The Common Touch and In the service of the Country qith Lost and the Peter Green Splinter Group

Sometimes I only write my way into a theme, sometimes I write myself out of one theme into another, but this evening I am as clear as I can ever be about what I want to try and say, sparked by two very different Television programmes experienced at 8 and then 9pm. The first was about the capitalist merging of copy goods with branded goods manufactured in China as this country becomes the economic power of the world. The second was a brilliant episode of Lost which brings the 4th series into a new dimension, explaining much that has gone before and which is to come, or does it?. One programme blurring the nature of what is fake with what is real and one which created a coherent explanation for the ability to believe one is in two different dimension of actual time without any physical transformation.

I had woken early, struggling to break from a dream in order to put the rubbish bin out. The dream involved my mother in her latter days, something which I cannot recall happening before, and a building, a familiar scenario, with the building a college or residential facility which also becomes and office, occasionally department kind of store, or a large house, and while these buildings are familiar or have familiar aspects there are always problems in that I cannot ever get back to where I have been and want to be, exiting some distance away, again in territory with familiar aspects, but sometime distance away from the place I anticipated and always thinking I know how to get back and never being able to do so.

On getting up I redrafted and corrected yesterdays writing. Sometimes my days become more circular than others. It was cold as I pushed the bin out under the half opened garage back door. I boiled the kettle and only then decided on coffee rather than first thought tea, and cheese slices on toast rather than cereal. I thought if I wake up quickly and feel physically alert I will start the house clean cycle once more. What happened to the forecast sleet and snow? Perhaps the radio or TV will tell me. I did not start the house clean and failed to answer my query about the weather forecasting. I heard the bin men come and then later the recycle box run which I had forgotten as my box had not built up over the fortnight, so it did not matter than I have to wait another two weeks. I forgot to bring the bin back in until darkness remembering when taking the evening meal plate into the kitchen.

I had some of the cold chicken as a salad for lunch, another portion will suffice for tomorrow, and a tomato soup around 5 and a ham omelette around 7pm, a banana at lunchtime and too much butterscotch whip around 9 as I was then too tired to prepare some fresh pineapple, followed by strong percolated coffee at 10 to keep me going until the writing is done for the day.

I worked long and hard on my work project during the day in order to meet the new monthly out target of 125 new sets of cards, 3000 in total, my average since the autumn of 2003 when I first got underway. This work included information on the volume about scientific Matter which I quickly decided must commence with scientific creation and the 57 ( after one quick count) non scientific creation belief system from around our planet of which three are Islam, Judaism and Christianity and then the multitude of second and third sub category beliefs system which emerged as individual human being wrestled with the emerging sciences and the extent to which belief was put into practice and was not.

As I worked I first listened to a two hour set of the Peter Green Splinter Group, which I had never heard of before until I realised this was Peter Green, born Peter Greenbaum of Fleetwood Mac, who started with John Mayal's Bluesbreakers, after Eric Clapton's departure. In the beginning there was Adam and Eve, then you and me and we are all connected. He created Fleetwood Mac and with success followed the predicable route of taking drugs, particularly the hallucinatory LSD which a psychiatrist I admired used to take very disturbed adolescents and others, sinking deeper into the criminal and self destructive abyss, on a bad trip into their childhood and the precipitating experience of their subsequent behaviour, but which in his instance may have precipitated his schizophrenia, the self administered LSD trips I mean. With the help of family and friends Peter resurfaced with new music in the late 1970's/early80's and then again in the 1990's with the Splinter Group. Like Clapton he collected guitars having over 100, he should have had 101 which would have been interesting. In 2004 a further tour was planned and cancelled and then with the British Blues All Stars but this was also cancelled because of the difficulty he continued to experience with his problems, in part caused by the medication. His large body of work remains on record and some on film. It is timeless music which will be played long after much of today's output of popular music is forgotten.

In the afternoon as my work momentum flagged I enjoyed the 1941 British Classic film The Common Touch which was a romantic view of a Christian socialist capitalism in which an eighteen year old finds himself inheriting a major company, decides to investigate the effects of a plan cooked up by his chief executive to make personal profit from a deal which will evict the residents of a homeless shelter used by those who have been to prison or fallen on other hard times. He and a friend dress down to live in the shelter until they discover something to thwart the plans and convince his Board to adopt a socialist approach to the planned development. There is a sub plot in this film where a high class singer declines the proposal of marriage from an England Test Match Cricketer, of the Gentlemen public school wing in the days when the Players were the professionals who tried to make a livelihood full time from the game while the Gentlemen had separate interests which provided their income and life style. Bernard Miles had a miniscule role as a steward at Lords.

I then planned to have as background to further work what I thought was to be a World War 2 film, In the service of the country, only to discover it was a Russian language film in which their secret service set out to thwart an Arabic, Muslim, Terrorist group's attempt to launch Armageddon on all non believers commencing with bombings in Moscow, New York and Berlin city shopping centres. The hero of the civil service team is a cross between the leader of the A Team and bionic Superman Ninja, with his sidekick Lara Croft who take on Cat Woman, the brain behind what was is in fact a capitalist heist to strip some of the oil made Arab wealth, 200 million dollars to 14 accounts in Switzerland, letting off a few real bombs to cause some devastation and loss of human life to keep the Muslim extremists content, much like the American Mafia funded the attempted capitalist return to Cuba. I watched the nonsense because I became very tired and at times it was difficult to keep my eyes open to watch the action let alone read the sub titles. It was an interesting Russian perspective, given he 75% popular vote for the replacement of Putin as Prime Minister while he moves into the Presidency, well it could have been 99.99 percent like the good old days. This reminds me to mention that the Clinton succession is running out of steam which means that I hope Obama is now on assassination watch, especially as a new Presidential assassination film opens this weekend and is bound to trigger another political, Mafia. American secret state within a state, capitalist conspiracy, religious extremist, racist assassination attempt, or is their secret service that incompetent to enable a lone individual to get close enough?

It was while I was trying to recover from this prolonged siesta that it looked as if an hour long programme about the extent to which the major international capitalist companies were being shafted by their own greed until they worked out if you cant beat them you should join them. I have no idea when western capitalists first worked out that China would solve all their problems of squeezed profit margins and bonuses because of the accumulative effects in their countries of minimum wage legislation, structured and protected workers rights with good wage levels, good holiday and pension arrangements, and the need for higher taxes to provide social expenditure on top of that required for security. The prospect of unlimited wealth from trading with Russian and China was only identified as possibilities when I attended a senior management course in the mid 1980's, although by then the capitalists understood that one had to internationalise in order to be able to move the enterprises when political, trade union and trading conditions became too difficult to maintain and further profits in any particular country.

The allegation is a confusing film (which appeared to be on the side of capitalist enterprises who have little thought on the impact of their machinations on workers at home or overseas), is that the firms are now, at best, only going through the motions of opposing the copying of brand images, and that they are unofficially cashing in themselves where they can on the parallel manufacturing and trading.
The story in this documentary is that the companies were so keen to get into the emerging Chinese exporting market that they took up with whichever bilingual Chinese fixer that came their way, not realising that in order to maximise the profit potential and therefore speed up the economic growth of their country, the individual, often which official connections, if not outright blessing, would directly or indirectly set up other production units to create copies which would undercut the Brand and also make more profit because they did not have the same chain of profiteers to service. The reason why the Branded goods went to China more than to Russia because they could recreate the slave labour conditions of the industrial revolution, getting volunteers to work 100 hours a week in for coppers or cents, often using adolescents and children.

As with the agricultural workers driven to the Industrial revolution factories in the UK or the theoretically emancipated black and Mexican slave labour in the USA, the earnings were still better than previously, with the prospect of advancement for a few who were able to understand and use the system for their personal gain. The hoot is that many of those exploiting the Brands names by making authentic copies, are principled communists who have worked out that this is a good way to pay back the Western capitalist for their years of trying to break communist power and authority. I just do not understand how western capitalists get away with describing these goods as fake or counterfeit.
Take Burberry for example, who have closed British factories with the consequence that Burberry is now a Chinese made good and made according to Chinese labour conditions. Somewhere in China there are other workers making Burberry like goods sold in China and overseas, at less price. Top Shop in the UK sells look alike fashion goods where the originals cost £1000 for £50. I do not understand the difference. The gripe appears to be who pockets the profits. It is not about the impact of the development on British working conditions, protected through membership of the ECC and which was once hated by socialists and defended by capitalists.

The programme illustrated my point by interviewing one engaging woman who is able to frequent travel the world and who always visit her Bagman friend in Marbella who is able to provide her and her friends with bag look a likes costing a tenth or twentieth of the original where there is usually a waiting list which means that when you get your original it is already out of date. So the original manufacturing brand name must be raking it in within six months of orders making and selling bag ten to twenty to forty and fifty times the actual cost of materials and labour and others are able to also make money from silly women with too much money and just as little social conscience. This reminds me to have a moan about all those creating markets on E Bay for example by giving publicity to the mark up on scare resource items. I have long suspected the complaint was coming from those such as footballers and those associated with football clubs who planned to make money by selling their allocation of tickets to the official resale market, the companies which provide hospitality packages at all the main sporting, theatrical and cultural events. What they not like is ordinary punters getting in on the act as this undercuts the price which celebrity interests can get for their tickets, and the demand for the inflated hospitality packages. You think I am joking? On the news this day the HSBC bank was writing off billions because of its involvement in the sub prime market in the USA, but still announced record overall profits in the billions because of its gains in the Far East. I was also fascinated by a local news programme which is spending the week promoting the new Emirates route from Newcastle airport to Dubai with its links to the Australasia, nice work if you can get and afford it. It is obviously a freebie promoted by the airline and Dubai. However my complaint is not that this is the nature of society, but by the increasingly flimsy pretence of it all as the general population becomes more educated.

Earlier in the day I had planned to spend time reading what Wikipedia has to say on Time but was over taken by this week's brilliant episode of Lost, one of the best of the 70 odd so far. Earlier in the 4th series the ultra realist Sayed had set off with the true love never hath so finer an advocate, Desmond, in the helicopter to the ship, only to fail to keep strictly on its course, and for Time to slip out of Time but with significant consequence Desmond who finds himself switching with increasing rapidity between his time in the British Army (it does not have an British army feel though) and being on the helicopter and the off island moored freighter. The reason why he has been affected in this way is because his previous experience of significant radioactivity and the electro magnetic storm which the helicopter passes through on its way to the freighter. In the past series the whole issue of convergent electro magnetic polarity was explored. In this episode the communications officer on the freighter and a friend have been also affected when they take the ship to shore boat and veer off the only course portal which craft can travel to and from the island. One of the two has already died and the other is shortly to die which emphasises the need for Desmond to find a treatment if one is possible. It is because on the island there is Daniel Faraday the Oxford experimental physicist who has worked out a means of transporting the brain (not the body) into the future and back in which you can experience the realities but not alter it… a device to ensure that those watching the programme cannot conclude that the mystery of the island is about alternate dimensions and realities, especially as in this series there are forward flashes as well as flashbacks. The beauty of this programme is that it provides a coherent explanation for what is happening with a Romeo and Juliet love story

During moments of onboard ship reality Desmond and Sayed are able to communicate with the island by telephone and with Daniel Faraday, the physicist from the freighter who explains that some of those who veer of the narrow sea or air course to the island experience a mental form of time travel in which the individual inhabits their actual physical body and memory in both dimensions and in order to stabilise himself in both and not bring his present to an untimely end he has to connect with a meaningful constant from both times, and which in this instance is Penny, the love of both their lives.

On discovering that Desmond believes the year is 1996, Daniel instructs him that the next time he is back in this reality he must go as quickly as he can to find him at Oxford University where he works and is at the early theoretical and experimental period of his brain travel work. When this happens he reacts that Desmond is a set up by colleagues to who ridicule his work but he has provided in the future a key to ensure that when in the past Daniel recognises that only someone inhabiting the future could know of the detail. He then explains to Desmond that in order to survive he must make contact with someone, a constant, from both moments in time.

The beauty of this story line will not be appreciated by those who do not know the history of Desmond's relationship with Penny and that she is using her family wealth to fund an ongoing search to find out what happened to Desmond and that despite what has happened between them and the years of separation, their love has remained constant, except for the time in 1996 which is where the brain time shift has taken him. To break the chain which is quickly leading to a brain seizure an death he must make contact with Penny in the present, where there is a double complication, he does not have her phone number, and the ship to outside world communication system has been sabotaged. Sayed the communications specialist is able to solve the latter but to get the phone number he has to go back mentally to 1996,find Penny's father and persuades him to given her whereabouts, he gives her address not her phone number, so Desmond visits and persuades Penny to give her number as a means of getting rid of him, and he registers with her that he will ring her on Christmas even eight years from hence, which he is able to do, they express their undying love how ever long it will take for them to be together, if ever, and in do doing he is saved, for now. The episode ends with Faraday going through his master notebooks where eight years before he has made a note, if things go wrong Desmond is my constant. Thus the situation is circular as I believe is time, and that what is imagined or dreamt reality and what is authentic reality is all part of reality, just as what is a fake, and what is a copy, or good representation or reproduction are all valid perspective of one reality.

The Children of Times Square and June Whitfield and ehr Comedians

Beware looking into the abyss too often for its watch into your soul is constant. The problem with method writing as with method acting, or method anything Is being able to switch back to you, especially if you begin to like the role played and then lose you all together. I suspect this is a problem for comedians, unless they are exceptionally and naturally talented, or become so, after year upon year of working as the assistant, the sidekick, the foil to all the great ones.

I write this as I watch a South Bank Programme about the theatrical, radio and TV life of June Whitfield who is 81. If I feel as I do as 69 approaches what will it be like at 70? June looked fitter, more energetic than me, despite being a decade older.

And she is still working, now on the London stage, with the English National Opera company. where she began in wartime GB, with a certificate of exemption as a student actress. Would we be so enlightened today? June was brought up in South London in a wealthy middle class household becoming a stage actress after RADA. She appeared in a number of production including by Noel Coward who invited his performers into his world, for a time. Last week I think I heard someone plugging Private Lives as if it was a new play, June recalled being asked by a contemporary young player if there was some message in the work, so she told him it was written in a week as the piece of entertainment it remains, although now a historical reminder into how we once liked to see ourselves.
It was not until 1953 that she became a household name when she joined Jimmy Edwards and the rest of the cast of Take it from Here, then a radio programme which had an audience of 22 million just under half the UK population. Her most well known character then was Eth engaged to Ron Glum. She appeared with Arthur Askey on early TV and then Tony Hancock with the Blood Donor sketch. One of the classics, also just about every name comedian of subsequent decades including Frankie Howard, Benny Hill Peter Sellers, Morecombe and Wise, Bruce Forsythe, Leslie Phillips, Roy Hudd, Terry Scott, Julian Clary, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders and has become a stalwart in Britain's longest running situation comedy, The Last of the Summer Wine. There has been no elevation to becoming a Dame or the like, perhaps because she is always there, the first call, perhaps because she appears to have led a normal family life away from her work.


Well done Melvyn and his team for reminding everyone and me just what a national treasure she has become.

There was an inevitability about the lunchtime film, The children of Times Square. which I imagine is similar to the area around Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus and Soho in London, and where the amusements arcades also attract youngster who run away from home and can quickly become prey to those offering shelter in return for work in prostitution and drug dealing. The film centres on two stories, the adolescent rejected by his step father and a mother trying to balance her adult relationship with those of her son. The films pulls no punches on the difficulties of finding someone who enters into this underworld. The second story is that of another adolescent who willingly allows himself to be drawn into this world as a solution to the family poverty which brings them to a communal shelter when their home is destroyed in fire and they are rescued by jumping from windows. The two boys are rescued because in their own ways, their mothers fight against the inevitability of fall into this abyss which happens to so many, the girl who comes to the city to escape a sexually violent domestic situation only to then sell her body to survive, or the street wise young man only too willing to take over the drugs ring when his boss and protector is killed. One wonders how many of the former children of the residential children's home in Jersey, and elsewhere, gravitated to central London who would be able to tell similar stories.

Last night I enjoyed a baked half of a side of salmon covered with Italian seasoning, which had been sawed frozen and then defrosted overnight. It was still too big a portion so what was left over was made into a salad for lunch with thick slices of brown bread, leaving the roast chicken breast with vegetables for the evening meal, deciding against roast potatoes for the second weekend running. The fresh pineapples had been reduced by half to £1 so I had bought two for afters, one portion a day with a banana for the second meal. I have taken not to having breakfast because of rising late and then having some cereal before going to bed, which is better than cheese on toast, or a salami sandwich. I have to drinking percolated coffee, in addition to tea, and orange juice, instead of Pepsi or Coca Cola, and also a little water.

Also for the second week running I opted for the second in the new Lewis series rather than the latest episode of Lost. This was a complex story with links to Morse and his love of Wagner. The amusing aspect of a various serious episode (which took us to the break up of East Germany and the problem of those who worked for the system, some 500000 estimated who have spied for the secret police on their neighbours, sending many to prison and their deaths, for the sake of some advantage and improvement in their economic situation), was that Lewis took up Wagner, which for years Morse tried to get him interested, while his graduate sidekick destined to become a chief constable or part of the Home Office police Inspectorate, makes him listen to contemporary popular records. One can see Lewis turning into Morse with every episode, now living in his own, his wife and children departed, with the occasional dalliance. There was a moment when such an encounter between Morse and another was recalled and the woman asked Lewis if he got on with Morse, responding that their interaction reminded him of a marriage. One can see the relationship between Lewis and his man developing to a marriage of convenience where this is for Lewis for the rest of his days, but the sidekick will be one of many as he marries, joins the Masons or Rotary and takes up golf.

There was further work on the canvases and on the main project as well as doing the end of month accounts. I played much chess and made a silly mistake ending my run of games at 96, five short of the target, having previously. reached 98. I thought much of mother, my aunts and my father.

There was a fierce wind outside for part of the day and the promise of cold and some sleet and snow reinforcing my mood. Around the town there are florious beds and banks of of crocus and my window boxes of daffs are in bud, and how I long to feel the Spring again.

Dinner at Eight with The Sea Wife and the Man in the Grey Suit

"Change comes in excruciating small parcels for those who want to do it " is my quote of the day from West Wing, where activity has been restricted to painting three canvases in layers of black or white acrylic. After weeks of failure after reaching 98 games of level 1 chess I am at game 76. The days when I reached 101 games three occasions within a month seem very distant

Of course suggesting as I did yesterday that British and American films prior to the ending of Second World War and then up to the early fifties had a distinctly different feel to those which came afterward was a generalization. I watched two films today where good manners and the appearance of things was considered more important than how people otherwise behaved. I do not know if I saw the 1933 American comedy Dinner at Eight during the years when I went to the Odeon Cinema Wallington every Monday and Thursday, but it has become a familiar story and another viewing this morning was also enjoyable. The film featured Jean Harlow, John and Lionel Barrymore, but for me the star was Billie Burke as the apparent shallow socialite wife who holds a dinner party during the Great Depression where the principal guest does not turn up. She shows her metal first by reorganising the guest list, and then when her husband reveals that they have been ruined, she immediately cancels as many expenditure commitments as she can and says they will move into less expensive accommodation and will learn how to cope. Her nineteen year old daughter has had a privileged life and is romantically and sexually involved with the aging actor more than twice her age, played by John Barrymore, who is seeking a refuge in alcohol as his career ends, his debts mount and he is asked to leave his serviced rooms. Facing reality he sends the girl away and commits suicide. The girl is persuaded not tell anyone about the relationship when a dinner guest discloses she knew about the affair, as she lives in the same block of rooms. This is Carletta, Marie Dressler, a gossipy aging matron who has been the mistress of anyone who was anyone in society, The new world is represented by a successful, dominating and ruthless businessman who had no time for the polite world of his hosts but goes along with his wife, Jean Harlow, who wants to be accepted on the world he is has not time for. His unlimited wealth and power no longer impress her. There is no point to this film other than using a pleasant couple of hours recapturing the brief years of the USA recovering from the Stock market crash and prohibition but it entertains and all the actors care about what they are doing.

Before the football commentaries, when it was necessary to have a radio on each ear until disaster struck Newcastle again and the Boro. but Sunderland managed a valuable point at Derby, I saw one of Gainsborough studio costume dramas produced during World War II which was also previously seen at the Odeon Wallington after the War. There were four, three I now know well, The Wicked Lady with Margaret Lockwood, James Mason and Patricia Roc which haunted until late adolescence; Fanny by Gaslight, with James Mason, Stewart Grainger and Phyllis Calvert: Madonna of the Seven Moons Phyllis Calvert and Steward Grainger which is not familiar; and The Man in the Grey Suit Phyllis Calvert, Margaret Lockwood, James Mason and Stewart Grainger. In both of her films Margaret Lockwood played villains, in this afternoon's offering a scheming, ruthless, two faced adventurer who resorts to murder when her ambition appears to be thwarted. This is the story of a playboy Lord who is persuaded to take a young bride by his mother in order to secure the blood line. Any resemblance to living people was never intended. The victim, just out of finishing school, Phyllis Calvert has the right breeding but her widowed mother has just about the funds for one Season and persuades her daughter to accept the offer of marriage although the couple have no interest in each other and live separate lives from the outset, except to provide the heir. Although they work hard to present one public image everyone in London society knows the truth.

Stewart Grainger is a dispossessed gentleman who Phyllis Calvert first encounters as a travelling actor playing Othello and Margaret Lockwood his theatrical wife who Phyllis previously encountered at finishing school and both become lovers of the Lord and his Lady and which is destined to lead them all to tragedy. The film uses the device of an auction to sell off the contents of the aristocratic home, in which a young airman, Stewart Grainer, meets with a descendent of the family, Phyllis Calvert, a device designed to encourage the belief in war time and post war audiences, that things would get better in time. They also revealed something fo the reality of behaviour behind he thin veneer of social conventions.

The Sea Wife is a minor work, of interest because it featured a fine performance by the young Joan Collins before she developed into Dallas and films such as The Stud and the charismatic Richard Burton played himself. Four individuals, Joan and Richard are two, are torpedoed by a Japanese Submarine. Richard is an injured serviceman and the other two men in the dingy are the ship's captain who is a bigot and a racist and Cy Grant in his first film, Cy was a British Guiana born shot down Flight Lieutenant and RAF POW in World War II, who subsequently qualified as a barrister and then decided to become an actor, singer and author, These three men and Joan survive after a long sea journey to an island which has limited water and natural food, so they construct a raft to try and reach a more habitable island and at this point the sea captain chose to try and abandon Cy Grant (The British answer to Harry Belafonte) who is then killed by a shark as he attempts to swim out to the departing craft. They are rescued and Richard spends time in hospital and on the continuing war before discharge and coming to England in search of Joan who was nicknamed Sea Wife, and who although tempted by the attention of Richard remained chaste. He does not find her. She was a nun. The ending of this short feature film is a poor one because Richard gives up his long and expensive search on being told by the Sea Captain that the girl is dead and without making any further checks about her. In fact his failure to find out from the shipping line or from his rescuers what happened to her or what happened to Cy Grant is unbelievable. The film makers should have followed what happened in Neville Shute's A Town Like Alice which is having its annual/biannual showing at this time

The punch line of the film is that no one looks at the face of nun. This is nonsense of course. But nonsense can also become reality which is the subject of S1m0ne, the Al Pacino 2002 movie in which a computer generated actress becomes internationally famous, allegedly giving live interviews, and a holographic stage performance. As the deception becomes world wide he likes less and less his creation, so he makes the worst film he can imagine and then in created interview he makes her spout the most extreme and offensive of views but all this only makes the media and public love her more. He then decides to kill her off only to be accused of her murder. What happens next is all too believable, alas.

Before bedtime I could not resist another showing of One Night at McCool's, previously seen in theatre. The moral of this film is beware Greek that bares her gifts, especially one whose ambition is a DVD recorder and a large screen TV media centre. This leads Matt Dillon to become a thief and complicity in two killings, one directly and one indirectly by the young women in question played by Liv Tyler. Paul Resier is the lawyer relative of the bar tender Matt Dillon, married with children and a penchant for dressing up in bondage gear and being whopped, what happens to him in the last flick of the film is worth the ticket money alone. John Goodman plays a detective who she is seduced when he finds out she is implicated in one of the deaths and his willingness to lose the evidence is needed. Michael Douglas his the hired assassin who runs off with the wicked wench as the twp are as well matched a pair of villain as James Mason and Margaret Lockwood of my generation. The final scenes are farce and funny but were not worth going out to the theatre for
Happy mother's day.

A good woman and Prospero's Books plus Escape to Athena

“Nowadays people look at life as a speculation. It is not a speculation, it is a sacrament. Its ideal is love. Its purification is sacrifice.

Are you beginning to reform me? It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.

Oh gossip is charming. History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite and a woman who moralises is invariably plain.

There is nothing as unbecoming to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience. That is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us, they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us quite unattractively good. The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a middle class education.

People call something an experience they mean it was a mistake.

Women do not want to be understood, they want to be loved.

No love is pure and simple as the love of food.

Everyman is born truthful and dies a liar.

Girls begin by loving their mothers but as they grow they judge us. It is because of men that women distrust other women.

If a man can tolerate his own past then why should he not tolerate that of his wife.

I cannot always explain myself to myself let alone to you.

It takes practice and skill to live without regret.

In this world there are two tragedies. One is not getting want you want and the other is getting it.

London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produced the serious people the serious people the fogs, I do not know.

I do not think now that people can be divided into the good and bad, as though they were two separate races, or creations. What are called good women may have terrible things in them, mad moods of recklessness, assertion and jealousy, sin. Bad women as they are termed, may have in them sorrow, repentance, pity, sacrifice. Ideals are dangerous things, realities are better, they wound, but they're better. There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil sin and innocence go through it hand in hand.”

Thus I spent Friday afternoon, leap year day, 29th February 2008 on the Amalfi Coast in the cinematic reproduction of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, called A Good Woman, seen in theatre in 2004 and now on DVD, and with the help of the Penguin Plays of Oscar Wilde, 1960 reprinted paper back edition which also includes The Importance of being earnest, An Ideal Husband, A woman of no Importance and Salome.

It was an excellent antidote to what I now regard as an even worse nauseating immoral film that the Foreigner, Escape to Athena. It is difficult to judge who was responsible for this insult to Greek people and all those, on all sides of World War II who fought and died bravely in the service of their country.

Elliot Gould can be forgiven for playing an extension of Mash, which although a comedy made out of war, restricted itself to the work of the front line medical unit, where humour is the only defence against insanity. Roger Moore and David Niven also played their normal roles, while Telly Savalas appeared to take his part seriously. I watched the film broken only by getting my lunch, taking in some parcels for a neighbour and checking the incoming mail just to see if it had any redeeming features apart from some glorious views of the Greek Island said to be Rhodes and which I have visited for a week. I must find time to do a volume of memories of that visit.

For two hours John Gielgud addresses the audience in a condensed poetical landscape of biblical, mythological and Shakespearean images conjured from his 20 books while Peter Greenaway uses every cinematic device available to him in the early 1990's to populate the rest of the screen with tableaux upon tableaux of Fellini figures out of Satyricon. Michael Nyman provided the music which merits attention on its own. Ideally one should be able to turnoff the music and vision and listen to the words, then listen to the words with the music, then just watch the images without sound, and then before experiencing the whole once more spend a day studying the twenty page study of references produced by Steven Marx of Cal Poly University San Luis Obispo and ignores the superficial article in Wikipedia. Most people will not like or enjoy the experience, or devote the time, even to watch the film, Prospero's Books from start to finish, once.

You also have to be in the right mood and frame of mind to experience Monster's Ball the 2001 film which led to an Oscar, A Bafta, a Golden Globe, an MTV award and the Screen Actors Guild award for best female performance to Halle Berry. The film and the award has had its critics among inverted racists who as with the previous film failed to appreciate its brilliance in uncovering layers of human reality. For me this is a film about two individuals deciding that they could share their lives after having to cope with tragedies wish would destroy most people. Billy Boy Thornton lives with his openly racist father whose wife committed suicide. Billy Boy, a widower works with his son, played by the late Heath Ledger who came to the fore with Brokeback Mountain as prison officers, preparing for an execution (The Monster's Ball) which affects them both, but his son more so as he finds it difficult to cope with the event and father and son row, with the consequence that the son kills himself in the presence of his father. Before these events Billy Bob satisfies his sexual needs with functional experiences with a prostitute, but then he becomes impotent and his inability to cope with his life leads him to resign from his career job.

The executed prisoner is black and has committed a crime which justifies execution according to state law and it take places because there are no mitigating circumstances. The man desperately tries to convince his son that while he is has been a bad man the boy represents everything that is good in his life. The boy finds his father's death difficult to cope with and develops an eating disorder and then is fatally knocked down in a hit and run accident in the presence of his mother. Thornton passes by, as do other white drivers, but returns to try and help, having recognised the woman as working in a restaurant he visits. He takes the boy to hospital and after his death he begins a relationship with the mother, who is losing her home, using the rent money to buy alcohol. It is only after they become lovers that Thornton finds out she is the wife of the man he helped to execute, and she only finds this out after she has moved in with him after being evicted. The relationship also faced an early crisis when she visit his home and meets his father who treats her in a stereotype racist way toward a desirable black female. Thornton reacts by placing his diseased father in a nursing home. His father pleads with his son not to be left to die in this way to no avail. The film ends as the new couple sit out eating ice cream looking forward to a future together. In the 1950's British theatre, and much of British film drama and romance was contrived and controlled with at its best the Plays of Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare. Then with Look Back in Anger and the plays of Arnold Wesker a contemporary reality was brought to stage and screen as people were shown to talk and behave as the majority. Room at the Top. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, together with Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey each concluded that one should seize any opportunity which becomes available but then be prepared to pay the price, which in some instances will last a lifetime. The combination of bringing home this reality and living with the threat of an annihilating third world war pushed people further into what is now described as the swinging sixties, although my experience was of generation who cared deeply about others and were prepared to do something about it as well as having some enjoyment with friends and lovers. The Monsters' Ball follows in that tradition of describing things as they are and despite all that had happened to them, and their own part in their respective downfalls, I felt this was a relationship that would not only last but remain meaningful. Neither would ever be able forget their past but the very experiences of pain and failure they had experienced separately would cement them together.

I write this in the early hours of Saturday as the wind howls to gale force with the prospect of reaching hurricane force in some part of the Northern England during the rest of the night. I go to bed content, not so much from the film or writing about them but from the sight of a pure black acyclic canvass. At present its seems wrong to add anything to it, even a signature of some kind on an edge. I feared this would happen. I can see myself wanting to abandon everything else and just explore what I can do and what I cannot.

J F K and Executive Action

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