This is a
Wuthering Heights free zone. In case you haven’t heard (lucky person, you must be living on Rockall) it’s a film, inspired by a book by Emily Bronte, her only published work in a short life, and the more you read about the Brontes, the more you think “ … and well out of that.” It is a film, you will either see it or you won’t. Because of worldwide release and a woman director it is being talked up a cultural storm.
Rummaging for something positive to write about, I came up with negatives. I began to think about what I don’t like – and I don’t like the Brontes. And in the case of WH, I don’t like sex to porn as a motif for life.
At school, I heard
Shakespeare read round the class which is the quickest way to kill it I know. Kids being asked read in forms they didn’t understand. Found a partial way back to WS through wonderful performance, but much later.
I don’t do
Jane Austen – there are occasional lovely dramatisations for lightweights like me. I have long theorized that writing has texture like food, and like food, while you may learn to like it, for most of us – you either do or you don’t. And I admit to an eccentric way of finding what I want to read – I follow my nose.
I don’t like leggings, I understand they are practical and economical but I don’t like the way they look. And have never seen a lower half they became.
I don’t like white shoes – white shoes of any shape – white sneakers possibly, in limited context – but white high heels with pointed toes?
No. I remember when the women of the Royal Family wore white shoes. I didn’t like them then and I don’t like them now.
Nothing will induce me to like flattened longer hair, whether it is Cleopatra or Claudia Winkleman. Don’t like it. Rarely kind, let alone becoming, and leads to the old crack “Come out of there – I can see your feet !”
I loathe long nails like talons (very loaded word for me at the moment, I call the pain in my poor back The Claw: it feels how it looks) My ex husband who had more form than Shergar once recoiled from five centimetres long sugar pink shellac with the comment “I don’t want that anywhere near me!”
Tired to dislike of talking about building new houses. Let’s start talking about a serious review of existing unused property, how long it has been vacant , what shape it is in and what has to be done to make into roofs over heads ? And how you are going to pay for it if AI takes over all those jobs? Those making money out of it won’t care – but the rest of us will.
And a watch this space from Sweden which 20 years ago, a respectable length of time, phased out books at school and phased in screens. Literacy has fallen, really, year on year till they have reversed the policy, books are back in, reading aloud – yes, I know a pig till you learn to do it – individual help for readers who struggle for whatever reason – and the figures are going back up. A self confessed book freak, I want to cheer. The problem is often the tone of the teaching. And Sweden has discovered
that some children have parents who struggle with reading and invited them in too.
It cheered me too because it was a European example – smaller numbers and budgets. And it was about doing something. As is a new book which is about making peace with the second part of your life – which is going to be different from the first. I have heard till I am green in the face about diet, exercise, and all the other sensible things which are a mantra against dying. But when you get to this second half (and I am deep in it) we are too good at the recital of its negatives and not nearly good enough at looking the good bits – which I find constantly – bad weather and all – uplifting*.
Annalog 