El Jefe

We are founder members of the Blackstairs Film Society which meets one weekend night a month during the Winter [Sep-Apr] Season.  I've mentioned this cultural lifeline before.  It's a lot more convenient than the Tinahely Film Group which we only go to occasionally.  They've been running in Tinahely since the days of 16mm film-stock and have a pee-break in the middle of the film - to recharge the wine glasses and critique the current film with your neighbours.  Originally this was to fill the time while the reels were changed but the members insisted on retaining the custom when DVDs replaced 16mm. Blackstairs is run by a committee who select films from a limited stock supplied by Access Cinema Ireland.  Access Cinema "Our mission is to provide all audiences throughout Ireland with access to the best of Irish, world and independent cinema, via our national network of non-profit and voluntary organisations.".  It's a nice little earner for the chaps mediating between Hollywood and Little People in rural Ireland [that would be Leprechauns?].

A few years ago, the BFS committee decided to show Babette's Feast, a gorgeous and funny 1987 film about food melting Calvinist hearts. They were inspired to serve food during the film and it was a mighty success.  The audience on Film night can be very thin if it's miserable weather and they are showing a docudrama about a neurosurgical hospital in Cambodia but there were loadsa punters for Babette.  It was only partly because the BFS demographic can remember 1987. The following year, they did the same idea with Like Water Like Chocolate aka Como agua para chocolate a magical-realist Mexican film from 1992. And last year we had dahl and chapattis with The Lunchbox.  It is a bread-winner for the Society which is limping along barely solvent from year to year.

This weekend, we were served tostadas, empanadas, and cubanos with Chef, a 2014 film [trailer] [nother trailer] starring Jon Favreau and Scarlett Johnansen, with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Downey Jr. in minor-but-brilliant roles. It's a pretty straight-forward feel-good movie about a Chef who is sacked from his position at a high-profile LA restaurant and redeems himself and his relationships by working a taco-truck from Miami to Los Angeles.  The chef's son goes along for the ride and comes to realise that the catering trade is hard, hot, work but rewarding if you give it your all. Same as teaching in The Institute except that I don't eat my creations.  I was telling Dau.II aka Cookie about the film but she said she'd seen it already "on the internet"; I bet she didn't get free empanadas with it, though. We both agreed that it was stupid for Scarlett to be serving food with her silky blonde locks dipping into everything: could she not tie it back?  We insist that the long-hairs to do that in the labs in The Institute; it's safer.

Chef was okay, no more. Dustin Hoffman is great as always but the sound-quality was not so good; we could have done with sub-titles. It doesn't help that the kid talks with his mouthful all the time: yes, yes, I realise it's a metaphor about accepting the father's world. The Cuban music is catchy but often loud enough to drown out important fragments of dialogue.  The end is IMO a cop-out but you may go see it so I won't do a spoiler now.

Museum Hours

Last night we didn't get home till today - 0010hrs.  It was film night at the Blackstairs Film Society, a group which is hirpling along the edge of solvency but still going after seven years.  Each of those years we've stumped up €50 (each!) to see 8 films over the months of darkness Sep-Apr.  In the early years, we had to black out the windows with bin-bags when sundown was bleeding the colour off the screen at the end April.  They show films like Jiro Dreams of Sushi which I reviewed a year ago: films with sub-titles. Apart from the stalwart time-and-energy-donating committee I think we're probably the only people who are still there from the beginning.  Several years ago I asked a friend, a former member of the club, why we never saw him on film night.  His reply went "On a brutal winter's night I should dash through horizontal sleet to my car, drive through puddles of uncertain depth to sit in a barn with rattling windows, wrapped in a blanket, hat and gloves to watch a worthy film with sketchy sub-titles about infanticide in Mongolia?".  Love it, but then I'm an aficionado of ironia.

The main feature last night was Museum Hours by Jem Cohen.  It's brilliant!  It gives an updated view of 'real' Vienna to compare with The Third Man.  I say real because The Beloved came out saying she would not be in a hurry to go visit that city. In The Third Man the streetviews are relentlessly sepia, in Museum Hours they are relentlessly seepy, bleak and univiting - until the protagonists step off the street into a bar or a cafe or, indeed, the eponymous Museum to continue their rambling conversation.  He is a guard in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, She is a middle-aged Canadian come to visit her estranged and now comatose cousin in hospital. So yes there are sub-titles; and yes, there are no car-chases: it wouldn't classify as 'exciting'.  But it was deeply engaging, perhaps in part because the Canadian is played by Mary Margaret O'Hara.  We first encountered her in 1988 at a concert in a disused cinema in Newcastle Upon Tyne when she was promoting her one and only album Miss America, which you may hear on youtube to get a hint of her extraordinary vocal range and sensitivities.  I guess we only went because we were home-sick for Ireland and saw her name on a poster - but we definitely bought the album after hearing her belting out A New Day.

Another huge attraction for me is the intellectual meat in the film including an explicitly didactic explanation of the life and works of the first Bruegel. That aspect of the film is very like another favorite 'watching paint-dry' film of mine My Dinner with Andre, which I'll have to write about later.  As an aside, we are forced to appreciate that really famous paintings are not located in a book or on a postcard or in Google - they are in a particular museum.  The Kunsthistorisches has a shocking amount of these, so well-known artworks.  Bruegel is good for detail - his paintings serve as Finding Wally puzzles from 500 years ago.  You could spend a lifetime, as a museum guard say, looking at a handful of his paintings and discover a new quirk or joke every day.  I'm sure my film-buffy pals will have picked up more depths of resonance between the streets of Vienna in 2010 and the streets of Flanders in 1550.  I am now resolved to use them in my next treasure hunt.

So that was an evening well spent, even if we regretted forgetting the blanket.  Our Man From La Mancha wasn't going to get much out of a film where the only bits he was likely to understand were when the dialog was in German (it's the subtitles innit!).  But rather than abandon him to his English studies at the kitchen table we left him off in the village hall of the local hamlet.  There Seamus Begley, world famous trad singer, and friends were leading a céilí. How cultural is that?  The choices we have in the boondocks.  Begley clearly wouldn't be shut up because we sat in the car at 2^oC for 45 minutes waiting for the music to finish and to pick up our Man.  And that's why we didn't get home till after midnight.

Incidentally, all you chaps in Ukraine have enough time to charter a plane to come over the next event in the Film Soc. - 22nd February we're showing Like Water for Chocolate, as the third in our annual Foodie night Specials. €12 for a film and all-you-can-eat buffet - sub-titles are thrown in for free.  побачити вас там !!

Suspense threshold low

I grew up watching Richard Greene as Robin Hood . . . from behind the sofa. It was far too frighty-me to watch on the telly while sitting normally. My excuse now, is that I was only 6 years old when the BBC stopped making episodes; of which several are available on youtube. That series is the archetype for such harmless nonsense as Men in Tights. But watching the telly from behind the sofa more or less set my clock with a low threshold for vicarious violence and, especially, for suspense. Getting to be an adult is to acquire a certain amount of autonomy - can choose what to watch without consulting siblings.

I walked out of Straw Dogs in 1974 even though I'd paid money to the UCD Film Society to watch it and I was quite a fan of Dustin Hoffman. It wasn't so much the rural English thuggery and viciousness as the expectation of RET&V in the very near future. I had, for example, sat through Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch despite its balletic bloodiness. The Beloved walked with me, so that was a bit of a mistake-date. Or maybe not, we probably went somewhere else and gazed into each other's eyes and talked about poetry. I'm not stupid, and I can read, so now I'm generally able to avoid getting into under-seat-puddle situations.

At the end of last month, I walked out of Dogman [trailer = summary] which was the Feb 2019 choice at the Blackstairs Film Society. I have a standing request in with the BFS organising committee to have more fluffy films: a gentle rom-com is what I'd call entertainment. Of course, having subtitles is desirable / essential - so a French rom-com from the 1970s would be ideal . . . but it ain't gonna happen. The committee have limited choice through Access Cinema and quite different tastes to mine. Dogman is about a dog-groomer living in a relentlessly bleak Italian sea-side town where affluent tourists have been replaced by graffiti and petty crime. Call me judgemental but dog-groomer is on my list of utterly useless ways to make a living - somewhere between telephone-sanitizer and currency-trader. The film started to go pear-shaped when the fellow's dog refused its kibble and started eating yer man's pasta - from the fork and then from the bowl [R from trailer]. We have been inured to the pornography of violence but most of the audience were audible in their disgust at these antics. The dog-groomer takes up with an enormous psychopathic petty criminal and, shortly after the dog-bowl incident the psychopath tries a bit of mindless violence. More seepiness ensues with barely-clad young women at a night-club . . . and I made my exit as quietly as possible.  No point in laying my values / sensitivities on other people.

If you want a better film about low-lifes you could shed the final N and watch Dogma written and directed by Kevin Smith. I enjoyed that.

Jonas aujourd'hui

Jonath qui aura 65 ans en l'an 2018

One of the first things I did when I went to college in 1973 was join the Film Soc. For good measure, I joined the French Film Soc at the other university across town where The Beloved was studying in The Arts Block. Those films set my clock: even today, if a film doesn't have sub-titles then there's something missing. I get my fix the last Saturday of every month with the Blackstairs Film Society. I couldn't get over how cool and sophisticated French films, by François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Louis Malle, Bertrand Tavernier, seemed back then in 1970s Ireland: when homosexuality was still illegal, and books by JP Donleavy, Edna O'Brien and John McGahern were banned.

In the middle of this beaker full of the warm South, The Boy was born at the end of 1975. The following year saw the launch of another film from La Francophonie: Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000. It was as if it had been written and directed for The Boy. 25 years later for his birthday in 2000, I went off on a hunt for the iconic film, not least because he was then about the age which the adult protagonists of Jonas were when he was born. The internet was a smaller, clunkier and less commercial place in 2000 AD. Google existed but was eclipsed by Altavista; Amazon existed but was years from its first year in profit; DVDs existed and play.com sold them by the bucket-load but their inventory was a long way from being comprehensive - especially for old, niche, not-American films. I never did get a copy of the film but I did track down a copy of the film-script in a bookshop in Texas. I called them up, read my credit-card details down the phone, and they agreed to sell and send me the book. I was delighted. I suspect The Boy was bemused. For his 21st birthday, I'd given him a box containing 21 different bottles of beer and I'm sure he'd have preferred to get N=25 ditto 4 years later.

Mais revenons-nous a nos Jonas. It was filmed in French but in the neighbouring republic of Switzerland, directed by Alain Tanner and written by Tanner and John Berger, the English critic, writer and radical who was a real inspiration for my younger radical self. I wrote about him when he turned 90 in 2016 and again, as an obituary 2 months later. It's a bit jumpy because it tells the interwoven tales of 8 young adults in the early 1970s as they try to discover a new equilibrium after their world turned upside-down by the Paris Spring of May 1968. [Hey, that's 50 years ago next month - we must have a retrospective] Tanner and Berger decided to call their principals Max Mathilde Marco Marcel Marguerite Madeleine Marie Mathieu which must have a Meaning more profound than I can fathom unless - I have it - they are all avatars or dimensions of Marx. It's about maintaining principles and an ethical stance while having to live in a real world which runs on different tracks. About trying to make a difference while making a living. And it's still kind of fun although kind of dated.

How do I know? Because someone called Joan Alice has loaded it up on youtube! I sat still one evening last week and watched it all the way through. Indeed I stayed up way past my bedtime to see it finished. I was confused - not least by Marguerite and Mathilde who look a bit alike. Here's a review. If I watched it again, I'd mine more nuggets of socio-political comment from 1970s Switzerland but maybe my time is better spent on today's problems today.  Who's Jonas? He is the son of Mathilde and Mathieu who comes along towards the end of the film as a new broom sweeping his parents generation into the dustbin of history and replacing their world with a bright new future . . . I think.

You raise me up

Yesterday I was on about the Blackstairs Film Society and reviewed the Main Feature.  The astute among you will have twigged that there must have been another film.  And there was, and it was brilliant also - in a no-car-chase paint-drying sort of way.  "You won't get that in a chemist" is a short film about the Southend Singers in Wexford Town.  This is a community choir whose average age must be about 65.  The film traces their lives through a year of Tuesday night meetings where they learn to sing by listen-and-repeat without sheet-music.  I've written about this sort of Singing Together thing before: if you ever get the chance to do this sort of thing seize the opportunity - you will be a better person during and ever-after the experience.  I've also written before about cracking open the door of opportunity so that ordinary people can sing their hearts out in public ad maiorem Dei gloriam but also to the greater glory of both singer and those to whom they sing. And speaking of ad maiorem Dei gloriam, I've also had words to say on the importance of song on pilgrimage.  The Chemist is a film about singing and learning to sing but it's also a hymn to community, to inclusion, and to empowerment.  It's not for nothing that the theme tune and the subject of their pinnacle performance is You Raise Me Up.

The film is shot in documentary style hearing these elderly people - the youngest is probably the daughter, who 'has The Downs', of one of the ladies - sing, but also reflecting on how much their involvement means to them.  Monday rolls by in double time in anticipation of Tuesday and Wednesday is taken up with thinking and cahtting about the fun they all had the night before.  That only leaves Thursday to Sunday for the quotidian world of Wexford. One suspects that, but for the existence of the Wexford rissole, life during those four days hangs heavy.

Another wonderfully normative theme in the film is the fact that these elders are practicing to sing with the local primary school.  The idea that children should have a relationship with adults who are neither family nor teachers is somewhat weird in the wonky world we now inhabit.  One of the great sadnesses of my father's declining years was that he felt that he couldn't go and help a child who'd barked his knees falling over on rough ground. As his garden backed onto the part of the village green that housed the children's play-ground, that happened more often than for most of the rest of us.  Any fule kno that the perp in a paedophila case is much more likely to Uncle Jim with his naked woodwork lessons than an unknown old chap with cruddy overalls and a straw hat.

So hats off to the Singers, the Southend Family Resource Centre, Teresa O'Leary, who shot the film and Murt Flynn & Brian Hand who helped with the writing and editing.  Thanks  -You've Raised Me Up!

I am Spartacus

A glorious day yesterday, after a pretty good day [cue Groundhogs] the day before. I had a lot on my plate because Friday-close-of-business my final year project students submitted the first draft of their write-ups. The quicker I gave them feedback, the quicker they could do corrections, and the quicker they could move on . . . final exams are six weeks away and there is lots to bone up.  I was ahead of the year because I'd spent the afternoon of the pretty good day mowing all around me so that the home-place looked less jungly. Accordingly I set to on the project reports at 0730hrs and worked and worked; but when the sun came up properly, I took breaks to sort out the woodpile and level out the dips in the yard. The door stayed open to let the sun warm the hall-floor and two strangers rocked up in the yard looking for information which turned into distracting chats about life the universe and everything LTUAE. To have the use of my legs and a ticker that ticks, to have a job where I believe I do good, to experience the first hot day of Spring, to meet engaging strangers and learn something new. Bliss was it in that evening to be alive.

Last Saturday of the month too! That's Blackstairs Film Society's [multiprev] film night. BFS is when I get to meet my community: the tree-huggers, ceramicists, hill-walkers, and blow-ins who also like films with sub-titles. There were no subtitles on last night's film, but maybe there should have been because I, Daniel Blake is carried on in deepest Geordie. But my ear is quite well tuned to that dialect's cadence because my first academic job was in the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and we lived there for seven years in the 80s. Indeed that was one reason to look forward to the film - to see if they shot scenes in any of the familiar streets of Newcastle.  The committee of the BFS has a tendency to turn aside from fluffy films and scour the World for gritty realism: Mongolian yak herder drowns in quicksand, the difficulties of being transgender in Cuba. I, Daniel Blake is another bitter-sweet story about an honest carpenter who can't work because his ticker has let him down on the job . . . but he doesn't qualify for Job Seeker's Allowance because his doctor asserts he is not fit for work and he doesn't qualify for Social Assistance because an apparatchik behind a Welfare desk decides that he is fit for work because he can walk 50m unaided and must apply for Job Seeker's Allowance instead.  Long sentences are hard to follow and I employ one there as a metaphor of the dystopian Kafkaesque world in which the poor old boy [my age, more or less] finds himself.

I, Daniel Blake is directed by Ken Loach and funded partly by the BBC. The BBC is reputed to be full of Lefties and anti-establishment types who find no paradox in sucking at the government teat while exposing government as inhuman and unforgiving and/or suitable for satire. And they have been good to Ken Loach who was making gritty BBC dramas exposing the failings of British society fully 50 years ago. As a young chap I was shook to my core watching his 'hymn' to homelessness Cathy Come Home [1969] as part of the BBC's ongoing series The Wednesday Play. My 12-y.o. middle-class eyes were on stalks as I watch that tragedy of the honest dispossessed unfold. His film Kes [1969], based on the story a Kestrel for a Knave, about a boy and a bird still makes me weep tears of frustration. You can find clips on youtube to give the bitter (there is little sweet here) flavour. Now here's a thing, all the kids in Kes are built like sticks: then there were no calories; now there are too many . . . but many working class kids are still without hope or prospects. Daniel Blake is a contemporary of Billy Casper, the young hero of Kes. Daniel left school, found work as a chippy, he worked, he married, his wife went mad and died, they had no children and he dies in the toilet of the office where he's trying to appeal his denial of Benefit. That's All.

One touching juxtaposition is that Daniel treats the kids, of a single mum whom he befriends, with respect, patience, courtesy and empathy. The Man treats him as a child because he can't fill in an on-line form or  a smart-phone but with considerably less respect, patience, courtesy and empathy. All very metaphorical: to himself and to his friends and neighbours, he is a Mensch. To those who have a pensionable desk job denying benefit to unfortunates like himself he is a cipher. The final scene, at his funeral, has his young friend read out the text of the appeal which he never got to make to the tribunal:

‘I am not a client, a customer, nor a service user. 

I am not a shirker, a scrounger, a beggar nor a thief.

I am not a national insurance number, nor a blip on a screen. 

I paid my dues, never a penny short, and was proud to do so.

I don’t tug the forelock but look my neighbour in the eye.

I don’t accept or seek charity.

My name is Daniel Blake,

I am a man, not a dog. 

As such I demand my rights.

I demand you treat me with respect.

I, Daniel Blake, am a citizen, nothing more, nothing less.

Thank you.’

What's with the Spartacus reference? Weren't they slaves? My point exactly!

Leave No Trace

The last Saturday in March was the last film in the Blackstairs Film Society 2018 Winter Film Season. After my feeling queasy walk-out of Dogman in February, the BFS committee promised me something more fluffy this time. That transpired to be a 2018 coming of age in the woods story called Leave No Trace [scene R] directed by Debra Granik and co-starring Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie as the teen. Because we are now film-primed for violence, and because of my afore-mentioned low threshold for suspense the film was more curate's egg fluffy than full-on fluffy. Whatever, it was this much worth going to: The Beloved and I spent ten minutes over Sunday lunch reflecting on what it meant. We had skin in the game because our teenage daughters both departed from the parental home just as they became old enough to vote. Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie was 17 when she made the film and is playing a girl a few years younger but, with the help of an amazing camera crew she captures the shimmering transition from girl to young woman. Shimmering because for every three steps Onward there will be at least one step back to the comfort and security of childood where someone, in this case her single parent Dad, will look after you.

Problem here is that Dad, war-damaged with nightmares about helicopters, can barely hold it together for himself let alone his motherless daughter. At the start they are camping out in a National Park in the Pacific Northwest with aspirations to return to nature but actually skimming what they need from occasional visits to town. He can light a fire without matches, but there is a propane 2-burner stove; she can pick wild mushrooms for dinner but also eats a lot of supermarket oranges. These symbols of urban life are used to document the girl's transition into her own woman. Oh and another resonance for us is that she has perforce been educated 'at home' [in forest clearing] and is punching above her weight on the 3Rs. The twilight world of dripping tarpaulins and visits to the Veteran's Administration for pills against the nightmares is suddenly shredded by the police and social services who bundle them out of their life on the edge.

The Man's attempt at rehabilitation of a Veteran and his dependent daughter is to secure him work at a Christmas tree plantation which comes with a 'tied cottage' + bathroom, kitchen, chairs, lights, and money. Another metaphor for the absurdity of Modern Life is that the Christmas trees, the quintessence of useless but culturally embedded ephemera, are carried from the forest by . . . helicopter. The owner of the woodlot believes he's doing the Vet a favour by working his gästarbeiter until his hands bleed. There is a rather heavy-handed scene where Dad takes the TV off the dresser and lugs it into the bottom of the closet - to show how he rejects the obvious trappings of American Life. And he likewise is shown to reject the offer of a pair of cell-phones because they've managed without them all along. Evicted from a damp rainy fog-shrouded primeval landscape in the National Park, he reckons a house-with-a-bathroom and work is a poor exchange .. . . and he precipitates a dawn flit from there before the girl can get enrolled in the local school.

I hear that LnoT has been getting accolades all over, so it's not just us it spoke to. We've never owned a TV; our daughter's missed school entirely; we have phones but they're not smart and the landline is often down: so we don't buy into the whole devil's bargain of modern life. But we are a long way from living in a bender-tent in a forest, or even a hut in the woods just outside town like Henry "simplify simplify" Thoreau. As my life careers down the track to retirement, I am making conscious decisions about Stuff, as in Less Stuff because little of it will be any use when the waves lap at the front door.

After some further adventures on buses, freight-trains and trucks, he has a near-death experience in the woods and she gets him help from a local trailer park community of pensionable and personable were-hippies [no no they are none of the extras in Twilight] . . . once-hippies. They are kind; not driven by money and the material; yet even here Dad's feet are itchy; even when he's lent a dog for a bit of unconditional love therapy.  When he calls time and sets off on the road again she refuses to follow him - unlike the goddam dog, her love is conditional - she needs to make her own way in her own way.

The End

The film is nice, the ending is sort of hopeful: he is still restless and troubled and the helicopter is still going WUKKA WUKKA WUKKA in his head but he's brought her this far and he can see that she is ready for, that she needs, an independent life. They'll always have The National Park and she'll always be handy with a knife. You can't see her settling for the bland suburbia that dissolved the girl at the end of Walkabout.

Review by Mark Kermode

Drummer meets Keeper

In September, as I've done for the last ten years, I rocked up to the Blackstairs Film Society [multiprev] and paid my annual sub for the season. Eight (8!) films with sub-titles for a €5er each - can't be faulted for bargain . . . if you get to them all. Well dang-and-blast-it, I missed the Oct, Nov and Dec screenings because we were in other counties at the time. Last Saturday, we had cleared the diary for BFS and then heard that Dau.I and her Plus1 were coming down to visit, so we made up a party to go to the movies. That required us to go for pre-event drinks in Osborne's the boutique bar and hostel across the street from the hall where the films are shown. Very civilised, very old style: you can buy wellington boots and sweets are Osborne's as well as beer and crisps.

And the film?  It was The Drummer & The Keeper [review RTE] written and directed by Nick Kelly. It was widely toured round the back-country earlier in the month as part of First Fortnight - Ireland's Mental Health Arts Festival. Whoa! Mental Health films? Like A Beautiful Mind? Is that going to be family entertainment? Seems like a lot of families thought so because instead of a few handfuls of getting-old aficionados of sub-titles, the venue was rammed with teenagers . . . and the usual elderly film-buffs. Drummer & Keeper is the heart-warming story of an unlikely friendship between two young men. Gabriel is the 20-something drummer in a rock-band and Christopher is a middle-class 17 y.o with Asperger's. The Drummer is troubled - the label is bi-polar - but can afford to get help from the same therapist who treated his mother before she offed herself. The bit of money inherited from his mother pays for the therapist and for his obsession with setting fire to material goods in unlikely places. The therapist is threatening to institutionalize the Drummer but holds off if he will join a mixed-ability soccer camp; which is where he meets Christopher; who has his own basket of obsessions - Lego, goal-keeping [he is the titular Keeper], woollie hats and statistics. He becomes the roadie for the rock-band because he can put everything back in the same place like assembling an elaborate Lego kit.

I won't give more of the plot away because you really need to get out and see the Film - it has won prizes at festivals and is going on the road beyond these green shores during 2018. You can, of course, buy it as a DVD and watch it all bobby-no-pals at home but I don't recommend that. We were privileged to have Nick Kelly the director at the BFS showing to watch it with us and have a short Q&A afterwards. One of the points Kelly made at the afters was that he likes watching the audience watching the film: every showing is different because each audience entrains and starts to react together in unpredictable ways - must be the pheromones.

Two points though. One is that the film is awash with money; it lubricates the boys' journey. I can't imagine poor mentally troubled people getting more than ten minutes at the GP and a script for drugs to trick about with their neurotransmitters. In Ireland we are a long way from treating mental illness as an illness like pneumonia or hyper-tension where timely intervention can deal really effectively with the problem. If you are troubled in the mind, the waiting lists are far too long for timely intervention. Which brings me to my second point:

The Drummer describes the Up cycle of his bipolar as being 'like more of who you are' which is why it is no longer considered appropriate to call it manic-depression. Not every bipolar person goes/is manic: the wildly fluctuating flux of neurotransmitters enhances the true self. The meds damp down the surges to establish a calmer equilibrium state. For the mathematician John Nash the wilder reaches of his mental shore won him, eventually, a Nobel Prize but also thrust him off the last point of stable land into a turbulent sea of troubles. Nick Kelly makes the point that the Drummer's meds really don't help his drumming, because they make him less of who he is. Teaching Human Physiology at The Institute, my running theme / leitmotif is homeostasis: we normally exist in an exquisitely balanced equilibrium maintained by complementary neurotransmitters, hormones and negative feedback loops. A small shift out of line (on core body temperature; blood acidity; glucose concentration; cell division, water balance, mood) is brought back on track within seconds - well before it is a perceptible problem. Medications, even give three-times-a-day after meals, are as a bludgeon to a scalpel: think Factor VIII for haemophilia. And taken orally, they act systemically: knocking The Problem on the head perhaps but also crashing about the body on other wholly unexpected fronts. Anti-psychotics screw with your sense of balance and gait (and rhythm!), gum up your insides and make you more likely to suffer a stroke. That's why the small-print list of potential side-effects on any medication is longer than the list of ingredients in a shop-bought cake. Cue Yeats

I balanced all, brought all to mind,   

The years to come seemed waste of breath,   

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

Die Göttliche Ordnung

That would be The Divine Order, a 2017 film about suffragettes in Switzerland . . . in 1971! It was the film that launched the 2018-19 season of the Blackstairs Film Society and we went Out On The Village last night, paid our sub and were delighted by the film. It seems appropriate to review such a film on International Blasphemy Day.  1971? The year women got the vote in Switzerland?? Surely that's a typo of 1917??? Because women got the vote in Ireland on 6th Feb 1918. Not all women, mind you, only sensible women who were older than 30. It took the foundation of Saorstát Éireann the Irish Free State (1922) to give women equality with men in their voting rights. For Britain and Northern Ireland in took a while longer [Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928]. The nuttiness of extending voting rights in 1918 was exposed by a dispensation for men - if you had fought in the Great War, you could vote at 19 rather than 21.  Recent research on the adolescent brain, suggests that 18 might not be the best milestone for the age of discretion. Far too many young men in their teens and twenties seem to be bat-shit crazy when it comes to cars, booze, bullying, office-hours and sex. Should boys who drive cars with drink, but no seat-belts, on board be allowed to determine who gets elected to parliament?

Meanwhile back to Switzerland, 1971. The trailer for Die Göttliche Ordnung catches it: there is a referendum in the air: it will determine whether The Cantons can join A is for Azerbaijan, Belgium, Côte d'Ivoire, Dominica, Egypt, Fiji . . . in treating women like adults. The lead is a young mother who is happily married and embraced by her wider family and the local, isolated, rural community. She is a helped to reconsider her position by a younger Italian immigrant and an unmet desire for wider, bluer horizons. The film is neat, probably too neat, in its investigation of the issues. A shrewish, elderly, secure-in-her-certainties woman is the main employer in the village and also ardently against change. A rakish, elderly, slightly dissolute woman is our heroine's first local supporter. There are stupid, boorish, violent, complacent men. But there are also men who are confused about their position in a rapidly changing world, who want to do good, who are fundamentally kind. Its basically happy ending ties everything up with a neat bow.

But getting the goddamn vote is just the beginning. In Ireland, women got the vote in 1922 but could only be employed in the civil service if they were unmarried. They were expected to get back in the kitchen and spoil their sons rotten after that. The pay scales were skewed, the glass ceiling was bullet-proof, and it's only this year that we're starting to deal with uterine autonomy by Repealing the Eighth.

As it happens we are having a go at blasphemy on 26th October 2018 with another constitutional referendum [issues explained] to decide this following change to Article 40.6.1 of the Constitution:
The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.  
And what is blasphemous? Eamonn de Valera had no doubts about what he meant when he drafted the Constitution in 1937. But that's because he confused himself with earlier Patriarchs like Moses: Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, "Bring the one who has cursed outside the camp, and let all who heard him lay their hands on his head; then let all the congregation stone him." [Leviticus 24:13]. I'll probably get myself in a lather later this month but for now I'll suggest we might be happier voting on
The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law. 
Free people must debate in the market place of ideas about thing which matter. I think it's indecent

• that children are homeless in Ireland, 
• that mental health is pathetically under-resourced
• that the CEO of AIB gets €500,000 which is 15 times the average pay in AIB

and I'm all for conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch [=sedition] on such matters.

Grumpy old bear

I've spent quite a bit of time in Finland: back in the 1990s I landed a gig teaching in one of the Universities and was asked back to run the same course at other venues across the country.  Not the wild and woolly North but Turku / Åbo in the Swedish-speaking gaeltacht and in Greater Helsinki further East.  Every time I went, I made a point of being deeply uncomfortable in a sauna: uncomfortable being naked in public; uncomfortable having my thermoregulatory system assaulted to breaking point. But you really can't go to Finland and avoid sauna - every home has one; even if it's a closet in the utility room that can seat one adult or two children. They make films in Finland.

The final film of the Blackstairs Film Society 2015-2016 season, last Saturday, was a comedy called Mielensäpahoittaja. Such a word could only be Finnish or Estonian, but it's rendered in English as The Grump.  The film was funny but it was also rather close to the bone [as the best comedies have to be] in its dissection of family relationships, ageing and communication.  The basic storyline is that an old farmer has lived all his life in 'hardy' conditions in the house he built with his own axe when he got married.  He has an accident and it is decided that it would best if he goes to the city for a while to get checked out.  He'll only leave if his son stays behind to continue preparing the potato field for planting, so he is taxied to stay with the son's wife in her upmarket modern house in suburbia. He is slightly demented in the sense that the tap in his mind is fully open. Most of us have thoughts which rise unbidden but are often best left unexpressed "Blimey you're ugly" - "Men can't be nurses" - "Them foreign johnnies are taking over the neighbourhood". Dementia lets it all hang out but it's usually only embarrassing to the children. In the film, there is no coffee to be had in Casa Suburbia because they all drink chamomile and rooibos, so he's taken out to a coffee-shop; they don't have anything which he recognises as coffee, but the daughter-in-law and the two women behind the counter decide that a latte will be the nearest thing.  When he comes out he remarks on how well the black girl spoke Finnish. Ooops. Did you know that Finnish censuses refuse to ask about ethnic or religious matters??

When his boys were growing up, the farmer expected them to do all the manly things he did with his hands: chopping wood, scything the 10 acre for hay, grubbing spuds, breaking the ice on the drinking trough, shooting bears [his hat L is made of bear-skin].  His wife did her best to protect her boys from this harsh and unforgiving life, which she recognised as being on the edge of the dustbin of history. They were let stay inside to study while she went out to do the chores, or they helped her make buns in the kitchen.  One of the sons got himself an education is now a nuclear physicist in Belgium.  The other is less obviously successful but has a quiet sense of self-esteem; which he might have developed avoiding, with the mother's help, the demands of his father and the goddamn farm. There is a telling moment at the end of the film when he comes home from 'minding the farm' [actually going on a nostalgia trip through the boxes in his old bedroom] with a stack of his mother's recipes which he then shares with his own daughters. When the buns are made, the old man shuffles up to the kitchen table and sits down with his family.  Maybe silently acknowledging that growing a loving and lovely family is an accomplishment at least as valuable at saving a moribund farm from the encroaching wilderness.

Another thread in the film is a persistent guying of Russia and the Russians, which the old man persists in calling Soviets 25 year after perestroika.  Like us in Ireland with the monstrous British next door; Finland has lived under threat from its enormous and potentially rapacious neighbour to the East. Despite the Winter War / Зи́мняя война́ in 1940, when the Finns held off a numerically superior Red Army for several brutal months, Remember Karelia. Finns are careful not to annoy the Russians too much. But that only fuels the development of subversive irony and ridicule: in Mielensäpahoittaja, Russians are charicatured by a plutocrat called Sergei [of course] who struts about with a bullying sense of entitlement, has a taste for drink and is maudlin and sentimental.

In summary, The Grump is like science's Ig Nobel Awards "first it makes you laugh and then it makes you think". Here on The Blob, in January this year, was a brief flood of page-views from Russia and I thought I was going viral in Красноя́рск or Владивосто́к but that tide drained away. Recently there has been another wave of traffic from Russia. I hope that they can take their satirisation like a man. Don't leave me boys! Не оставляйте меня товарищей!

Mellors

Lady Chatterley's Lover? That would be Mellors. Shortly after the birth of the Blackstairs Film Society, the sourcing committee decided to show Lady Chatterley a french version of the famous tale of inter-class bonking. It was nearly 3 hours long; so long indeed that there was an intermission [intromission was in the second part of the film]. When the film cranked up again, the audience was considerably diminished because most of the blokes had trudged off across the road to the pub as being more immediately amusing.

The story was retold again in 2015 in a BBC version which had the advantage of being only half as long. It has become one of those books that has been heard of by everyone who can read but hasn't actually been read by many of those same people. It's too long and too dated for today's book-readers. The reason for its highly regarded status is because it was put through a trial which concluded on 2nd November [today!] 1960. The trial was the result of a prosecution brought under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. Before that Act, the Obscenity laws were locked in the morality of 100 years earlier. One judge held something to be obscene if it showed a "tendency ... to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall."  When Edward Gibbon published his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire between 1776 and 1789, his explanatory footnotes about sodomy and sex were in Latin because if you could read Latin you were of such stern moral stuff that you couldn't be corrupted:  “A very surprising instance is recorded of the prowess of Proculus. He had taken one hundred Sarmatian virgins. The rest of the story we must relate in his own language, . . .” The 1959 Act attempted to allow publishing naughty bits in plain English so long as they had artistic or scientific merit.

The trial was actually a prosecution against the publisher Penguin Books and marked a watershed between stuffy hypocrisy and the much more open society that now has us, and our children, awash with porn. Penguin were taking one for the team, in order to clarify the law with a high-profile test case. They sent, for example, several copies of the book to the police so that they could have something to get hot about.  The prosecution made themselves ludicrous by asking with heavy rhetoric "Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters - because girls can read as well as boys - reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying around your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?"

The defense, otoh, wheeled out a bishop to assert that Lawrence was portraying sex as a sacrament rather than something nasty in the potting shed. Further academic evidence was laid out to show that language was in a perpetual state of evolution and that taboos of yesterday - unmentionable words, indeed - were now common and their offensive meaning thus diluted. And above all, maybe, the jury was urged to consider the book's value as a whole rather than just highlighting the fucks and damning it as obscene because that word caused a frisson.  It took six working days and 3 hours of deliberation for the jury to return a unanimous verdict of Not Guilty.  That set the agenda for literature in a multicultural Western democracy.  It took rather longer to open the flood-gates in Roman Catholic Ireland. You have to have a high degree of self-righteousness to lay down the law about what other people can and cannot read. When I turned up for college in 1973, I brought a box full of books that I felt this one student couldn't be without. That included several books which were banned in the Republic, including The Ginger Man by J.P Donleavy. Reading, or rather laughing out loud at, this book was instrumental in getting me to meet The Beloved.

El Olivo Oyl

Saturday 29th April was the last meeting fro this Winter Season of the Blackstairs Film Society BFS. We stop showing films in the Summer because the black-out curtains are kind of sketchy and it's still light outside at 8pm in May-August (the not oysteR months). The film El Olivo The Olive Tree is a labour of love between Scots screenwriter Paul "Wind that Shakes the Barley" Laverty and the director his partner and Madrileña, Icíar Bollaín. Laverty wrote the screenplay for I, Daniel Blake, a tragedy of the modern world which we saw at BFS last month. Both films premiered in 2016, is there no end to his talents?

El Olivo, like I, Daniel Blake, ends with the death of an older man which leaves a young woman bereft but the eSpanish film is much more upbeat, funny and heart-warming.  My preference for fluffy films wasn't met because there is a thread of edge running through it, dealing with silence in families, social justice and  the grasping of Multinational MegaCorp. The Olive Tree of the title is the gnarled, craggy, patriarch of the family farm, perhaps 2,000 years old, from which scions and cuttings have been taken by generations of small scale farmers.  The grandfather is looking backwards through the rose-tinted mists of nostalgia and heritage and sees the tree as the soul of the farm and hence the soul of the family. His sons see it as an asset that can be stripped to give them a better life in town. The grand-daughter, not co-incidentally, is called Alma [=soul] and she skips a generation of baggage and loves her grandfather unreservedly. The love is reciprocated from the moment of her birth. There is a lovely scene in which a sub-teenage Alma is seen painting Grandpa's nails shocking pink and then applying red gloss to his aged lips "whoa! it tickles". I leaned across and whispered Eddie Izzard in The Beloved's ear.  The second part of the film is a road movie in which Alma, her humble Uncle and the truck-driver who collects the chickens for market all drive off to Dusseldorf in a flat-bed to re-patriate the tree. The lose ends are all tied up in a coda where another slip from the father of all trees is set in the ground to see what the next 2,000 years look like.

The day after we saw the film I was pointed at an article in the LA Times about Sissy Goodwin of Cowpoke, Wyoming. The pointed, as often, was metafilter where you can read some extra commentary and a sweet to-from between Sissy and his wife. Goodwin is a hard-chaw cowboy who did a stint in Vietnam and recently retired from teaching science in the local school. He's married with two kids but, like Eddie Izzard, is waaay happier dressed in a frilly skirt than in tooled leather cowboy-boots with a huge shiny belt-buckle. That's who he is, and he decided long ago that he can't be bothered to rein his cross-dressing into lonely sessions in the bathroom at home. Accordingly, he goes to work, the hardware store and the gas-station dress in is something comfortable to him - even if it makes everyone else around his uncomfortable. That should be fine on the basis of your rights end where my nose begins, but of course it isn't and he has sustained rather more barracking and assaults than his more blend-in neighbours.

Part of the deal with going on the March for Science with Dau.I was an away match with her BLT pals at Dublin Pride on 24th June this year. Since the first Gay Liberation Day of Haight-Ashbury in 1972 Free The Gays has been steadily adding classes to the group: any advance on LGBQTIA, this week? Maybe by June I will added right in [with my leotard and sequins] as part of LGBTQIASWM. You may choose to heed Sir Thomas Beecham's advice "In this life try everything once, except morris-dancing and incest", but I can tell you I've broken 50% of his anathemas. And i don't mind telling <TMI alert!> that along with Eddie Izzard and Sissy Goodwin I've had my 15 minutes of fame TV.  In about 1960, when I was six, my father was put in charge of HMS Vernon [prev], a naval shore-establishment in Portsmouth. A house came with the job right beside the front gate. My older brother bet me half-a-crown = 2/6 = 1/8th of a £ that I wouldn't get into my sisters ballet tutu and dance outside the house at out-muster when all the workers in the place knocked off work for the day. Always up for a challenge [it wasn't about the money] I rose to the bait and spent about 30 seconds cavorting about on the pavement to the bemusement of a couple of hundred sailors. My brother handed over the money but suggested that it would be only fair if we went together to spend the money at the seaside amusements about 600m away on the Promenade at Southsea. And that too was so. It was within the normal range of parental behaviour in 1960 to allow two chaps aged 6 and 9 to bunk off to the other side of town and piss away enough money to buy 10 cigarettes or three loaves of bread.

Tentatively hopeful

Finns always happen in threes. If 'they' don't say that, they should. Just two weeks ago, I was watching Finnish subteens winning trophies by pretending to be horses. That was refreshingly weird. This coming week, we have a delegation of pharmacists from Finland coming to visit The Institute to see how we teach our Pharmacy Technicians. It's a day when I am light on classes, so I volunteered to  help show them around. Actually, apart from having an affection for Finns and memories of being uncomfortably hot in saunas, my main motivation in getting involved was saanko ilmaisen lounaan?

I'll tell you two woody things about sauna.

• You want to be careful about the wood you use for the seats. On no account recycle floorboards or use pine Pinus sylvestris boards. These will have some residual resin which will leak out of the wood when the temperature gets up to and beyond 80^oC. Sit on a gobbet of boiling resin and a) it will stock to your skin and b) raise a blister. My contacts recommend alder Alnus glutinosa boards. This tree, whose roots are considered a delicacy by badgers Meles meles, grows along the margin of our property where the river forms the county border. The tissue of the tree is so soggy, from the environment it thrives in, that there is no rooms for resin. It lasts for a long time in a damp environment with radical temperature changes.
• The other piece of advice is the optimum species for use as a vihta - a sauna whisk. Irish saunas don't offer this but in traditional Finland you go out into the forest and cut some small branches of Betula pubescens the downy birch and Betule pendula the regular silver birch, make them into a bouquet  - a vihta -with the leaves fanning out and baste yourself up as you roast. One species is flexible and robust, while the other produces a frothy mix of saponins which helps clean and stimulate the skin. Science does not confirm this theory.

Sandwiched by these two Finnish experiences, the Blackstairs Film Society [multiprev] launched last night with Aki Kaurismäki's The Other Side of Hope [trailer]. Kaurismäki gave us Leningrad Cowboys Go America in 1989 which was a seriously peculiar film altogether tracking the experiences of a Russian rock band on the road in the USA. A bit like Spinal Tap. The Other Side of Hope tracks the experience of a Syrian refugee who has been formally deported from Finland after arriving as a stow-away in a coal-freighter, Making the refugee blacker than he really is becomes a metaphor. The bureaucracy is unforgiving but many of the bureaucrats do their best to subvert the system. Khaled the Syrian is adopted by a group of misfits running a small restaurant-bar in a bleak industrial suburb, somewhere in Finland. The bureaucracy give no credit to the stress of having home destroyed and family killed and operates a utilitarian algebra that has no kindness. Ordinary people, citizens and refugees alike, give what they can to the yet poorer. If they cannot give money they can lend a cell-phone, if they haven't a cell-phone they can share a cigarette. I think the film's title indicates that hope, however fragile, depends upon small acts of compassion from strangers who become friends. The film wraps up in a somewhat ambiguous, to-be-continued, manner but Khaled's situation is no longer so hopeless in Finland as it was when he was digging the bodies of his family out of the rubble in Aleppo.

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing 

because he could do only a little. 

Edmund Burke or Sidney Smith.

Reviewed by Mark Kermode in BBC

Mighty Thor

The Blackstairs Film Society is the high-point of our social and cultural life in the remote section of rural Ireland which we inhabit.  On the last Saturday of every Winter month September through April, we get to see a film with subtitles!  They can be earnest like The Seven Brave Tractor Drivers of the Caucasus or classics like Babette's Feast but they are rarely the fluffy rom-coms that I prefer.  Since I had to hide behind the sofa as a nipper for most episodes of Doctor Who, I have a very low threshold for suspense or frighty-bits.

Last night at the Film Soc was the newish biopic from Norway called Kon-Tiki. Trailer. I zipped through the book shortly after I learned to read at age 8 and thought it was a ripping yarn. We had far fewer books back then, but nevertheless it would be hard to avoid it after being translated into 70 languages and selling 50 million copies. So I was surprised to find that there were adults in the room who had never read the book and only had a hazy idea of what it was about.  It is, after all, nearly 70 years since Thor Heyerdahl and his pals sailed across the ocean blue and lots of other adventures have happened since. It took the Norwegians just over 100 days to drift 8000km on a balsa-wood raft [R] from Peru to Polynesia and, to be frank, not a lot happened on most of those days. You can't fill 100 minutes of Aspiring-to-an-Oscar with 6 half-clothed well-bearded hunks eating tomato soup and picking flying fish off the deck, so the demands for drama concentrated on the few dramatic encounters - even with these, nobody died, although their pet parrot fell of the boat and was scarfed up by a shark.  Hollywood required this event to be conflated with another in which one of the men fell overboard from the relentlessly drifting, can't-turn-back raft.  Having one of his quick-reacting colleagues seize a line, plunge in and swim away from the ship back towards his disappearing ship-mate was dramatic enough without having to invent some stage-sharks in a feeding frenzy.  Then there was a big storm; they were outpaced by some fin-whales Balaenoptera physalus; they saw some unworldly phosphorescent creatures; they were excited at seeing a gull because that indicated the presence of land beyond the horizon  . . . and suddenly we are all crash landing on a reef at Raroia.  To string that out to an hour and a half you have to have a lot of lead-in with Heyerdahl growing up adventurous, spending some years in a tropical paradise, and some years being laughed at by people whom he asked for financial support.

One of the imperatives for Heyerdahl was to keep the adventure in the public eye and the only way to do that was a vacuum-tube short-wave radio.  Even as they were getting wet in the Pacific, Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen were inventing the transistor at Bell Labs in NYC and transistor radios didn't become widely available until 1955.  They needed an aerial to transmit and receive signal and the Kon-Tiki was low-slung with stubby mast, so they flew a balloon aloft to raise the aerial sufficiently high.  In the film, the balloon is lost because of the antic of the parrot (who was nominated for a Best Supporting Avian award).  I'll have to go back to read the book to see if this too was a simplification of events for dramatic effect . . . then again maybe I won't bother - I'm not 10 any more and I've still got the whole of Harry Potter to get through.

Turn and turn about

On the 17th April after a week of no rain, we had a yard sale [above] . . . nobody came . . .  so we put it all back in the same shed. That might strike tidy uncluttered people as an exercise in futility, and I'd have to half agree. At least everything got an airing and we are slightly more confident [no hiding place] that the mouse which had been sharing the sheep muesli wasn't there any more. We also managed to set aside a car load of electronic trash: computer monitors, Aldi web-cams, a casette recorder.  Just as soon as the Bring Centre re-opens we'll get that shite off site. I was amazed to [re]discover a large boxful of commercial DVDs. There was phase in my life, after I discovered play.com and was in full time employment, when I'd internet order films which I though would edutain our home-ed self-educating daughters. I wouldn't go mad about this but for several years, every bday or holiday someone in the family would get a film. That box had haemorrhaged my bank account of at least €500. Heck n jiminy, sometimes we'd watch films several times, so that was better value.

In any case, I had a nostalgic riffle through the box of boxes and came across Le Quattro Volte [2010 written and directed by Michelangelo Frammartino] which I was pretty certain I'd never seen and couldn't remember buying. It might be called 84 minutes of deep; some critics have called it Slow Cinema. It's the kind of thing that gets shown at the Blackstairs "subtitles obligatory" Film Society [multiprev]. The film starts with an obscured view of a charcoal business [above] which with hindsight sets up one of the key themes of the film. After that there is a several minutes sweep across an impossibly romantic Calabrian landscape following an elderly and lonely goatherd high on a hill through his daily round. At the end of the day the old boy delivers a bucket of milk to the village church where he exchanges it for an envelope of church dust-sweepings.
Grazie he says
Prego, the sacristan replies
At that point, I have a panic because no subtitles appear with the voices. Stop the movie, search the options and settings for subtitles - English for pref. There .  are .  no .  subtitles! Worse things have happened to me in a cinema and with some trepidation I watched on. Well, those two words were the only dialog in the film, so subtitles schmubtitles.

The critics say it is an investigation of metempsychosis which requires us to accept that, after the old shepherd dies in his bed, he is reborn as parti-coloured billy-kid. We follow the lonely life of said kid - lonely because the little creature gets lost in the woods. The herd of goats [with or without the lost one] is taken over by a younger, fitter, fatter goat-herd . . . and the inconsequential normality of rural life continues: there are no gunfights and no car chases. Another Volte!

The next episode involves a mighty community effort to fell out an enormous pine tree from the surrounding hills and re-erect it in the centre of the village: we have moved from the life-and-death of man to the life-and-death of goat to the life-and-death of tree. Third Volte!

At the end of the Patron Day's festivities the tree trunk is brought down, sawed into convenient lengths and taken away . . . by the charcoal burners! Quattro Volte! Yes yes four turns makes a full circle, we are back where we started and the charcoal is for sale by the sack [R] around the town. Without the charcoal there would be no pasta carbonara and life as we imagine it in deepest Calabria would come to a creaking halt, The critics say there is a conscious tribute by the writer-director to weirding philosophy of Pythagoras; who lived and died hereabouts 2,500 years ago. But that must be nonsense because everbode kno Pythagoras was all about the broad beans Vicia faba and they don't get a sniff of a mention through the whole film. We can all find 84 minutes of idle time to fill during Coronarama: you should give Quattro Volte a go [it's on youtube] and it's been reviewed in the Grauniad.

Credit for everyone in the Union

I R retire. There is little enough to amuse me in the Winter evenings, now that I've given up YouTube; gone half throttle on The Blob; and can only spend so long eating dinner and washing dishes. Then I remembered that January is Credit Union AGM season and checked on the web for the date. It was only there that I discovered the option to not get mailed a 36-page booklet with the accounts & agenda for the last financial year. I filled in the no mail application on line and got a phone call the next day telling me a) I was 5 weeks beyond the deadline b) my AGM bumpf had been sent the day before c) I was no mail registered now & forever d) the AGM was scheduled for 8pm Weds 29 Jan 2025. If they want to get more members saving the cost of a stamp, they could be more proactive on the comms.

I thus more or less obliged myself to leave home in the dark, with 1°C on the car-dash, and drive 20km to bear witness. I dumped our glass-trash in the bottle-bank [✓] on the same trip. There were 12 'officers' on the top table, three employees getting some overtime [I hope! they get paid buttons], and . . . 19 members incl me. The average age of the latter was about 70. It took 90 minutes to cover the 20 item agenda.

Gotta say that much of the information was given redundantly in different reports by auditor, chair, different sub-committees and it's all in the AGM booklet anyway. And without a powerpoint prez, reading a lorra numbers off a sheet is kinda useless, There were three different elections, which were tallied by 'independent' CU-volunteer tellers and all officers up for re-election were re-elected. We weren't told how many people voted "not this person for the love of Mike" which is the only really interesting info. In the past I got snitty about starting the meeting with an invocation aka Make me an instrument of your peace supposedly by St. Francis of Assisi. And also about failures to embrace modern tech [heck, even PPTx is an Ask!] These are related: if you're going to attract a younger, more techie, class of volunteers, let alone muslims and wiccans, ya gotta ditch the "Invocation". Vote for next year: Prayers Out Powerpoint In.

The Blackstairs Film Society BFS [MultiPrev] was killed by Coronarama but also a little by its niche interest. Years ago, an acquaintance from the next county came once to a BFS event [was it Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley?] and never again. A while later, I caught up and asked why we didn't see him at BFS more often. hhmmm, he mused, drive 20km in the dark in February as temperatures plummet, to sit in a drafty hall bundled up in a plaid rug watching a sub-titled film about Mongolian tractor drivers? OR stay home and pop another log on the fire?? 

The CU-AGM feels a little like that, because logistics and regulations require a Winter AGM, but the CU has their own incentives. As part of our community's social glue and a public good, in the run up to the AGM, they shake down all the local businesses for contributions to the door prize. Everyone who braves the weather and rocks up is given a single raffle ticket. While the election ballots are processed, the ticket stubs are drawn and winners get to choose from a number of prizes. In the before times, the top prize was a rural appropriate ½ tonne of peat briquettes. Most of the prizes seemed to be sundry vouchers in envelopes. My ticket was 399, and my hopes dashed a little when the first tik drawn was 398 and I was, like, wrong wrong almost right. But I was tangling myself in the gambler's fallacy because the numbers came, in >!data!< order: 398 394 382 392 387 384 388 385 389 399 393 383 390. 382 to 399 more or less matches my [N = 19] members head-count. The top table having, appropriately, recused themselves from the lottery. 13 prizes among 19 people is just about [cw: The Late Late Show is a hateful grabfest] one for everyone in the audience. My 399 was quite a ways down the list but I had the choice of a) two bottles of indifferent plonk b) a €30 voucher for the butcher c) a bottle of Jameson's d) a tin of biscuits the size of a Yaris spare wheel.

See [L with kettles for scale - hot whiskey for the win!] for my choice - the Yaris already has a spare wheel. Afterwards, at 21:30 hrs! tea, sangers and iced-dainties appeared at the back of the hall. That's waaaay too late for tea for me but I couldn't in all conscience just leg it out the door with my loot: I hung around in desultory chat with the other olds. My membership number, from 25 years ago,  is 3894. I met Mary [#324] and her husband [#84]. His dad, long deceased, was one of the CU founders in 1976. 

In Jan 2024 there were 3940 members. In 2024, the CU acquired 92 new members but the total membership increased to only 3960. That suggests that 72 members of the Credit Union died last year. The national death rate in Ireland is 7/1000 but it is 18/1000 in the CU membership - nearly 3x higher but not as high [39/1000] as the death rate for Irish pensioners. Pensioners happily [in the fullness of their years etc.] contribute 84% of all deaths despite making up only 15% of the population. So CU membership skews higher than median age; but CU membership who turn up for the AGM skews higher still.

Ho hum, nothing a few hot whiskey's won't cure.

la heroína de la piscina

We were the second blow-ins to The Valley. The first was a musician and handyman who bought a 2 acre field on a 25% slope and built a wooden house at the top of the plot and an enormous wooden boat at the bottom near the road . . . 40 km from the sea. At least our eccentricities were confined to home-education, Birkenstocks and tree-hugging.  Après nous, la deluge d'artistes: visual, conceptual and mental. Without them there would be no Blackstairs Film Society and we'd have to watch films without subtitles. But the only one we're on borrow-a-cup-of-sugar terms is La Torbellina de Tenerife TdT a multi-tasking, multi-talented woman from Spain who married into one of the local families. She was a rock for O'Manch' and Young Bolivar, our long-term visitors and English language students: bringing them eSpanish food and translating when mutual understanding was vital.

After a life-time lifting tureens in the catering trade her back is crook and she has regular therapeutic sessions in the 25m swimming pool of one of the local hotels. Last week her attention was drawn to a family: mother, father and two excited children: a boy and girl probably twins. TdT noted that the mother was focusing 85% of her attention on her smartphone. Something [precognition is quite possibly one of her many talents] made her think ' keep an eye on those kids' and she was thereby distracted from her normal length-swimming regime. Sure enough, a few minutes later the girl ran whooping straight out of the ladies changing room and disappeared beneath the surface of the pool. TdT swam furiously to the spot, dived down, grabbed the child's arm and heaved her like a drowned kitten onto the poolside tiles. She was no longer pink but a terrible blue. But small children have an imperative to live and the girl coughed up some water and sat up. Her father came quickly on hearing the hullabaloo but the mother was still changing . . . apps on her phone. TdT told the father that he might mark the day as his daughter's [re]birthday and he replied that the twins were indeed 4 and the swim was a birthday treat.  And the life-guard? Out behind the desk in the lobby sharing his attention between the CCTV view of the pool and his laptop. These goddamned devices will be the death of someone one of these days, why, I was almost killed by device-driven inattention.

The St Adjudor's Saving-from-Drowning club in The Valley is fairly select and the only other member I know about is me. When the girls were small, going swimming was part of the relentless round of off-site edutainment that gave them 12 hours a week in the car listening to audio-books and having roiling discussions about life, the universe, and the Eiffel Tower. Those trips, reading books, and the roiling discussion in the car and at the kitchen table was what constituted their education. Despite hating to get wet socks, sometimes I had to be the adult-in-charge at the pool. I loved being with the girls but I didn't like swimming because it was another of the things I was crap at when I was young. My brother and sister were like fish and passed successively their bronze, silver and gold swimming and life-saving exams and have the medals to prove it. I have a certificate for Swimming One Length of the Drake Baths in Plymouth. I could manage two lengths but my bottle gave out beyond that: it was like my anti-prowess at running. ANNyway, about ten years ago, I was standing up to my neck in the water watching the girls coursing up and down when my reveries were distracted by a commotion down at the deep end. A large woman was splashing about unable to make any progress to the edge of the pool. Without thinking, I swam towards her and by holding my breath and standing underneath her I was able to push the woman by her capacious bottom towards the pool side. And the life-guard? That spotty youth was running up and down the poolside shouting . . . and had also been off-site chatting to the girls at the check-in desk. Apparently, not getting into the water is part of the standard operating procedure. We still had 20 minutes left on the clock, so I went back to standing up to my neck in the water until the girls had finished their antics. The woman's husband cruised up at some point to say thank you, but the woman herself was quite oblivious to the drama she had caused. There is, of course, a certain irony that the only one of our sibship who is not qualified to save anyone is the one who has actually saved someone.

Because, in fairy-stories, things often come in threes, I have another life-saving tale. Maybe 20 years ago, shortly after we had left for Ireland, my late lamented pal Roy was walking along one of lone and level beaches that stretch from the outskirts of Newcastle upon Tyne to the Scottish borrrder. In the distance he could see two boys digging a cave into the face of the sand-dunes. As he got a little closer he realised that only boy was visible and he was jumping about in a peculiar manner. Quick as thought, Roy ran to the scene and saw two sneakers poking out of a heap of freshly fallen sand. With a super-human desperate heave, he hauled the other chap from the embrace of death and helped clean the sand from his nose and mouth. Within a couple of minutes, the boys were running off down the beach joshing and shouting towards the distant and invisible parents. Roy wondered afterwards, but didn't lose sleep about it, if the parents ever realised how close they came to a funeral.

These effin' qualifications are now the tail wagging the dog of all aspects of our lives. Train drivers who are 'qualified' without ever going out on their routes. I stopped using the chain-saw for about 5 years after I'd taken a chain-saw handling course which can hardly have been the intention. An elderly neighbour told us a few days ago that he'd been compelled to take a farm-spraying course after 20 years of spraying farms on contract. "Did you learn anything?", I asked. "A little bit about safety,", he replied, "but the paper-work and the exam were a struggle - I was never any good in school". He passed despite the exam, nobody has any interest in failing sprayers; The Man just need to get the optics right.

When duty whispers low thou must

. . . the youth replies "I can" [Ralph Waldo Emerson]. It was the last weekend in the month, must be a Film Soc night. Was to have been on Saturday but it was bumped 24 hours so that our neighbour Mike could rest in peace in the church next door - and tea and sangwiches could be served in the hall where we usually show films. For November, the selection committee for the Blackstairs Films-with-subtitles Society picked Wajib,  a road movie by Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir. Thelma and Louise it ain't; but it's an interesting unpicking of the challenges of living with other people while being true to your own values.

Shadi comes home to Nazareth to help the family prepare for his younger sister's wedding. Nazareth is a Palestinian town embedded in the North of Israel so it's a bit like living in a Catholic town in the North of Ireland 40 years ago: it's hard to drive around town without seeing dozens of squaddies in uniform. It's edgy because you know that the conscripts' weapons have a magazine of live rounds and you hope they have the safety catch ON. But it is also the new normal and you can't be having an adrenalin rush at every encounter: you'd be wrung out by lunch-time. Shadi has been living in Italy for the last several years a) because he's educated and there are no jobs for Christian designers in Israel and b) because he'd been an angry young man who bridled at the inequities of the place where he was brought up. He sticks out at home because he wears red trousers, a pink shirt and his long hair tied up in a bun. But he casts fresh exile's eyes on the invisible background of his birth-place: the streets are awash with domestic refuse . . . and soldiers in uniform come into the same falafel-and-houmous place where him and his Dad go for a mid-morning snack. It's like the propaganda gables [above R] in housing estates in The North in the 1970s - they were just there for the kids who lived round the corner.

It's not an exciting film because there are no car chases, indeed chunks of time passes as Shadi and his Dad sit in gridlock. They are in the car together because of Wajib - Duty - that requires the family to hand deliver each wedding invitation and accept tea, another tea, more tea and cakes in return. They also have to stand a barrage of polite enquiry and unspoken tsk tsk criticism of their choices, their morals and their standing in society. And who gets an invitation? There is a list decided by quite rigid protocol, which is adhered to lest offense be taken. They have to invite singers who can't carry a tune; Dad's boss who was mixed up in Shadi's enforced exile; all those yahoos from the groom's family; the widowed aunt whom protocol demands cannot attend because she is a single woman; the cousins because they are cousins. Don't even think how much this is all going to cost.

And all the time, both father and son have to button their lips about the failings of others and soldier on through the social mine-field that is a small tight-knit society. The stress exposes the generational difference: the younger man can act on his principles with righteous anger because he has nothing to lose but his life; and all young men know they will live forever. The father has far more hostages to irredeemable  misfortune: his children, his home, his carefully built standing in society (he's a teacher). His principles are tempered by pragmatism, and perhaps by compassion: it's easier for everyone if you tell a few white lies so that your neighbour's cosy belief system is not challenged. Just like any community, in fact.

If you're intrigued by the tribulations of living in Israel and like falafel you might check out the late lamented Anthony Bourdain's 45min programme about eating in Jerusalem.