Some Serious Work To Do

Today I run the Retford Half Marathon which starts at Retford Oaks Academy. L and the boys come along to offer vocal support.

Some folk from Sheffield Running Club described what is to come as pan flat which, as there is nothing anywhere near ‘pan flat’ for them to compare it with in Yorkshire, could mean anything. As it turns out the course is remarkably flat for the first five miles but then becomes quite undulating thereafter with several long but gradual inclines.

The race is well organised, on closed roads, but very low key e.g. somewhat lacking in atmosphere. Outside of Retford itself, it’s a case of spot the spectator and it’s also not hugely scenic, which I don’t mind at all.

As is the way with races early in the year there are not many slow runners so the pace is brisk. I make a good start but after three miles my thighs stiffen up and I gradually get slower and slower. This is where actually doing some training might have helped.

My time of almost 1:49 leaves a lot of room for improvement although, being very early in the season, there is plenty of time for that. If I was to ever get among the awards here I have some serious work to do. First 40+ Male clocked 1:14, first 50+ Male 1:18 and first 60+ Male 1:23. Ouch. So, just half an hour to knock off my time to get first 50+ Male next year. I suppose I did want a challenge for my 50^th year.

I also entered the Nottinghamshire Amateur Athletics Association Half Marathon County Championships which was part of the race, and I didn’t win that either.

There is no goody bag, just a bottle of water and an orange t-shirt. It was ominous at registration, that they gave me a pile of leaflets with my race number as this is the sort of tat that usually weighs down the goody bag. T-shirt wise, as orange t-shirts go, it’s not too bad.

If I found the lack of a goody back disappointing then MD found it positively soul destroying. He is so upset at the lack of crisps and/or biscuits that he starts to eat my race number in frustration.

Later L and I have a drink in Lord Roberts before taking a pint of Supreme into tonight’s film which is Moonlight. It’s disappointing to see that there is nothing from the Stout and Porter Trail in either the Roberts or Broadway itself. 

Moonlight takes place in Liberty City, Miami and shows three snippets of a young man’s life as he grows up black and gay in what is a  tough neighbourhood.

First we meet a young Chiron (Alex Hibbert) nicknamed Little. His lone parent is his crack-addicted mother Paula (Naomie Harris). Basically he is fending for himself and eventually he runs away from home. Typically, it is a crack dealer named Juan (Mahershala Ali) who finds him inside an abandoned house and takes him home to the place he shares with his girlfriend, Theresa (Janelle Monáe). Both Juan and Theresa form a bond with him despite hostility from his mother.

Then we meet Chiron as a teenager (Ashton Sanders), withdrawn and just about coping with his still addicted mother but he is bullied by his peers who regard him as a ‘faggot’ but it isn’t until he hooks up with an old friend, Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), on a beach that he has his first sexual encounter.

In the end though, Chiron cracks under the weight of the bullying when Kevin is put up to attacking him and he smashes a chair over the ringleader Terrel (Patrick Decile), which means he ends up in a juvenile detention centre.

Finally, we see Chiron (Trevante Rhodes) ten years on, now known as Black. He's now a drug dealer himself living in Atlanta and has basically turned in to Juan, showing what a big influence he had on him. Although, Juan himself is no longer alive. Chiron’s mother is now in a home. After getting a phone call from Kevin (André Holland), who is now a cook in Miami, he goes to visit him. Kevin is still his only sexual encounter and he still has feelings for Chiron despite now having a child of his own.

'Moonlight' is one of those films that just drifts along, following a life, but in a mesmerizing way. It's not the sort of film that gives you answers, it just shows you the way things are and lets you draw your own conclusions. A bit of thinker’s film if you like. Ultimately it chronicles how much a part drugs can play in the lives of some people.

The film is full of strong performances from the likes of Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris as well as others, which is why it has been heavily nominated for awards this year. It also has three actors playing the lead character, as well as for the likes of Kevin, which is a bold move.

Is it the best film of the year as decided by the Academy? Probably not but it's still pretty good.

Afterwards, unlike our earlier watering holes, the Blue Monkey does seem to be embracing the Stout and Porter Trail with three beers to choose from.

(Sunday 12th March)

An Unglorious Return

Today I make my running return. My first outing on the tarmac since the ill advised Christmas Pudding run at Langdale before Christmas.

We are at the Cheadle Spring 5, a mammoth five miler but needs must. I manage to up my pace a little from the levels of my training runs (all three of them) and record 39:16 and 83^rd place, half way down the field. The official photos show me battling with some school kid who I managed to fend off eventually. It wasn’t a glorious return but a return it was.

In the evening we head into town to celebrate... 

You used to have to go to dodgy little back street cinemas to see films like tonight’s offering. Nowadays it seems even good old respectable Broadway has such fodder on offer. ‘Stranger by the Lake’ (L'inconnu du lac) is basically a full-on dose of gay pornography and perhaps the perfect antidote to last night’s Lego extravaganza or maybe not. It’s so explicit that I doubt even Nymphomaniac can compete, not that we’ve been there yet.

The film takes us on location, to one location, a gay cruising spot by a pretty lake somewhere in France. Everything in the film happens by this lake. Everyday everyone arrives at the beach, park their cars in the same place, lay their towels out in the same place and then tan their equipment in the same place. Before later retiring to the woods for the main course.

By the end of the film I was so familiar with the layout of the area that I could have drawn a map of it. This repetition succeeds in building the tension because you know there’s going to be more to the film than this (surely).

The main character is Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), a man on a mission, for a shag. Well he’s come to right spot you would think but he’s initially frustrated. The object of his desire, Michel (Christophe Paou), isn’t available. That is until Franck sees Michel drown his current boyfriend. Now Franck doesn’t think oh shit I ought to report this to the authorities, he only thinks that goody, Michel is now available.

To be fair to Franck he’s not the only one who does nothing, nobody else does anything either. Even when the dead man’s car remains on the car park and his towel lies on the beach in the same place for days on end no one bats an eyelid.

Instead Franck hooks up with Michel and covers for him when the police come investigating. Franck is so blindly in love that he even goes swimming with him. FFS. Yet, despite his puppy dog devotion Michel refuses point blank to have any sort of relationship with Franck beyond the boundaries of the beach. Which is good for the director I suppose, taking the film to another location would clearly have blown his mind, and probably ours too.

What we have here is a gay twist on the old chestnut about the young girl in love with the bad lad from the wrong sides of the tracks; the one that’ll be no good for her but her love is so blinkered that she can’t see past the rippling muscles of his chest. Only with a lot more sex. If you already suspect that this isn’t going to have a happy ending, then you’d be right.

It’s educational I suppose, I learnt a lot about how cruising in the homosexual world operates (if this is typical).

 

It’s not a bad film but the endless naked flesh is a bit off putting. I’m also not really sure who the stranger on the beach was supposed to be. Michel? Franck himself? or the self-pitying non-gay Henri (Patrick d'Assumçao), who turns up on the beach everyday for no other reason that he’s on holiday and has nothing better to do.

Henri to his credit is the only clothed man in the film, apart from the police inspector (Jérôme Chappatte), and there’s not a woman in sight.

Personally I’m still waiting for the first body to wash up on the beach. 

We eat at Broadway but are again thwarted at Brewdog which has now become amazingly popular so we have a few drinks in the Major Oak instead.

(Sunday 2^nd March)

And They All Lived Happily Ever After

The fitness campaign has been rescheduled (again). So today the Newcastle 10k, that’s

Newcastle Under Lyme by the way, and I thought I’d retired from 10k’s last year. Needs must.

This is the first time this race has been run as a 10k, previously it was known as the Newcastle 7, over seven miles. That had taken place for 40 years but this has now been shortened to take out a tricky road junction.

The race start is outside the organising club’s HQ on Ashfields New Road. The course takes us on road but steadily uphill for the majority of the first 6k, up something known locally as Black Bank. Then we descend to the finish. It also goes off-road at this point. Firstly on to gravel tracks and then dirt tracks along the route of an old railway line. Thankfully it's not been too wet, so the course isn't muddy or slippery.

The finish turns out to be at least a half a mile walk back to the race HQ, so one wonders why it couldn’t still have been a 7 miler?

It’s a popular event with 416 finishers and a rather nice commemorative mug for all. I am one of those finishers despite struggling with tight calf-itis throughout. I consider dropping out several times as my muscles alternate from tight to excruciatingly tight but I carry on in the belief that this is actually doing it some good.

My time of 49:31 reflects my cautiousness and my discomfort but at least nothing snapped. However I think doing the same over a half marathon distance at Scunthorpe in two weeks time is out of the question.

We head back home and then later go over to Quad in Derby.

The Paperboy is an adaptation of a novel by Peter Dexter which isn’t about a little school kid who delivers newspapers.

Set in the late 1960s, it is about a man called Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack) who has been jailed for the murder of a local sheriff. Van Wetter is on death row and awaiting execution.

In prison Van Wetter is penpalled by Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), a woman who has cherry picked him from all the other inmates as her preferred murderer to marry.

Bless enlists the help of two journalists to attempt to get Van Wetter released. These are Ward Jansen (Matthew McConaughey), a man from the same town where Van Wetter is being held, and his colleague Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo), a black journalist from London. They are assisted by Ward’s younger brother Jack (Zac Efron), a former university swimmer who was expelled for vandalism. He is their driver and ‘paperboy’. Jack’s only real friend is the ex-family maid and narrator of the story, Anita (Macy Gray), who raised him and his brother in the absence of his mother.

Ward and Yardley set about investigating the case, where they find some of the evidence against Van Wetter to be inconsistent and they suspect that he may not have received a fair trial.

Meanwhile, Jack falls heavily for the tarty short skirted Charlotte but she only has eyes for Van Wetter. To the extent that Van Wetter, a man you wouldn’t even want to write a letter to, and Charlotte pleasure themselves at their first meeting rather than discuss the facts of the case.

It all gets even more bizarre when Jack is stung by jellyfish while swimming and Charlotte fights off all the other women on the beach to be the one to urinate on him. Apparently this helps and has nothing to do with Efron being many a young woman’s fantasy.

It is the relationships between the main characters, a generally unpleasant bunch if the truth be told, that keeps us on our toes. Each has sides to their character that they wish to hide and that we probably wished they’d continued to hide.

Ward, for instance, is revealed as a closet homosexual with a fondness for interracial masochism. This puts him in hospital and enables Yardley to print an article on Van Wetter that doesn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Jack, who finds out that Charlotte has slept with Yardley, in order to persuade him to come up with some evidence, tries to stop publication but all he manages to do is to find out that Yardley is actually an American. This is a time when racism was rife in the States and local black men could not attain decent jobs. Even then Yardley had given Ward sexual favours to the get the job.

So it’s all pretty sleazy stuff. All we need now is for Charlotte to offer Jack a sympathy shag, which of course she does and this does nothing to ease his infatuation with her.

As a result of Yardley’s article Van Wetter is released from prison and after taking his fill of Charlotte roughly in every room of her house, he takes her away with him to live out in the swamps.

...and they all lived happily ever after. Err no.  

It’s an interesting film, which you are never totally sure where it’s headed but it all seemed to make sense when it finally got there via a rather ramshackle route. It has to be said that Cusack is terrific and Kidman plays yet another deluded lonely soul but all the cast are good. Recommended.

After the film we hop on a bus to Stapleford and, without much enthusiasm, to the new Wetherspoons there,  the Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren, for some food before moving on to the Horse & Jockey, that we enjoyed so much on our last trip. We never get there. The food is typical Wetherspoons fare of course but the beer range is something else. We stay there all night.

(Sunday 14^th April)