Blimey, I'll be walking funny tomorrow.
Because I went for a six and three quarter mile run this afternoon. What did you think?
You disgust me.
My new year's resolution to exercise for at least 30 minutes a day has been going pretty well. In my "Don't Break The Chain" of exercising I have now ticked off 7 consecutive days (I've only missed three days, including New Year's Day). Most days, like today, I have done more than half an hour. We ran for 75 minutes and today it felt easy. Afterwards we had a light lunch. I did some work in the afternoon and it was only at about six o clock that I realised how hungry I was. We ordered a Chinese take-away and I ate a massive plate of food, in quick time. It reminded me of my days as a professional rower back on 2004. The food barely hit the sides and I still felt hungry and even on a diet I still had a good five hundred calories left to consume. It's nice to earn the right to be a greedy pig. It's important to earn the right. Otherwise you're just a fat pig.
Tonight's film double bill courtesy of the random DVD generator that is Lovefilm, was meant to be Cowboys and Aliens and
Poliakoff's "The Lost Prince". We were more in the mood for cowboy silliness but decided to watch the worthy one first, but as it turned out, it was a two part drama series and it filled up our whole night. It was an interesting enough story about Prince John, brother of Edward VIII and George VI, who due to his epilepsy was supposedly hidden away from public view. I think I had rented it as I am planning to write a film set in the same period (I might have even thought this film was about Alexei, the Russian Romanov prince). As with most period drama the pace was slow - the way the camera lingers over beauty and wealth is almost pornographic and maybe when people get too old to even stick things up their arse for fun they have to get their kicks elsewhere. I wonder if it's possible to do a period drama that is a bit more incident packed and exciting and genuinely amusing. I'm not saying it needs to be "The Lost Prince and Aliens", but there may be some room to play around with the genre a little bit. Don't get me wrong I like the banquets and the sunsets and the awkwardness and repression of the upper classes, but I think you could have all that and add some stuff that would make history exhilarating. I say this as I might have come up with an idea to so a little something in that direction, but after three hours tonight I was pining a little for a zombie to come crashing through a wall. There was an odd (and slightly poorly judged) scene where the princes imagined the Russian royal family working on a farm. It didn't play well. Maybe you just have to stick to the format.
These younger brothers (John and Georgie, the future Duke of Kent), of two future kings did make an interesting story. I didn't know too much about either of them, but thought George was the one who had died in the second world war. This turned out to be the case. But he was also a bit of player, sleeping, it seems with women and men and possibly with Barbara Cartland, which is an odd thing to think. As was the fact that George's grandson married Big Suse from Peep Show. If I had been writing this film I would have made sure that both these facts made it into the script. Plus a zombie.
But still liked the film, in spite of its languorous style. I think it perhaps took a few liberties with the truth (don't think John was quite as isolated and unloved by his parents as it seemed), but it does reveal that George V was the one who made the choice not to let the Tsar and his family come and live in the UK. Which was a decision designed to cover his own arse, but which might well have prevented that family being butchered in a cellar.
