Somebody Else’s Problem

While L drools at the thought of the 46 park runs that are in London, which would be quite a project and no doubt would become a project if Daughter got the job down there, she also admits that Project East Midlands is also proving quite testing.

I should be encouraging her to spread her wings more but Project Bacon Sandwich is quite a draw for me and Forest Rec have the best but today we are determined to go elsewhere. So we pencil in a trip to Sherwood Pines but as often happens we end up running late and don’t get there. So it’s Forest Rec again. Which suits the boys too, as they can have their usual ball session.

L then has Pilates and I have a match, oddly a normal 3pm KO. Sky seem to have lost interest in us this season which is understandable considering how poor we’ve been.

As I leave for the match I notice a dead cat lying in the gutter just outside our house. At first I drive past it thinking that it is most definitely somebody else’s problem but then I change my mind. I just can’t leave it there, so I U-turn and head back just as L is arriving back home. Together we scrape it up and ring the vets. They will take it and scan it but it has no collar on, so it’s probably not chipped either.

Derby lose again, 2-1, but at least they scored this week.

L cooks pre-race pasta but then abandons it to head to the hospital. I head home, collect the boys and head over there as well. Before I leave I manage to move tonight’s theatre tickets to another night as the situation with L’s brother isn’t looking good. 

(Saturday 24^th September)

Mud Bath

This morning L is marshalling at the Forest Rec Parkrun rather than running. I indulge in the usual ball chucking before adjourning to the café with the dogs for a well-earned bacon sandwich. In fact they serve me a full breakfast sandwich by mistake which I share with the boys.

L isn’t parkrunning because she’s participating in the Dirty Dash 10k at Holme Pierrepoint instead. Normally it’s a total mud bath but oddly it doesn’t seem too bad today. Must be the 40mph winds that have dried everything out. As it’s a noon start I drop L off before heading home with the boys and then to Derby’s match.

After the match, which Derby win 2-0 over Cardiff, I head straight back to Nottingham and meet L at Broadway.

‘The Lady in the Van’ didn’t make a lot of sense to me but then you perhaps need to be an Alan Bennett aficionado to appreciate it. This film comes with not one but two Alan Bennetts (Alex Jennings), well actually three if you count the real one who turns up at the end.

This is apparently the real story of Mary Shepherd aka Margaret Fairchild (Maggie Smith), a woman who wiped out a motorcyclist and then went on the run from the police even though the police weren’t looking for her because it wasn’t her fault.

Bennett doesn’t know this when she turns up in a battered old van and parks in his well-to-do street in Camden. Spotting Bennett as a soft touch she worms her way on to his driveway, where she then lives in her van (or vans and always repainted yellow) for fifteen years until her death.

It wasn’t until after her death that they finally found out who she was but the film shows us, sort of, as we go along. Like how she was a gifted pianist who then tried to become a nun. How her brother put her in an institution from which she escaped. 

None of which fully explains why she acted as she did in the first place and what happened to the life she left behind. She is, it is implied, simply eccentric.

If that isn’t eccentric enough, then there’s Bennett himself or indeed the two Bennetts, Alan the writer and Alan the homeowner. Bennett the writer wrote a book about the whole thing, turned it into a play and now this film. Both of which starred Maggie Smith, who better to play a batty old woman.

The relationship between the two leads is the heart of the film but I found both of them insufferable and while I couldn’t understand the logic of her decision to live in a van, I couldn’t understand Bennett's decision to let her stay either.

So it’s all a bit too eccentric for me and that’s before we get to the graveyard scene at the end.

(Saturday 21^st November)

Admirable Commitment

L decides not to do today’s parkrun at the Forest Rec and to save herself for tomorrow’s Tour de Yorkshire. I admire her commitment. Instead she offers to help out, marshalling etc. So we do the usual thing and I take the boys to chuck some balls. Then the boys and I go for a bacon sandwich whilst she finishes up.

It’s the final match of the football season today, for those not in the play offs. Which now includes Derby after they finally imploded by losing 3-0 at home to Reading which caused them to tumble down to 8^th place.

I certainly needed the afternoon in bed after that but decided to forgo the alcohol. We spend the evening AF and on the pasta as the Yorkshire hills loom tomorrow. 

(Saturday 2^nd May)