Some success and some annoyances.

We successfully took ourselves off to see Kurosawa's film Ran yesterday. What a relief! It was worth the effort: a very impressive if rather stylised film. Many scenes involving extensive dialogue seemed to be filmed exactly as they might have been played on stage. But it worked; all the careful movements appeared to add significance to what was being said. The huge outdoor scenes, including battle scenes with castles burning, were particularly impressive, the more so when you consider that they were done without computer generated images. Astounding! 

Getting to the cinema was not a problem. Getting back was a different matter. The film was due to start at 19.50 and was supposed to be 2 hours and 40 minutes long, a length that no film comes even close to nowadays. We had calculated that if we hurried to the nearest tram stop as soon as the film finished, we had a good chance of catching the last train from Manchester Victoria station to Greenfield. We already knew that, no matter which means of transport we chose from Manchester, it would already be too late for a bus to Delph. A taxi from Greenfield would only cost half as much as a taxi from Oldham; so the train to Greenfield was preferable to the tram to Oldham. 

Of course that did not happen. In the first place the screening began ten minutes late and then there were the trailers for the films which are "coming soon". This last bit took at least another five minutes off our timing. Nonetheless, as soon as the film was over we hurried out and hot-footed it to the nearest Metrolink station. The clock there showed 22:56, four minutes until the last train from Victoria was due to leave. But the next tram to Victoria was not due for another six minutes. That plan was not working! However, we could still catch a tram and then take a taxi from Oldham and be home before midnight, the witching hour or the time when fairy tale princesses turn back into raggedy-dressed kitchen girls, coachmen into mice and fancy coaches into pumpkins! 

Leaving the tram in Oldham we headed for the taxi rank. There was a taxi available. So far so good. Then, not even five minutes into the journey home the taxi made a curious kind of banging noise. I wondered of we had gone over a particularly large speed bump. No! A puncture was the cause of the thumping! We sat in the taxi while the driver made phone calls. It's a good job we are not paranoid or we might have suspected a possible kidnapping plan! (I think I have been reading too many detective stories and novels involving mafiosi!) 

So we waited for about ten minutes for another taxi, summoned by our apologetic driver, and finally completed our journey, after our midnight deadline but at least we did not turn into white mice or pumpkins!