself up for failing, in my two hours off, to tackle ordinary household duties, like dirty laundry, filthy sinks, and bits of space rocket on the floor. But the bit I watch is frankly bizarre and makes me wonder about my memory. In fact this film starts so bizarrely it matches anything Grit and the gritlets can muster while they crash about English fields scouring the land for monks or moths or sewage or badgers.

For a start, nearly everyone in this film, James Mason excepted, looks like a cross between Beverly Hills and Munich. They're all clean-cut young folks stained with the same colour of wood varnish and flashing perfect dazzling smiles, while dressed in weird costumes that remind me of lederhosen. Worse, one of the male leads with a rugged all-American jawline has this fake Scottish accent, not helped by striding around in a kilt feeling the need to hack out och ach ach och like he's caught a rat in the throat. When they're not striding about being American Scots, the characters break into song.

Clearly, none of this troubles the gritlets. Just like mama 40 years ago. The gritlets are totally absorbed by this surreal Journey to the Center of the Earth, and remain so, even after I absent myself to scoop up bits of rocket and cry in the midst of my depressive bout. When I return, it's all over, the prehistory's been proven, and I ask whether the film helped everyone think about the stuff we did on explorers, or Darwin, or geology or, I add hopefully, anything at all.

And then Squirrel says she was sorry when the dog was eaten. I don't remember a dog, but somehow manage to talk at length about dogs and what Americans might do when they're starving and lost underground and there is a dog and it looks tasty.

Squirrel stares at me blankly. It takes us forty five minutes to ascertain that she didn't say dog, she said duck, and then I remember that of course, in the film it is Gertrude the duck. And she is eaten.

Which makes perfect sense, because it is perfectly normal to take your pet duck to a journey underground from Iceland to discover the origins of life, even if you are from Beverly Hills dressed up in lederhosen and singing Hollywood songs before being spewed out from a volcano whereupon you can get married and live an ordinary life of fame as a fake Scottish geology professor.

Makes our life sound quite normal.