In true reckless spendthrift style we have blown every penny of last night’s admittedly rubbish takings on a trip to the Royalty cinema in Bowness to see Beauty and the Beast.
I am not normally a great fan of Bowness Cinema, any cinema which still has a Wurlitzer organ coming up through the floor is in my opinion in need of some drastic modernisation, but they had turned the heating on, which was a good start, and although not quite an IMAX it turned out to be absolutely ace.
Obviously we all went, it was not a romantic mummy-and-daddy-date-night. If we had done something like that probably Mark would have gone to see The Fast and The Furious, and I would have gone to see Their Finest. We had a family outing, including Harry, starting with I Spy in the car on the way down, which was mercifully short as Bowness is about five minutes away, and finishing with violent abuse in the kitchen when we got home.
Beauty and the Beast is a splendid film, including a brilliant castle with staircases and ledges of the sort that occasionally appear in nightmares of mine when I have had cheese for dinner. Everybody was dressed magnificently, and the princess was beautiful, I think I would like to be her when I grow up. The beast turned out to be the chap from Downton Abbey in disguise, which was an unexpected twist, sorry if I have spoiled that for anybody who hasn’t seen it, and I loved every gloriously overdone minute.
We ate buckets of popcorn, and Oliver and Harry had candy floss, and felt very pleased indeed with the evening. We enjoyed it so much that we stayed in our seats all the way through the credits until the box office lady started to get cross, and turned all the lights on and started telling people to go home.
We got home to the disconcerting discovery that we had made a mess of the going out process. We had put a barrier over the stairs to stop the dogs from going up and down. We use this when the children are not here, mostly, actually it is a large cardboard box, but they can’t get past it. If we forget then they seem to believe that we won’t know if they go and get in our bed and have fights or bring bits of chicken bone out of their dishes for picnics. Once we found lots of wrappers from stolen Christmas tree chocolates guiltily stuffed under the pillows.
We had remembered to put the barrier there, but it turned out that we had neglected to ensure that the dogs were on the right side of it, and when we got home we discovered that one dog had been imprisoned upstairs.
He was not quite sure whether to be pleased to see us or not, having presumably spent the evening in forbidden activities like chewing the rug in my office, which is an inexplicable favourite. Roger Poopy, who had been downstairs, was so pleased at his return that he charged about barking for ages, which metamorphosised into some domestic violence, mostly involving Oliver.
We enjoyed it all very much, I think I would like a yellow princess dress and a red cloak for my birthday.
I haven’t got a picture of their thrilling castle, so I have stuck a picture of our holiday castle on the top.
When I look at it the colour of the sky makes me feel depressed. It really was that colour. That is why Disneyland was not built in the Lake District.
