Category: nostalgia

& memories

Categories
nostalgia raves

My Mate Noam

There’s a guy on my street who has two boys. We’ve all been friends for years and we’ve watched his boys grow up, he’s watched our girls grow up – even saw our youngest the day she was born. We’re all fans of Man United so we got together for all those big games in 1999, when we won the treble. As one, we lept into the air like crazed loons when Ole Gunnar Solskjaer scored the winning goal against Bayern Munich.

The oldest boy’s name is Noam, because his parents are friends and admirers of Chomsky. (So we can’t hold that against Noam…)

Noam and I chatted today on MSN – he’s in Edinburgh studying biomedical sciences right now. Like many guys his age he doesn’t stay in this country for long – it’s one long world-wide trip punctuated by the odd few weeks taking classes in Uni. He showed me his Youtube page, which has two of the most innovative videos I’ve seen.

Check this one out. It’s a video-meta-email! He calls it a facetube.
I love it – so clever, it works on several levels. (Goes long though – Noam, cut the end!)

This next one crack whore made me roar with laughter.
It plays with the notion of bilinguality. If you don’t speak Spanish, all you need to know is that the conversation between Noam, his Mum and his gran is actually about the gran being cross that Mum has put Gran up in her own bed. Not about being a crack whore at all. If you speak Spanish you’ll get the joke even more.

I’ve known Noam since he was about 11. Watching children you know well grow up really IS wonderful. A great comfort to those of us this far along the aging process…

Categories
nostalgia writing

Pie Season

There are fresh raspberries in the shops, and they’re not bad at all. Meanwhile, in the fields around Oxford, berries are ripening. The pick-your-owns will get going in about a month.

All of which signals the start of pie season. Thank goodness I had a fresh-baked apple and raspberry pie this weekend. We had an unexpected guest, a rather senior cleric, who was rightly put out at the misunderstanding that led to him arriving to an unprepared house. The pie, however, put a smile back on his face.

Mmm, mm. Yet another excuse for socialising. Yet another excuse not to write. Especially teenagers – they love apple pie. Whenever I bake for my daughter and her friends, it’s the pie they gobble first.

Pie…inevitably triggers a Seinfeld reference or three. There’s the episode ‘The Pie’ in which Jerry’s girlfriend refuses to share Jerry’s pie, and there’s ‘The Calzone’ where Kramer bakes a huckleberry pie (and so can’t use his oven to dry his pants)…and there’s ‘The Bubble Boy’ where they drive through what Kramer describes as ‘pie country’.

R1x really has me concerned with that whole Spidey 3 thing. Yes it was daft but I was SO entertained…which I can’t discount. I’m going through the story with a fine toothcomb trying to spot hideous errors that I missed due to chuckling and eating chocolate.

God help me, this blog has finally degenerated into a full-blown displacement activity.

But you know what? I’ve decided to think of it as ‘morning pages’.

Categories
nostalgia

Living Like Bloody Millionaires…

This was my mother-in-law’s favourite response when my then boyfriend and I would go off together as students, to exotic places like Spain and Italy, (other people we knew went to Tibet and Thailand, but, yanno…) or eat out more than twice a month.

We love the phrase and use it all the time now. “Going out to breakfast? Oooh…yer living like bloody millionaires…!”

Reading Fortune magazine over coffee this morning, I noticed that they had a special section which might as well have been entitled ‘How To Live Like A Bloody Millionaire.’

(I don’t know why we get Fortune magazine. Neither of us remembers subscribing, but there it is every month, along with the Speccie and Time.)

They actually called it ‘Life At The Top’. It is a guide to how you can spend eye-popping amounts of money on bags, cars, golf clubs, wine, and featured a brief interview with Cartier’s North America boss Federic de Narp, improbably handsome and sleek, giving tips about shoes, shirts, briefcase, coffee, watch (mai, bien sur…), where to have lunch, what brand of umbrella…

I notice that they didn’t ask him about his exercise regime. US businessmen have to be all about the daily workout regime (like Haim Saban, featured elsewhere in the issue) and ‘visionary futurist’ Ray Kurzweil who reckons that exercise, diet and 230 daily supplement pills has slowed his aging process. I’d like to think that the European alpha male can still put style, elegance and culture before a slavish devotion to the gym. But I doubt it. You don’t keep a figure like de Narp’s or Antonio Baravalle’s, the molto sexy head of Alfa Romeo, without some work. European businessmen probably keep that sort of thing quiet.

My poor father wouldn’t have enjoyed this brave new world of sushi and pilates. He revelled in the three-course, boozy working lunch that finished with brandy and a packet of cigarettes, where exercise meant the distance you had to walk from your chauffeur-driven car to your next meeting. Which may have contributed to his death aged 46.

I must have something of an Electra complex though, because the sight of a handsome businessman in well-tailored, dark blue pinstripe suit, white shirt and tie makes me weak at the knees…

Categories
movies nostalgia raves

Bridge to Terabithia – I cried AGAIN!

If you are reading this blog post when ‘Bridge to Terabithia’ is still playing in the cinema, and you haven’t seen it, may I make a suggestion?

Move AWAY from the computer. Get your purse/jacket/wallet and head out to see it. Right now.

This is the best children’s movie I’ve seen for years and not only made me cry but is beautifully adapted for the screen, and captures perfectly what it is like to be a child who lives in a make-believe world. It wasn’t just the storyline that made me cry, it was being reminded so sharply of what it feels like, as a child, to lead a younger sibling into a magical world you’ve created just for them.

Ah, but you’re writing children’s books now, you may say. You’ll be doing that for your readers.

It isn’t the same. Writing is hard, technical work. But as a kid I once led my baby brother into an old, overgrown and walled orchard at sunset and convinced him that the apples were enchanted, that we had to cross the orchard without looking back ONCE. I swear…as we crept across, my brother trembling with excitement, in the corner of my eye I saw those trees move.

Categories
movies nostalgia raves writing

The Painted Veil – I cried!

I love Deborah Ross’s movie reviews in The Spectator. The poor woman mostly seems doomed to have to see films that disappoint, and when she says to stay away I usually do. Conversely, when she gives something a really big huzzah…hey, I’m there.

So I had to dash out to see “The Painted Veil”, which made our Deborah weep, apparently. I was one of the only people aged under 50 in the cinema, so I could tell right away that it was a Serious Proper Film for Grown-Ups and not like the usual eye-candy I usually go to see. (Art cinema, moi?)

Actually it wasn’t very arty at all, which explains the multiplex distribution. Instead it was a good-old-fashioned emotional drama told really well, with no fancy footwork. I loved the screenplay, which ticked all the boxes I can remember reading in Robert McKee’s ‘Story’ as well as a pretty strong Hero’s Journey for the Naomi Watts character, Kitty. I read somewhere that in the Extreme Love Story genre the lovers actually fall into the roles of Protagonist and Antagonist. I can’t remember seeing this technique better and more subtly executed than in this film. You can keep your histrionics and your ‘Frankly-my-dear-I-don’t-give-a-damn’s; what could be more touching than two people accepting each other’s minor failings as human beings, learning who they really are and falling deeply in love?

I thought I’d get away without crying…until they played that song À la claire fontaine. Nostalgia overwhelmed me; I remembered singing that song at school in French class.

I was warned once about the soppiness of middle-age by my father. He used to stream tears at sad movies and Italian opera. As a teenager I’d watch him, all crisply dry-eyed and make some cutting remark. “Wait until you’re in your forties,” he’d say, “and there’s nothing more beautiful than crying at Italian opera.”