Yesterday evening ITV3 made the mistake of rescreening a 'Miss Marple' we had seen only a few days previously, and, satisfactory as it was, we were not quite ready to see it again, perhaps for the fifth time in all. So scraping around in the bottom of the DVD box we found a gift from the 'Daily Mail' containing 'The eagle has landed' and 'To die for'. The first was a perfectly respectable film, quite possibly novel at the time it was made, in its English language portrayal of Second World War things from a German point of view, but not what we wanted yesterday. But it did provide a reference for the second, on the basis that if one was good two was probably better.
So off we went, into what turned out to be rather an odd film. A sort of black comedy on the US fascination with television and the fame & status that can come from appearing on one, with trailer trash who might be trash but still have the credentials and cash to buy guns and who go on to commit more or less pointless murders with them and lastly with oral sex (passive male variety). This side of the pond we still find it odd that a film can spend so much time on this last while being very careful that we do not catch a glimpse of a single nipple or buttock, let alone the oral in question. Although we do get to see quite a lot of Nicole Kidman's mouth, and very nice it was too. All in all a well made and watchable film, even if the plot was more than a touch unlikely and even if the film did make us feel a bit uncomfortable at times. But does Ms. Kidman do anything better with her considerable talents?
Along the way I was reminded of the rather splendid, if rather offensive, slang word 'guinea' for an Italian and I learn this morning of two possible derivations. One, from the coast of West Africa where black slaves come from. Two, from the guineas that superior Italian masons in London used to be paid in. Although learn is perhaps a bit of a strong word in this context; without a bit more evidence, of the sort one might get in the OED, I do not find either theory particularly appealing.
And so to bed, to rather an odd dream. Odd in that there appeared to be a moral and in that in addition to myself there were two other known people - BH and the Prime Minister - known people being rather unusual in my dreams. We were staying in some hotel and the Prime Minister and his family happened to be staying there too. His teenage son (I don't think he actually has one) breaks his leg and goes to the holiday GP. Prime Minister's family not very happy with the outcome and want to go private, to rather an unpleasant sounding and greedy private doctor who wants to charge £980 to repair the botched job of the GP. The Prime Minister proposes to take it out of some probate pot in which our two families have equal shares. At a meeting involving both families and the private doctor, BH gets very cross and says no way. I try to smooth things down and suggest that she will probably calm down and agree given a little time. At which point I start to wake up and think that I was a bit soft. The Prime Minister has pots of money already and can well afford to pay without dipping into the communal pot, before tax as it were. So the moral that I take away is that it is a bit stupid to be nice & soft about money. There are too many people out there who will take advantage. No idea where the rather exact and definite sum of £980 came from. We didn't get to meet Sam.
The money theme then continued over breakfast where, I was sorry to read that our last big mutual bank, the Co-op has fallen prey to the same greedy drive for expansion on the back of dodgy lending in a property bubble that sank some of their more overtly commercial compères. The troubles of the bubbles being made worse by straightforward errors of judgement.
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