Northern light

The northern pinnacle of my last post was followed, later the same morning, by northern light. That is to say, on the Ewell Village Clockwise rather than my more usual Horton Clockwise, I was very struck by the effect of the light on the trees towards the top of Longmead Road.

Mid morning, overcast and grey, but there was something about the light which made one very conscious of the shapes, in three dimensions, of some of the bare trees. How their branches arced around to enclose space. The illustration was a failed attempt, among a dozen or so, to capture this effect - from which I conclude that it depended in part on stereoscopic vision at fairly close quarters and in part on the parallax effects of my slow walk, both lost in the telephone. But also that the quality of the light was what made artists who could afford to build their own studios, have big windows facing north, as far away as possible from the light of the sun.

Several other trees caught my attention in the same way as I proceeded up Longmead Road and through Ewell Village on my way back to Epsom. But I took a break in the Oxfam shop there to see what they could offer in the way of evening entertainment and settled for what I thought was a fifties thriller called 'The Woman in Green', but which turned out to be a Sherlock Holmes story, starring one Basil Rathbone, from way before the invention of Jeremy Brett.

The story watched well with a drop of white from Waitrose, despite the age of the film and despite the aged film quality (brought to me via China). A straightforward plot which managed to build up the tension nicely, despite one knowing more or less from the outset who the villain was and how it would all end. They managed with virtually no sex or violence, at least not the explicit sort and not by the standards of today. Not even the fairly harmless plastic stuff dished out by the Midsomer people. They also managed without the sometimes irritating cross-word puzzle wealth of red herrings, clues and cameo parts which modern versions of the same sort of thing find necessary. Not to mention all the puffing Poirots - but there was plenty of smoking by pretty much all of the human participants to make up for the absence of steam locomotives (see reference 1).

Clever introduction with a long line of uniformed policemen marching out of old Scotland Yard to hunt for the new ripper, this despite the US/colonies accented voice over. Fortunately, the accents thereafter sounded more English. Or perhaps one just stopped fussing about them as the story got under way.

All in all a good watch, so I was surprised to find this morning that the film, the 11th in a series of 14 was not taken from a proper story at all, but was confected by the film people, albeit using scenes from several real Holmes stories. So the script writer had done his work well, and his film had worn well over the 70 or so years since it had been made. This despite being in black and white and the significance, if any, of the 'in green' of the title being completely lost, to me anyway.

I also found that I could have watched the whole thing on YouTube for free, instead of paying Oxfam £1.99 for it. But as far as I am aware, you cannot browse in YouTube in quite the way you can browse a shelf in an Oxfam shop - although the way that Amazon do things is getting close.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=puffing+Poirot.