This is a hold-up

Got a message from elder daughter this morning. I was in the middle of my art lesson at the time, and my fellow students looked around for the harp. (I find it less stressful than the whistles and bells usually used for notification.)

When you have library fees, she texted from Hades, you are a "delinquent" user. Just one more delinquent book to go and then I should be on the straight and narrow.

She's been piling up and extending library holds since obsessively insisting on reading all seven books in the Harry Potter series in French. She thought she could do it over the Christmas holidays. She was wrong. She finished last week, and there's an impressive stack of library books on her coffee table.

Not that I can talk. I annually insist - that's "annually", not the other adverb you might be inserting - on watching as many Oscar-nominated films as I can manage before the Academy Awards ceremony. I got to five of the eight so-called Best Film nominees, plus a half-dozen films that figured in other categories.

This means I will be reading books from my own suddenly burgeoning holds list. Most of the films were "based on real events". We all know what that means, don't we? Two books on Dick Cheney (Vice) have just become available, and I expect my requested book on Queen Anne (The Favourite) to follow fast. I'll have to wait quite a bit longer for the books Can You Ever Forgive Me? and Black Klansman, the latter being the inspiration for this:

For the record, my favourite of the bunch was Roma, and my least favourite was Bohemian Rhapsody.

Sure, I like Queen, but this movie had every cliché in the book - which isn't on hold.