07:00 Lois and I tumble out of bed – another early start; it’s a
shower day and also we’ve got the local convenience store, Budgens, delivering
next week’s groceries this morning at some unpredictable time: yikes!!!
We switch on our phones and see that Sarah, our daughter in Perth,
Australia, wants to move our weekly zoom conversation forward: to today instead of
tomorrow, for one week only, because she, Francis and their 7-year-old twins,
Lily and Jessie, are going out for a big expedition tomorrow. It’s Father’s Day
there tomorrow, a couple of months after we had our Father’s Day in the UK. Why isn't it the same all over the world? I expect though, that this is just another case of the UK being out of step with everybody else as usual. My
goodness what a crazy country we live in!
10:30 We start our zoom call. Lois and I are very envious of their
situation over there, because Western Australia has managed to control coronavirus so well
that it’s now disappeared in the state, and life has gone back to normal: they are still keeping their state borders
closed, even to visitors from elsewhere in Australia - something the other Australian states aren’t doing any more. Hurrah for them, we say!
The twins are lively and bouncing around as usual. Their big news is that they want to show us their first electric toothbrushes that Sarah bought them each today - the toothbrshes have got have little pictures of Barbie on the sides. How cute those girls are!!!!
It’s an unusual event for us – it’s the first time since the start
of lockdown that we go inside somebody else’s residence, and accept a cup of
tea and a couple of biscuits: yikes, scary!!!!! But Fran looks fit and healthy, so we decide to take the plunge.
Fran (left) and Lois, in front of Fran's little "park home"
What madness!!!!!!
20:00 We watch some TV, the second half of the crazy Swedish film
that we began watching earlier in the week. It’s a film about a pretentious art
gallery director called Christian.
Like all continental films it’s incredibly slow-paced, to put it
mildly. Also very enigmatic.
On Wednesday we saw Christian fall victim to a distraction street
robbery where he loses his mobile phone. But he doesn’t seem to go to the
police. He can tell from his stolen phone’s signal that the thief lives in a
certain apartment block in a poor part of town, and so he hatches a crazy plot
to send all 100 plus residents of the block a threatening letter: in the letter
he writes to each resident that he knows they took his phone and he knows where
they live, and he threatens them with vengeance unless they return his phone.
Then later, after a trendy party at the art gallery, we saw
Christian end up in the bed of a woman journalist, Anne. The couple have sex
and afterwards there’s a weird tussle between them about who gets to throw away
the condom they have used. After a tug of war Christian eventually lets go of
it, and Anne ostentatiously jettisons it in front of him.
Tonight we screw up our courage and try to watch the rest of the
film.
We watch it to the end, fast forwarding through some ultra-slow
bits, but unfortunately we go to bed totally baffled. Luckily, however, Lois
thinks it all over and she explains it to me as we lie in bed the following
morning.
Lois’s explanation: Christian is a rather detached,
emotionless man who doesn’t think about the effects of his actions on others.
But by the end of the film, he has begun to realise that he tends to hurt other
people emotionally without realising it. He also takes the step of resigning
his job at the art gallery. So for him it’s been a “journey”, as people say
nowadays.
Christian’s process of “learning his lesson” begins when a little
immigrant boy confronts Christian about his threatening letters to the
residents of the apartment block. Apparently when the boy’s father read the
letter from Christian, he assumed that it was his little son who must have
stolen Christian’s phone in the street, and he’s been punishing the boy ever
since. When the boy first approaches Christian, Christian pushes him away, but
in the end he realises the damage has caused and tries to make it up to the boy
by approaching both the boy and his father, to apologise humbly and
open-heartedly.
And Anne, the woman journalist whom Christian goes to bed with
after the party, confronts him about the fact that he has made no attempt to
contact her after their night together. She forces him to see the episode from
her viewpoint, and she forces him to admit that he uses his prestigious job as
art gallery director to get women to go to bed with him.
So that’s all right then – Christian at last realizes that he’s
hurt a lot of people, and that he’s got to mend his ways. Although even after Lois’s
analysis there remain a lot of bizarre scenes in the film involving apes and
chimpanzees that we still don’t get!
What a crazy country!!!!! But we love it !!!!!
22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzzz!!!!
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