Seriously. Why am a watching this movie yet again? There are so many bits you have to skip to make it bearable. All the scenes with Keira Knightly because the storyline is just too cutesy. All the scenes with the couple who work as stand-ins for a porn film because of how awkward and totally unbelievable the premise is. The Hugh Grant scenes are great, Emma Thomson is perfect, the guy who goes to the US to find love is mildly annoying. The pop star is good because of the actor…what’s his name: Bill Nighy and all the Alan Rickman scenes are golden because he was fabulous. But Colin Firth and the Portuguese lady storyline also suffers from too much cutesy. I prefer the dry sardonic Hugh Grant every time: “Ruthless, trained killers are just a phone call away.”

Here’s the absolute worst thing about seeing Love, Actually in 2020: watching people hugging at the airport, as if it were the easiest thing in the world to do. All the travelling and all the hugging, that’s why.

Early scenes…Margaret Thatcher meets the Queen who, as played by Olivia Colman is, it must be admitted, a lot sparkier and funnier than the actual queen who probably can’t allow herself too many flashes of whimsical humour.

Later, various member of the British aristocracy are fulfilling their destinies by engaging in royal pastimes: fly fishing in Finland, grouse shooting in Scotland, stalking in the moors, and lobster trapping in Sligo, Ireland. Ominous music in the background telegraphs that all of these wholesome activities are about to be interrupted by something rather disturbing.

The funeral comes as no surprise. Charles walks around in these early scenes bowed as if a boulder of expectation had been placed across his back since childhood and he is utterly unable to shrug it off. He stands as though he were at least two inches shorter.

Gloom all around and Charles utters the prophetic words: “We could all do with a bit of cheering up.” Enter Lady Diana. According to her distant relative, Barbara Cartland, writer of goopy romantic novels: “I’m afraid she read too many of my novels.” It all starts happily enough. Charles needs a new start given that his true love is married and he carefully considers Diana’s character before deciding to ask her out. Diana is portrayed as being smitten by the idea of princedom.

Tremendous character work by actor Josh O’Connor, but, though he does his best to furrow his brow and look older, he’s entirely too young and dishy to look like a much older swain to Lady Diana. Emma Corrin is splendidly cast: thin, fey, starry-eyed, and also rather intent on making an impression on Charles. The episode ends with a new beginning.

Moustaches.

Performance reviews.

When you order sushi and it comes with salad and the glob of wasabi falls in the salad and you eat a great mouthful of wasabi by mistake. I hate it when that happens.

When you buy presto logs and they smell bad and give you a headache. That’s just not cosy, and that’s the whole point of a presto log,

When you buy lettuce and you have every intention of making a salad. Time passes. And then one day you say, “I’m definitely going to make a salad today,” and you go check on your lettuce and it’s turned into soup, but you’re not in the mood for lettuce soup.

Get Organized with the Home Edit – No. Everyone is too excited about closets. Inexplicable.

Utopia – Gruesome, depressing, hopeless. The bad guys kill people, the good guys kill people and you will never look at a spoon the same way afterwards. So, no.

W1A – Brilliant, dizzying dialogue with priceless corporate jargon gems. The ultimate office satire with a heart of gold. The dim-witted intern turns out to have hidden depths. Everyone has their own recognizable speech pattern and it’s narrated by David Tennant, so what are you waiting for?

Des – Again, David Tennant. He makes a show about a serial killer who gets caught in the first ten minutes absolutely riveting. His gestures, his speech rhythms, the depth of feeling behind the eyes of a compulsive killer who politely hopes the police will explain why he kills. Shakespearean.

The phrase “All you can eat.” when used to make a restaurant sound appealing.

How TV detective series tend to start with a young woman running through a forest at night, barefoot, terrified, escaping from some unseen assailant.

The Bachelor

Leaf blowers

Tiny house tours. I used to like them, but I watched too many of them and now I hate them.

Black liquorice.

Plastic. Using precious water to wash plastic for recycling but feeling compelled to do it anyway.

When actors prepare something to eat in a scene and then they don’t eat it.

The word staycation.

The phrase “going forward”

When everything has to be “aligned”

Aphids

Dogs bred to be so large and intimidating that they can’t play with other dogs cause other dogs are afraid of them even when they’re gentle.

Dams

The phrase free gift

Payday loans

“Live Laugh Love” decor feature on walls

Bad peaches

The phrase “Let that sink in.”

What can I say? It rained for the entire season. Those actors will never feel warm again.

There was definitely a Lady Macbeth motif in this last season, with various characters desperately washing blood from their hands, and their hair, and lots more murders in general. There was a particularly nasty trio of killers, a three-men-in-one-special murder squad specializing in garrotting. Not nice. Beloved characters met gruesome deaths at the hands of their close family members, but I guess that is par for the course in real life. No one bathed, showered or changed their underwear. Although one character was brought a fresh change of clothes at one point,  but for sinister “you’re about to kill someone” reasons so that wasn’t a comfort. No one ever drank any water, had a cup of tea or ate a sandwich. And this bothers me. The apocalypse would be a lot easier to bear if you could just have a nice cup of tea and a bubble bath once in a while.

The clubhouse of the time travellers underwent various assays of interior decorating each more chaotic and destructive than the next, with the fire damage reaching higher levels on the painting of Adam and Eve. The black-ball-of-time-travel made its appearance in different epochs with techie sophistication deteriorating during the 1880s. The character who represents Martha/Eva in old age appeared to be lurking behind the main door dressed in black, just waiting for the hapless youngsters to show up and be confounded again by cryptic messaging. I like to think of the rather sinister, scar-faced Eva as lounging in the green room backstage downing a pink gin before slithering around the doorway and putting even more worry lines on Jonas’ (versions 1 and 2) and Martha’s (versions 1 and 2) faces.

Facial scars were all the rage throughout the season with vicious slashes being used as handy signposts of which version of the characters has shown up at any given time. I guess the writers wanted to give the audience some sort of handy who-is-who tool but still, really, a bit harsh. In this season, Woller is a one-armed man instead of a one-eyed man without any explanation. Mayhem.

Seriously, like someone once said of Goethe: When watching Dark, “sometimes I have the paralyzing suspicion that it’s trying to be funny.”

There were a few delicious lines that made my heart sing: “You don’t want to stop the Apocalypse at all!” I feel that way about how the US is handling the pandemic.

Greatest romantic line to feed your loved one: “Both our fates are bound together in eternal damnation.” Very Goth.

All I know is, from now on whenever I make a terrible mistake and just generally totally foul up my life, I will quietly murmur to myself: “Ich hab alles kaputt gemacht.”

And for God’s sake, why didn’t anyone try to go back and stop Mads from getting killed? That was technically the beginning of the suffering for all the characters and we were never shown that moment. I think I would have liked Mads, he was the only one who ever smiled and was reported to be kind and never spoke ill of anyone. No one ever, ever smiled during this entire season. Except briefly at the very end, but by that time you’re so beaten down by the gloom… a smile here and there would have made up for all the garrotting.

Dark, there will never be another show quite like you and I will miss your beautiful, brilliant, deranged musings on life, guilt, regret, human failing, the relentlessness of time and love…what will I do without you? So many life lessons; I’ll have to write another post to take them all a bit more seriously. For now I’m dizzy with it all and I need a pink gin and a bubble bath. Also, a cup of tea and a sandwich.

 

 

Other possible titles:

I was a third-rate Khaleesi

How I became responsible for the care and feeding of thousands of little orphans.

Not Mosquitos

(Previously on “She went to the south of France without a keeper” our heroine was trying to keep her dignity in spite of suffering from a little known nervous disorder which results in an inability to dress properly. Read previous entries under the travel blog tab.)

If anyone out there still envies me after reading this, I’ll eat my straw hat, scarf included.

The July 25 outing to Bagnols had as one of its aims the purchase of a mosquito net. Dozens of painful itchy bites had appeared virtually overnight upon arrival to Salazac. Raised welts, swelling, etc. I thought, “I must be allergic to the French mosquito. How odd.” After buying not one but three mosquito nets, one of them a fancy camping one which could be strung over a camp bed, I was no closer to achieving a good night’s sleep. After spending a few nights cowering under the mosquito net, trying to keep it closed and away from my body, difficult to do in a low ceilinged alcove, I had finally realized that my mosquito net had great big holes along the seams. One night at 3 am, I disentangled myself from my protective cocoon of sheet and net, stood outside the net and focused on a pair of small mosquitos waving from inside the net. I had to go back to the store to return the first net. My complaint that the net was full of holes elicited the response of “Mais bien sûre, Madame, c’est un mustiquaire.” Very funny, but said quite seriously. I patiently showed her the defective seams. This time around, I got two mosquito nets thinking I could put them together and achieve maximum protection.

By now I resembled a medieval drawing of a plague victim, one of those with the person lying there stiffly, wearing a sort of white diaper raiment, and covered in bright red spots. I was in terrible discomfort, covered in ugly, itchy, swollen bites. The ones on my arms where in a strange pattern: three, all in a straight line. Eventually more appeared and took on the look of The Big Dipper. I counted 100 bites and then stopped counting as it began to be a depressing pastime.

My trips to the pharmacy and supermarket in search of a remedy, deterrent, or ultimate killing anti–bug weapon became obsessive. I drove to lovely towns and stopped to look at fascinating chateaux and made stops at all the pharmacies along the way. The electrical contraption mentioned on July 5^th was the first of many purchases: Citronella diffusers, lavender oil, repellent sprays, soothing ointments with and without cortisone, antihistamines, candles, etc.

One very kind Pharmacist, who spoke Spanish and had been to the Peruvian amazon, told me it was difficult to repel mosquitos and that the bites looked like they could be from a smaller type of local mosquito. He suggested the lavender oil. He was wrong. A few days into this nightmare two of the bites developed the classic bull’s eye rash (ie Lyme disease rash).

I dithered and denied and put off the inevitable and eventually called my landlady’s doctor, the hilariously named Dr. Clape. This after one of my neighbours and a pharmacist both ventured to suggest that the bites looked like the work of bedbugs. By this time I had seen a bright red bug leaving the seen of the crime, an adult by its size, otherwise known as Mom. I had also seen many smaller ones strolling across the sheets. All this time I had been cocooning myself against the mosquitoes, the enemy had been lurking within the confines of my rickety bed. Once I had inspected the mattress, I wished I hadn’t. I had bought a chemical bug bomb, which had to be deployed and then left in the closed room for three hours. I was never able to bring myself to sleep in the bedroom again. I picked up the bedside table lamp and retreated to the living room and its broken click-clack futon.

The doctor turned out to be a genius and immediately understood my problem, prescribed antibiotics and sent me for blood tests. The wording on the order form is not one you want to read while on holidays: Maladie de Lyme. But the fact that he took me seriously and knew I might have to take antibiotics long term made me very grateful I didn’t get sick in Canada.

By this time I was doing massive amounts of laundry everyday, dragging bedding and area rugs and couch covers up and down the hill from the house to the clothesline set up at the bottom of the garden. The Scottish couple in the straw bale house lay blissfully in the sun as I fought a losing battle with tiny vampires. It seemed I had clearly drawn the short straw in this rental. Their side of the house was unaffected. They invited me over for wine; and in exchange I wittily regaled them with tales of my battle against the bug demons. Strangely, after a while, the invitations seemed to dry up. Perhaps mentioning I was also hosting an infestation of fleas was a mistake. The added bonus of a bedbug infestation is that you become a social leper.

The Scottish man in the straw bale house had listened with great interest when I explained I had finally found out where the bugs had been hiding. My theory at the time was that they were fleas, as they appeared to jump when I tried to catch them. His eyebrows shot up, “Fleas?” he said politely.

At three in the morning (that’s right, I had stopped sleeping by then) I was conducting another one of my close inspections of the bed, trying to cut them off at the pass as it were, when I looked over at the lamp and saw a youngster venturing out for a midnight snack. Big mistake. I’m sure his mother loved him, but I killed him anyway. So she had cleverly found them a nice, cozy, warm bed and they had been nestled in the felt base of the lamp the whole time. When I had collected it from the bedroom, I had simply brought them along for a picnic. I sprayed the lamp with every insect killer I had but they thrived on the stuff and continued to make forays. I made a druidic circle of talcum powder around the lamp and found great entertainment in watching the bedbugs get stuck in the powder and flounder around like tiny cross-country skiers overwhelmed by a snowstorm.

“Doesn’t she have anything better to do,” you ask yourselves?

As I say bedbugs have the effect of turning the most inoffensive person into a social pariah. My only chance for romance at this point would have been to meet a very brave entomologist working on a dissertation entitled Bedbugs: Lyme Disease Vector? – A Field Study.

While I was still explaining to everyone I met that I had been the victim of particularly vicious mosquitos; I encountered nothing but compassion and concern. Mosquitos, after all, are an equal-opportunity pest. You can’t ostracize a mosquito-bite sufferer because you could easily become the next victim. They are considered tiny winged acts of God and everyone can commiserate over their respective mosquito bites.

Once you wander into the lonely land of the bedbug, however, you’re on your own. Even Dr. Clape joked that he should probably be seeing me outside and I’m sure he wielded the DDT spray bottle as soon as I left. I went to see him a few times, oppressed by the certainty that I was dying of Lyme disease, and he calmly assured me that it was too soon to tell. He had a Lyme disease patient who had been on antibiotics for 5 months. This was not reassuring, but at least he knew what to do if it came to that. As I left the office, he told me that later on in the year was the season for dengue fever and West Nile virus…

“We are becoming a tropical country with global warming,” he said, gleefully.

 

Dear friends: I’m so happy to be able to announce that my new book of poetry, The Schedule of Loss (Ekstasis Editions, 2019) has been published.

The book launch is set for Sunday, April 14, at 3pm at Bastion Books, 14 Bastion Square (entrance on Commercial Alley), Victoria, B.C. Directions: https://bit.ly/2HMjNAu

Their number is 250 385-8786. There will be light refreshments and lots of poetry. I look forward to seeing you there.

The book can be purchased from Ekstasis Editions at: http://www.ekstasiseditions.com/

This show reminds me of Breakfast at Tiffany’s: crowded party, New York apartment, quirky characters, fire escapes, lost cat, and protagonist going through an existential crisis.

Natasha Lyonne reminds me of Giulietta Masina: petite, squashy endearing face, awkward body movements that somehow create the character, lost but plucky never-say- die types. Except of course that Lyonne’s character keeps dying and that’s the problem.

Lyonne and Masina remind me of Charlie Chaplin: everyman underdog, gets kicked around but fights back, funny but heartbreakingly sad at the same time.

I think the message is: We are all doomed to repeat our mistakes until we learn from them. Every time Nadia dies she learns a little bit more of the puzzle, and she gets a bit further along in the story. The catch is that she has to keep going out into that scary world that is inevitably going to kill her because if she doesn’t, nothing happens. Kind of like life. Every day we get up and we go out there no matter how scary or hopeless it is because if we don’t, nothing happens. And every day we learn a new piece of the puzzle.

Where am I going with this? I’m not sure, but I’m in the grip of yet another Netflix addiction so I may as well write about it. Damn you Netflix. I should be cleaning my kitchen.

Because I’ve always been a great admirer of Christopher Hitchens, I’ve long avoided reading his almost unbelievably tone-deaf essay Why Women Aren’t Funny. Oddly, for such an articulate master of debate, he is, in this essay, defensive and well…not very funny.

What he doesn’t get about women and humour in the face of male power is that we’ve been laughing at men (quietly) for thousands of years. It was our only defence against the situation we found ourselves in. Women have been more attuned to the comical aspects of those in power for a painfully long time. But we’ve had to keep our sense of humour and our wit hidden for fear of pretty much instant death. As Margaret Atwood said: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them and women are afraid men will kill them.”