Week One
I don’t really have any resolutions for the new year. What I do have is a determination to lose weight. This week I have been eating much less than I would do normally and trying to insert some activity into my otherwise sedentary lifestyle. As a result I’ve lost close to three pounds. This is roundabout where I want to be. The purpose (rather than engaging in ‘fad’ diets) is to change the way I live, to take better care of myself. The aim is improved health, as much as it weight-loss.
On Friday we went to see The King’s Speech. It was our first trip to the cinema in 2011 and a good reason to start. Original but strangely comforting, funny, moving, dramatic. It had all the components of a good story and at the same time was extremely cinematic, which gives it the edge over other royalty-based films such as The Queen. Colin Firth was convincing, as you’d expect. There’s talk of him being Oscar-nominated. On the way home we talked about whether or not he deserves an award for that kind of performance. He was brilliant, as I’ve said, but was the role challenging enough? We thought of The Reader, in which Kate Winslett played an utterly disgusting character yet made us feel sorry for her, root for her, and feel upset when she took her own life at the close. No comparison between the two.
All I’ve been able to read is Harry Potter. I’ve started with The Philosopher’s Stone, reading a chapter to the bump every night. It’s nice to read aloud, although the crushing repetition of adverbs is hard to swallow, and makes me a bit angry.
I finished Stewart Lee’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate (incorrectly titled as How I Escaped a Fate Worse than Death in previous blog posts) between Christmas and New Year. It was hilarious, and also quite touching. He segued nicely between his stand-up routine and an account of a debilitating and quite embarrassing illness. At times it was a bit wanky. The endless footnotes got annoying. Overall a funny and clever man.
Christmas
Christmas Day was a mess of various meats, pickles, pies, chocolate and an overly long and nearly-violent game of Pictionary. At the end we fell into an icy car and returned to Boughton and that was that. A fitful night’s sleep (populated by meat-based dreams) later and we arrive at Boxing Day. England are wiping the floor with the Australians at cricket, later there be football, we all have presents to play with and ‘Christmas Telly’ to watch. Recorded the Queen’s speech and a number of episodes of Born at Christmas, a couple of films, Doctor Who, that thing that David Walliams and Matt Lucas have done about an airport. Drivel, basically.
Revolutionary Road has now been superceded by two Christmas receipts: Stewart Lee’s How I Escaped a Fate Worse Than Death and Tom McCarthy’s C. That’s a fiction and a non-fiction, which is a good pair to be going on with. I’ve read Revolutionary Road before and the final fifty pages are the most depressing, so I’m happy to leave them to memories, until its next read.
The Stewart Lee book is an autobiography of sorts, about his return to stand-up comedy following a several-year hiatus. Included are transcripts from some of his live shows, with comprehensive footnotes explaining the genesis of his ideas. The footnotes are a bit heavy-handed in places, and I sometimes fail to understand why they’re not just included in the text, but overall the book is funny and interesting and well-written. I read some to our baby last night until Abi got fed up with my glasses poking her in the stomach.
C is a strange book, about what I know not. Currently, a baby has been born in the eighteen hundreds (I think?) to the sounds of the world’s first wireless transmission. What I do know is that Tom McCarthy has always written interesting books, even if they occasionally misfire. Remainder is about a man who receives a great deal of money as compensation for something falling on him, who then uses the money to reenact in minute detail very specific events from his life. It gets a bit much near the end, with the never-compromising level of detail, but it’s about ten times more fascinating than most novels. Tom McCarthy also wrote Tintin and the Secret of Literature, which is an analysis of the famous Herge creation and is a pretty-much perfect work of non-fiction.
I’ve also just had a bath. It was slightly too hot, and now I’m finding it hard to feel my feet. No matter.
