As I write Gregory's Girl has just started up on BBC1. Can't quite believe it was made in 1980. Nearly 30 years have passed. If back then you had tried to get me to watch a film made in 1950 it would have felt like it belonged to a different historical era.
I taped Gregory's Girl off the telly a few years later and like my tape of American Werewolf in London there were certain sections that started turning to static due to over viewing. Ironically enough one of those moments was the very first scene, where Gregory and his mates are perving over a young nurse undressing in the window. Looking at it now it is incredibly tame stuff. But there was no internet back in the early 80s, so you had to get your fun where you could.
In the mid-Nineties I would meet
Clare Grogan at a party and make a ham-fisted attempt to pull her. She, being married (as if that was the only obstacle in my path), laughed it off in a charming way and has always been very lovely to me when I have met her since. I guess she had become used to the effect she has had on a generation of men my age and become used to dealing with it.
Ah it's just got to the bit where John Gordon Sinclair covers up his nipples when Dee Hepburn comes into the dressing room. What a wonderful film it is.
Thirty years. God how many Guardian Weekend magazines is that?
I've had another lazy day, playing internet poker for the first time in a good while (and winning a couple of hundred dollars) and watching the first two episodes of
The Incredible Human Journey, which suggests that every human being, outside of those in Africa, is related to one of 100 or so individuals who found a route off the African continent 70,000 years ago. Which is a pretty incredible revelation. Especially for any of you racists out there. We're all Africans originally and all the other races are directly related to the same tribe. We're all cousins you fucking idiots. And it's a heritage that goes back tens of thousands of years, which is a lot longer than any of your allegiance to any supposed culture you might be promoting. England has been English for a 1000 years, but we've been humans for a couple of hundred thousand years and absolutely all of us are descended from our forebears in East Africa. The evidence is inside you, in your DNA. God didn't create certain tribes that he preferred over other tribes, nor did different gods create different tribes (and if they did what were the chances that they would make us sexually compatible? Given that in the late 70s videotape manufacturers couldn't even agree on a universal format?)
We're all the same, you bloody idiots. Stop beating each other up and killing each other. You're only hurting your own flesh and blood.
