Emotonal Romps ( with Friends and On Trains)

The Peace Gardens in Sheffield.......site of my Scotch Egg tea picnic

Last Night I met up with five old friends.

Our histories have intertwined for two decades, through thick and thin....at work and leisure...and through much laughter and occasionally quite a bit of pain. I have passed through my thirties and forties and now have crept into my fifties and still they are there...a little greyer, a little older but still constants in my life, albeit now more intermittent contacts than they were when I lived in the old steel city.

I miss them. 

I miss my neighbour and friend John swishing his arms like a demented Bette Davis in my back garden.

I miss Jane's warmth and ability to laugh at anything, I miss Mike's sensible geniality, Sarah's unflappable nature and I miss Ruth's machine gun "Frankie Howard" repartee. 

Life and distance can get in the way of friendships if you let them so

it was good to touch base...........a year was far too long to be apart.

We chatted and laughed, like we have always done and like we will undoubtedly do again in a few months time when I get my arse into gear again to make the short trip across from Wales..........

and I went to bed at midnight happy in the fact that somethings in life dont really change

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Have you ever cried on a train?
I have...well just a little that is......I have just watched the Israeli film "Yossi" which is a surprisingly unsentimental yet incredibly moving portrayal of the long tern grief suffered by the 34 year old closeted gay cardiologist Yossi after the death of his soldier lover during their army service in the Lebanon a decade previously.
Yossi is an over weight, workaholic loner who spends his life in a quiet, emotionally flat sort of desperation, a sad, lonely existence that is challenged quite unexpectedly by a chance meeting with four young soldiers to whom he gives a lift to.

Eytan Fox has produced a little gem of a movie a decade after his breakthrough first feature Yossie and Jagger( 2002) , ( which is the story of the original doomed love affair between the two twenty somethings boy soldiers.) for Yossi is a quiet and measured study of depression and loneliness without the usual Hollywood histrionics and emotional romping

Ohad Knoller reprises his original title role quite magnificently. In hushed tones and with sad whipped puppy eyes he portrays Yossi as a character who is not only still grieving for a past life and love but who is an emotionally flat, unconfident lump of a man reminiscent, a little, of Ernest Borgnine's Marty.
It's an incredibly restrained performance in a rather understated, moving film.
9/10