walking, Walken and watching

Another belated update, this time because M and I have been regularly walking around the city's "Green Circle" (15 miles worth of wonderful countryside surrounding us, via bridle-paths and footpaths and fields). This very pleasant activity has kept us happy and fit in all weathers, before we take off soon to join a small group of walkers in the West Bank. From where, eventually, we shall both blog on. Should be an interesting trip in any case.

Meanwhile 2 recommended films, both by Brit directors, excellent oddities I've recently picked up for a couple of quid apiece in local charity shops. Donald Cammell's Wild Side, starring our old favourite, the wonderfully weird Christopher Walken, well over the top as always, and especially so in this lurid little psychosexual thriller. And one from 1971, Red Sun, directed by Terence Young, a generally undistinguished action specialist (e.g. he orchestrated all the early James Bond flicks). Red Sun has the utterly superb Toshiro Mifune in vivid Eastmancolor and quite resplendent in full samurai kit. Swordsman Tosh easily steals the show from a strange international cast heavily reliant on both beef- and cheesecake – Bronson, Andress and Delon. They're all Out West, by the way, circa 1860, and this violent East-Western oater (plus railways, Mexicans and Comanches added to the mix) is nevertheless something of a neglected gem. Both these films are, you could say, colourful escapism , but thoroughly good, decadent fun for any true cinephile. Entertaining nonsense and none the worse for that.

festivities, flu, Ambit and Angela

Long lapse in the journal, or 'dear diary', aspect of this blog. Perhaps not so surprising, for after the successful book launch of Haiku At Seventy last December, as noted, came the snow and ice: minus 15 degrees just across the River Exe. Then 2 weeks of flu over xmas and my birthday, so the celebrations were necessarily scaled down. Lethargy ensued, along with the depleted energy of septuagenarianism etc.

Visitors from France, providing excellent and convivial cheer, arrived early on in the New Year, staying 10 days, a time which also proved most enjoyably inimical to writing anything here, except for a couple of miserabilist poems… We were given 2 extraordinary films, Claude Miller's Mortelle Randonnée (Deadly Run), a terrific thriller from 1982, with Michel Serrault and the wonderful Isabelle Adjani, about whom I've already raved. This sumptuously photographed and surprising movie (from Marc Behm's rather original American pulp noir) was quite a contrast with Vitaly Kanevski's gritty monochrome Russian epic, Bouge Pas, Meurs et Ressuscite! (Dont Move, Die and Rise Again!) (1989) which chronicles a nightmarishly wretched childhood in Siberian wastes. Marvellous children's performances: how do directors manage to get these non-professionals to act, or rather, exist, this way – so movingly and convincingly on the screen? The grimness though was riveting and quite relentlessly conveyed. Nothing like horrors of one kind and another to cheer one up, I always say! Read Gissing, for example; you'll feel so much better about your own health, finances, relationships and prospects etc: "there but for the grace of Fate" [certainly not god!] go we.)

Revitalised by these and other wintry experiences, I was glad of a brief London trip to see old friends Paul & Val and read at the launch of Ambit magazine's splendid issue no. 203. Apart from my own poems (of course!) there are excellent graphics and prose, and no less than 12 pages devoted to the unique American poet Fred Voss. Voss is absolutely one of a kind, and how many machinists in steel foundries are there who write anything at all, let alone such funny, moving and utterly distinctive work?

Finally, a superb concert a few nights ago, given by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in Exeter Cathedral, with the great Angela Hewitt playing Mendelssohn and Schumann. A nice note on which to close.