August 12 2025, 18:25
Summer experiments
It’s twenty-nine degrees outside, and I’ve drawn the blinds, turned on the fan, and hunkered down until my swimming lesson at seven. My family return at the weekend, and I’m excited to see them. Tomorrow I’m taking a last-minute day trip to Edinburgh, and I’ve bought tickets to hear A.L. Kennedy talk about her new book at the Edinburgh Book Festival.
I’ve seen her in person once before, thirty years ago at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, when I was twenty-two. Back then, I was overwhelmed by the power of her work, partly because I knew she wasn’t much older than me, so she represented literary possibilities. I’d booked the train ticket for tomorrow before I knew she was speaking. It’s a serendipitous closing of a circle.
Last week I spent two days in London, being a tourist at Borough Market, the Tate Modern, the BFI South Bank, Foyles on Charing Cross Road, and Coal Drops Yard near Kings Cross. Before that, I went to Salt’s Mill, Saltaire. As a karmic down payment, the first weekend alone I spent sanding and oiling the kitchen worktops, and I wined and dined my mother-in-law. It worked.
I’ve had two weeks to myself. It’s been a joy. I can’t wait to see everyone and hear their stories, but I’ve really used my time well. Most importantly, between the jobs and adventures, I’ve made real effort to build habits to take into the autumn when I’ll be back in work with everyone around me firing on all cylinders.
Stretching and strengthening. Learning to swim. Learning to play guitar. Writing every day. Reading every day. Meditating every day. Eating well (most days). I’ve done these things regularly for a fortnight.
I was partially doing them around my 9—5. Is it possible to work full-time and keep them all going? I’m back in work for a week, then off again for the bank holiday week, so I’ve got a chance to experiment then regroup to process the results.
August 09 2025, 19:52
The Girl on a Motorcycle
Director: Jack Cardiff
Release year: 1968
I’m pleased with myself for seeing one of these #ArthouseSummer films in the cinema. The BFI South Bank is an amazing space, and it’s been several years since I’ve visited, so I’d forgotten how they have red curtains in NFT2 and how uncomfortable the seats are. Also, the weirdos.
A guy made a beeline for me in the foyer, an older fella getting far to close to me, and I had to do an unexpected pause and side step to get away from him. He then sat next to me in the film. My seat was booked hours earlier, but I can’t believe it was a coincidence, he must have crashed someone else’s seat. He struck up a conversation.
‘What brings you here to watch this film?’
I was confused. His emphasis was provocative. ‘Well, I’m writing some blog posts on arthouse films...’
‘You think this is an arthouse film?’
‘I haven’t seen it yet. I don’t know. I hope so.’
‘What are you writing?’
He didn’t seem to understand what a blog was, or pretended not to. ‘Posts on the internet.’
‘Well, whatever, you follow your dreams.’ The derision was floating around him in a cloud. ‘But it’s not good. It’s certainly not arthouse. It’s a piece of crap.’
‘I hope that’s not true. Look, please don’t spoil...’
‘And have you met her?’ He pointed towards the front of the cinema.
‘I don’t know who you’re pointing at...’ The penny dropped. ‘Marianne Faithfull? No, of course not. Have you?’ I knew the answer before I’d finished asking.
‘Yes. She was awful.’
At this point I exploded. ‘Are you going to spoil this for me? I’ve asked you not to. Are you going to be trouble? Because if you are I’ll have to move.’ I could sense the people around me listening to all this, but I was furious.
‘Okay, if you don’t want to talk, I’ll leave you alone.’ He pulled a large black backpack off the floor, heaved it onto the empty seat to his left, pulled out a large bag of sweets and started rustling them loudly.
Reader, I left the cinema. At the entrance, I spoke to the usher and he said just to sit anywhere once the film started, so I zipped down the front when he closed the rear doors and got an aisle seat, which was perfect. (I should say something about the film!)
Newly married Rebecca is given a motorbike as a wedding present by her sadistic lover, Daniel. Her husband, Raymond, allows her to keep it, and one morning she secretly sets off from their French home across the German border to visit Daniel in Heidelberg. We discover her story as part of her journey.
If I’d seen the film at home, I don’t think I’d have finished it, but there was something about it on the big screen that made it sing. It’s cheesy, the dialogue is often clunky, and Marianne Faithful gives an over-the-top performance, but damn it if I didn’t have a really good time. They showed the Alex Cox Moviedrome introduction to the film, and he’s pretty dismissive and snide about it, but I think he misses the swings director Jack Cardiff is going for.
It might be overgenerous to say the film is deliberately funny, but it’s definitely knowing in some of its humour, and it wrestles with ideas of marriage, monogamy, marrying young, what it means to be free, free love, types of masculinity, and indeed femininity... and it’s playful.
It’s not erotic, which was part of its marketing/mystique, because whenever there is sex, the screen pulsates with neon pinks and greens. It’s an experimental film, for sure, and the narrative unfolds in flashbacks and dream sequences to clever effect. It’s incredible, based on its current reputation as a bad cult film, that A Girl on a Motorcycle was the sixth most popular film on general release in 1968. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s far more ambitious than most things that get made today.
August 06 2025, 21:59
Irma Vep
Director: Olivier Assayas
Release year: 1996
Hong Kong action star Maggie Cheung arrives in Paris to take the lead in a remake of a classic silent film, Les Vampires. The cast and crew are friendly, but Maggie is an outsider, and the group's conflicts and histories become increasingly pronounced as director René begins to realise the film is not working. Costume designer Zoé has a crush on Maggie, leading to further complications.
I thoroughly enjoyed this. Sometimes a film hits you just right. The camera weaves between the people working on the film set so that it feels like we are eavesdropping. Each character has some sort of grievance or flaw that plays out through the story. Maggie Cheung, playing herself, navigates with charm the petty politics and negative opinions of the film (and French cinema in general!), staying ever the professional as things falls apart around her.
René’s film is based on an infatuation with the idea of Maggie Cheung in a catsuit. That’s his entire energy for the film, and once she arrives and he gets what he wants, because the script isn’t good enough to sustain the idea, he has a nervous breakdown. As an actress, Maggie needs to understand what her director wants from her. Distraught at the creative failure of the film and not being able to help, Maggie wears the latex catsuit to sneak around her hotel, as if she is Irma Vep, her role in René’s vision. She steals a necklace—but was it a dream?
Unwilling to be replaced on the film, René makes a cut from the footage for the new director which is completely unhinged and wonderful. Perhaps Assayas is saying that French cinema has the possibility of being more adventurous, for all the film’s talk of it being stuck in the past. This was made in 1996, almost thirty years ago. It makes me want to find out what happened.
August 03 2025, 16:44
Le Samouraï
Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Release year: 1967
Hitman Jef Costello takes a contract to kill a nightclub owner, but he is seen leaving the premises by several employees. Despite having a watertight alibi, the police superintendent doesn’t believe Costello and puts him under surveillance. Meanwhile, Costello’s employer is unhappy with the police involvement and the hitman has to find a way to get both parties off his back.
This feels like a seventies film, so it’s amazing to me that it was made in 1967, four years ahead of The French Connection, seven years before The Conversation, both of which take chunks of Le Samouraï’s DNA. Thinking about it, many films flow from here, including Ghost Dog, The American, Drive, The Killer... but then, Melville was heavily influenced by the gangster and noir films put out by Hollywood in the 40s and 50s, so it all goes around.
Alain Delon hardly moves his (beautiful) face, and the lack of emotion is deliberate, but it makes Costello a hard character to care about. The final scene is set up by a subtle display of remorse, but it wasn’t enough for me to feel much for him. Like Tati’s PlayTime, it is flawless in what it sets out to do, but doesn’t let you close to anyone. It’s technically perfect, but too cold for me to love.
August 02 2025, 16:03
PlayTime
Director: Jacques Tati
Release year: 1967
Monsieur Hulot arrives in the centre of Paris to meet a man about some business, but his attempts to connect are thwarted by the distractions and mechanisms of a modern city. Other people come and go—tourists, businesspeople, tradesmen—culminating in a chaotic dinner at a the opening night of a new restaurant.
There’s no real plot to PlayTime. The city is the main character, a precisely rendered alternate reality where everything runs like a clockwork machine, the buildings full of box-like rooms, and the latest gadgets being presented and sold at all times. Hulot brings a clumsy humanity to the sterile environment, which is like a children’s book version of adult life.
The first half of the film presents a series of comical set pieces, each one bursting with small jokes and events in the foreground and background. It’s impossible to know where to look. I would imagine I would see more on a second viewing. Like the adult world, watching PlayTime is often amusing, but also repetitive and sometimes dull, even with so much going on. It’s like looking at an ever-changing piece of art in a gallery for two hours.
The second hour is mostly set in a newly opened restaurant with many jobs in the building still unfinished. Design mistakes cause staff to trip over, collisions, electrical faults, and all while an increasing number of people flow into the space, until the chaos of humanity overwhelms the architect’s vision, the music gets more raucous, and fun is had in spite of the collapsing dining room. Tati’s message seems to be that for all of modern life’s restrictions, people will find a way to connect and have fun.
August 01 2025, 19:21
Morvern Callar
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Release year: 2002
On Christmas Eve in a Scottish port town, Morvern Callar finds her boyfriend dead on the floor of their flat. In a suicide note, he asks her to send out his unpublished novel to a list of agents. Morvern is trapped in a supermarket job and has no family, so she convinces herself he means for her to post the novel under her own name. She uses the remaining money in his bank account to take her closest friend, Lanna, partying in Spain, and she doesn’t expect the swift response from an agent who loves her book.
I hadn’t seen this film in years, but the novel is one of my favourites. I wanted to repair the damage of not enjoying the film of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Lynne Ramsay and Liana Dognini cowrote the screenplay and, like Picnic, it holds true to the book and sticks closely to the narrative, but for me Morvern Callar is in a different league. Samantha Morton as Morvern and Kathleen McDermott as Lanna are luminous. They shine through the dynamic camerawork, playful use of music (her boyfriend leaves Morvern presents to unwrap that include a Walkman and a mixtape), and the girls’ wickedly infectious personas. It’s gritty and fun and hopeful, and now one of my favourite films.
I think my problems with Picnic at Hanging Rock were that, yes, I don’t particularly like straight period dramas, even clever ones, but more than that, the characters don’t go through any real internal changes. Morvern’s gradual maturing is the beating heart of Morvern Callar.
I love Morvern. She makes what to her are pragmatic decisions around her boyfriend’s death: she accepts his novel as a gift and puts her name to it; she uses his funeral money to go to Spain and disposes of his body; she processes revelations about her closest friend in a stoic and surprising way. And with each decision, she becomes more mature, more outward looking, and begins to imagine a bigger life.
July 30 2025, 20:08
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Director: Peter Weir
Release year: 1975
On an outing from their boarding school in the Australian outback, four girls wander around the base of Hanging Rock and are tempted to climb higher. The rocks seem to have ghostly powers and the girls fall asleep in a stone circle near the top. Three of them walk through a gap and disappear. A teacher from the group is also seen walking up to Hanging Rock and also goes missing. The mystery engulfs the school and the local community.
It’s clearly an excellent film. The schoolgirls all give strong performances, the audio is cleverly used to make the viewer feel unsettled watching the corseted, gloved girls in an ancient wilderness teeming with insects and birds, but... I couldn’t get into it. Because I only read the book last week, the faithfulness of the adaptation makes the film seem uninspired. Chunks of dialogue are taken straight from the novel. I can’t seem to see the film on its own merits.
This hasn’t happened to me before. I wrote notes on the book at the weekend on Patreon, and there’s no point in repeating myself. I don’t think the film brings enough new to the story. There’s a stronger focus on the potential lesbian relationships in such a female-centric community, and the friendship between Michael and Albert has gay undertones that I didn’t pick up in the book, but it isn’t enough of a differentiation. A disappointing experience.
July 27 2025, 21:35
Run Lola Run
Director: Tom Tykwer
Release year: 1998
Lola and Manni are at a relationship crossroads. Manni is trying to make a living doing jobs for a Berlin gangster, Ronnie, and as a test of competence is told to pick up 100,000 DM of diamonds, sell them and bring the money to a rendezvous at midday. He accidentally leaves the bag of cash on a subway train and phones Lola in desperation. She tells him she will fix things, and she’ll meet him with the money he needs—but she only has twenty minutes to somehow make things good.
I saw this in the cinema when it came out and I remember being blown away by the mixture of pulsing techno, Franka Potente running through the streets of Berlin, and the looping narrative. I hadn’t seen anything like it before. I’d forgotten the animation, the philosophical game the film is playing, and the ways character arcs spin in different directions each time Lola’s actions deviate in very small ways.
It’s a beautifully edited film, and it plays with the ideas of free will, destiny, chance, desire and love. Lola’s agency creates the second loop through the timeline, and it’s ambiguous if Lola or Manni create the third, but each time through Lola seems to remember small details from the time before, and her screams at moments of extreme stress certainly bend reality to her will.
The central question of whether the couple can be together is answered when Manni steps up to solve the problem he’s created for himself. There’s an implication from the beginning that he tends to rely on Lola fixing things for him. By the end the lovers are equal.
July 16 2025, 18:56
Splashing in the shallows
A month ago, I said I was going to try new things, and that’s what I’ve done. I started swimming lessons. I had a guitar lesson (with another tomorrow). I redesigned this website and built it under a new domain name. I read a non-fiction book about the prolonged death of neoliberalism.
As a reward for taking these small risks, I had some dreams, one of which involved an obscure conversation with my father in a deserted castle. It’s a potent time. It’s a good start.
I’m getting close to my summer break, which is exciting. In August, I’m off for three full weeks. It’s not like any other summer I can remember, because my wife and daughter are going to Vietnam, and I’ve chosen to stay home. After Australia in November sucked up most of my annual leave, I couldn’t face another adventure holiday. I haven’t had a week off since my Arvon week in February, and that wasn’t a rest. Instead, I’m going to relax at home. Alone.
The alone bit is unsettling. I don’t think I’ve been alone for more than a weekend in thirty years. There was always a child, or both children, when my wife was away, and before we met I was in a succession of house shares. Someone was always about. I'm always making a meal for another person.
I’ve started a list of things to do. I know this is a defence against the possibility of feeling lonely. It would be more radical to let the holiday come and not have plans. The only thing I truly don’t want to do with the time is fill it with online bullshit—the news, YouTube, Bluesky. I want to be bored, I want to relax, and I want to follow my nose.
Having said that, I really fancy getting the train to London for a couple of days and going to an art museum, some book shops, a good restaurant. And I want to go swimming in the daytime. And I want to get into a film project to post about on the website. And I want to keep writing the novel.
Only a couple more weeks. It’s close.
June 15 2025, 13:34
Soft machine
I’m thinking about digital gardens and my creative mechanisms. Making anything involves ideas, craft and tools. My current mechanism feels like a meat grinder. I’ve managed to make “creative writing” into something brutal and excruciating. Time to dismantle the machine.
This is what I do now
I go to the gym for weights. I stretch my hips at home.
I write in my notebook (a lot) to help me process things going on in my life, some dreams if I’m lucky, but mostly feelings and patterns. There are lots of notes towards a second novel.
I post to Bluesky, but recently I’ve been using an alt account because I needed to play around without censoring myself for an audience. I write the occasional blog post about my life. I read novels and post my notes on them to Patreon. Sometimes I’ll do a film challenge and post a series of short reviews. Once a month, I post a list of books read and films watched for paying patrons, and I started recording a vlog (which has stalled).
Every couple of years I redesign my website and move it to a new technology. I play a golf video game after work because it helps me relax and reminds me of my dad. My day job is mostly problem-solving, in software, systems and group dynamics.
My daughter introduces me to new music. I recently became obsessed with music reaction videos on YouTube—people recording themselves experiencing classic songs for the first time. (Coming off them now. I got addicted to the emotions.)
This is my creative life. Body. Bluesky. Blog posts. Novels and notes. Films. Coding (rare). Managing a team (9-5). A video game (one!). Music.
What’s the problem?
Anxiety. My anxiety says I’m not making anything. Not really. It says I’m not being serious. There’s no ambition. I say, I’m in survival mode. In other ways, I’m thriving, but my anxiety doesn’t buy that.
My mother was ambitious, my father wasn’t. Those two wolves still face off every day in my mind—one dissatisfied with her lot and wanting more, the other work-exhausted and wanting to hide in his burrow. I’ve created routines that serve the exhausted wolf because I’ve become a version of my father. My day job goes against my nature, but it keeps us all safe and warm. Dad climbed machinery in a steel works, I work at a desk with abstractions in code (and people).
Mum was a numbers gal, a bookkeeper, a jigsaw-lover, and did evening classes in all sorts of things. Dad read gigantic fantasy novels, watched old films and played golf. I have so many more opportunities than either of them had. Work makes the weeks go fast. Children make the weeks go faster. My notebooks fill up with the same old spirals. I keep thinking of my age, the age Mum was when she died, when I’ll die.
Possibilities
I want a softer machine, perhaps even something organic. An animal. A wolf wearing reading glasses. A panda. A Cronenberg-style metal-flesh hybrid. A naked woman. Talking books on a walking set of bookshelves. All of these. I want making to be fun.
It’s important I’m not just writing. The Bluesky alt account showed me the wonders of a free(r) libido. The animal wants what it wants and is surprisingly easy to negotiate with if I’m respectful. There’s no reason to limit myself. Piano. German. Learning to draw. Dungeons & Dragons (I loved being a Dungeon Master as a teen). Photography. Tennis. Travel. Let’s go!
Wanting success is the problem. The illusion of hard work guaranteeing success is baked into our culture. My mother believed it. Dad didn’t. The pressure that comes with that crushed the joy out of writing for me. I’d rather be ambitious for a full and interesting life.
What’s next?
I realise I’m restating similar ideas to my last post. That’s how it works in this house. I’m going to replace my author website with something more playful. I might link to a YouTube channel. I’m going to write less in my physical notebook and work through my daily shizz in more creative ways. Sometimes this will be online, mostly it won’t. There will be new skills.
I’m excited to be a beginner again. It’s going to be uncomfortable. My censor will try to block me. The internal chorus will try to shame me. The overwhelming feeling I have is a deep regret I didn’t understand all this sooner mixed with excitement that there is a wave building through these words with so much energy it could take me somewhere completely new.
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