One of Those Weekends
20 January

Well we've just had one of those weekends where very little happened but it was all very pleasant.

The usual round of local shopping on Saturday morning was followed by a trip out towards Ormskirk with Roland and a pleasant drink at the Ship Inn in Haskayne on the banks of the Leeds/Liverpool canal.

After food, we settled down to watch Taken, the Spielberg driven Sci-Fi series which is setting out to track USA history and UFO sightings over the latter half of the 20th century. It has lots of antecedents - Dark Skies which graced our TV screens in 1997. As a sort of nod in that direction, Eric Close, who played one of the main roles, John Loengard, in Dark Skies, appeared as an alien. There were other nods in the direction of Close Encounters and E.T. However, unlike Dark Skies, this does have pace and verve. Ross and I are likely to stick with it. It's certainly worth an initial three star rating.

I did some yoga first thing on Sunday before setting off to see Albert and Grace for a short while. They are both in good health and it was good to see my dad, particularly, looking quite spry. The afternoon was gloriously sunny so we went down to the sea front to sit and read in the open air. The light on the estuary and the bay was silver and the Wirral glowed and danced in the hazy distance like Venice across the lagoon. We only lacked the Adagietto from Mahler's fifth symphony to turn it into a truly cinematic experience.

Last weekend brought us a rather ordinary adaptation of D H Lawrence's Sons and Lovers with overly muscley boys and little sense of the social context. None of the actors was good enough to carry a sense of personal history from one scene to another. I tell a lie. There was just one. Hugo Speer who played Walter Morel, the father. He had less and less to say as the adaptation played on but his sense of a personal history of lost hopes and destroyed spirit which completely ignored by everyone was touching. His excellence, however, didn't stop the production from failing to rise above a two star experience.

This weekend brought us Steven Poliakoff's Lost Prince, the story of Johnnie the autistic son of King George V. The idea of the piece was to see behind the veneer of history with the eyes of a child. It worked thanks to good writing and excellent playing from an all star cast but, by the high standards of Steven Poliakoff (viz Perfect Strangers and Shooting the Past), it wasn't really up to that high standard. So, it's a three star event, I'm afraid.