Not snowing. Talking to anglers. Watching old films. Not quite meeting film makers.

I checked my weather app before I got ready to run this morning. It said, “snow stopping in ten minutes”. So I looked out of the window. No! No snow! It was a bit damp though. Yesterday’s sunshine was clearly just a brief interlude. The sun tried to come out later but it’s not been very successful so far.

I’ve noticed as I’ve run past one of the millponds over the last week that it is once again crisscrossed with blue ropes. This seems to happen every year at this time. As a rule the fishermen who sit around the pond are not great communicators. They give the impression that they really don’t want to be disturbed. This morning, though, there was one who was prepared spontaneously to say good morning. So I took advantage of his willingness to speak and asked if he knew what the blue ropes were all about. “It’s to stop the cormorants”, he told me. That’s a surprise. I’ve seen cormorants on the other millpond, the one without fishermen, and they tend to dive from the surface of the water where they are bobbing around, rather than diving from a great height and risking getting tangled in the blue ropes. But the fisherman (angler?) seemed convinced that that was the explanation and it will do until someone comes up with a better one. 

We’ve just re-watched the film “Once Upon a Time in the West”. I’d not really forgotten how beautiful the film is but it still surprises. We have a special edition DVD, made produced about 20 years ago, with a series of “extras” about how the film was made, the opinions of people involved with making it (generally that Sergio Leone was a wonderful man to work for because he loved actors, whether or not it was political (general opinion was that Sergio Leone was not really interested in making political points in his films but that because this one was about the railway crossing America it did have political content), and so on. 

One of the commentators was Alex Cox, the oddly elfin-looking independent film director. Many years ago we used to enjoy watching Alex Cox present cult films on the BBC series “Moviedrome”. According to Wikipedia, he went off the work in America, so I assume he is still there. 

In the early days of EasyJet, when Liverpool airport was still just developing and had not yet become Liverpool John Lennon airport, my daughter and I set off from there with Granddaughter Number One (n a tiny two year old) to go and visit my Spanish sister. In the airport I spotted Alex Cox and was about to go and tell him how much we appreciated his “Moviedrome” work. My daughter, 19 and sill young enough to be mortified if her mother did embarrassing stuff in public, actually held me back and would not let me cross the airport. It’s a good job I have a sense of humour! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!