Playing Short

L stays in bed rather than parkruns but then runs off to double Pilates. I take the boys for an amble on the park, they seem shocked. No balls are involved. Mid-walk, Daughter rings, she is about to seal the deal on her own flat.

Derby have an early 12.30 kick off and lose again.

We have a late late Full English and then head over to Derby to Quad to catch one of the Oscars contenders that we have missed ahead of tomorrow’s ceremony.

We pop in the Silk Mill for a pint before and the Old Bell afterwards. They now have the old front room of the Old Bell reopened. It’s a nice refit and they have kept the same layout as from when I was 18. I even point out to L where we used to sit! Not that we came very often, it wasn’t actually anything special in the 1980’s.

The Big Short is based on real people and true events surrounding the financial crisis of 2007/8. It is based on the book by financial journalist Michael Lewis.

It is about collateralised debt obligations, sub-prime mortgages, credit default swaps, bundling... Warning some of the financial jargon may go well over your head.

Not to worry, the producers have assumed that the audience will be blissfully ignorant of such matters and have enlisted the likes of Margot Robbie (in the bath) and a celebrity chef to help explain things in some of the frequent off the wall moments in the film. 

The film itself focuses on four fringe Wall Street players starting with the eccentric financial analyst Michael Burry (Christian Bale). Burry saw what nobody else wanted to see, that the housing market was based on an increasing number of dodgy loans to people who should never have been considered in the first place. He saw it as inevitable that the market was going to collapse but of course no one believed him.

Burry had complete autonomy of the investment fund he controlled and so he created a commodity for his clients betting against these mortgages. When he went to the banks to explain what he wanted to do they simply laughed at him and willingly sold him all the ‘insurance’ he wanted. 

Word of Burry's madness quickly spread and trader Jarred Bennett (Ryan Gosling) gets in on the act. He sells the idea to a group led by a cynical and depressed banker called Mark Baum (Steve Carell). Baum is the boss of a fund under the umbrella of Morgan Stanley, now he is betting against the hand that feeds him.

Finally, there's Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), a couple of rookies trying to break into the finance industry. They team up with disaffected former banker Brad Rickert (Brad Pitt) to bet against the investments. 

What they all ultimately find is that the investment houses ignore the coming crisis and in fact attempt to hide it because they were all making too much money to want it to stop. The film goes on to suggest that the corruption didn’t stop there and extended to the agencies who oversee the markets and possibly beyond.

The film succeeds in making a story about the financial crisis entertaining and that’s no mean feat. Although it could be viewed as a partner piece to 2011's Margin Call which achieved the same feat and is also well worth seeing.

The Big Short is a smart, clever film with some great acting performances. It could even be the best of this year and is well worthy of its Oscar nominations.

(Saturday 27^th February)

A Fair Amount Of Faffing

It’s our first indoor winter dog show of the season today. Doggo opens things up with no sign of a limp. At least not from him, I’m a different matter. Mine will get a good test the first time I run MD.

When I do, we have the last pole down. It didn’t help that the last jump was about four foot from a wall and someone placed his lead in the gap. No wonder he slammed his brakes on and fetched the pole down. The perils of indoor shows in confined spaces.

His next run is clear but with a fair amount of faffing. We come 9^th but he could have won that, faff free.

He celebrated that minor success with an elimination in his next run and every mistake imaginable bar an elimination in his last run.

Doggo is clear in his ‘Allsorts’ agility. Which is a feat itself even before you take into account his Lazarus like recovery from Friday’s crippling limp because they leave the contact equipment on full height, which I’ve never seen them do before on an ‘Allsorts’ course although we don’t do that many. They’d certainly drop the heights for a Veterans class.

L takes the opportunity of our absence to do some painting at home, glossing whilst the hairy ones are out, the backdoor isn’t wide open and there’s no requirement to throw footballs at the same time. Now it’s time for us to head back to disrupt this, at least all the hairs are well plastered down with mud.

Then we head over to Derby where we eat in the Dolphin, then pop in the refurbished Bell for one before we head to the Flowerpot for a gig. 

The test of an artist is often whether they can ‘pull it off’ when they’re up against it. Peter Coyle, it is probably fair to say, is up against it. He turns up tonight totally on his own, no band, no instruments and is at first mistaken for a roadie by the bulk of the audience.

So it is to his immense credit that he then swiftly gets everyone’s attention, and at the same time turns the entire venue into respectful silence, as he delivers his three minutes of fame from 1983, ‘The First Picture of You’, totally a capella. Coyle you see was the vocalist with the Lotus Eaters. A band that had great promise and even Peel sessions but despite several subsequent singles, they never really achieved another three minutes in the spotlight and Coyle went solo, again without making much of an impression.

Thirty years on Coyle certainly still has that brilliant voice even if he does not possess either his own guitar (or keyboard) or perhaps the capacity to play one. Instead he fires up a backing tape and does karaoke for the remainder of his support slot. Faced with this, and the fact it’s all unfamiliar material, the majority of the crowd turn back to their conversations and their pints.

China Crises on the other hand arrive as a three piece and with instruments. The band's core has remained constant throughout their long career with Gary Daly on vocals and Eddie Lundon on guitar. They do introduce their keyboard player several times but I, amateurishly, don’t make a note of his name.

I look forward to seeing how this slimmed down line-up handles their back catalogue but I’m quickly disappointed as sadly, like Coyle, they also make heavy use of backing tapes. Thinking back now, I bet they always did to get all those twiddly bits into their songs for their live shows.

I’ve seen the band several times back in the day and I can even now vividly recall them at Rock City in 1987 bemoaning the fact they’d been downgraded from the Concert Hall because their fourth album, the excellent (in their opinion and mine) ‘What Price Paradise’ didn’t sell as well as their earlier stuff. Of course to me the Concert Hall not Rock City is the downgrade and they were back at Rock City in 1989 a bit more chastened.

Two things are striking tonight as regards that memory. Firstly they’re now very at home in a pub (a downgrade deluxe), albeit a full one, and they play nothing from that excellent fourth album, sadly. It is, slightly predictably, mostly a hits set.

The start though is a bit more leftfield. First up ‘The Soul Awakening’ from ‘Working with Fire and Steel’ followed by ‘Temptation’s Big Blue Eyes’ and ‘Seven Sports for All’ from ‘Difficult Shapes and Passive Rhythms’ which Gary urges us ‘to get out of the loft’. As if I’d assign any records to the loft.

‘Temptation’s Big Blue Eyes’ particularly is a surprise and they admit that this gem off their debut album remained pretty much unplayed for the last thirty years until recently.

Then it’s time to plunder their most famous offering ‘Flaunt the Imperfection’ for a clutch of tracks. ‘Gift Of Freedom’ and ‘You Did Cut Me’ are played without the tapes and with only the audience as backing. Resulting in a far less polished offering but the songs are the better for it. The whole point of seeing someone live is to see what they can do outside the comfort of the studio and not to reproduce everything in prefect CD quality.

After that they revert to using the tapes and ‘Black Man Ray’ opens a run of all singles through to the end. Among them is a song which transports me back to Sixth Form College and starting my A Levels. Do I really want to go back there? Probably not, but a note perfect ‘Wishful Thinking’ does it anyway. Assisted by those immaculate backing tapes of course.

Peter Coyne reappears for the encore of ‘Here Comes a Raincloud’ from ‘Working with Fire and Steel’ but he leaves them to close what has been a pleasant evening on their own. Gary and Eddie have been chatty throughout, pleasant hosts, and we’ve even managed to overcome the language problems posed by their Scouse accents.

In fact the only track they don’t chat about and introduce is the last one. It’s also the only one the majority of the audience don’t know, as they close with ‘Diary of a Hollow Horse’ from album number five.

We close our own night with a swift one in the Royal Standard before getting the bus home.

(Saturday 23^rd November)

The Descent Into Blindness

The lumbago is much improved this morning, so L can be as rough with me as she likes. The dogs are rougher though, and very energetic as we hit the park.

After an annual check up at the opticians to see how my descent into blindness is progressing, I manage to watch Derby defeat Sheffield Wednesday 3-0. Then I meet L in Derby where we head to Quad.

‘Philomena’ is adapted from Martin Sixsmith's book ‘The Lost Child of Philomena Lee’ and is directed by Stephen Frears.

Back in the day, when she just a mere girl, Philomena Lee (played as a youngster by Sophie Kennedy Clark) had sex with a boy at a fairground, before she even knew what sex was. She also didn't know what a pregnancy was but she soon found out. As this was Ireland in the 1950s for this unforgivable sin she was locked up in a convent where she gave birth to a son, whom she called Anthony.

Actually she wasn't such a mere girl really, she was 18, but as I've already said this was Ireland in the 1950s and "the thing is, I didn't even know I had a clitoris." Which is what the older Philomena (Judy Dench) tells former BBC journalist Sixsmith (Steve Coogan) fifty years on. This is how Sixsmith, unsure of what to do after being sacked as a government adviser, apart from writing a book on Russian history, ends up doing a human interest story, something he thought was beneath him as he assists Philomena in searching for her son.

The pair of them head back to the convent where they confront the nuns to find out what happened to Anthony after he was removed from the convent at the age of three. The nuns weave a shroud of deceit to cover their tracks including telling them that all the records of the adopted children were destroyed in an ‘accidental’ fire. That is apart from the form they asked her to sign which waived her parental rights which has been lovingly preserved.

Sixsmith finds that a convenient conversation in the local pub is more help than the nuns. The landlord pours scorn on the 'fire' theory and tells them that aside from subjecting the inmates to what amounted to slavery, the convent ran a nice sideline in selling the girls' children to rich Americans. Which is what happened to Anthony.

Sixsmith makes use of his contacts in the USA and they both head over there to find out more. What they find is that the adopted Anthony was renamed Michael Hess and on the internet Sixsmith finds out that Michael worked as a high-ranking official in the Reagan administration, all the time hiding the fact he was homosexual and sadly died of AIDS nine years ago. 

They track down and visit his adopted sister Mary, who was taken from the convent with him. Then they find Michael's partner who won’t at first talk to them but eventually Philomena convinces him to do so. He reveals that Michael did try to find his mother in Ireland and even went to the convent to speak to the nuns. None of which the nuns admitted to as they continued to blatantly lie even fifty years on. Also it was his final wish to be buried there.

So they head back to the convent again, see the grave, and confront the sister who was in charge back then, Sister Hildegarde (Barbara Jefford), who is still unrepentant. Philomena, incredibly, forgives her. FFS.

I’m impressed by the film. It's enthralling, not unduly sentimental and it doesn't have a happy ending, not really. Judi Dench is Judi Dench, of course, flawless. Steve Coogan, who is everywhere right now, is well... Steve Coogan. I’m still not convinced by his acting ability, he always seems very one dimensional and here he again appears to mainly play himself.

More to his style perhaps is the fact he co-produced as well as co-wrote the film but he does seem to have sneakily re-jigged Sixsmith’s book. The screenplay has turned the sequence of events on its head and in the process built a bigger part for Cougan. I don't think keeping to the original story would have made any difference to the impact of the film but it would have produced two leading actresses in Dench and Anna Maxwell Martin, who plays Philomena's daughter Jane and only a minor role for Cougan.

After the film we head to the restored Old Bell Hotel on Sadler Gate. Only the Tudor Bar is open at the moment but its mightily impressive and a far cry from the place that has been known as the local drugs den for all my drinking life.

We have a few drinks in there before moving on to the Flowerpot.

 
(Saturday 9^th November)