Last time I stayed at this hotel I woke up in the early hours of the morning to begin a day of vomiting and missed out on my birthday treat. This time I slept soundly, without vomiting - I may have drooled lightly - and managed to make it down to breakfast. And with a start as unladen with sick as this it seemed a good idea to finally fulfill my 2010 birthday wishes, just 369 days too late and so rather than going back to a predictably rain sodden Latitude (my car could not have taken another battering) we headed to Sutton Hoo to see the burial place of some Anglo-Saxon geezer, possibly Rædwald. He was buried in his boat in the middle of a field (or maybe just his stuff got buried as there's no sign of a body) and somehow though most of the burials around him would get looted over the centuries, all his stuff stayed safely hidden until the 1930s. We'd seen the treasure in the British Museum
last September (though I seemed more impressed by the Clangers), but I'd been wanting to see the site for some time. So whilst I could have been taking drugs or drinking cider or pretending to be in the National in a wet field, I instead chose to walk round a wet field looking at some mounds of earth. Further evidence, were it needed, of my fogeyism. And though we got a bit wet I enjoyed it and the visitor's centre. It wasn't up with Fishbourne Palace as a tourist attraction, partly because there isn't too much to see there and all the actual treasure is in London, but I was still glad to have visited this historic site. Plus I had cheese on toast in the cafe. It was a late 43rd birthday, but it was a good one.
It had been bad enough being rained on here, with access to a warm museum, cafe and functioning toilets, so it wasn't a hard choice and we drove home afterwards. And it meant a very rare weekend off for both me and my girlfriend. After the long drive we headed out to the excellent Wahacca restaurant in the Westfield. Really ace Mexican street food and lovely beer or tequilla. Really tasty and lots of fun and whilst I imagine this stuff is somewhat cheaper on the streets of Mexico, it's still fairly reasonable for a night out (I think we got six different things and four drinks for about £35). Then we went to see the final Harry Potter film - not something I had been particularly relishing, but my girlfriend was very keen to see it and she had happily come to see the burial mounds of some dead Saxons, so the least I could do was to watch the denouement of the story of some fictional wizards, even if I didn't fully understand who everyone was or what was going on.
I really liked the stuff about Snape and think that the whole series would have been better (certainly as a film) if it was written about him, with all the children being peripheral characters. Snape is a fucking excellent character throughout and Rickman is a genius. The problem is that all the brilliant actors are grown ups and get hardly anything to do, whilst the youngsters, cast as 11 years olds, have to carry the film and largely struggle to do so. You'll be delighted to hear (if anyone doesn't know already- I didn't, so you might not) SPOILER ALERT not all of the child actors make it to the end, but there is a disturbing final scene SPOILER ALERT where the action needlessly jumps 19 years into the future and the child actors now appear as 36 year old versions of themselves, though for a film with such a special effects budget, they really don't look any different, and have kids of their own. They all seem to have stayed with their childhood sweethearts, which seems to cement the fact that Rowling is trying to write about a world firmly stuck in the 1950s with monogamy and public school educations. I don't like that aspect at all. I can buy all the magic and the dragons and shit, but seeing 19 year olds dressed as 36 year olds, still with the people they were with at the end of the action, hugging 12 year olds..... it's the most chilling and unpleasant thing I have seen in the cinema for a while. And I have seen the Human Centipede 2. (I haven't).
But yes, JK. Can you write the entire series from Snape's point of view please? And make it for adults not kids? It'd be a real money spinner. And now the series is over you must be short of a few bob, right?
