Thursday, September 15

The weather turned distinctly autumnal at the beginning of the week and has maintained this policy ever since. Every morning has arrived with the sound of drizzle or rain. I have had no trouble avoiding morning walks.

Today I had two separate VAKEN meetings, one concerned with the near future and one concerned with longer term plans. I also did many other, more homely, things.

Now we have come to Itis to watch Where The Crawdads Sing, the second film that Olivia Newman has directed (the first: the aptly named First Match). It has received some tepid reviews. Emma Simpson, in the Radio Times, for example said that “What should have been a murky trawl through the swamp of small-town suspicion instead feels sanitized and poorly fleshed out”.

Not to us it didn’t. We both felt more like Marie Asner who said that the “atmosphere of the marsh is accomplished by Cinematographer Polly Morgan. You get the essence of sea marsh and what it takes to gain a living here”.

We both left the cinema feeling raised up by the film, and moved; but not before I had photographed a screenful of credits while Taylor Swift sang her specially composed song and the audience began milling around.

Agreed, the story did not have much substance, if we mean by that that it did not have a convoluted plot that twisted and turned, with a final twist to baffle and delight. The story moved in a straight line and didn’t need to do anything else.