It drizzled today. I dropped the Systems Administrator off at the railway station, en route to a Christmas lunch with old colleagues, then spent the morning writing the last of the Christmas cards, and staring occasionally out of the kitchen window, marvelling at how nice it was to have a see-through window you could look out of. One of my lost parcels turned up, delivered by a very cheerful driver who said he knew exactly where our house was, and somebody who didn't know the route must have picked the parcel up last time. The other is being held by the Royal Mail in a post office which I thought had closed down, so I tried over the internet to rearrange delivery for next Tuesday, and hoped for the best.
The last Christmas cards to be sent tend to be the ones that take longer to write. Scribbling as much of our news as will fit on the reverse of the picture is a pleasant enough task, as is filling in a few pages of Basildon Bond with tidings of the new windows, and the latest health of the cats, especially Our Ginger. The ones destined for friends where you know, or fear, that something is amiss take a little more thought. Have a Great Christmas and New Year doesn't really cut it when one of the recipients has just started another course of chemotherapy, and things aren't going well. I guess people grumble about the cost of stamps so much because we end up buying them all at once. If you asked them whether they grudged spending a pound once a year to let people they didn't see so often know that they still remembered them, and liked them, and hoped one day to see them again, most would reply that of course they didn't. The pointless cards are the ones to anyone you don't like or hope not to see again, in which case the cost of stamps has nothing to do with it.
The Christmas cards, and my next task, which was to finish writing up the minutes of the music society committee meeting, will scarcely support more than two paragraphs, so I will tell you about the film we watched the other evening. It is called Sightseers, and came out late last year. I must have heard about it on one of the BBC radio arts shows, because I added it to my spreadsheet of films I want to see (which my laptop has now eaten, or rather hidden away under a temporary file name in a secret directory somewhere. When the Christmas party round is over I must get the Systems Administrator to find it for me, and show me how to look for it myself next time it happens).
Sightseers is a black comedy, described in some write-ups as a pitch black comedy, which is about right. It begins with the dowdy daughter of a controlling mother setting off on a caravan holiday with her fairly new boyfriend, who seems nice enough and perfectly normal. There is some very sharp dialogue, and we could be in Mike Leigh territory (it was a review of Sightseers that put me on to his early work Nuts in May, which is a masterpiece). Then cracks start to appear. The boyfriend is not so nice and laid back as we thought. Then he runs somebody over in a museum car park. Accidentally, according to the police, because they are allowed to continue on their holiday. The next death is not an accident.
And I can't tell you any more than that, without giving away the plot and spoiling it for you, but it is brilliantly done. It is not laugh out loud funny, and reviews which claimed that are wrong. Instead it is very, very bleak, while simultaneously extremely funny, and sad, and pulls off the difficult trick of making the audience empathise with leading protagonists who have by then done some appalling things, and are probably psychopaths. At one point in the middle I briefly lost my nerve, and thought I had persuaded the SA to spend the evening watching a mere gore fest, but the film pulled it off. The final plot twist is brilliant, and I didn't see it coming at all. Afterwards we agreed that it was deeply weird, but would stick. Several days later it has stuck, which I find the best test for a film. Fish Tank, another low budget and almost unremittingly grim independent film which I inflicted on the SA, has stuck for both of us, whereas I honestly can't remember a thing about Oceans Eleven, except that it had George Clooney and Julia Roberts in it, and I was bored throughout.
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