I've been keeping my head down today with these high winds watching Churchill's finest hour ( 2 odd hours long), plus bringing home the empire, all about the London docklands.
Just finished the last episode (12 in total). Absolutely superb barring the hippy nonsense, but i guess that comes with the territory. I need to go and stand on that cliff at Nazare i think.
The National Parks: America's Best Idea. Gretel Ehrlich: "I think we’re born lost and we remain lost until we remove the shell of who we think we are, all the preconceptions of who we think we are, and to expose ourselves to the great power of the natural world and let it reshape us the way it’s reshaped the rocks of Yosemite Valley." Maybe sounds a bit California, but I think she's grasped a profound truth there. Though perhaps you have to go into the wild perhaps a little recklessly to see it. Alone; no-one else around, 'cos when someone else intrudes into the scene it breaks the spell - because no matter how minuscule it might be, there's always narcissistic feedback when another person enters the equation. I also think it needs to be a potentially very-dangerous situation - like climbing a sheer mountain side without equipment (what the guy she's talking about did). Putting yourself there, so completely alone, dwarfed by spectacular scenery, the fiction of everyday life falls away. 100 years ago they'd talk about God and today they talk about God, and who knows whether it's a metaphor, since the talking heads are American, so they might actually believe it. But maybe, 100 years ago, the Scottish son of a loony Presbyterian preacher, when he talks about God being the rocks and trees and water and the weather, and the rest of it all around him, he sees God as how I see God, only I call it Nature, whereas he was in the very Devil's Cauldron of God-botherers - America: son of a preacher man in God City, Arizona (sic) - so of course he'd call it 'God'. Anyway, that is how you see Him, faced with the lucid realization of the most truth the soul can comprehend. For even when you put the amateur psychologist hat on and reason that it must be arbitrary to see breathtaking beauty as far as the eye can see and the nose can smell and the ears and so on and on, because they're all electrical/chemical impulses, programmed to read off that way, and if anything it's pure good fortune that you're capable of neurotransmitter surges that make you feel like amphetamine or LSD make you feel (because they mimic the same neurotransmitters) and for all you really know you might even be experiencing red, and if you could figure that much out, you might call it 'yellow' anyway. Yet it doesn't matter, because you still know that you're naked and in the presence of the unadorned world, stripped of pretension, false modesty, the self-importance that defines the part you always play in company, and those neurotransmitters are sending commands that make you feel how primitive people (with brains as good as yours) deduced they had an audience with God, though you get the sniff of an epiphany about how, if you were uneducated and had cunts for guardians, you'd probably think that too, rather than how they couldn't handle the immediacy of it; how the religious can't handle the revelation so have to invent a buffer along the lines of The Great Oz in purple, behind a green curtain, like sending the signal through a resistor like a volume pot on '1', because a man, you can understand. There are many, many timid people - just like I nearly made a grown man cry, thirty years ago, which is when I realized that no, not everyone should be able to take it! Until then, that was almost my religion: you should be able to take relentless sarcasm. It's like thinking you should be able to kick someone's head in! I guess that was the beginning of my understanding that friends are, for the most part, of a feather: much of the rest of the planet are not like me at all; so I'd be a fool to assume otherwise. Luckily I'll be able to get some Harrys now. Harry Rag. I think I'll play that when I get back. Better get NRT too, though I'm getting sick of it; just about decide 'bollocks to quitting', then back to wheezing when I lay me down. Fuck. Can you tell I'm losing my religion? Or my sanity? Six of one and Seven of Nine. Meanwhile I'm off to the Great Beyond. In Ruby DMs.
Stumbled on ‘The King’ on Netflix, best film I’ve seen for a long time… 2019 but worth a mention …. If hasn’t before !
Binged all of Mr Bates Vs the Post Office on ITV. Absolutely fuckin despicable what they did, same emotions as when I watched In the Name of the Father. Hopefully this drama will give new energy and momentum to their cause and those responsible should be brought to justice, doubt that will ever happen but at the least strip Paula Vennells of her CBE!
We binged that the other night as well. A very good series, real eye opener. What a bunch of total shits at the top of the post office.
Mini tv series Fool my Once When ex-soldier Maya sees her murdered husband on a secret nanny cam, she uncovers a deadly conspiracy that stretches deep into the past. Intriguing both in its storyline and filming locations
This one last night, made in 2011, worth a watch if you like pretty girls & action, only spoilt at the end when the credits and a Johnny Cash number played as some stupid person spoke over the song.
