Yuletide treasure

The rainy night, with its sinister swinging shadows, created by high winds, has left a shiny new day and new year.

This morning, the pavements were littered with twigs and chunks of bark blasted off the aging trees of our neighbourhood.

It's the eighth day of Christmas, so we're still exchanging a few gifts, and enjoying the last precious hours before elder daughter flies away back to Hades.

I thought I'd hastily leave a record of some of the treasures given me this Christmas - aside from time with family.

I saw three ships go sailing out?

The lights are going out in the holiday harbour, which seems not right and unfair, seeing as this is only the eighth day of Christmas. Younger daughter is forced into the icy waters of the new year on Monday (the tenth day of Christmas), and elder daughter returns to Halifax on the eleventh day of Christmas. With New Year's Eve Eve, rain came and washed away the filthy snow. We have filthy puddles instead.

Sometimes I feel life is a test for which I have failed to study.

I feel the engines of the boat beginning to vibrate. Time to move out into 2011. Let's do it together.

Courage.

The ninth day of Christmas (the annual New Year's Day movie)

For most of our marriage, the Resident Fan Boy and I have taken in a movie on New Year's Day. As I said yesterday, New Year's is rather a nothing sort of holiday, and seeing a movie not only gives us a focus for the day, but oddly enough, the movie seems to set the tone for the rest of the year. This means choosing carefully. Given how 2008 has been, I didn't think Doubt or Milk would be quite the boost we needed, although I do plan to see them before awards season kicks in. I decided to take in Happy-Go-Lucky. Minimal research seemed to reveal it was about a London school teacher who is...happy. A quick check at the Yahoo! Movies site hinted at a flick that was liked better by the critics than the viewing public, and indicated that the viewing public was split into two camps: those who loved it ("enchanting" "interesting" "funny"), and those who hated it ("boring", "pointless", "no &*%$#ing plot"). Seeing as I've liked the Mike Leigh films I've seen, I gambled that I'd fall into the former camp.

So the RFB and I found ourselves trudging through the streets on a crystal-clear and bitterly cold first January afternoon to the ByTowne Cinema, an arts movie house which is, fortunately in view of the continuing bus strike, a 25-minute trot from our house. It's an enormous old-fashioned cinema, complete with a balcony. As you take your seat, it's easy to spot the regulars. They're the ones circling the auditorium and giving you the evil eye because you've taken "their" seats. It occurred to me that I haven't been to the ByTowne in over a year. Since it's a repertory sort of system, it's a challenge catching the film you want at the time you can actually get to the theatre, especially since the 9 o'clock show is out of the question for me and I tend to nod off even at the 7 pm screenings, which leaves me only weekend matinées...

Watching Happy-Go-Lucky, I was rather pleased I'd read some reviews first, and thus was braced for the plotlessness. The film follows a few summer weeks in the life of Poppy (Sally Hawkins), and it does feel like we're trailing a supporting character of another movie, or of several other movies. Each of the characters Poppy encounters could have a film made about them: a grim book store owner, a slightly-unhinged flamenco dancer, a very unhinged driving instructor, a deranged street person, a troubled little boy who hits his classmates, even Poppy's relaxed room-mate or bickering sisters. And in each of these stories, Poppy would be the shining little bit part, or supporting role, or comic relief.

However, this movie is entirely from Poppy's point of view except for a brief glimpse of her room-mate at work in another school. And Poppy is...happy. And lucky. She's not oblivious; she is aware of suffering and does try to intervene, but she refuses to let anyone's misery pull her into the depths. She's lucky because she's a young, attractive, employed person with a circle of friends living in a particularly lovely version of London. The camera often sits back and lets you take in the whole of the scene, or linger on an interesting face in the background.

I suppose we're left with the question: Is Poppy happy because, as she says, she's lucky? Or has she chosen to have a sunny disposition, finding that this is what works best for her in coping with whatever wanders into her path? I left the movie quite liking Poppy, but wondering how irritating I'd find her in real life.

Part of the fun of watching a Mike Leigh film is recognizing faces in passing. If you look at the photo, you might recognize the flamenco student to Poppy's left and our right. It's Rebekah Staton who played Jenny/Mother of Mine in that most splendid of Doctor Who episodes, Human Nature/Family of Blood. Remarkably enough, she doesn't have a speaking part in this. I understand Mike Leigh's films are workshopped, so I suppose anything she had to say was edited out.

After the film, the Resident Fan Boy and I headed home. It was only four o'clock but the sun had nearly set, and the towers of Parliament Hill and the Basilica stood out darkly against the gold-rimmed sky. The deserted streets were white with the cold, not with snow, and I sadly realized that we only have three days left before returning to the strains and stresses of the everyday. What about me? Can I choose to be happy? Or am I not quite lucky enough?

I'm gonna wash that man right out of my basket

"As the first day of the year goes, so goes the year," intoned my husband, as we trudged down through horizontal snowfall to the bus stop. I got really worried about this ten minutes later, as I stood blinking back tears, gazing into the window of one of the neighbourhood's recently bankrupted coffee shops, wondering why I persist in leaving the travel planning to him. A bus eventually showed up and we made it to Atonement on time, our choice for this year's New Year film. Therefore, I am refraining from doing the Resident Fan Boy's laundry today, as he has just told me that there is a superstition which holds that washing someone's clothes on New Year's Day will wash that person out of your life. Which means, I guess, that you should offer to do laundry for your bêtes noirs today.


This has been the sort of Christmas that Ottawans like to imagine is typical of their Christmas. Less than half of our eight (oh gawd, 8?) Christmases here have been white; the rest have been grey, kind of khaki, and usually icy. The Resident Fan Boy and I made our way through the streets from the movie, there being little bus service on this eighth day of Christmas. I cursed myself for failing to bring my camera as we waded down a deserted Sparks Street where a quartet of naked black statues gamboled in the swirling flakes, past the nearly whited-out tomb of the Unknown Soldier, by Laura Secord standing forlornly like the little match girl, only far better clad in her empire-line coat and bonnet. Story-book flakes continued to dance down on tobogganers at McDonald Gardens Park ("If we were half-decent parents," I remarked, "we'd be taking our children tobogganing instead of pissing off to movies.") and people with the countenances of pilgrims parading down Charlotte and over the St Patrick's bridge, shouldering snowshoes, cross-country-skiing paraphernalia, or snowboards.

Atonement, all in all, seems a splendid way to start the new year. I think the Resident Fan Boy found it a tad depressing, but I'm with Stephan Moffat who has Sally Sparrow in his Doctor Who episode Blink declare: "Sad is happy for deep people." Moffat may be full of it, for all I know, but sad good art doesn't depress me, while bad art invariably does, no matter how upbeat.

Anyway, Atonement: splendid cinematography; Keira Knightly acting like Helena Bonham Carter for the first half, and Winona Ryder for the second; five glorious minutes of Vanessa Redgrave; and a plot which, despite zigzagging back and forth (which would drive my mother wild), is enthralling and plausible --- except for one bit and by the end of the movie, you know why this is so. Oh yes, and I'm not sure what James McAvoy's character would be doing deep in the war and ready to be evacuated from Dunkirk four years after the initial events which are supposed to have occurred in 1935. Not-so-upbeat artistic license, perhaps?