Tomorrow I fly out to Melbourne for a 10 day stint of talks and workshops, expecting some warm sunshine for a change after our horrible weeks. I hear from colleagues there that the weather has just turned – cold and rainy. Here it has just turned sunny and warm-ish.
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Blade Runner – the Director’s cut
I have just got back from seeing Blade Runner. This ‘director’s cut’ has been around for a while but I have never seen it. Its also the first time I have seen it on a big screen with decent sound (music is by 80s icon Vangelis and at times I imagined it turning into the theme from Chariots of Fire. Luckily it didn’t. Having seen so much of Harrison’s Ford’s laid back acting style in other films I took more notice of beautiful replicant Sean Young. What’s fantastic about cinema is that the screen is so big so that ultra closeups of replicant Rachel undoing her hair, for example, and her highly produced lips are breathtaking and intimate and of course I couldn’t help falling in love with her. It would be impossible not to. She was so beautiful and so vulnerable and this is clearly what Ford’s character, Deckard, is drawn to. Now, there is the debate about whether Ford is actually a replicant himself, a suggestion which I don’t like for some reason as it spoils the intense and central ambiguity about a human falling in love with a non-human, but apparently director Ridley Scott has acknowledged that it is plausible – for a couple of very subtle plot reasons. Check here from 7 years ago or here.
Follow the Christ
Just when I was having problems: 1) I wanted to improve family life. I was planning to buy a new three piece suite and get cable TV – but not any more. 2) I wanted to oppose the devil, of course, and was planning to do this by buying a new three piece suite and getting cable TV. But this flyer arrived through my letterbox.
Motorcycle trauma
Yikes! Riding a bike is so difficult! Its so scary for a start. Today we Camriders were on 500cc machines for the first time. And we drove down onto the A14 going north out of Cambridge, jostling with the articulated lorries that look just big from a car but look enormous from a bike. As our instructor urged us to wind it up to 70mph, the signs flashed by detailing how many deaths that stretch of road had claimed last year. We survived, me and a female school teacher who looks around my age or a bit younger, but with so many faults pointed out by our increasingly grumpy instructor (who has a bad knee injury that we could see was getting more and more uncomfortable) that by the end of the day I am feeling despondent about it.
I have one more four hour session then on Thursday morning I take the test. I will have to really focus and sort out my faults in that four hours or there is no chance at all to pass. Hmmm. Interesting. Learning new skills later in life is interesting and certainly an opportunity for reflection: how do I deal with criticism and lack of confidence? Do I deal with it better now than I did 30 years ago? Is it harder to learn? Do I understand physical learning? I’m also keen to know what brought the instructors into the job. Maybe I will ask. I notice some similarities in how I respond to a tough day on the bike to my experience as a student nurse when I was in my early thirties coping with very high stress situations (e.g. first ward of training on a head injury unit). There’s something similar about the vulnerability of being in these situations with little confidence. However now, its not so ghastly….
Watch this space (if anyone ever does) to see how I got on with the test on Thursday.