Such A Saint

We have Saturday night in after a fairly heavy night in Leeds on Friday. We also take Sunday off running with neither the long trek to Draycote Water for two loops of their reservoir in their 10 miler of the mud bath that is Coalville 10k appealing. Well the mud bath may well have been appealing to L and I did offer to hold her coat but she declined.

She goes off shopping instead and meets me later in Broadway. Where despite the fact there are two 5% beers on she’s on the coffee. Such a saint. One of the beers is Shipstone’s Krubera, this time finally on cask. So I pop down to meet her and while we’re there we take in a film.

Sorry We Missed You is a film by Ken Loach about a chap called Ricky Turner (Kris Hitchen) who takes a job in the 'gig economy' working as a delivery driver for a parcels firm in Newcastle.

The story goes that after the 2008 financial crash Ricky lost his job in construction and struggled to make ends meet as a handyman. Then he lost his family’s home when Northern Rock went under. Now, with his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) and their two kids, they are back renting.

In a move to try and get his family back where they were, Ricky takes the delivery driver job. However he won’t be an employee, he’ll be a franchisee as the firm’s obnoxious manager Gavin Maloney (Ross Brewster) explains. Maloney is a man who eats unproductive drivers for breakfast.

Unfortunately Ricky doesn’t fully understand the terms of his self-employment. This is a world where there is no sick pay, penalties for missing targets and if you’re absent you have to arrange your own cover. Thankfully the drama doesn't extend to him struggling to do his tax return.

He can either rent a van from the company or buy his own. So he sells Abbie's car to get the deposit for his own van. The only problem with that being that Abbie is a home carer and now she's on the bus. Therefore Ricky makes the mistake of prioritising his job over hers and immediately puts extra pressure on himself to deliver for the family.

It is a job that is largely inappropriate for him because his family’s circumstances were always going to make it difficult for him to do the job. So, from the outset, we know where this is going.

The thing is Ricky is good at his job and at first things go well but then he starts taking harder and more difficult routes. The extra hours take a toll on him while Abbie struggles with the extra restrictions he’s placed on her job. All this damages their relationship with their kids, daughter Lisa (Katie Proctor) and son Seb (Rhys Stone) who has started skipping school, taking up as a graffiti artist instead.

When Ricky needs to get to the school to sort out Seb the only way he can take time off is to accept a fine from the company who are only interested in the bottom line. When he gets mugged there is little sympathy from his boss and he is charged with replacing a scanner that gets damaged in the process. Although I find it incomprehensible that this wouldn’t be insured by either the company or by the drivers themselves.

Of course everything that happens in the film is possible and it makes for great cinema but it's very contrived. Basically all the worst case scenarios have been lumped onto one family. So we get a rather unbalanced view of a business practice that does indeed have many faults but which are maximised here for full effect. 

Despite that it is a good film that captures real life struggles but ones that could have happened in any industry, inside the gig economy or out of it. In all industries there are good employers and bad ones.

Ken Loach gets his political point across but for me it was more of a film about relationships and parenting. If anything I though the plight of Abbie as a care worker was more worthy of highlighting than Ricky’s was.

(Sunday 10^th November)

Last Minute Fit

This morning it’s our most local of races, the Wollaton Park Easter 10k which we return to time and time again because there isn’t often a good reason not to do it. I can think of one today though. The weather has been utterly foul all weekend and the park is a complete mud bath but there’s not only me on the start line but L too. 

I am trying to get last minute fit for next weekend’s Sheffield Half Marathon while L has been following a more coordinated plan in her pursuit of the Derby 10k the week after.

I would say that I had a decent run and I did, for 8k of it. It wasn’t quick but then the conditions weren't conducive to quick and it wasn’t particularly pleasant but then the conditions weren't conducive to pleasant. It was ok, until my calf went at 8k. Which puts a huge question mark against Sheffield. 

(Monday 2^nd April)

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)