Unfortunately, Clare has been doing battle with a horrible cold this past few days, and was brave to have made it to the opera last night. It's amazing how, year after year, she succumbs to illness on or around her birthday, for no apparent reason. Today, out of sheer self preservation, she spent much of the day in bed. She has much to do next week, accompanying Ann to the inquest into Eddie's death last year, and wants to be fit to travel to East Anglia for this.
So, until Kath and Rhiannon arrived at tea time, we had a rather quiet day. When they arrived, we decided to get a take-away meal from 'The Italian Way' restaurant on Cowbridge Road East, we'd booked at table in, to spare Clare having to go out, and this was quite a success, apart from the amount of disposable packaging to be dealt with afterwards. It's one good reason to shun ready meals, and cook from fresh, no matter how much effort it takes.
Ann and I watched the penultimate set of episodes of Black Lake, on BBC Four which continues to un-impress. The acting of people in roles confronted by disturbingly traumatic experiences leaves much to be desired. I don't think it's a matter of culturally different responses to tragedy, but rather a failure of the movie producers to understand and reflect real human reactions to situations they cannot control. There may well be an interplay between the use of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian languages rather lost in subtitles, but many feelings can be conveyed by facial expressions and body language, which in this series are absent. The plot is flaky enough already without stretching credibility further.
I keep watching, if only to observe how stupid the producers believe their audience is. It's waste of time really, but at the moment I have time to spare. It's odd, when the movie production values disturb you more than the intended horrific narrative. Like Mel Gibson's 'Passion of Christ'.
