Colours Of Time

 I think I’ve seen the best film of 2026 so far, and it’s a charming bit of French whimsy set in the present day and glorious 1890’s Paris 

Four strangers, distant cousins, are united by the fact that they and a dozen other family members have inherited a rundown country cottage earmarked to become a trendy new shopping mall. 

Benign beekeeper Guy( Vincent Mccaigne) galvanises sad executive Celine ( Julia Piaton), retiring schoolteacher Abdelkrim( Zindine Soualem) and on line artist Seb ( Abraham Walpler) into studying their family tree, mainly concentrating on 21 year old Adele ( Suzanne Lindon) and her journey to Paris to find her mother. 

Here the film gently dovetails from the family bonding of the cousins ( beautifully observed and never saccharine in its portrayal ) to Adele’s journey of discovery, where she meets her mother and ultimately her father under the strangest of circumstances. 

Every character is underplayed beautifully with Lindon and Piaton being especially impressive, and the climatic scene involving psychedelic drug taking, and Victor Hugo, has to be seen to be believed.

I loved it

A beautiful, well crafted and charming film, about family ties, growing up and history

Go and see it

Serendipity

 

I love a story of coincidence.

Around 32 years ago I found myself on a specialist six month work course at the Spinal Injury Unit in Southport. It was expected that for part of that course, I was to organise an elective placement somewhere interesting and after weeks of organising I was lucky enough to wangle work experience in the USA Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to be precise. Much of my experience centred upon the spinal injury rehabilitation hospital in Harmarville.
Like many rehab facilities, Harmarville was located out in the sticks, so to get to and from my lodgings which were back in the City, I was provided with a volunteer driver, who happened to be a very elderly black guy called Norm. Norm insisted that I sit in the back of his large black car, and so I( and many others) was reminded of the movie Driving Miss Daisy when we turned up at any event. The film had only just opened in cinemas the previous summer.
Anyhow I digress.

Fast forward a decade or so to rural Lincolnshire, to an antiques emporium at a former RAF station to be precise. In a dusty, junk filled room, I spied an old map with art deco writing in a battered frame and on a whim bought it. It looked American, in period with the look of our former house , and it filled a spot in the hall.

The map travelled with us to Trelawnyd and until recently it has graced the wall on the upstairs landing, more or less unseen by all.

You may recall that fairly recently I painted the living room, hallway and landing, and after this, I rearranged the paintings in the cottage and moved the map to it's present position in the spare bedroom.
There , I looked at it again with fresh eyes.

The map, I noticed , had small illustrations on it. A golfer in plus fours, a hunting hound, a whole series of huntsmen and women in full livery, and written in the right hand margin in faint deco script was the name Harmarville.

I looked closer, and spied a road called Fox Chapel Road and I suddenly recognised where the map was of. Of all of the places in the world that a 1930s map could have been from, I had bought an old map of the very place I had worked three decades before!
The map was of one very small far suburb of the city of Pittsburgh. A suburb where the Harmarville Rehab unit was to be built some fifty years later.

A Hiking of Bra Straps

 I feel brighter and more focused today. 

A lot more. 

For weeks I’ve felt a little listless and out of sorts. Something I couldn’t quantify adequately but something that had brought down my mood and my resolve.

The weather is bright and warm and sunny and I’m making my first list of the day

A to do list.

First thing I collected my petunias from Oli . He’s a lad who lives on Byron Street who was selling home grown petunias to earn extra pocket money.

I treated myself to a McDonald’s coffee, walked the dogs and picked spring flowers from the garden and lane, garlic mustard, bluebells and aquilegia , which I put in that little vase I bought at Camden Market.

The Velvet Voiced Linda gave me a gift over the kitchen wall

A book of poetry by Lucas Jones

It’s quite lovely

Good timing or what? 

Bra straps hiked to top position 

Best foot forward

The Arm Chairs No one sits in…..

Gay men love to rearrange furniture. 

It’s in our genes. 

It underlines control and order in lives we cannot always control and order

A behaviour which helps day to day life.

Ok you get where I’m coming from. 

I was laughing with the velvet Voiced Linda today 

Sharing what we think of when times feel somewhat bleak 

5 am ish on Friday I was sitting in the lounge trying to tape my forehead gash with a succession of band aids when I looked around the neatly ordered room

Two arm chairs now face the window 

The little grey one which used to sit in the kitchen and the antique maroon Edwardian one , in which I always get my fat arse wedged in, so never use

Bespoke cushions sit on both

And through my headache , I suddenly felt very sorry for myself .

“Look at the place”I said through a bloody tea towel “Two fucking armchairs with no fucker to sit in them” 

Singletons will understand such a comment and the emotion of sitting alone with said bloody tea towel stuck on their face  

Hey ho
 

A old Harry Potter

A old video ( I’m guessing 20 years at least ) of my lisping choir 

 I slept long and heavy today. I woke around 11 am without a headache and hungry. I suspect I had a minor concussion yesterday. 

Jesus John it’s one thing after another. 

Mary was unhurt in the fall, and went back to bed after thoughtfully licking the blood stains from the Lino. 

I went on a study day in Bangor which was foolish . At least I had a day off today so after dog walks, a breakfast of scrambled eggs I watched old reruns of The Walking Dead , spoke to the German on line and slept on the blue couch with the dogs and both cats 

I’m off to bed shortly and it’s only just after 9 pm

I sent a colleague a photo of my injury 

She said I looked like Harry Potter aged 64

Bladder Problems

 5 am and you go for a pee and you don’t see a half blind Welsh terrier sitting in the bathroom doorway

( Mary’s ok )

April Dusk

 We are not going to have Mary long now. 

She sleeps most of the day, and curls up with me for most of the night .

But at dusk tonight, after a bout of cardiac coughing , she perked up like an old lady at a church jumble sale and trotted into the lane with her ears up, and her one eye bright, for her last walk of the day.

These walks with the Welsh are special times now, especially as Bun comes too, her tail erect, her mouth yowling some sort of message which means fun and solidarity. Today she comes from her den in the ponies’ field and she skips alongside us, in that playful way kittens do when they are learning to hunt and sometimes Roger will dart out towards her, in a half arsed effort to dominate. 

Tonight, was sunny but cooling, and Weaver stood on the cottage wall, quietly watching us go. She reminded me of one of the bad footballers at school, one who wanted to play for the team but the one no one chose to play. 

I called to her but she remained stoic and unmoving, only following us into the cottage after we returned, where she retraced her way  to her lonely safe place on my double bed. 

My laburnum is budding carefully in the churchyard and we walked round with some fertilizer to give her a boost. 

Mary watched the rabbits flag us with white tails as Mervin’s racing pigeons shimmer and gently roar around the bell tower on their last lap before home, and under the dying ash trees on my old corner of the graveyard , the gooseberry bushes I planted fifteen years ago look bright and green and healthy.

The dusk arrives gently 

And as we wait for Mary to jump the last shallow step into the cottage, I’m sure I heard the first breeze of a bat down the lane 

Cloud Watching

 Sometimes it’s important just to be

Several of my counselling clients want to be mindful of things other than stressors 

One cried when I asked them when did you last have any fun?

I got home this afternoon to find out my sister had tidied the garden.

It looked lovely

The mock orange I bought in memory of Finlay is flowering strongly near his grave, and I lay on the grass to cloud watch, even though there wasn’t a much  of a cloud in the sky. 

Not many people outside Cwm Road, are used to 63 year old man lying supine in this front garden and two concerned amblers stopped briefly to ask if I was alright. 

I’m enjoying the view I told them and they walked on amused at this tubby old bloke enjoying his garden 

Blue skies and telephone lines