EASTER REFLECTIONS

You know, what I really wanted as a nice sunny Easter weekend. I suppose we all did, really. That one “official” four-day holiday weekend of the year when you can unwind a little, kick off your shoes and just get on with the things that you want to get on with. Granted, there are many who do have to work those days, but I still think that I am not alone in this desire. In fact, if what I heard about the madness in the supermarkets on Maundy Thursday is anything to go by, my ambitions were very small, when others were out stocking up as if for a siege and an eight-month drinking session compacted into four days, on just one of which the shops might not actually be open.

Not that I had any actual plans as such, it’s just that I have this notion, an idea if you like, that sits inside my head as a kind of “idealised” version of what I would like to happen and which seldom gets lived up to. It’s not a “big” concept, in fact I’m sure it’s hardly even original and fails on just about every level with regards to being “innovative” or “different”, but it is one of those small “hopes” that tends to get you through to the end of another busy week.

Sometimes, all that I just really want to do is put up the sun umbrella and set the folding chairs out in the postage-stamp garden, sit down in the sunshine without any real cares to trouble me, and maybe read a book, chat to the neighbours or just decide to quietly watch the world going by. Maybe, if the mood took me, a bit of pottering and planting and tidying of the postage-stamp would have happened and those dead brown remains of last summer’s gardening might have been reduced slightly. Perhaps the bird-feeders would have got filled and our feathered friends would have flittered about me as they fed, and the bees would have buzzed and an idyllic warm Spring day or four would have unfolded into genuine relaxation.

But the slate-grey skies of Friday and the brewing storm clouds of Saturday and eventual torrential rains of Sunday and Monday rather put the lid on any of those options and instead I mainly remained indoors, apart from a relatively flying visit to our various parents which was mostly significant because of trying to track down somewhere that was still selling flowers on Easter Sunday…

So, as ever, for much of the time we ate cheese and goggled at the idiot box, and afterwards, as the combination of images and the cheese kept me awake, I mulled over bizarre projects that will never come to pass. Like, for example, the rather bonkers idea of building a tiny astronomical observatory on the roof of our house.

I wondered whether something akin to the “bubble” gun turrets on a Lancaster bomber could be adapted, poked through the roof, and still leave room for its walls to be made up of circular bookshelves to contain all of those books about the night sky which I’ve accumulated but still failed to absorb and recall much of the information from.

In my head “observatory” then became “observe a Tory” and I started to wonder whether I could write a story about “William Vague” which just goes to show the kind of nonsense that rattles around in my noggin after I’ve woken up in the middle of the night but before I actually get up.

No wonder things can get so strange in these weird pages.

I was also kept awake by the 1995 film “Copycat” which we watched on Saturday. Surprisingly, I was not kept awake by the horrible imagery and ideas that such films used to lodge in my head when suddenly every night-time creak and shadow could transform in my imagination into a lurking psychopath. “Silence of the Lambs” is now over twenty years old but it can still give me the heebie-jeebies when I remember the long sleepless night I spent after going to see that film.

But “Copycat” started to bother me on another level. There’s a scene towards the end where one of the cops is finally reconciled with another cop, their bickering having been a source of tension between them throughout the story, but then there’s no pay-off to that scene at all, and later still, when the plot has reached its inevitably bloody final phase it just sort of stops. All over. Film finished. Go home.

This really started to bother me at four o’clock the following morning, I can tell you. Perhaps it’s just that in the intervening decade and a half I’ve become used to editing and plotting that pretty much underscores and explains every little plot point so we all feel that we somehow have got “closure” of a sort, so maybe it is us, as the viewers, who have changed, because real life is, in reality, more complicated than the movies are, and those little moments can always be left unresolved unless we choose to resolve them ourselves, but I still found it rather odd.

Still, after clearing that film off the DVR hard-drive, we addressed the shiny discs from the movie rental company which had been gathering dust for a week or so, parked them in the player and whittled some more of the weekend away.

“Game of Thrones” had been recommended to us time and again, and I know that it has its fans, but didn’t really grab us over the course of its first two episodes, so we might just delete the rest of it from the rental list and let them swing their swords about without us.

What was surprisingly gripping was the German subtitled film that we half-heartedly settled down to watch because we knew that it lasted for over two hours and we really weren’t sure that we had that kind of stamina.

However, “The Lives of Others” (“Das Leben der Anderen”) turned out to be an astonishingly good and compelling movie which I wouldn’t hestitate in recommending to anyone if I didn’t think that you’ve already been fully aware of its brilliance for the six years it’s been out and are already shaking your heads and tutting at how far behind the times I have allowed myself to become.