weeknotes 26
It's been a very strange week, with my gran's funeral. Does going home and staying with your family make anyone else feel like a different person?
I'm looking forward to
- Going to Cardiff on the weekend to see my friend perform and then going on a night out with the girls.
Films 🍿🎥✮⋆˙
All of the films I saw this week were on the weekend:
Bergman Island (2021)
I enjoyed this meta drama about directors staying on the island where Bergman lived. I might have got more out of it if I'd watched any Bergman films, but I'm a sucker for a film in a film. Not as good as The Worst Person in the World, but gave me a similar feel.
Black Bag (2025)
I've seen a lot of "cinema is back baby!" reviews about this stylist spy thriller from Soderberg and it is very fun, go see it, but it's also pretty workmanlike and why all the bloom??
Ultraviolet (2006)
Awful action flick with Mila Jovovich but I knew what I was getting into. Looks like a bad racing game trailer.
Flow (2024)
Adorable animated cat! Although the animation style was giving video game to me, I couldn't fault the character and movements of the animals. It also gave an enjoyably eerie vibe - the impassiveness of nature, the giant whale, and alien world. Nature isn't good or bad, it just is.
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Enjoyed this a lot - British Hitchcock mystery thriller with a lot of fun characters and twists and turns.
I've been feeling 🫀🩹🥀❤️🩹
Very sensitive and tetchy - I got too drunk on Saturday and cried.
Weird about my life choices and my future. Aside from what I personally want, it's hard to think of any of these things while the world burns. It all feels impossible. I read a book called ~The Accidental Woman~ (see below) about a woman who's indifferent to life and it scared me; I don't want to live like that.
Overall though I'm grateful I feel a lot better than I did last year - I feel like I've got a much better handle on my emotions and I'm in a much better place - but still dissatisfied (are we ever satisfied?)
Things I've done ✎ᝰ.📓🗒 ˎˊ˗
Pilates on Monday was really the only exercise I got in this week.
I went out for a meal with some friends on Tuesday
I went to my Gran's funeral, then the wake on Thursday. I saw a lot of old family and friends - my Grandmother has five (adult) siblings, and I find it hard to keep track of all their children and and grandchildren.
I stayed with my parents on Friday, and spent the day with my Dad - we visited old family friends I knew from home-schooling - one of them is an artist, it was lovely to see them - and then we walked around Langland Bay.
I've been reading 🍵📖
Finished The Hunter by Richard Stark, finally. Started and finished The Accidental Woman by Jonathan Coe - it was funny until it became heart-breaking. I like the way it's written - very post modern with a narrator that intrudes into the text - but it felt too mean. (The author acknowledges this too).
Maria left him to it, walked out into the sunlight. Bright blue summer. She walked into town, jostled with the shoppers, gazed at the buildings, sat in a café, tried to feel part of a crowd. It didn't work. She heard the noises, distinguished the words, saw the faces, but at a distance, even now at a great distance. Alone. Alone, she left the café and walked towards Magdalene bridge. Light played on the water, shot it through with a cleaner green, light lit up her hair as she began her slow return. She trailed, conscious all around her of beauty, fond of the warm and pleased by the sense of a day already on the wane. A tremour of gladness, that's all, hardly noticed, and hardly to be trusted, for she had only her own word for it, alone. The Accidental Woman - Jonathan Coe
Links
I love the style of these bitsy games on itch.io, and they're fun to play. I especially liked Endless Scroll.
The Most Unsettling Inscription I've Ever Found on the Inside Cover of a Used Book, Bar None
Photos
See you next week ~ 👋