Rats!

Last night I watched Gus Van Sant’s film Elephant which I most strongly recommend to anybody who hasn’t seen it yet. In my humble opinion, it’s an extraordinary piece of filmmaking and kind of inscrutable, in a good way. I couldn’t stop thinking about it all day.

It’s amazing what a bit of clean living does for one. I was up at six-thirty this morning and full of the joys of…well, spring I suppose. The weather is so fantastic it actually does feel like spring here, without all the darling buds of May. I was ‘at work’ by eight-thirty and continued through the morning churning out more prose per hour than a battery of Mills & Boon writers. Feeling pleased with my achievement I grabbed a tin of sardines off the shelf to celebrate, then sauntered down to the riverbank with a spring in my step (that’s three repetitions of spring, sorry – Paul Merton please takeover on the subject of Geoff’s blog).

It was so warm I stripped down to my t-shirt and made myself comfortable at the foot of some creaky wooden steps at the water’s edge. I wrote for a while, then did a touch of bird spotting, but my kingfisher chum was on his day off. I lay back against the grassy bank and continued reading the rather fantastic ‘Eleanor Rigby’ by Douglas Coupland which was lent to me by somebody with very good taste in literature, and everything else for that matter. I was getting stuck in, the ducks were quacking and I was lost in the story when I became aware of something nestling against my shoulder. I turned my head, and there was my big fat rat friend come to say hello. He did make me jump, and that startled him so he scurried off, looking over his shoulder at me accusingly. It wasn’t until later on, as the sun was going down I tore my eyes away from the book to see three more big rats scrabbling about very close to me. Quite possibly I was sitting very close to a lair, and I started getting James Herbert-stylee visions of being carried off by hundreds of rats and dragged into a tunnel deep in the banks of the Dordogne. I took another one of the special little green pills the doctor gave me and felt much better. Actually, I quite like rats, with their little twitchy noses, whiskers and twinkly eyes, even if they do carry bubonic plague and the black death – I’m sure they would quite happily pass up on that responsibility given half the chance.

Well, it seems to happen everyday, but yes, the sun went down and I watched the whole performance. The sun was as big as ever I have seen it, and sent Munch-like upside-down exclamation mark reflections across the still waters. I took so many photos, if you put them altogether and flicked through quickly it would be like watching a very dull film by Andy Warhol, but without Candy Darling. The photo above is possibly the best one, because of the ducks who were very happy to be directed and a joy to work with.

Back indoors, more writing, then tea with Cinema Paradiso – which I thought I knew but I must have been asleep or pissed last time because I didn’t remember any of it. I didn’t cry at the end – does that make me a bad person?