A domestic Methuselah writes...

Old age is a string of clichés. I forget things, am content to look like a tramp, insult people sometimes accidentally sometimes intentionally, and there's this growing relationship with the porcelain. Now I'm getting sloppy with food.

"Wipe your face," says VR not cruelly, "there's soup on your cheek."

"It's good soup."

"Of course it is, but let that be our secret."

"We need table napkins. And a dispenser."

I had in mind one of those tightly packed chromium-plated boxes best seen in context - on the table of a US diner. (I'm a great diner enthusiast. If I won El Gordo I'd endow a diner on the Abergavenny road.) Unobtrusive, always full, a single symbol to set the sentimentality motor off and running. But alas, British catering suppliers appear to regard them as luxuries, tagging them with prices I resent.

It took lateral thinking, perhaps even a paradigm shift, for me to realise that napkins could be dispensed upwards (as it were) as well as sideways. Hence the smoked brown plastic tray you see in the larger pic. But then came the much bigger question: what kind of napkin?

Tesco cheapies could handle soup (my eating habits haven't improved) but foundered on chilli detritus, eventually turning into disgusting tomato-coloured balls. We stepped up to much thicker napkins with pleasing patterns.

But these cost more. Never mind whether we can afford it, what cannot be gainsaid is my ineradicable West Riding urge to save. If the food smears are minimal I re-use and VR doesn't approve. Ostentatiously she crumples hers and stuffs it into an empty yoghurt pot.

Old age - the tube train that's going to end up in Essex (Noo Joisey for Yanks)..

The way to Hell... can be surprisingly comfortable

Illness prevented me (with VR) from attending film festival movies on three consecutive days. So, thirty quid down the drain.

But I don't want to write about illness, rather the response to it. On the first day I was so groggy VR said "Don't get dressed. Put on your dressing gown and stay in the warm." It was kindly meant but I think it was wrong for me, temperamentally.

My new dressing gown (see pic) is fleece-based. It not only insulates it is utterly lightweight - a very seductive garment. On my feet I wore Pop Socks, thickish knitted material with rubber bumps on the sole to ensure I can tackle steep gradients. I didn't shave and this was perhaps the most significant sign I had temporarily moved into a different world; I always shave; I hate the bristliness otherwise.

Strong wind had partially knocked over the bird table in the garden; I observed this through the French windows and let it be. Later the Wine Society delivered £250-worth of wine and I let that be too, didn't put it away. I downloaded a popular thriller - on offer at 99 p - to my Kindle and sluffed around the whole of the day. "I need this sluffing," I told myself. I tried rewriting my novel and a page took over two hours, my mind dog-paddling through porridge.

Let me repeat: this post is about the reduced standards, self-pity and defeat that arrive with invalidism. Next day I wasn't much better but I dressed and shaved. Put away the wine. Did the washing up. Became a slightly stooped but recognisable version of my rackety self. Told VR horror stories about my youth when my parents broke up.

Moral: Put your faith - if you have any - in antibiotics

Cinéastes are well dispersed

In metro-centric England, Herefordshire, the county where I live, is virtually unknown. Often confused with Hertfordshire which is nearer London. Actually Herefordshire deserves to be unknown.  Total population, 183,600, is roughly that of Wigan or Crawley and population density is fourth lowest in England. One small city, four market towns, masses of tiny villages - that's it.

However, many villages have halls, hence Flix In The Sticks a scheme forming part of present film festival. Residents choose movies and foregather in the hall to watch. Halfway through there's wine, coffee, cakes and pop. Like slipping back into a 1930s whodunnit. We've trekked out to Garway
and Gorsley; Ross tomorrow. Village audiences more sophisticated than those in city; they don't titter.
 
Movies we saw/hoped to see at Borderlines Festival
In The House. France. Discouraged, middle-aged lycée teacher of French Lit discovers writing ability in one of his charges and devotes time to bringing him along. Gradually the lad's reportage, the reality of what he describes, and the teacher's corrections and suggestions become inseparable
and doom seems imminent. Three-dimensional performance by Fabrice Luchini - he simply is a teacher, good and bad.

The Impossible. British family, holidaying in Thailand, assaulted and dispersed by tsunami, finally fly off by chartered jet (paid for by travel insurance) to Singapore to be patched up. Supposedly true. Special effects impressive but I was never hooked. However, PB (The Guardian) cried throughout.

Anna Karenina. Keira Knightley. Too exhausted; will rent DVD.

Where do we go? Japanese. Two kids separated. Was looking forward to it but illness intervened.

Minor attack of conscience

What are a blogger's responsibilities, if any?

I've been at it since May 4 2008 - say, 750 posts. Over the years I've received about half a dozen comments where the writer said he/she intended to take up something (a book, music) I'd mentioned or recommended. Very gratifying. Of course they may have been fibbing.

Recently I slagged off Quartet seen at our local film festival. Returning to the main festival cinema I found a board carrying forty post-its, mostly one word, all ecstatic about Quartet. My opinion hasn't changed about this piece of stodge but I feel I must allow mention of these views.

I was limited to two or three lines. After writing them I checked with my cinema reference, Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian. Here's his view of Quartet.

Movies we saw at Borderlines festival
Moonrise Kingdom Silly title. Two troubled twelve-year-olds, a boy and a girl, leave society behind to embrace la vie sauvage in an island off the New England coast. The first half is inventive and has its charms, but the exigencies of the plot and certain American beliefs in what is "proper" render the second half mechanistic. The director Wes Anderson, famed for his quirkiness, (eg, The Royal Tenenbaums), attracts a stellar cast, all of whom make the best of their cameos.

Amarcord Italian director Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 8½) lays aside obscurity and re-creates his childhood in the port of Rimini during Mussolini's rise to power. A vividly realised scrapbook, alternately uproarious and touching. terribly noisy and featuring a class of male teenagers capable of breaking any teacher (or parent) on God's earth. Released 1973, hasn't aged a bit.

Our mythical US home

BIG NUMBERS Our first address in the USA was 3214 Annapolis Avenue. My mother asked: are there more than three thousand houses before yours? Annapolis Ave was a mere 300 yards long, so no. A colleague explained: 3214 was a guesstimate location which presumed an imaginary 1 Annapolis Avenue at the centre of Pittsburgh.

This never sounded like an American system. French, yes. Perhaps even German. But too niggling for Americans. Also, during our six years' stay, I never found a use for this ghostly information.

Such addresses appear in Blogger's new word verification system, sometimes running to five figures (typical, I'm told, of LA).

Movies we saw at Borderlines Festival
Barbara. Absorbing, austere story involving two doctors in 1980 East Germany faced with emotional/professional dilemma.

Quartet. Dustin Hoffman's unhappy directorial debut. Broken-back plotting based on unbelievably lush home for retired musicians in UK. Waste of Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Tom Courtenay, Pauline Collins.

The Conformist. Admirable but not lovable account of ambiguous Fascist assassin in Italy, pre- and post-WWII. Jean-Louis Trintignant superb only exceeded by Bertolucci's  inventive and visually beautiful direction. Made in 1970; some say "greatest film ever made". New to me.

Starbuck. Sperm donor hero in amusing Canadian funsie. Flirts dangerously with sentimentality but saved by French dialogue (with sub-titles).

PROGRESS Memorised 13 lines (out of 37) of Lady Percy's speech. Bath a great help.

Wish you were all here

To mark the changes in the home-page graphics I am memorising LP's speech. It is 37 lines long and may take time.

Hereford's Borderlines Film Festival has just started. We are booked for twenty movies. The first, Sightseers, was inauspicious despite its ever-changing and familiar scenes (the Crich Tram Museum, Mother Shipton's Dripping Well, the Ribblehead railway viaduct). SPOILER ALERT!!! A serial killer takes his new girl-friend on a caravan trip north from Redditch. Immensely irritating.

Compare/contrast with Babette's Feast which we were seeing for the fourth or fifth time. The tears rolled down my cheeks, dried, and rolled again; I didn't dare glance at VR. In case you have been misinformed this is not a foodie's wet dream but a film about human goodness told with surpassing wit. I have pondered and I could not be friends with anyone who did not respond positively to Feast. Please, please, do not tell me if this is the case with you, dear reader.

Then along unlit, narrow, barely surfaced, country lanes, guided only by the satnav, to Garway village hall to see a masterpiece: Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (five stars out of five by The Guardian).

In modern-day Turkey three cars, carrying policemen, a doctor, a public prosecutor and two suspects follow a seemingly hopeless nighttime quest, along remote wild roads, to locate a place. Nothing mystical, the concerns are obvious but the film's length (2 hr 28 min - and it's not a second too long) tells us this is no mere criminal matter. Quickly the idea that these are actors becomes ludicrous; they are as real as you or I. Procedures are botched, arguments boil up and dissipate, beauty briefly visits the mens' tired bodies. Be patient for a while; after that there are just people, small scale (but significant) events and your thoughts. 

Eat your heart out Hereford

Ice Age Art (above): The swimming reindeer.

The Guardian  gave our Emerson Quartet concert (Bartok qt 3, Janacek qt 2, Berg Lyric Suite) four stars out of five and I was pleased this eggheaded programme more or less filled Queen Elizabeth Hall, also drawing a high percentage of under-forties.

P and C, with whom we were staying, live in Lewisham in south-east London. Normally we take London's motorway ring-road, M25, from which it's a 20-minute drive. Instead we plunged into London's suburbs on the western side of the capital to pass by our old house in Kingston-upon-Thames. Since I know this quadrant I tried to override the satnav but finally (for complex reasons) I gave in. Needless to say it took ages and the satnav came into its own during the final three or four miles of hilariously zig-zagged narrow streets liberally endowed with sleeping policemen (Speed bumps in the USA).

C, who paints and sculpts, had chosen the British Museum Ice Age Art exhibition the following day. A salutary display. Carvings in mammoth ivory and reindeer antler, some dating back 40,000 years, evolved from realistic renderings of, say, a bison and (my favourite) a tiny, perfectly detailed sole, into impressionistic and very beautiful shapes evocative of the female form. The mental processes on which modern painting and sculpture are based were already there and active all those years ago.

At the Courtauld two-dozen paintings by the nineteen-year-old Picasso revealed him stumbling his way through imitation, low-grade Toulouse Lautrec and ending up with a masterpiece, Girl With Dove. All in one year.

Docklands Light Railway down to Greenwich for a couple of pints at London's greatest pub, The Trafalagar*. London has it all.

*Superior to the pub on Roupell Street in only one respect - it has a view.