Do You Hear That, Mr Andersen?

[I’m going to have to post the most recent two days separately, but I wanted to get something up now.]

Lugging our gear was pretty much what I expected. We left Portsmouth with plenty of time, but we got off the motorway too early, and experienced the extended crawl that is London traffic, with the added “margin of time trickling away” thrill. But in the end there were no problems handing off the car; however, it started to rain, and the car drop-off point was not handily at a tube station, so there was a certain amount of wet trudging. Nevertheless, we eventually made it to King’s Cross, where Meredith dashed off for Amsterdam EuroStar train.

C’s brother wasn’t finished work yet, so we went and paid the exorbitant left luggage rates (eight and a half pounds per piece!), and then headed towards the British Museum. Margie pointed out that this would take us towards the excellent comic shop Gosh London, lair of the infamous Andrew. Margie hadn’t seen Andrew for eleven years, but they’d played together in a game run by Morgue, and that will mark a person. (I also know him well enough through Morgue to be a Facebook friend.) He was about to go to lunch, so we popped into Pret and chatted for a bit about London, babies and the state of the comics retail industry.

We then hied ourselves to the Museum to briefly scratch the surface of the Antiquities Wing, seeing things like the Rosetta Stone and the palace of Ashurbanipal (who may be familiar to some of you from the They Might Be Giants song, “We’re the Mesopotamians”). Then we hung around the front of the Museum waiting for Drifter to come and whisk Margie off to his flat (where she was going to crash), and then heading back to the flat, briefly stopping to grab some apple pie and ice-cream. This was our first experience of the Tube in the (tail end of) rush hour traffic; feeling the Tube doors ruffle your hair as they shut just above your head can be a bit alarming.

The next day we decided to have a bit of a rest and reorganise, and then met Margie at Boroughs Market (where we encouraged Margie to eat a giant German hot-dog); we then walked to London Bridge, and then along the waterfront to Tower Bridge, stopping and admiring the Tower of London. We then went back to the flat and met C’s brother (who we shall call… D), and headed out to Soho/Chinatown to find some dinner.

We walked for a long, long time – it turned out that D’s partner (K) is an essential component of the food-place decision-making process, and she was having work drinks. Luckily, she was able to meet us, and (after a bit more wandering and a surprise tuktuk ride) dinner was had. This was followed by a late-night visit to M&M world, and then we walked through Piccadilly Circus. (And then we tried to catch the Tube home, along with, it appeared, all of Piccadilly Circus.)

The next day the partners decided that this would be C & D’s day to do their duty for their mother. I should explain – their mother had spent many of her formative years in Putney, living in a lovely house among many other lovely houses while her father did diplomatic-type things. We were under strict instructions to take C & D there; to go to the Green Man pub (which had been her “regular”); and most importantly, to take plenty of photos. And so plenty of photos were duly taken, with only minor rebellions on the part of the siblings. The pub was very, very good, and I believe D & K have plans to return. I also discovered the joy (and danger) of good alcoholic ginger beer.

We were meant to go to a barbecue at a cousin’s place; since there was a two-month-old baby that C had not met, we wanted to take her a present. And because she has a three year-old brother, we wanted to take him a present, to stop him being jealous. Picking a present for a baby was relatively straightforward, but the three year old caused us some dithering – we knew he had a Thomas the Tank Engine obsession, but didn’t want to get him something that he already had. We eventually selected a yellow digger that looked like it might fit a small train in it’s maw; he later took it to bed with him. Present success: achieved.

The next day we decided to go to the Tower of London with D & K. The Tower Guards who give the tour are all ex-Sergeant Majors, and have been since the Duke of Wellington’s day; this means that they are mostly men, have voices good at projecting to the crowd, and have an interesting range of experiences (one of them briefly mentioned guarding Rudolf Hess in Spandau Prison – Hess being one of the last prisoners to be held in the Tower, coincidentally). The crown jewels were as impressive as the line for them made them appear – a line which moved quite smartly, by-the-by. Almost all the regalia was post-Cromwell, since it all got sold off or melted down during his Protectorate; I suspect that this contributed to its impressiveness, since it would have been a show of the restored monarch’s legitimacy.

And the diamond in the sceptre is big. Really, really big.

There were also a whole bunch of oddities, like the crown that was made for Queen Victoria to go to India to be crowned with (which hasn’t been used since); they had hired jewels to be used in this (and some other crowns) when they were worn officially, and the jewels had been replaced by paste versions when we saw them.

We also went into the White Tower, which has exhibitions from the Royal Armoury. It’s interesting to see the different bits that they’ve managed to keep, and how different ages have regarded these sorts of artifacts – they showed a bird made out of bits of obsolete guns, for example, which probably wouldn’t happen now. (Well, apart from a dragon.) I also learned that livestock that falls off London Bridge still technically becomes property of the person who runs the tower. There was enough to see that we ended up losing D & K (who had to hurry off to do their weekly shop); in fact, we ended up being kicked out, as they closed soon after. We headed out to Camden to be shown around the Stables market and have a lovely Italian dinner and sorbet with Margie and Drifter. Plans were made to get to the station on time for our trip to Paris.

So the next day, we got up extra-early, fitting in showers between the different flatmates, and then it was off to Kings Cross/St Pancras again, handily beating the rush-hour. We had a restful breakfast at Pret, watching the passing travellers, and then soon after Margie turned up it was off to check into the EuroStar, where I dozed fitfully. We arrived at Gard du Nord, and then to the surprise of all (including myself), I successfully navigated us to our hostel. On the trek up to the fourth floor, we discovered that we have quite a nice view of Sacre Coeur, so we traipsed up for a visit. Except we remembered that we hadn’t had lunch, so we stopped on the way for some traditional French food (I had a croque monsieur and an Orangina); the service was not particularly fast, but the food was fine, and we negotiated the minefield of tipping adequately.

One of the things that I’ve noticed about the part of Paris that we’re staying in is that it feels a lot more feral than any of the places we visited in London. There are a lot more beggars, for a start, and a lot more scam artists – I was accosted by five or six. Some of them had fake petitions they want you to sign to occupy your hands while they pick your pockets, and the rest were “friendship bracelet” sellers, who were quite aggressive in wanting to tie the bracelet to your wrist – apparently they then demand 20 euro for this act of friendship. I actually had one touch me and demand whether I wanted to fight after I told him no twice; I told him, “Non!” louder, and kept walking.

There were other people with blankets with pull-strings on the corners (to more easily gather their wares and run if the police appear); the weird thing is not the terrible junk they’re selling (4 for 1 euro!), but that I noticed that the exact same junk was available from the local tobacco shop for 22c. Why they need a three-cent mark-up over a fixed retail store was unclear to me.

We looked at the view, and then looked back at the cathedral. I thought I told C that I’d just pop up to the Cathedral door to see if there were prices and/or opening times; unfortunately, she didn’t hear me, and I didn’t notice that they actually went into the cathedral. So I returned to where I thought they were… and they weren’t there, Meanwhile, C & Margie were walking through the cathedral, getting more and more annoyed that I was lagging so far behind, and that they weren’t able to find me. I hoped that they might have gone in (rather than wandered off somewhere else, or been kidnapped), but I decided that it was best to stay at the last place I saw them. It seemed like a long time before C appeared.

Then they kindly walked through the cathedral with me, so I could have a look at it.

Then it was down to brave the hawkers a second time, and back to the hostel where we were meeting Meredith & a friend of C’s who I’ll call… G. (I should really get around to getting permission to use names on this blog.)

Meredith hadn’t gone up Sacre Coeur, so we started traipsing up the hill again… but Margie, C & I decided to stop partway up, and admire the two-story carousel, and marvel at how many cigarette butts were in the grass we were sitting on.

We didn’t really want dinner, but G had some bread and cheese for us to help her eat. Then it was back up four flights of stairs, and to bed.

In the end, we didn’t manage to do very much of anything in Portsmouth, other than haunting the streets in an attempt to find our lodging. But I don’t regret anything, because we saw all sorts of cool stuff on the way.

C has wanted to see a standing stone, so our first stop was Avebury. We didn’t get to see everything (I want to go back and look at the museum), but it was the first chance that we’ve had to take advantage of our NZ Historic Places Trust memberships, and it was really worth it. The old st

The second chance we had to use our Historic Places memberships was for parking at Stonehenge. We didn’t go in, opting to stand behind the fence next to the road in the light drizzle, but you’re not able to get very close regardless. One of the things that struck us was how small the site was, compared to the cathedrals and monuments that we’d been seeing; but once the age of the place started to sink in, it gave a certain perspective. I could imagine going back for a proper look one day.

Our final tourist stop was Salisbury Cathedral. Once again, we managed to accidentally get caught up in a tour; this meant that we got to see things like the dip-stick they use through the floor to make sure that there is enough water in the ground underneath the cathedral (since if the ground dried out too much, the walls might shift even more than they have, and there might be an accident). It was interesting in a completely different was to the other two cathedrals we’ve seen – because they shifted the site where the town was in the 12^th century, they were able to start from scratch, and because they finished building it incredibly fast (under 40 years), all the main features were in one consistent style. One of the guides speculated that the fact that there wasn’t any religious house associated with the Cathedral (no nunnery or monastry), they may have gotten off more lightly during the Reformation than other centres. Oh, and they have a working mechanical clock that was made in the 1300s, with all the mechanisms out on display. And one of the three copies of the original Magna Carta, which was… quite small, considering how important it ended up being.

We then headed into Portsmouth, where we were unable to find our accommodation until we gave up and asked a helpful barman; we then checked in, and popped into an Aldi to grab something to eat. It was… odd. Margie suggested that it was what it might be like if there was a supermarket that only carried Pams-brand products; and no-one seemed very happy to be there, including the staff. But we managed to scrape something together (cursing the fact that most places have no microwave or fridge – I had pot noodles), and then watched a bit of BBC news, chatted for a bit, and went to bed.

I am sunburnt, and footsore, and it’s because of Wales.

We stayed at the Three Counties Motel in Hereford, which was uneventful (except for some sort of school ball, which we successfully avoided, and me locking us out of our room within 10 minutes of checking in). The rooms were in the process of being upgraded, which was why we were able to get a pretty good deal staying there; even so, it was a little annoying to traipse all the way into reception to use the slightly flaky wifi. (I know, I know, First World Problems.) But it made a good base to start exploring Hereford from, and the next day we started at the Cider Museum.

The Cider Museum was quite well done, in that I feel I have a much better understanding of how both still and champagne-style cider was made. One of the things it brought back to me was how much work went into a bottle of cider (or any other food), and how much mechanization has sped things up and made them easier/cheaper; and it made me wonder how much will have to change when petrol becomes super-expensive. Not that this was a focus of the museum; instead, I learned all about how you turn bottle-fermented champagne-style cider upside down and let the yeast sediment settle in the neck, and then freeze the neck, making a plug of ice that you pull out and replace with either syrup or cider. (I hadn’t ever really thought about the mechanics of how you’d get the yeast out.)

I was hoping for some sort of “comparative cider tasting” at the end, contrasting the sharp and sweet ciders, and maybe a few perries; but the only tastings they had were the products they made on-site, at the King Offa Distillery. Still, those were quite nice, and I was going to purchase a small bottle of cider liqueur, but our Customs officer reminded me that the limit is three bottles of up to 1.125 litres each, and I couldn’t get a 2 litre bottle if one of the bottles I took was 300ml. So I got a slightly bigger bottle.

We arrived at Hereford cathedral just in time for the daily tour, and I’m glad we did; I really enjoy hearing knowledgeable people talking about these places, and explaining why the different parts of the church look the way they do. (They also mentioned that the Cathedral was twinned with Canterbury Cathedral in Christchurch, and they had been sending money to support it.) And then we went and looked at the Mapa Mundi, the medieval map of the world that was part geography, part history, part bestiary and part philosophy. I think that it might be available to view online, but it was kind of cool to look at the actual treated calf hide in person. There was also a chained library, where the books were chained to the shelves to stop people stealing them; they had recently moved the library, and had found a bunch of medieval paintings untouched by the Reformation, which they had restored to their former glory.

We dropped Margie back at the motel to relax and edit photos, and then went off ruin-hunting; we found, more or less by accident, the site of an important castle and market town (abandoned during the Black Death and reduced to earthworks and a few walls); and then a much more complete castle, with a bunch of local kids running around in the grassy courtyard shouting, “Irontail! Pikachu is the best ever! Thunderbolt, blindey-blindey!”

The idea of having a ruined castle as your playground seems inexpressibly cool, but I guess it all depends on what you’ve grown up with… nah, I think that, no matter what, it would probably be pretty darn cool.

After poking around and taking a few pictures, we picked Margie up and returned to Hereford proper, and then ended up at a pub called the Spread Eagle for dinner. It was just outside the cathedral, and was excellent; if we had been staying longer, we would happily have gone again.

The next day we headed out to Wales. We stopped at the happiest place on Earth, Hay-on-Wye, and enjoyed getting our bearings, looking through the Castle bookshop, and finding out that elderflower sorbet is delicious. Then it was on to St Fagan’s, the Museum of Welsh Life – they have taken historic buildings from all over Wales and carefully put them back together in their original form, as well as adding some reconstructions (like an Iron Age village). There were some really interesting exhibits, like the row of four workers houses furnished as they would have been in the 1830s, 1880s, 1930s and 1980s, and there was a refurbished tearooms, where I might have accidentally ordered a cream tea that I didn’t really need.

Then we got to meet Meredith’s aunt, Sue, who had cooked us spag. bol. on her Aga, which she described as her pride and joy. (I think it would be a bit of a learning curve to cook on it, but she used it with practised ease.) We also met her old black lab, Nell, who didn’t take to me at all (she apparently has a grudge against males); and then it was off to the caravan.

To me, “caravan” conveys something slightly smaller than what we stayed in – two toilets, a master bedroom, shower, and a seating area separate from the kitchen and dining area. It was all compact, but it was closer to a small bach than a caravan, and we were very comfortable.

The next day got off to a slow start, but we managed to go for a drive on the moor (which involved waiting for large numbers of wild horses and semi-domesticated sheep and cows to get out of our way), and then to a very complete castle, Carreg Cennen, which had only been demolished in the 17^th century (after a band of brigands had occupied the fort). There was still plenty to see — it had towers, a quarry where they had mined the limestone for mortar, a kiln where they’d fired the limestone, and a tunnel that turned into a limestone cave that wormed its way into the darkness. It was pretty neat, and at least two of my siblings will be getting related postcards.

We drove around a bit more, visiting the site of an Iron Age fort, and then we took Sue to a local pub, The Greyhound, as a bit of a thank-you for all she was doing. It was there, thanks to Margie’s apparently incomprehensible accent, that we accidentally discovered the idea of a cider shandy, which was actually very tasty indeed in the hot weather.

The next day, I made the mistake of taking up the challenge to walk out to Worm’s Head with Meredith. This was rather more rigorous than I was anticipating, with 20 minutes solid clambering over rocky-shore terrain before we arrived at the first island in the chain, not realising there was another scramble still to come. By the time we got back, I was in dire need of an ice-cream, which the National Trust shop was happy to provide. (I also leaned there that the opening scene of the second-season Dr Who episode with the cat-sisters tending a hospital had been filmed out there, and a chase scene from a recent Torchwood episode was filmed at the beach.)

We then went back to the caravan for lunch, and then decided to do something very local – we went to a village garden tour in Llanmadoc… which would have been easier if I hadn’t already exhausted myself on Worm’s Head. Still, it was very nice, and interesting hearing people talk about beekeeping and the like, as well as having a bit of a nosy. Then we went out to another Authur’s stone (which was apparently a pebble that he flicked out of his show which grew, and goes down to the sea to drink every midsummer night), and then back to the caravan for dinner.

Which brings us up to today, where we’re heading for Bath.

I don’t know why I was surprised by the amount of birdsong in the morning, but I was. Maybe it’s because I have this mental image of England that’s primarily urban; but C was woken in the middle of the night by foxes in the Clapham Common flat where we were staying, and she described them as “the pukeko of the northern hemisphere”… though you may need to have been woken up by pukeko to be able to appreciate the severity of this statement.

(I was completely oblivious to this; whether that is due to the fact that I’m a much heavier sleeper than C, or because of my 50+ hour sleep deficit, I’m unsure.)

We didn’t get into town very early, but we did manage to make our way to the tube station just as it started to pour down; it made me wish that I’d packed a raincoat with a hood, no matter how bulky I thought it was. As you can see in this picture, it did stop, but we were still a bit damp; but as you can see in this other picture, we didn’t let that stop us enjoying ourselves. (The reproduction of the Monet that can been seen in the background was made up of growing plants, by the by.)

Some of you may recognise the location from the pictures – we managed to wander around Trafalgar Square, St Martin-in-the-Fields church (where there was an interesting Big Issue photo exhibition in the crypt), and the National Gallery. We didn’t even skim the surface of the collection; we just wandered through the Impressionists and related painters, feeling slightly off-kilter as we looked at Monets and van Goghs, trying to read the character of people whose portraits have ended up being national treasures.

One of the things that struck me was how fluid paintings are – people getting medals added to their official portraits, busts of politically inconvenient people being painted over with curtains, paintings started in one style, abandoned, and then finished in a different style. I mean, you can change photographs, but I think that’s different somehow to changing paintings. Maybe it’s because there’s no “real” version of what you’re seeing, in some sense?

Then it was back to the flat, off to a pub dinner with the people we were staying with, and then home to go to sleep.

The next day we intended to try and sight-see before catching a train to Leicester. This was defeated by several factors: not the least of which was the left luggage people wanting eight and a half pounds for each bag they would be looking after.

But to be fair to the baggage people, one of the major issues was C trying to work out how to explain to her bank that she actually wanted to be able to use her credit card while overseas — as she said when she first got the card, and when she went into the bank in person to find out why it wasn’t working just before leaving the country, and to the credit card center (after being on hold for an hour) when she rang them after being told in the bank, “There’s no problem, but ring them to be safe.”

(Margie has since worked out that the bank seems to have, in the course of this discussion, cancelled the card that C actually has, and issued another, different card, which they presumably tried to send to our empty address, and have now activated… how they thought this would help is unclear. It is hard to imagine how they could have got it much more wrong, basically. Luckily, she is travelling with a bunch of people, is able to get money out on her EFTPOS card, and has some Travelex money cards; so if C’s mother is reading this, don’t worry, she’s fine and being assertive in her bank mail.)

We got to Leicester without hassle, and immediately plunged into the swirl of wedding prep. I somehow found myself tramping through an English wood with a practising ecologist, with hair full of leaves and arms full of ivy, as the light slowly faded. Other highlights include storing picnic baskets in a British yurt, and an English carvery lunch. (No pictures, I’m afraid; I’ll see if I can make up for it tomorrow.)

Anyway, that’s enough for now. I need to finish off the FAQ for dealing with our house, and get some sleep… since I don’t actually know how I’m getting to the wedding tomorrow. Next time, I’ll try to include a basic itinerary, insofar as we’ve decided anything.

My first film was at 10am in Te Papa with C. In The Attic: Who Has A Birthday Today is told with a mixture of stop-motion and normal film (with a touch of hand-drawn animation), and is about a society of discarded toys in the attic of a Hungarian home – but a forgotten Communist bust, served by a mixture of deformed toys, insects and a villainous cat, has decided to kidnap the doll Buttercup for himself.

There were many very cool bits, such as the pillows drifting out of drawers and floating as clouds (complete with feathers falling as snow), or when the foot of one of the toys accidentally catches on fire, and he hops around and then jumps on a mirror (which sizzles like a pool of water, and puts his foot out). Or how, when people go inside things like train cars (made of suitcases), we see drawn representations of them through the windows pasted on the side. The film manages to give quite distinct personalities to all the creatures, and I would be quite happy to revisit that world.

There were a couple of puzzling things that were never explained, but I don’t care – I liked this movie a lot.

* * *

After a quick, surprisingly good lunch at the Te Papa cafe, C abandoned me to the next movie: Alamar, the story of a boy going from Rome (where he lives with his mother) to live with his father and grandfather for a bit; his grandfather being a fisherman living in a house on poles on a coral reef in Mexico.

Some scenes were obviously staged, since there was only one camera-man – to get shots from multiple angles while they’re climbing up a pylon, they would need to wait while the camera-man clambered up past them, for example. But I doubt that the film-makers lured the alligator that lurked outside the house, waiting for scraps, or trained a cattle-egret to come and eat cockroaches from the walls.

There was very little explanation of what we were seeing – it wasn’t clear whether the father did this for a living, or was just visiting, though we did show him teaching his son the names for plants and animals, and scaling and gutting fish. We also saw a little of the boy’s life before and after in Rome.

Women were strangely absent on the islands and boats, and it was never explained why; and I would have liked to hear a bit of what the boy thought about the different ways of life. But I enjoyed the movie.

* * *

Then it was off to the Film Archive to see Secrets of the Tribe. There is an Amazonian tribe, the Yanomani, which is famous in Western anthropological circles as being the prototypical “untouched” society, and which has been heavily studied from the 60s onwards – but the title of the film refers to the the anthropologists, and the highly questionable things that some of them have done, both in describing the Yanomani, and to them.

I’m a bit conflicted about this film. I strongly feel that you cannot approach a field of science by saying, “This result would mean something horrible about humanity, so we can’t accept it.” In Freakonomics, Steven Levitt says that the evidence persuasively suggests that making abortions freely available is what led to the downturn in crime a generation later in American cities, rather than the innovative policing programmes it’s normally attiributed to: this wouldn’t be a pleasant truth, but the fact that it isn’t pleasant doesn’t speak to its truthfulness.

But – there’s strong evidence that the leading proponent of the idea that humans are animals too, and that biology needs to be strongly considered in anthropology (Napoleon Chagnon) was also involved in the Atomic Energy Commission research that, deliberately or not, seemed to make the measles epidemic among the Yanomani substantially worse; and he was an ally of Jacques Lizot (disciple of Levi-Strauss), who compiled a Yanomani dictionary… and brought in plane-loads of trade goods which he used to get tribesmen to masturbate him and allow him to have anal sex, and who had a small encampment of young boys near his research camp whom he exploited.

And on the other side… Chagnon’s thesis (that the Yanomani are a fierce people who compete because of competition for women) was challenged by various people, including Kenneth Good, who claimed that they were actually peaceful innocents. Good was then accused of paedophilia, because he married a Yanomani girl (who was of age in the tribe, but not by Western standards), but his books were very popular.

Anthropology and sociology do not come off very well here. Chagnon trumpets the need for statistics over opinion, but Good points out that many of the statistics he relied on to make some of his arguments are flawed (doing a nutritional study on a group so much in contact with the outside world that they had a store you could buy canned meat, for example). On the other hand, even flawed statistics can sometimes tell us something interesting.

The overwhelming impression is that both the Yanomami and the scientific community have not been well served by the antics of many of these people; and that many of them are more interested in justifying their actions than examining them.

It was a good documentary.

* * *

Then it was off to the Embassy for When You’re Strange, a documentary on the Doors. I hadn’t realised how much the Doors frontman Jim Morrison dominated my perception of the band; that is, I hadn’t known how talented the other musicians were, how many of the songs were written by them, and how much they were able to cover for his lapses. It makes me wonder what would have happened if they had been paired with someone who didn’t have such a destructive relationship with drugs and alcohol.

I enjoyed watching this, and felt that I came away knowing more than I did before; and it inclined me towards listening to more.

* * *

Next was Bill Cunningham New York with Jenni at Te Papa, the story of a a fashion photographer deeply embedded in the fabric of New York, yet curiously apart from it. He covers gala events, dinners and parties of the rich and famous; but he will not accept so much as a glass of water while he’s there, since he doesn’t want to feel beholden to anyone. He haunts the streets of New York, riding his bicycle in his blue street-sweeper smock, seeing what catches his eye, and what might be the next big thing. He goes to fashion shows, but sits on the side, because he wants to see what the outfits look like from all angles, and won’t take photos of what he doesn’t think people would actually wear. (He’ll also show when a designer is “inspired” by other creators, showing them side-by-side.)

He seems to be a genuinely nice man – frugal, modest, cheerful, funny, and smart. He doesn’t seem to care much what he eats, or where he sleeps, much to the despair of the estate agent tasked with finding him an apartment by the city (to replace the Carnegie Hall one filled with filing cabinets that he has lived in for decades, since they want to swap the resident artists for telemarketers). There was a moment of darkness, or perhaps sadness, when they asked him why he still went to church every Sunday; it wasn’t fully explained, but that’s as it should be.

I really liked this documentary.

* * *

Jenni & I ambled over to the Paramount for American: The Bill Hicks Story, which was about the career of the outspoken US comedian. It was interesting to see the arc of his work, from goofy character stuff as a teen, to the anger of his drinking and drug days, through the time when people came to see him as a spectacle rather than an entertainer, and then out the other side as a smart, angry and funny comic who was rather more successful in Britain than in his homeland, and who was frustrated that his country didn’t live up to its potential.

It felt like it was fairly honest about his limitations, and his family came across as good people; it is a real shame he died so young.

* * *

I only had one seven-movie day, so I was quite tired by the time I got to Triangle, a horror movie. It is hard to talk about the movie without giving too much away; I’m torn, because there are some bits that work pretty well at giving you a creepy feeling, but I felt that you had to work hard at it to make what people did make sense; and even now, I’m not sure I can make the world shown in the movie consistent with itself, and I think I’m pretty flexible-minded. It’s also quite gory.

I thought they had a pretty nifty idea, but it felt like it needed something.