It’s going to be a good week – Josh garnished the garden
yesterday and there is a French film on Saturday next I haven’t seen. It could be a bad one but I haven’t seen too many of those and I have been exposed to endless Welsh/Scottish/Irish product. The Gaelic language thriller was outstanding but the others weren’t. Doubtless another BBC quota to be ticked alongside second rate Scandi in the name of the good ones which were outstanding. I don’t do more than a week at a time.
The key players
in the present world crisis make me angry, afraid, anxious and to what point ? They will do what they do, damn them, against the best efforts of an administration labouring through a system in dire need of laxative to move us on to appropriating Russian assets and splitting them with Ukraine, putting rearmament programmes in place and beginning to teach people that they have a social contribution to make and it’s unlikely to be anything to do with a belated diagnosis of ADHD or depression.
The enemy within is the empire of the drug companies,
the acceptance by far too many people that diagnosis should be ten minutes, a label and a prescription and the mental submission posture that implies “Everybody can do something about this – except me.”
It was a bad week at the hands of an internet provider who doesn’t care and a long haul back to balance. I met a neighbour yesterday, looking tired and frazzled, who had been trying to buy proper waterproof boots for a botanical expedition. She hit blank indifference and disinterest, including Harrods, which she referred to as a vision of hell. I privately thought she was a decade out to be going there. I gave up on my favourite “big” store when it offered me a cashmere rollneck for £1200 to a background of rap, for me the musical equivalent of having my teeth filled.
Because Snowdrop and I sometimes share books, he got me to re read Henry James. But you’re stuck with personal preference. I couldn’t, I am an Edith Wharton girl, HJ was like homework.
What I was looking for was escapism. I would have embarrassed to say that years ago. My life is good, what do I have to escape from ? But the positive side of escapism is that you open yourself to something other than what usually makes up your life. You might see the performance of something you never thought you’d watch. The experience of any form of reading, tv. radio, film is all based on suck it and see. You are in control of incoming cultural traffic. Pass on HJ, pause on Dancing Back to the Light (BBC2).
There is no logic to my love of ballet except that it is other than anything else and watching this film (directed by Stephane Carrel) about Steven McRae’s recovery from tendon injury x 2, not 20 any more, confirmed a big insight.
McRae is a principal dancer
at the Royal Ballet and I watched this man put all his physical and mental intelligence into rebuilding and repairing the only instrument that counts for him – his body, in dance – assisted by all sorts of sympathetically accredited disciplines.
And I had an insight into the tension between the endless work – back,legs, feet, stretch, rest – like preparing for an athletic event – again and again and again – to procure the illusion of effortlessness.
Long ago a famous ballerina said “you can have two days off – but then you have to do class.” It’s like painting the Forth Bridge – unremitting.
And McRae is married to a former dancer (oh that’s an interview I’d like) with three appealing small children, and he came aged 17 to the Royal Ballet from a suburb of Sydney. Dance is his discipline – and he learnt and talked of how he had been misguided, what he had to learn anew – to students as well as the camera.
And it was not without reverses.
And I watched him exercise his straight toes – vital of course as part of support of the foot. No foot, no float … It’s too late for my toes but the film shone 90 minutes of light on me in a dark world.
Annalog 