A SOGGY SUMMER SATURDAY

Last weekend, the day of yet another planned day out finally came around, only to be stymied, in part, by the rainfall hammering down outside the window and a general air of fatigue meaning that a vote was taken amongst the members of the household and we decided, temporarily at least, to stay put, have our breakfast at home instead of trudging the soggy streets of the big city in search of the lesser-spotted “Café Rouge” and maybe watch a bit of telly.

We have, it must be said, been thinking about a particular style of “going out for breakfast” ever since our breakfast plans were thwarted by disease during our planned relaxed stopover at Gatwick Airport on our way back from Egypt a couple of years ago. That planned, but unfortunately never eaten, leisurely “Continental Breakfast” has gnawed at us ever since, really, but somehow the opportunity to have another go at it has somehow managed to remain untaken in the intervening time, and, it seems, yet another weekend has slipped away from us without it happening.

We were, after all, only taking the “heading into town” option anyway because our usual venue only offered “3-D” screenings of the movie we wanted to see in the late afternoon, whereas the one in the city had an 11.30 AM option on a gloriously flat and unhampered 2-D screen instead.

Breakfast and a movie, maybe a late lunch afterwards and catching the train home - as plans go, it wasn’t all that complicated, but, as is quite often the case with us, it didn’t happen…

Instead, after a morning spent with Scandavian Crime Dramas and, surprisingly, actual play in the Third Test at Edgbaston to listen to on the radio, we decided to head out for that later showing after all, and so we grabbed our stuff and headed out into a rain-soaked afternoon, planning on stopping at a stationery shop and a supermarket on the way, and maybe stopping off at a restaurant for a curry on the way home, if we could manage that without a reservation.

Sadly, the world of stationery shops is not what it was and we left without buying anything, which is more than can be said for the supermarket, which always seems to draw us into its wicked web and tap us for far more cash than was ever originally intended when we “Just pop in for a few bits…”

This visit to a supermarket was steeped in nostalgia as I was reminded of the days, many years ago, when I would catch the bus down to it after work on a Tuesday evening, whizz around the place inside twenty minutes to shop for my grandmother, and just be able to catch another bus to where she was living. I was rather surprised, to be honest, to realise that what I still think of as being a relatively “new” supermarket, must now be at least twenty four years old for me to have been able to have done that…

It’s still a grim old place, though. As many supermarkets are. I walk around them looking at the people who seem to fall into two main groups; those who either shuffle around like they’re in some kind of “day release” programme or those walking around with such an air of arrogance and contempt that they think that they rule the world, perhaps because their own futures haven’t yet come along and bitten them.

I think you can guess which group I belong to…

I was rather amazed by the amount of “Union Flag” merchandise still on display now that the Jubilee was over, especially with how much of it was emblazoned with the legend “The Great British Summer”. One look out of the windows was enough to blow that particular slogan out of the water. For once the equally unpleasant sounding but suddenly much more literally appropriate “Cool Britannia” would have been preferable.

We paid and left that unpleasant place and headed for an even more unpleasant place, the cinema complex, with me still mulling over the fact that the banks are making it so much easier to pay by adding little bleeper chips to their cash cards in an era when they keep on adding levels of security (and extra bank charges) to our accounts. How does making it so easy to pay by simply waving a card at a reader fit in with all that?

The cinema itself brought more questions that will remain forever unfathomable… Why does the smell of the air outside a swimming pool immediately transport me back to my youth…? Why do people put on silly “child-like” voices when talking to their own children in front of other adults…? Will future generations look back and wonder why, with all the computer design power at our disposal, designers still seem unable to run a spell checker over their work before sending it to print…? Or has “availiable” become the accepted spelling nowadays…? And, finally, is “Prometheus” better than “Alien”…?

Well, that last one is for others to answer, of course, (and, don’t worry, I’m not going to spoil it for you here) but being two films that hit similar beats, tell similar stories and were directed by the same man over thirty years apart, it is an interesting question to ask. I liked a lot about “Prometheus”, not least the fact that a lot of the design work that has sat on my shelf in “The Book of Alien” which I bought last century has finally been made into silver screen reality, but, on the whole, I think that I still prefer the original. There’s something about that iconic model work in “Alien” that still gives me goosebumps in a way that much of the - admittedly very impressive - CGI work just doesn’t, and, whilst there were moments that were very satisfying, I still managed to walk away feeling less than entirely “blown away” by the only film this summer that I really felt that I wanted to see.

Perhaps, in the end, there’s always something slightly disappointing about having the gaps in the story filled in and having legends explained. Somehow the mundane reality that someone finally comes up with is never going to quite live up to the infinite possibilities of what they could have been. It’s like with a magic trick, somehow, when you find out “how it’s done”, the initial wonder you felt when experiencing the trick itself gets diminished.

Some explanations really are best left unsaid, the onion left unpeeled...

Perhaps that’s why religion and science are always at such loggerheads, too. Once you start to work out how the wonders of the universe work, you start to peel away at the magic of it all, and all of us, no matter how cynical we may be, do still need a little magic in our lives.

Especially on a soggy Saturday afternoon in the summer.