Early Spring
23 January

It's been unseasonably mild.

In fact, we seem to have traversed this winter without recourse to the usual cotton sheets on the bed retaining the lighter linen ones. We've not have the candlewick bedspread over us either. There's been no need for the central heating to be on overnight and I have hardly worn my thermal underwear at all. The stout, warm boots and the thick warm socks have stayed in their place.

Already we are seeing many of our garden plants sprouting for Britain - the early Clematis has flowered; the bluebells are well up as are the daffodils. This year we have a particularly good show from the witchhazel with cascades of yellow/orange/brown flowers.

Birds are getting frisky too in the strong sunlight and there are signs that ducks and geese are already flying North to the summer haunts.

It's a little unsettling but I've been making good use of the clemency.

I spent part of Monday afternoon sitting out in the garden with a nice red wine reading Terry Pratchett's Going Postal. With a couple of layers of clothes, it was most pleasant to get the sun full on the face and the chest. The book is rather good. As with Alexander McCall Smith's In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, it is good to be reading a best beloved author back on their best form. At his best, Pratchett has the ability to make me laugh out loud whilst pondering the questions of how to live a good and sane life which any sensible person should consider. It was a good read.

Ross and I finished the day off nicely with a trip to the Plaza cinema on Monday to see Ladies in Lavender. It's worth travelling long distances to see Maggie Smith and Judy Dench in anything; they are mesmeric performers and, in this case, certainly transcended the material they were given. Only when I was leaving the cinema did I start to have niggling doubts like "Was the young man thrown off the ship or was it a shipwreck?", "Did the nice man ever get his violin back?", "How did two country spinsters manage to gatecrash a post concert party in London?"

Still we enjoyed the film fully whilst it played. It was worth three stars for the stars alone.

The capacity house who sat there with us enjoyed themselves tremendously as well. We must have encountered Mothers' Union night because the place was packed with redoubtable ladies of a certain age who quite clearly caught every nuance of the two Dames' performances. When the young man went for a swim the line "Oh, I do hope father's bathing costume hasn't got any moth holes" got quite the appreciative cackle. I now know what it must have been like to ascend the scaffold to the sound of the tricoteuses laughing.

Come Saturday, we didn't go to Romeo and Juliet as planned. Ross just felt out of sorts so we settled down in front of a nice fire and watched DVDs.

First up was Bernardo Bertolucci's Dreamers. It really is an older man's wet dream phantasy about free love and liberty in the Paris of Les Evenements in the spring of 1968. Pleasant as it was to see Michael Pitt's willy, the substance of the film was really quite trite. Distinctly average and not the masterpiece that the critics proclaimed.

In contrast Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education is a great, great film. By turns shocking, erotic, engaging, riotously funny, it is a film noire with a salsa twist. Gorgeously filmed and brilliantly acted by a cast that includes Gael García Bernal, this is without a doubt one of my films of the year.