Morning, Ramblers

 

Five mile leisure stroll. I know this looks like 'never as lonely as in a crowd', because every photo I have is when they all walk off in front of me. 

 

But it's a sunny morning to breathe frost air and hear the crunch of ice. I did have a conversation with a path checker, so not spent entirely alone.

Walk and talk

 

I'm with Shark today. Everyone else has gone. 

We go on this walk and I tell her about the young woman I saw in Tesco on Christmas Eve. She was wearing a flawless drawn face with perfect coiffured hair, dressed in boots and unwrinkled pyjamas. Held in smooth hand with tapering fingernails before her, was a phone, picture-perfecting her steady walk through the harassed crowds. Her face, expressionless. The rest of us, exhausted and spent, making way, clutching our grubby last minute parsnips and cheap brandy sauce. 

I say to Shark I find it dispiriting that our cultural life seems to be no more aspirational than to be an influencer with a marketing plan. Then we're all running along, threatened with the miserable lives we are destined to have, if we should fail to 'live our best lives' and 'curate our authentic selves'.

I ask Shark, 'What will you do when you get back today?' She answers after a slight, thoughtful pause, 'Draw a goldfish.'

There's hope for humanity, yet. 

Script? What script?

 

Family outing to see Avatar. The new one. The script is terrible. Don't go for that. It was so bad, at one point I felt the balance of my mind become disturbed. 

I cheered up a bit when I'm told that my script score of -10 was fair. People don't go to Avatar for the words apparently! They go for the spectacle. And American violence. Guns and fist fights.

Well, we got some great discussion from it, so not all bad. About the Romans, the process of film making, the emotional management of audiences, CGI and the role of writers. We covered good ground in a two-hour autopsy.

The photo, by the way, is not the Avatar audience. The screening was well attended, and I have my limits when it comes to crowd scenes. I took this photo some time ago when I was the only one in the audience.

More shonky curtain stitching

 

I bought a pair of green velvet curtains for £2 from a car boot sale about ten years ago. 

They were hanging in the garden room for years, then spent four years in a cupboard. 

Today I cut up the second one to stitch it to the first, to turn a six foot curtain into a ten foot curtain.

The electric sewing machine spat out the velvet, so I complained for an unproductive time about things like Nap and Frister Rossman 1974. Then I gave in and hand sewed the lot. Here it is. 

Achievement looks like this.