We have been irresponsible.
We did not go to work tonight for the second time this week.
Partly this is because tomorrow is Valentines, and we will be working for at least the five days that come afterwards, and more likely than not, for the rest of the following week as well, because it is half term. We thought we would have a rest in advance, as it were, as if somehow you could bank idleness and save it up to remember on a day when you were sick of work.
It is also partly because I have been longing to go and see a film about Shakespeare which has just been released last week.
It is called All Is True, and it is about Shakespeare when he comes back home to live with Anne Hathaway after he has been famous in London. It has got Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh and Ian McKellen in it, and so obviously it was going to be brilliant.
We should not have gone to see it because we didn’t have any money, but we wanted to very badly.
We had a brain wave and emptied the two pound coin collection, but we had forgotten that we had emptied it last week, and a lot of shaking produced six quid.
Six quid is not enough for the cinema.
We considered our next move, and in the end decided to throw ourselves on the Gods. I went to the gym, because of being fat and lazy, and Mark went to sit outside it in the taxi. This is because he does not like the gym at all. He has spent all of today splitting logs and does not wish to spend his leisure time attempting similar exertion.
By the time I came out, pink and trembly from exertion, he had made a tenner. This had just been good fortune. He had only had one customer but they had gone a long way. All the same, we thought, sixteen quid would get us to the cinema.
It turned out that Bowness cinema was not showing it. This is because the cinema in Bowness only shows things like Pirates of the Caribbean and Its A Wonderful Life at Christmas, in between concerts on the Wurlitzer organ and advertisements encouraging you to get drunk in the local pubs. I am pleased to say that I have never once been tempted to go to the various village restaurants who advertise in the cinema. They are supposed to be showing off their best wares, but actually the pictures would work just as well on a warning leaflet about diabetes.
We discovered that our film was showing in Ambleside, at a fairly new cinema called Fellinis. This used to be the Conservative Club when I was a young taxi driver, and I used to have to puff up the stairs and peer through the clouds of smoke to bellow “Taxi!” at the customers, who were elderly and drunk and deaf, and who ignored me anyway.
It has changed out of all recognition.
It is smooth and sophisticated and beautiful, with thick carpets and warm lighting. Also they sell wine.
They didn’t even do that when it was the Conservative Club.
This innovation meant that we didn’t have enough money after all, so we had to pay for it with Mark’s credit card, and since we were using it anyway we thought we might as well get some salted caramel popcorn as well, and complete our self-indulgence.
The film was lovely.
I am no film reviewer, and so will not go into detail on these pages about my opinions, except to say that it was gloriously beautiful to look at, and too quiet to eat anything crunchy out of a rustly bag. If you go to see it take Haribos and put them in a sock.
We liked it very much, except for the endless tiresome thing that people keep putting in modern films where they pretend that Elizabethan women were constantly railing against their unhappy misunderstood undervalued lot, and that they were equal to men really. Judi Dench did not do this, though, so it was all right.
We sat still and quiet afterwards for a few minutes, contemplating Shakespeare and Ian McKellen, which was one of the best bits. Our heads were full to bursting. It was a lovely moment.
We made our way home, and felt content.
It has been a brilliant winter for watching things. We have seen Shakespeare and Christopher Robin and A Game Of Thrones and Bohemian Rhapsody and Laurel and Hardy. This is the thing I love best about the dark nights, and I shall be sad when they are over. It is wonderful to watch all of these thrilling stories, just there on film in front of you, almost as if they were real. People are so clever.
This is an ace time to be alive.
Have a picture of the Library Gardens.
