Miss Jean Louise, stand up....

Golden Anniversary

During Lockdown Three Point Zero, you take your celebrations where you can. So, if The Harry Potter Film Club has to meet on Zoom, then so be it. The group started as a prelude to watching The Cursed Child at the the theatre (in the olden days of theatre-going) because one person had limited knowledge of the Wizarding World. But then it continued, fuelled by a love of wine and cake and sociable bonhomie. And we decided to mark the 50th film with dressing up as characters from films we’d already watched, thus, above:

• No-Face from Spirited Away
• Sadness from Inside Out
• Idgie Threadgoode from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café 
• Mr Perks from The Railway Children and
• Lina Lamont from Singin’ in the Rain

Hey, Boo, fifty films and counting

There have been

• 10 Fantasies
• 7 Comedies
• 5 Animations
• 5 Documentaries
• 4 Dramas
• 3 Historical Films
• 3 Crime Thrillers
• 3 Musicals
• 2 Biopics
• 2 Family Films
• 2 Literary Adaptations
• 2 SciFi Movies
• 1 Disaster Movie and
• 1 Satire.

Over half were made since the Millennium and the earliest so far was 1940's Pinocchio. The 50th anniversary film choice was Robert Mulligan’s 1962 movie of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird with landmark performances by Gregory Peck (as Atticus Finch), Estelle Evans (as Calpurnia), Mary Badham, Phillip Alford and John Megna (as Scout, Jem and Dill), Brock Peters (as Tom Robinson), and Robert Duvall (as Arthur (Boo) Radley.) With mood-perfect rhythms and music by Elmer Bernstein and a miraculously faithful adaptation by Horton Foote, the movie captures the spirit of the novel without simplifying any of the moral and legal complexities. The film remains light touch in the way a modern version, I think, would be far more heavy-handed.

Trip to the North

Inner geeks
In honour of Emily’s birthday, here’s what we did last Easter. Sally and Harriet went off on a walking tour round the Yorkshire dales (Settle, Malham, Grassington) and Emily and I summoned our inner geeks to explore the western end of Hadrian’s Wall and other historical sites in the Border country.

Brougham Castle
After a toilet break and cheese market purchase in Kirby Lonsdale we first stopped at Brougham Castle, the seat of the formidable Lady Ann Clifford. The view from the top of the intact keep presented an uplifting view over the whole site. References to the castle’s role in the Border Wars and the Wars of the Roses gave plenty of ammunition to kick-start our imaginations.

Brougham Castle

Carlisle Castle
Carlisle Castle was a remarkable surprise, partly because of the mighty building itself, well-preserved with several floors to explore. Its reputation as the most besieged castle in England is well explained with details of its Roman origins, connections to the Wars of the Roses, Mary Queen of Scots and the Jacobite Rebellion; as well as its time as a military prison. On the day we were there wild violets grew in clumps so it looked especially beautiful.

Carlisle Castle

Museum of Military Life
My biggest surprise there was how much I enjoyed the Museum of Military Life housed inside the castle. It was unexpectedly fascinating and poignant. It showed soldiering through the centuries and was packed with human-interest stories of sacrifice, ambition, courage and complexity. Military facts, figures and jargon were all there, but in every section there were personal stories, not only of the soldiers’ lives but also of the reputations of the military and how it changed in different circumstances in different periods.

Heads Nook Hall
Our home for the four nights was Heads Nook Hall, a hefty pile, beautifully-appointed with plenty of space in the rooms and bathrooms. A great armchair to sit in in my bedroom overlooking sunrises and sheep fields through to the horizon. Malcolm Murray, our informative host, welcomed us with home-made scones and tea and supplied perfect
breakfasts every morning in front of an open fire.

Heads Nook Hall. Emily was in the Blue Room with a bath. I was in the Yellow Room with a view.

Birdoswald Roman Fort
Birdoswald was our first Hadrian’s Wall stop. It boasts interesting panels and museum artefacts but the site atop a pretty valley was upstaged by an eccentric kite-flying festival with audacious designs (like a weird deep sea diver) and stroppy tantrums by stunt-kite fliers. A whirlwind of enthusiastic amateurism, extraordinary skill and eye-catching design. Only in England….?

Birdoswald Roman Fort

Corbridge Roman Town
Corbridge Roman Town was another surprise, sited just south of the Wall and clearly servicing the settlements in all the ways you might imagine a military outpost would. An excellent audio-guide brought the streets and buildings to life. I hadn’t imagined the walls would be so intact. You get a strong sense of the different bits of the town community almost 2000 years after it thrived.

Corbridge Roman Town

Aydon Castle
En route to our next Wall stop we spontaneously called at Aydon Castle. A super-enthusiastic young man at the entrance tantalized us with what was available: a higgledy-piggledy totally eccentric pile of a house occupied (spartanly) as late as the 1960s when the owners were still using outside toilets. Stairs cropped up in strange places; rooms led off rooms that made little sense. It felt like being in an Escher building where you never know what room will come next – all the result of different occupiers bashing it about, including, at one time, a group of bandits. A real gem of a house with a short but pretty outside walk – through an orchard – above a gorge dropping down to a gurgling river.

Aydon Castle

Housesteads Roman Fort
I’ve wanted to visit Housesteads Roman Fort for ages – it didn’t disappoint. It was a bitingly windy day which made the thought of the Roman/Syrian occupiers even more atmospheric. Housesteads clings to a ridge across a wide area and it’s easy to imagine how isolated the auxiliaries must have felt being stationed there. The museum was freshly informative and the randomly-placed panels around the site meant your view and perspective kept changing if you made an effort to read all the panels. A panoramic, cobweb-blowing visit.

Housesteads Roman Fort

Roman Army Museum
Our B&B host recommended we include the Roman Army Museum, a commercial set-up which wasn’t planned but it proved well worth it. Targeted at and suitable for all ages, the multi-AV museum is essential if you want to sort out your legionary from your auxiliary and delve deeper into an understanding of Roman Army life. The different set-ups are all imaginative and a 3D film includes aerial shots of The Wall as well as recreations of the life of a bored auxiliary stationed in Roman Britain. A cheesy semi-soap about a group of auxiliary friends also highlights different aspects of the whys and wherefores of being a soldier at that time. The Roman emperor timeline was enlightening, as was the section on Hadrian himself in all his complexity, including his unsuccessful marriage to Vibia Sabina and his love for Antinous.

Roman Army Museum with "Roman" loos....!

Vindolanda
I had imagined Vindolanda quite differently. I knew Vindolanda had ongoing excavations every summer (and will do for the next 200 years if all goes according to plan) but what I didn’t expect was such a massive site with such a clear visual presentation of the dynamic between the fort itself and the vicus that grew up outside the fort. It was a rainy and cold day when we visited but that played into the narrative of Pat, our excellent tour guide, who brought various parts of the site to life with a mix of funny anecdotes, dry references to quirky facts and a genuine love for the place itself. She knew her stuff! The reconstruction project of a section of stone Wall and a section of wood/turf Wall was fascinating as was the museum at the bottom of the site. The highlight for me of the museum was the remarkable discovery and presentation of writing tablets discovered quite by accident and revealing personal details of the lives of people at the time.

Vindolanda

Lanercost Priory
The austerity of the functional church at Lanercost Priory is a stark contrast with what your imagination can do with the remains of the medieval Augustinian Priory, a solid and impressive edifice. It was fun (and sad?) to find bits of Hadrian’s Wall purloined to build the Priory. It’s hard though not to obsess (in a disturbing way) about the terracotta effigy of four month old Elizabeth Howard, a Victorian tomb by Sir Edgar Boehm. Felt very conflicted about its value but it certainly made an impact.

Lanercost Priory

Richmond Castle
Richmond Castle is another substantial building with an intact keep and fantastic view over the town and into the far distance. Scolland’s Hall is a highlight inside, as is the extensive curtain wall. The cockpit garden contains some dramatic topiary and there is an informative display about the Richmond Sixteen, the conscientious objectors from the First World War.

Richmond Castle

Easby Abbey
Our final stop on the way back home was Easby Abbey. The stunning refectory with its great window and the atmospheric cloister were easy to imagine with the help of the information panels. You can just see some original faint traces of red paint on the outer archway of the gatehouse. An impressive ruin though the highlight is probably the peaceful setting.

Easby Abbey

So what now? You decide.
Dad-daughter geek fests – highly recommended! First we did Arthurian sites, then this Hadrian’s Wall trip. Where next? We got along enough to think it may well happen again – yes, there is much talk of history and what we’ve seen, but there is also talk of politics and the state of the nation and reactions to and comments about James O’Brien LBC podcasts (The best of…. and Mystery hour) and we watched the films of Avatar and The Eagle to wind down in the evenings. And, well, we could spend as long as we liked reading the information panels. And we did.

(final lines from The Eagle)

Esca: So what now?
Marcus Aquila: You decide.

Road to Fatherhood

Emily and Harriet

Road to Fatherhood

I have no doubt that Being A Father is the summit of my achievements. Helping create two new human beings and marvelling at their interactions with the universe are astonishing aspects of my existence. They are both part-Me; they are both part-Sally; they are both Entirely Themselves. They are The Same and they are Entirely Different. How could two people brought up by the same parents in the same environment have such wonderful variations? And yet also display some of the same senses of humour, some of the same interests and some of the same dreams? And so proud am I that they are both intelligent, creative, responsible, compassionate, empathetic, generous, intuitive, honest, courageous, wholehearted and spirited.

“Your father’s image is so hit in you….”(Leontes in The Winter's Tale)

Whereas Harriet has absorbed some of my sense of the absurd and delight in the oddities of the English Language, Emily has inherited my love of history, fantasy, myths and legends. So it was that father and eldest daughter embarked on an Arthurian road trip last summer. I pretended it was a birthday present for Emily but really it was a personal pilgrimage to places I had longed to visit myself. And Emily humoured me. (And the sun shone, the plans worked out and we had a wonderful trip - full of sights and sounds that still linger in my imagination.)

Welcome to Plymouth....

“And I unto the sea from whence I came….”(Montague in Henry VI Part Three)

We began in Plymouth – by the sea – where we hired a car and met up with one of Emily’s university friends at the remarkable gin distillery. I wandered over the Hoe, admired Smeaton’s Lighthouse and imagined Sir Francis Drake’s pre-Armada game of bowls. A fitting beginning for the Odyssey ahead. Next stop Tintagel.

Views of Plymouth

Oscar Wannabes

My film of the year: Brooklyn

Odeon Screen Unseen

This time last year I started going with the family to the Odeon Screen Unseen showings – usually Monday nights, usually critically acclaimed, usually £5 a ticket.  All good. The risk is you sit down not knowing what is going to come up on the screen! That way we got to see Nightcrawler, Whiplash, Selma, and It Follows last year – all fascinating in one or more ways. This week it was Room and when the title came up I was happy (and worried) because it was a book I had raced through earlier in the year, astonished at the tension built up by the narrative voice in Emma Donoghue’s novel. It could have gone either way.

Emma Donoghue, Jacob Tremblay, Brie Larson - Room

Room
Room was excellent, I thought. The lean screenplay, the photography and editing, the final shot of the suburban garden in the snow…. All worthy of prizes but equally wonderful were the performances from the sublime Joan Allen as Nancy to the heroic Tom McCamus as Leo, from an intense William H Macy as Robert to Wendy Crewson as a devastatingly smooth TV interviewer – all cameos of great power. But could an Oscar nomination go to a 7-year old? Jacob Tremblay as Jack certainly goes through a convincing gamut of emotions in the film, spending half of the running time looking horribly ill. But I will be very surprised if Brie Larson isn’t nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. She, I think, plays unpredictably, sometimes unsympathetically, maternal but highly-strung, dead-eyed but full of life force, strong and vulnerable – and at all times, in my opinion, playing truthfully to the dramatic situation.

In the Heart of the Sea, Murphy, Gleeson, Fairley, Whishaw, Hemsworth

In the Heart of the Sea

Ron Howard’s film about the loss of the whaling ship Essex and how it inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is less obviously award-winning except possibly in the special effects categories. I wasn’t bored but my daughter spoke the truth when she said it had elements of the cartoon version of Thumbelina – ie one disaster after another. Chris Hemsworth scrubs down well (and looks truly wasted at times) and Ben Whishaw, Brendan Gleeson and Michelle Fairley can do no wrong in my eyes; as for Cillian Murphy, I would watch him read the phone directory. But there was something about the structure of the movie (the script, maybe?) that meant I cared very little about the outcome, though absolutely cheered for the whales (and excellent dolphin performances, too.) Oscars for the special effects, I think, and thank you to Cineworld who presented this in an early Secret Screening, Cineworld's equivalent of Odeon Screen Unseen.

Carol, Mad Max: Fury Road, Mr Holmes, Diary of a Teenage Girl, Ex Machina

My Oscar hopes

My film (and book) of the year has been Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn and I will be delighted if it wins every award going; if it wins nothing, I won’t care because it’s permanently lodged in my psyche. I also enjoyed Bridge of Spies, Carol, The Martian, Mad Max: Fury Road, Mr Holmes, Inside Out, Ex Machina, Diary of a Teenage Girl and Steve Jobs. I’ve yet to see (but am looking forward to) Spotlight, The Revenant, The Danish Girl, The Big Short, The Hateful Eight and Trumbo.  I would definitely add Room to my list of great films of the year now, if only for Brie Larson’s performance. I’m already booked in (twice) to see a galaxy far, far away but will be going with phantom trepidation as much as new hope….