Twaddle

We have watched another film.

I can jolly well tell you that it was twaddle.

It was about Mary Queen of Scots and clearly the people who had written the script had never met her. Not only had they never met her, they had obviously never met anybody who knew anything about her.

I have never met Mary Queen of Scots either, but if all modern films are as dreadful as that one, then we have wasted our money on the purchase of a film-watching machine.

In this cinematic interpretation, Mary Queen of Scots had a multi-racial court and demonstrated a remarkably forward-thinking acceptance of trans-gender issues when her musician dressed up in her clothes and explained that really he felt as though he was her sister.

I am not terribly woke myself, but did not think that this was any reason to stab him to death. We knew the people who did so were baddies because they clearly did not accept trans-gender issues, which was jolly intolerant and un-woke of them.

I was also irritated beyond measure by a scene in which Mary, who had retained her youthful good looks because of being a goodie, met Queen Elizabeth. Misfortunately the latter had aged into a hideous harridan because of being a baddie. They met in somebody’s garden shed which had just been inconveniently draped about with washing, which is what anybody would do if two monarchs popped round and asked to borrow the garden shed for some international diplomacy. They wandered about bumping into the washing and never seeing one another until the final moment of dramatic and highly symbolic effect when Mary tore down the washing and lost her temper.

I had lost my temper several minutes before. They had both announced several times, loudly and clearly, that their garden shed meeting should be as secret as if one of them had just had a positive test for bat flu, and that no record of it should remain anywhere. This probably explains the difficulty that no such record does, indeed, remain anywhere.

I can hardly believe that such utter drivel should somehow have found somebody to fund it, and worse, that we actually paid money to watch it on Amazon Prime.

I am feeling disappointed. I had high hopes for our film-watching future.

In its favour, there were some magnificent views of the Scottish highlands, some of which they told us untruthfully were at Carlisle, and we occupied much of the film looking for bits which might be familiar from our regular journeys up and down taking Oliver to and from school.

We didn’t see any, mostly because they didn’t feature the A9 in it at all.

It could only have improved it if they had.

We have had an email from Oliver today, which was rather splendid, I had been contemplating ringing the housemaster to check that he was not dead. He is not dead, just too busy to write letters, which actually I think is a jolly good sign. It is dreadful when your children are at the terrible first-stages of boarding school homesickness when they ring you all the time.

He said that he would like pizza for his birthday, so I rang Matron to arrange it whilst Mark was busy drilling holes in the living room wall for hanging the new film-watching machine.

When he had finished we had a terribly anxious few minutes of trying to lift the thing up and slot it neatly on to its hooks.

I can hardly tell you how relieved I was when we let go and it stayed there. We have brought the picture downstairs ready for Phase Two of the installation, as you can see on the photograph. It has been sitting in the loft for ages, waiting for the renovations to be finished, and it is a happiness to be looking at it again.

I shall be quite glad when we go back to work and are not tempted to watch films any more. That is two films this week now, and we are not managing to get anything else done.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they hadn’t been such twaddle.