It's Chriiiiiiistmaaaaas
Sorry for the brief pause in activity
One minute you’re looking forward to the start of Strictly and the next you’re looking down the barrel of Christmas like you’ve been holding your telescope the wrong way around.
How is it MID December?
Anyway, apologies to all for leaving the shop window bare. I shall now fill it with a full festive spectacular complete with life-size plastic reindeer and a nodding animatronic Santa with realistic beard.
I have been working my socks off on two big projects, both which have just entered “a new phase”. Isn’t it annoying when people enigmatically allude to things and then don’t tell you what they are?
But they are things I’ve been working on for ages and ages and frankly I am proud of myself for not giving up. When they finally come to fruition, I can add them to “having a baby” and “doing the marathon” as two more long, sometimes tedious endeavours that I persisted with despite my obvious lack of motivation.
And talking of that, I had a revelation a few weeks back when I was talking about one of the aforementioned projects to a friend. I marvelled at how a period of extended sluggishness (which I’d put down to grief and general fogginess of outlook) seemed to have lifted quite suddenly.
I found myself actually getting things done and even feeling driven to start new things. I didn’t recognise this new vigour or have any idea why it was making itself known at this juncture.
Then I realised, about 6 months ago, after a routine blood test, an HRT doctor had told me to try testosterone because I didn’t seem to have any at all. Barely a trace of it, she said.
I slapped the gel on, her warnings about being careful not to overdo it in case my voice started to lower and other things started to grow, ringing in my ears, and blow me if I have'n’t found my vavoom again.
Then I was furious. Do men feel like this ALL THE TIME??? Constantly driven to achieve and ready for the fight? (Not for A fight, I haven’t take that much.)
I have MANY recommendations for you if you seek brilliant things to watch while you stay indoors until March.
Let’s start with what I have just enthused about on BBC 6Music with Lauren Laverne this morning.
Typist Artist Pirate King is the new film by the genius Carol Morley. If that name rings bells it might be because you were floored by her 2011 film Dreams of a Life in which Zawe Ashton played a real woman called Joyce who lived a glamorous life among London’s party set before dying alone in her flat, undiscovered for two years.
It’s fair to say Carol Morely is tuned to a wavelength that belongs to the outsiders and the stories she tells are always so incredibly affecting because of her gentle curiosity. She seems to ask, “Who are you?” and it’s as though her subjects themselves are giving her the answer.
Morley came across the story for Typist Artist Pirate King while doing some work with the Wellcome Collection in London. There she found the archive of the artist Audrey Amiss who had died in 2013.
Audrey had been diagnosed with several mental health conditions over her 79 years including bipolar and paranoid schizophrenia. But she never stopped making art, whatever else was going on for her, she communicated so much through what she made.
She started out at the Royal Academy, but when her mental health was badly effected in the late 1950s, she was persuaded to retrain as a typist, a more sensible pursuit for a young woman. The title of the movie comes from her self-declared occupation on her passport.
Here she is played by the exceptional Monica Dolan, an actor so able to merge with her characters as to almost become invisible. Thanks in part to her beautiful performance (and this is an imagined story of Audrey going on a road trip with her mental health nurse) watching the film is like having a can opener taken to your heart.
It is not a film about mental illness: its limitations and the “bravery” of its sufferers. It is about life and living and how the brain that may have caused Audrey pain and difficulties in life, also let her fly free.
Her capacity for joy is total. When something good or magic happens, she holds it close, giving it a mythic status, like the handkerchiefs given to her by a little girl performing a parlour trick.
She sees magic in the mundane, documents her whole life in scrap books and seems entirely able to live in the now. It doesn’t diminish the terrible pain of her “madness” and how it impacted her and those around her.
But it speaks to the free-flowing joy of creativity that she so obviously enjoyed as her work transitioned from conventional art school work into something entirely direct and honest, grown-up brush strokes being replaced by crayon scribble and disarming line drawings that say everything with a few simple marks on paper.
I cried a lot during the film and I didn’t always know what I was crying about. But I do know that Audrey has something to teach us all about feeling and not being afraid to feel.
I think I also cried because, in my late 40s, I have only recently come to understand why it’s so important to make things, not just to talk about the things other people make. Make things and fail: that’s fine too. But do make things. What else are we here for?
I have also eaten up the three Doctor Who specials which marked the time traveller’s 60th anniversary, culminating in The Giggle, the episode that went out this weekend.
Russell T Davies is a man at the very height of his powers (although his height seems to be lasting for years and years, he is very tall). The perfect plotting over the three episodes, the repeated nods to the franchise’s greatest hits, the introduction of the brand new Who (Ncuti Gatwa), Bernard Cribbins’ swansong - there was so much to pack in and yet he accomplishes it all, building towards a cymbal-crash, symphonic climax in which he (spoilers) gave us those glorious scenes between the old and new Doctor.
I think now is a good time to remind you that I predicted who the new Doctor would be well over A YEAR before it was announced. But, as my husband keeps reminding me, I did not put a bet on and this was a grave error.
Still, I get to boast about it.
What else? Oh, I’m still really enjoying The Doll Factory on Paramount+ (also getting its terrestrial screening, weekly on Channel 5) and am absolutely beasting the new series of Slow Horses on Apple TV+ because it makes my jaw hang with its brilliance.
You’ll just have to accept this picture of Gary Oldman eating an ice cream in the new series because apparently “Jackson Lamb vest” is too niche even for the internet. There’s always freeze frame.
If you’re still reading, you deserve a treat. So do hop over to Margaret Cabourb-Smith’s brilliant Substack where she posts ad-free versions of her BRILLIANT podcast Crushed and all sorts of other lovely stuff about love and life.
In fact, go there specifically on Christmas Eve and you can listen to Margaret and me talking about crushes and Love, Actually, my favourite festive subject. It was an absolute hoot to record and a small contribution to Marg’s fund is the only way to hear it.
I think that’s all for the festive catch-up. Do tell me what you’ve been watching and enjoying with the curtains shut.
And if I don’t see you before, have a very Happy Christmas.