Not much on that front, no news are good news.... no, wait, my sister is letting a flat and it got flooded just a couple of days after a new tenant moved in.

Now the tenant will believe that he was conned, which he wasn't because my sis had been living in the same place for 3 or 4 years before.

In the immortal words of that war criminal, Rumsfeld, shit just happens, it is one of those unknown unknowns.

- Work

Churning along. Fellow colleagues, both permies and contractors, keep falling up down and centre, which means my impending dismissal may not be that impending. If I make it to the end of Dec I may not need a new job until 2015. Crazy stuff....

- Travel

Packing tonight to go to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. I'll meet briefly my absolutely lovely red headed friend, whom I would take to the altar now, no questions asked, but life is not so easy.

Anyway, the company once she leaves is the best I could wish for, I am happy with my lot, one keeps wishing for more I suppose. The weather seems to be dreadful, why I am talked into doing this trip every year?

- Running

I just signed up for the British 10K in July and the London Parks Half Marathon in October.

If you would check the website you would see yours truly in one of the promotional pictures (I am not telling you which one :-) )  It is strangely compelling to see oneself there as part of the promotion of a major event like this, thousands of people eying you unconsciously while deciding if they want to subject their bodies to such abuse, it brings back home  all those terms and conditions one signs for when joining such races.

- Opera & music

PROMs season announced. NY Met Opera Season announced. Royal Opera House ditto.

So much to see, so little time....

- Film.

I have seen 3 films worth mentioning since my last diary:

  + Pina:  this is an absolute marvel of a film. I still shudder with emotion when I think about the choreography accompanied by Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring": it is beautiful, visceral, alluring, sexy, menacing, absolutely terrific, Stravinsky would have been very flattered, and Diaghilev very jealous.

  After that we are introduced to even more work by Pina Bausch, a name I was aware of, but since dance has never been my thing, I really didn't know much about her. What she was is a revolutionary, took dance by the scruff of the neck and brought it to the 21st century (i.e. she was ahead of her time since her body of work was done in the 2nd half of the 20th).

   All the bits that are shown of her better known choreographies leave you wanting even more, and if they don't you are not human.

   Wim Wenders is utterly marvelous making the dance eminently cinematic, I watched some old videos of the same work and they are very underwhelming. Wenders uses the film language to great effect and for the first time since Avatar I felt that the 3D was not just a gimmick, but an artistic statement.

  This is indispensable viewing @@@@@ without hesitation.

  + Little White lies:
  Ah, French cinema, where a wife sits very civil listening to another woman confessing that she fancies her husband, laughs the confession off, and the goes to sleep leaving her husband with the confessed traitor for the taking; or where a guy that knows he is not gay gets the hots for one of his hunky friends, who is angry at being the target of this unexpected attention, but never uncivil in general terms, and would you don't know it, both will come to a manly but sensitive reconcilation at the end of the movie.

   That is the tenor of this 2.5 hours film. Upper middle class people being miserable for the most varied reasons, the hunks (very hunky) with a sensitive heart and crying out their sensitive souls at the first opportunity, the women all pretty and desirable, but never outrageously beautiful, very green and organic and ecological and conscious and flirty and argh! fly me to Paris already please.

   And all of them anchored to what matters in life by the oyster merchant, the guy with perspective because he makes a living from the fruits of his manual labour.

   It sounds worst than it is, time and time again only the French can get away credibly with this kind of drivel, a @@@ for me.

   + How I ended my summer:

   Russian movies are always an unknown quantity, this one didn't disappoint. We have only 2 actors,both male, one a young pretty boy doing some short term project during the summer, the other an old rugged guy that has seen it all, both stationed somewhere in the Russian Arctic working for a scientific project of some kind involving some very nasty nuclear material.

   What they saved in acting talent is spent in location and filmography. The desolated landscapes are absolutely otherworldly, and the camera work is mesmerizing, they are literally painting with the landscape and the light, at some point overindulging so much that you can only think that the film becomes an homage to the work of Mark Rothko.

  This is not to imply that the acting is bad, in the contrary, the contrasting characters are played to perfection, they create the tension that drives the film, and although the plot is a bit messy, the descent into despair and madness is very well portrayed.

  Watching this would be time very well spent, in spite of the slowness of the film, which moves, fittingly , at glacial pace at times, but sometimes only at slow speed one can appreciate the beauty of desolation (bonus: you learn how to gut and air dry a trout, both the traditional method or the nuclear option, what is there not to like?).

   @@@@ without a doubt.

- TV

Haven't watched much, except the new Dr Who.

It went completely over the top of my head and I can't be bothered to watch it on iPlayer.

Initially I found the latest companion girl of the doctor very sexy (tall, svelte, young redheaded!) but more and more I begin to find her annoying. How can that possibly be?

- Books

One of note: Bestiario by Julio Cortazar. It deserves more commentary than this passing mention, may do it later.

- Cat and Polish people.

Polish builders gone. Kitchen is now modern, dragged to the 21st century from its former  Edwardian squalor without paying homage to the particular ways of the English builders.

Cat is now conspiring with the yummy Polish cleaner, she the cleaner spoils her the cat a lot, and the cat knows that a single smile of the cleaner is enough to convince me not to impose some much needed feline discipline.