The cafe in Chester’s Storyhouse doubles as a library and a study area. Consequently it is always busy with tables filled with students on their laptops and diners eating Trendy bites.
I found a table only frequented by one academic type at his computer and asked if I could share. He readily agreed and made room for me when I returned with my Americano.
As I sat down the man pointed to my T-shirt and asked if I was being ironic
I told him that I was but added that most herbivores were big boned.
He laughed and said he wasn’t inferring anything.
The man was slim and smart and was in his forties. He looked Middle Eastern or perhaps Egyptian but had a crisp radio 4 accent.
I looked at my phone and I could feel him looking at me.
We fell into an easy conversation .
He asked me what I did for a living and mentioned he had done some work in Chester’s Hospice collecting recorded thoughts and reflections from patients. I shared that I had done the same from older residents in Trelawnyd .
We discussed the use of memory boxes in hospice care ( they are boxes of memories some patients like to prepare for their loved ones to reflect upon after their death) and my companion shared that he’d often thought about videoing messages for his children to see after his death .
As I sipped my coffee, he looked at his watch and said he had to go.
“ You have a happy face” he said as he gathered his bag and I laughed in genuine surprise
“See you again in here” he said before leaving.
And he left me pleased and intrigued
The conversation was as refreshing to me as a beer is to a tired man on a very hot day.
Jack Lowdon
I went to see the rather sad drama Benediction which is the story of the wartime poet Siegfried Sassoon from his invalided exit from the army, his subsequent unhappy relationships with Stephen Tennent and Ivor Novello, through an unhappy marriage ending with his conversion to Catholicism as an older man .
The narrative, especially the ones of the wartime years, is told in a series of cinematic tableaux where music and poetry, photographs and live action build a picture of a man haunted and angered by the horrors of war but as the story moves towards Sassoon’s search for love the plot becomes a little more traditional.
Jack Lowdon is impressive as the angry and eventual rather lost Sassoon. Mathew Tennyson is heartbreaking in his short but pivotal role as the gentle Wilfred Owen who Sassoon meets in the Scottish “neurological/ psychiatric” hospital and Ben Daniels gives the bleak first half some warmth as his role of Dr Rivers, a gay psychiatrist who sees the world with some welcomed benign pragmatism
Terence Davies has produced an impressive but overwhelmingly sad film about failure, survivor guilt and sexual shame.
from Going Gently https://ift.tt/W0UX7pi
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