Headed down to Nottingham today - we're going to see friends in East Anglia tomorrow and this was a convenient halfway point. Slowly but surely making our way home.
The journey was unremarkable apart from passing a field with a camel in it, which made me double take and then when we were on the M1 driving past a broken down vintage car, garlanded with ribbons, with a bride, her father and her bridesmaids standing beside it looking pissed off. What a terrible thing for her and yet what an amazing piece of drama. A whole story told in a momentary sighting. Heart breaking and yet slightly comic at the same time. I hope she got to church on time. Or took this as a sign that her marriage was doomed and jumped on a bus and escaped. Vintage cars are romantic, but unreliable (like most romance). I didn't stop to offer them a lift, but my car is packed with all the stuff I took up to Edinburgh so I wouldn't have been much help. I presume they had someone on the way to rescue them.
For the first time in a very long day my girlfriend and I were going to have a Friday night on the town. Both of us are usually working at the weekend, so it was quite exciting to both be free. I had booked cinema tickets on line, though discovered that the cinema was right next door to the "Just The Tonic" comedy club and I kept joking that I might just pop in to see if they would let me do five minutes. We were going to see "Super 8" which I didn't know too much about. It didn't seem to be a popular choice for Friday night in Nottingham: seating was unreserved and when we got there about ten minutes before the start there were no more than 10 people already seated. We headed for the centre back of this smallish room so we could get the optimum view and have some leg room (and maybe have a canoodle if the film was rubbihs). Five minutes later three Japanese tourists arrived and headed for the back row too. I presumed that they would head along the row a little bit, but the three of them sat to my immediate right, one of them in the seat next to mine. It seemed an odd thing to do in a practically empty cinema and it might have been more polite to leave at least a one seat gap, but I assumed it might be a cultural thing. And one that reflects well on the sociability of Japan and badly on the grumpiness of the UK. But evenso it made me feel weird and uncomfortable, so I moved to the empty seat on the other side of my girlfriend establishing a one seat gap between her and the interloper.
I really enjoyed the film which is a mixture between ET, Close Encounters and the Goonies (that last one is my girlfriend's correct observation) with a bit of Jaws thrown in or Alien (which is just Jaws in space). It's a bit of a nostalgic pastiche, but one with some proper emotion and suspense and characters you can engage with. The young actors in it are absolutely excellent and though it perhaps doesn't live up to the tension of the first 45 minutes, it's still lots of fun. And don't get up an leave the minute the credits roll like an idiot. There's obviously going to be a bit more. And it's worth staying for.
It's not as good as a sad bride standing on the hard shoulder, but there's no way of guaranteeing when you will be able to see that show. So go and see Super 8 instead.
