Three Films

We rarely go to the cinema these day, mainly because our taste is films is so disparate there are very few films about that we both want to see, and although I am quite happy to go to the cinema on my own the OH isn't. And of course many of the more interesting films jus never make it out of major cities. So on long flights we do tend to binge watch because there is lots of choice and we can both find what we like.

So this time out I watched Suffragette, The Dressmaker and Everest.

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Suffragette was obviously really memorable, since I had completely forgotten what the third film was and had to refer back to a Facebook post I had written earlier to remind myself. What a wasted opportunity! What  a clunky script! What a lot of mis-cast actresses! Honestly this film was so bad I didn't even tear up when they sang March of the Women, and that I can tell you is unheard of. The only bit that was at all affecting was right at the very end when the fictional film of women at the funeral of Emily Davidson morphed into contemporary footage of the event. That was moving. But equally it summed up the whole off-balance tenor of the film. Emily Davidson wasn't the major character in the film, so it seemed very odd  that it should end with her funeral. It wasn't the death of Emily Davidson that got women the vote; in fact there are some who might argue that in fact it delayed the granting of women's suffrage rather than hastened it. So again, an odd place to end. And although Emily's name is one that every girl in the country should know, they don't. And even after watching this film I doubt many who don't know would be any the wiser. Like I said, a missed opportunity. So, overall, not a fan of this one.

 

 

 

 

One of the things I cherish about flights to Oz is the chance to watch quirky Australian made movies that often don't get universal release. This doesn't quite fall into that category, not small, not totally Australian and not as quirky as all that,  but it had some great moments. I picked it from those on offer because of the presence of Hugo Weaving, who acted up a storm as a local policeman with a serious fabric fetish. It was billed as a comedy, and it was very funny in places, but it should have been labelled as a black comedy, not because that would have stopped me watching but because it would have made the end more foreseeable and more bearable. In fact, dressed up with jokes and a lot of laconic Aussie humour though it was,  this is at bottom a bleak little story, with very little good to say about human nature.

 

 

 

Everest I watched because I had recently read an interview with Emily Watson about her role in this film, which is based on true events, as the base camp manager who had had to arrange communication between the dying leader of the ill-fated Adventure Consultants Everest Expedition  in 1996 and his pregnant wife back in New Zealand. In the event I couldn't really see why playing this role  should have been such a harrowing experience for Watson as the interview made out, but then it's Watson who is the award winning actress, not me. (Don't get me wrong, I think she is an excellent actress, and she was as good in this as in anything I have ever seen her in, bar Oranges and Sunshine, in which she is stupendous, I just think maybe the interview over-egged the pudding a bit).Anyway the interview made me curious to see the film, so when I saw it on the  playlist I leaped at it. I might not have shown such alacrity had I known beforehand that Keira Knightley was in it, but by the time I saw her I was sick of messing about with the touchscreen controls and luckily, as the pregnant, left behind wife, it was a small role. To be fair, although I am no fan of KK who I think has some very annoying actress tics, she was very good in this. It's not the sort of film of which you can really use the word enjoy, since so many of the people in it die, but it was watchable, compelling, interesting, I watched it again on the way back and have since read up some more about the expedition. None of this has brought me any nearer to understanding why people want to climb mountains at grave risk to life and limb, which has always seemed to me to be stupidity personified, but possibly to understand it you have to have the right sort of personality which obviously I don't have.

 

As far as I now the OH watched the latest Star Wars movie again. Crash, bang, wallop. It's what he likes.

 

 

 

The Great Australian Adventure Part 1 (of what will probably turn out to be far too many...)

In theory, and indeed in past practice, it is possible to get on a flight from our local airport and carry on via two changes all the way to Oz without a stopover. However the local airline has had a lot of bad press recently over 'technical issues' ( for which read 'their planes are too old and they break') and we didn't want to be delayed and missing a connection, so we decided it was safer to fly to London the day before our fight to Sydney. A very comfortable night was had at the Terminal 5  Sofitel,

 

and yes it is quite posh. The next day we went to the British Library to see the Alice n Wonderland exhibition. It being Saturday the place was packed out which made it a bit uncomfortable, but we managed to see most of it. It was mainly lots and lots of different editions which was fine by me. I have a passing interest in children's illustrators, particularly Victorian ones, and was pleased at how many of them  I recognised from their work rather than the descriptive labels. After fighting our way round that, we took ourselves off to the relative quiet of the Treasures of the British Library exhibition which was equally fascinating.

 

Then back to collect our luggage and off to Heathrow for our flight. Unsurprisingly Heathrow looked like this....

 

 

Some 25 hours, three films, one good and one not so good meal later we were here. Sydney!  Surely one of the great cities of the world.

 

 

 

 

I appreciate that looks a bit grey and overcast but it was very early in the morning. The sky blued up remarkably quickly every day, and it was the hottest I have ever known Sydney to be. I suspect moans about the heat will be a bit of a feature in these holiday blog posts.....

 

 

 

Project 60 Pre-Empted

So while we were in Australia there were a few things that would have been ideal candidates for Project 60.

There was Paddling in the Pacific

 

 

 

There was riding a camel

 



and there was a helicopter trip

 

The only problem with all these things being that I have done them all before and therefore they don't count.

 

I thought that paddling in the Pacific was a sure thing, until I remembered that many many years ago on my first trip to Oz the friends I was staying with took me to the beach one day and not only did I paddle, I swam in the Pacific. Well, not so much swimming,  it was more a case of walking out to shoulder depth, waiting for a wave and launching yourself on top of it as best you could, then bobbing about  until you got back to the beach.

 

Did my first camel ride in Tunisia, possibly in 1996,  and although I sort of enjoyed it, and it was amazing to be in the Sahara, even if not very far into it, I thought I would have enjoyed it more had I known before I started that I wasn't going to fall off. Also I'd rather not have developed a bruise the size of a dinner plate on my right inner thigh over the following three days, due to the wooden saddle the thing was wearing. This time it was very different; proper soft saddle i.e. not a cobbled together wooden frame, and because I'd done it before I was fairly convinced the animal wasn't going to take it into its head to run away.

 

I've been lucky enough to have two previous helicopter rides, one in New York when I was very much younger, and one a few years ago when we were in Oporto. I could have done one to a glacier in New Zealand a few years ago but it meant telling the tour supervisor my weight which I wasn't prepared to do. The OH had to do that one on his own. This time I didn't want to miss out so I gritted my teeth and wrote down my weight in the appropriate box on the form.

 

So three exciting things that I can't count. I suppose what I should do is simply rejoice that this means three more empty slots on the Project 60 page!

 

More on the trip to Oz coming soon.

Project 60 - Number 20

Yay, a third of the way through - and here's a photo of number 20.

Yes, I've added jam to the marmalade and curd making. I'd have done the jam first if I'd known how much easier it was to make than either of the other two. Marmalade was such a faff and the curd took forever and a day to thicken, making me worry that it might have gone wrong. The jam was, by  comparison, a breeze and I will deffo do it again.

It was made with home grown raspberries and I will now relate a funny story. When we first came here we were full of good intentions about gardening - well about many things, but gardening was one of the main ones - and we duly joined the local gardening club. When asked about our plans for the garden I said the one thing we knew we definitely wanted to do was grow raspberries, at which point there was a hissing sound as everyone else in the room drew in their breath, closely followed by one old son of the soil delivering himself of the opinion that we'd 'never grow raspberries in Burray'. I damn well will I came away thinking, and we have. Our raspberry canes grow like weeds and we always have many more raspberries than we can comfortably accommodate in the freezer. In fact it was in an effort to clear some space in the freezer that I finally decided to make the jam.

And yes, it IS delicious!

With apologies

to those who may already have seen this on Facebook, here is a picture that sums up how my life has been for the last two weeks

and it will be the same for the week to come!

Luckily there is light at the end of the tunnel, it's just a question of whether I will reach the light before Thursday reaches me.....

So, just before I start

on the Great Australian Adventure, do you remember this?

the yarn I dyed at a class held by The Knitting Goddess last autumn.

well not long before Christmas, I turned it into this

 

 

Now if I had chosen the pattern before I did the dyeing I think I would have made the brown a lot darker and differentiated the yellow shades a lot more. But you know what? I'm relaxed about the fact that it isn't perfect. Because I have finally come to realise that you don't get things perfect the first time, however much you may want to, and in my case however many years you have spent thinking that your should. OK its not exactly how I would do it if I were doing it again. But you know what? I can now accept that that's sort of the point. Doing something new is a learning curve, accent on the learning, and when I wear this I'm gong to be proud of myself because  at the end of the day I chose those colours, I dyed that wool to match them and then I made it into a pretty thing that I could wear. And really, that's quite awesome.

 



Yes I Is Back

In fact I've been back for about 10 days and I do feel bad that I haven't blogged but I spent three days catching up with post and working my way though a very long To Do List which had built up in my absence. Although considering the length of the To Do list I worked through before we went I'm not quite sure how that happened. I then got totally whacked from behind by the jet lag which refused to be ignored for any longer. Once I'd sort of crawled out from underneath that I have been lost in the depths of a draft chapter of my thesis, and I'm still there, although fingers crossed, slowly working my way out.

I will be back, blogging at no doubt inordinate  length about the trip, which was fantabulous by the way, in due course. Meanwhile to whet your appetites, here's a photo of Sydney, surely one of the great cities of the world.