R's rue

Last night I finished watching "The Kominsky Method" courtesy of Netflix. It consists of twenty two half hour episodes. I  saw all of them in seven days. The series was recommended to me by my friend Mike. It chiefly revolves around a Los Angeles stage school where has-been actor Sandy Kominsky puts his coaching "method" into practice. He is played by Michael Douglas who is not an actor I had previously registered much interest in. He kind of passed me by. "The Kominsky Method" is very nicely produced and it is imbued with quirky often subtle humour. The writing is solid and intelligent and there is a  laid back quality to the entire tapestry.  There's a refreshing and total  absence of guns, killings and screeching car chases. Instead the drama focuses upon relationships, ambitions, failures and the differences between people. Michael Douglas is a revelation - playing his part with dry self-deprecation and humanity. The well-known film criticism...

  My darkest time of lockdown was last winter I was on months of nights and like many of us, was physically and mentally isolated from the real world All I saw was work, death, colleagues and bed. As I drove into work, in the dark, I always drove through the slightly less salubrious suburbs of Llandudno. It was the ordinary people’s Llandudno. Not the small hotels, and genteel Victorian flats of the Promenade and Mostyn Street, but the flats of the working people and the smaller terraced houses of the older locals. Ordinary land. It was then I generally spied the girl. She always sat very upright at a table or desk in the window of her first floor apartment ( I use the word apartment because I’ve already overused the word flat) The lights were dim in the room but she was always illuminated by a pink desk lamp, either with her head down , presumably writing or reading or looking forward , seemingly ,in thought. She looked around 35, so was hardly a girl and with her ha...