Lockdown Diary - Sunday 31st May 2020

Started the day with a walk. My usual circuit - 34 minutes walking of which the NHS app reckons 31 qualified as brisk. That'll do me.

Carers already at work when I returned home, had a brief chat with one of them, exchanged pleasantries with the other, before getting on with a variety of boring bits of tidying etc. When they left I went and got ready to properly face the day, bright and sparkling clean.

Usual list of chores I'll not bother to repeat - once under way, time to sit down eat my breakfast and drink coffee. First, though, another minor online task to complete before it was finally time to read the papers and enjoy the rest of my coffee.

Spent a while reading the papers before returning to the chores - told the boys I was washing all their towels today, so they'd need to get new ones out the cupboard. There are limits!

The papers sent me scurrying of to find the poem 'The Second Coming' by W.B. Yeats - I knew I'd read it a long time ago but couldn't remember where it was, a search not helped - as the article discusses - by how many times parts of it have been quoted in other books, records etc.

Time passed as grains of sand sifting through my fingers: late afternoon now and I settled down to watch 'The Vast of Night' again. I took a couple of long-ish phone calls - the first with my mother-in-law and the second a more relaxed and open conversation with my kid sister. Always good to speak to her, better still to meet her, if I could.

Back to the film. Watching it whilst awake was well worth the effort. The camera work is excellent - there's a great sequence where we travel out the phone exchange/switchboard, up the main street and across the town to the basketball hall in one long sweep - it really adds to the tension of the film.  There's great dialogue between the two main characters - it's both very dialogue-centric as well as visual. There's casual social comment which gives an insight into small-town America in the 1950s as well as references to social concerns of the time - Russian invasion, spies, and space. There are also subtle references to H.G. Wells, Orson Welles and other things and dramatic use of a patch-cable telephone switchboard. If you have access to Amazon Prime video, do yourself a favour and watch it, it really is that good.

The evening was rapidly upon me and dinner was upon us.  Time to start something new - this time 'The End of the F***ing World', which we'd not watched.  I knew the basic premise and that the soundtrack was by Graham Coxon, but not much else.  Watched the first two episodes which were both shocking and amusing - the two leads must be the most dysfunctional teenagers in any TV or film, so far. It could only be British. I look forward to watching more.

Ride with 'Only Now' from the album 'Carnival of Light' 

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