Four Nights In

We've spent four nights in the new house. Sometimes it feels like we're staying in a hotel and sometimes like we've always lived here.

I had a dream in which Chairman Xi was supposed to be addressing a mass audience in a football stadium- only his podium had gone missing and he was wearing his underclothes. In the end a man came out of the crowd, put an arm round his shoulders and gently led him away...

I watched Spencer last night- the movie about Princess Di spending a ghastly weekend at Sandringham. Stephen Knight- who wrote it (he also writes Peaky Blinders)- is a belated Jacobean.

I would like to be writing long posts full of wise analysis and witty turns of phrase- even perhaps the odd smidgeon of prose poetry- but I'm very, very tired...

Gulls And Doves And A Wounded Bird

My mother left some of her lunchtime liver and bacon and I put it out for whoever might be interested. The gulls had a sentry posted on a nearby roof and it sounded its klaxon and its mates came thronging from all quarters. There was squawking, there was intimidatory spreading of wings and the morsels were gone in seconds.

A pair of collared doves have shown up. They like the seed that has fallen off the bird tables. They're the smallest birds we've seen as yet- still big, as birds go, but gentler than the crows and the gulls and the pigeons.

I would like to write many pages about Spencer. I think it's a terrific film. As I said, in my last post, when cryptic was all I could manage, Knight has a Jacobean mind- by which I meant that he likes blood and spooks and high-fangled words- just as I do. Kristen Stewart's determination to get Diana's tics and mannerisms exactly right (a British actor might have found it less effortful) has an alienating effect- but perhaps we shouldn't be identifying too closely with this wounded bird. Sandringham is a haunted castle- but the world of baseball caps and Kentucky Fried Chicken into which Diana and her boys make a temporary escape is hardly less oppressive. The ghouls who inhabit the castle (I kept thinking of Bergman's Hour of The Wolf) are knowing ghouls- trapped in traditions they feel powerless to shift- indulging in joyless banquets and the ritual butchering of more pheasants than anyone could possibly eat because they think the public expects it of them- and because they're too lacking in imagination to conceive of any other way of being royal. Their servants- bonded to the institution if not to the people who embody it- serve them dutifully, but unfeelingly, and love Diana for her flapping at the walls of the cage. Perhaps she'll make a hole through which they too can make their escape. As the most prominent of the royal functionaries Timothy Spall and Sally Hawkins do some beautifully expressive close-up acting and are given wonderful things to say by Knight who- when he is on song- is a very fine writer indeed...