Midsomer

 I love a TV murder however I’ve always said that if I lived in Midsomer then I’d get out of there…quick. I wouldn’t wait for the second person to be killed. How stupid are those people that live there?

I’m on holiday.

I wanted to go to Bristol to see hundreds of balloons in the sky but due to general indecision and being less happy about leaving home than before there was no Bristol accommodation left, so we are staying in a barn just outside in a rural Somerset village. 

The dog is completely freaked out by the country sounds, smells and an echoing barn. There are big dogs that say, “Moo,” outside the door, a farm dog that barks all the time, rabbits, sun, rain, shadows, fences, stone circles, witches. You name it, it bothers him. Still, there are plenty of cow pats to roll in!

I’m beginning to share his unease, though.

As chief map reader I’ve noticed how close to Midsomer Norton we are and how all the villages around this farm sound like the people that have been murdered.

Stanton Drew, Compton Dando, Queen Charlton, Bishop Sutton, Norton Malreward, Hinton Blewett, Compton Martin, Rodney Stoke, Farrington Gurney, Tarrant Monkton, Sutton Benger and….Mark!

The panic phase

 I seem to have hit the panic phase of the six weeks holiday earlier than normal. We are only two weeks in and already I can see that it's not enough time.  The first week was spent just relaxing enough to feel normal.  The second week was spent cleaning and now I'm in panic mode. 

The Long Suffering Husband had a day off from his new full-time job as a retired person; one day without a golf game.  He said, "Let's do something."

"Oh...That...would be ni....actually....I'm not sure.....still too much....the cupboard....book...."

I looked up and saw him looking at me with 'that' look. And I realised that I was in panic mode.

There should have been a clue that it was coming early when I had a full on panic attack in a bookshop. It was a shock.  Bookshops are usually my safe space but last Saturday I walked into Waterstones and couldn't breathe. The books jumped up and down on the shelves and shouted. They all wanted to be read and all I could think was that there's not enough time. 

"Don't panic!" I thought to myself, imagining the front cover of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was gifted to Arthur Dent just as the Earth was about to be flattened to make a new interstellar highway. Of all the times to be told not to panic. 

I read somewhere that of all the times you panic, it is only 8% of those times when the thing you are panicking about will come true, which is why you shouldn't panic.  But I will never read all the books, my cupboards will never be clean and tidy forever and it looks like I'll never finish writing this blessed book.

Even my fitbit has been trolling me.  Whenever I look at it near the end of the day, when I realise that I need to sit down and do some words, it tells me the date I should be writing about.

I’ve stopped taking photos because I know….1882!

If you are prone to a touch of panic then can I recommend that you don't ever think about writing a book, unless, of course you are actually talented and hard working and able to finish anything without forgetting to eat.

Name Tags

I saw Oppenheimer.

It was a struggle. Just sitting still for three hours, for me, is impossible. But it was more than that. It was a struggle.

“Didn’t you like it?” asked the lovely visiting author at book club, as we discussed the comparative  merits of the Barbie film, feminism, toxic masculinity and the experience of ‘everywoman’ in her book. 

“Oh, I did but it was distressing.”

I think that was the point. You were supposed to feel uncomfortable. 

It could have been much shorter. The whole minute countdown to the bomb test scene could have not been in real time. The music could have been continuous without huge sections of silence and when it did play hundreds of violins could have not played competing rhythms. They could have made the women less trope-like. (The naked sex woman, the underrated intelligent drunk and the Cassandra who warns that Japan were about to surrender)

It could have had an easier timeline and it could have been easier to tell all the men apart. 

However, that would have made it too easy to watch and it was supposed to feel as though you were tied to a rock having your eyes repeatedly  pecked out by eagles.

It was an amazing piece of cinema. Not one you’ll want to watch again but the acting was sublime and the use of colour gave a depth to pov I hadn’t seen before. 

There has been a lot of secrecy about the film and not much analysis post release, except for men of TikTok farting at the end of the countdown. I think it’s because it leaves you feeling devastated. It’s not really something you want to talk about.

We saw it as a family (a wonderful but rare occurrence) and as film lovers were able to discuss our appreciation of it and my inability to sit still (this is my formal apology) 

After about 20 minutes of confusion I had whispered in the Long Suffering Husband’s ear, “I need the date in the corner and for all those men to wear name badges.”

It was almost as though the film makers heard me and the men suddenly had badges. (Although they had all been to the Elon Musk school of naming things: U2, X20, C3PO.)

“That was not the kind of name badge I had in mind,” I hissed at the LSH. 

Hiroshima is a beautiful town that is still grieving for what was done to it. I was particularly struck by two stories and one photo and a document I saw while I was there. The photo was of a child’s bike in the destruction. The document was the date on the surrender form. The first story was of the man who was working in Hiroshima during the first blast, survived a little battered and shocked and went home to Nagasaki only to survive the second blast. But the one that really upset me was the story of Sadako Sasaki.

She was just two years old when the bomb dropped, 2km from her home. Most of her neighbours were killed but her mother and brother escaped the fires. Apparently uninjured she lived a normal life until she was 7, when they discovered that she had leukaemia. The next 5 years of her life were spent with this disease and the trials of its treatment, until she finally died at 12 years old. While she was in hospital she folded over 1000 paper cranes (which Japanese legend stated will allow your wishes to come true). Her classmates also folded and then erected a children’s statue in the peace park, millions of people from around the world have also folded. When we visited Hiroshima in 2020 a project was underway to get as many folded cranes there as possible and it was quite a sight.

Having seen the Oppenheimer film and understanding ‘boys and their toys’ I think I’m going to be busy. If you want me I’ll be folding paper cranes.