Anti-natal
You might wonder how on earth a creature that can’t even pick things up gets to have dirty fingernails in the first place. I’m wondering the same thing, but I’m in no position to harry because a hairdresser told me once I had the dirtiest hands he had ever seen on an adult woman. Anyway, back to the cinema …)Let me explain the rudiments - until your child is a year old, you can take it to these special screenings at the pictures, where it’s allowed to scream its little head off and nobody can complain because theirs will probably start up in a minute, too. T almost never has a problem that can’t be solved by sticking something in his mouth, but D, my niece, goes by the nickname Angry D, and might at any time take a violent dislike to the music of Joy Division or the smell of popcorn, or the dark. D, by the way, is four weeks older than T, and people often ask me and my sister, S, whether we timed it on purpose. At this point, I launch into a sarcastic monologue about how totally daft we would have to be, only I think it suffices to say, how daft would we have to be? And plus, how freakishly fertile?Sorry, back to the cinema. It is good for a load of reasons - you get a free croissant. You get to half-watch a film that you would otherwise have to wait a year to half-watch on DVD. Cinemas tend not to put on kid-friendly films because that’s the opposite of the point - children are only allowed in when they are too young to understand, so paradoxically, the programming is rather adult. The first film T and I saw was Control, the Ian Curtis biopic (C waved us off, saying, “Have a nice time! I hope nobody commits suicide.”). The exception to this was one week when they screened Ratatouille and S was so enraged that she now even calls the dish rata-fucking-touille*.I haven’t read a film review in ages - well, I can tell you exactly how long, six weeks and six days - so all I know about films is what I gather from the trailer on telly and consequently everything looks really exciting. S will call and say, “They’re showing Eastern Promises”, and I’ll go, “I’ve seen the trailer and it looks really exciting”, and she’ll go, “Plus, it will be nice for the babies to see Viggo Mortensen’s knackers”*. Then we’ll get there, and they’ll have changed it to Elizabeth: The Golden Age, only I won’t mind, because the trailer for that looked really exciting as well (D hated Elizabeth, though we will have to wait until she’s older before we know whether it was Cate Blanchett or Clive Owen who really set her off. So we had to leave in the middle, but we had a fair idea of how it was going to end, on account of how neither of us speak Spanish).The downside, naturally, is that you can’t concentrate. My friend P sat through the whole of The Bourne Identity under the impression that it was Bridget Jones’s Diary, thinking, she hasn’t put on that much weight … I wonder why she’s being chased by all those black cars.It is, of course, possible your child will drop off to sleep immediately - in which case, you’ll probably go to sleep too. All you’ve done is pay for a nap whose unorthodox timing is going to bugger your afternoon, or looked at another way, bought yourself a %26pound;6 croissant.*I have made it sound as if my sister is the one with the filthy mouth. This is a gross misrepresentation, even though it’s true that these are direct quotes.
Tags: cars, cate, cate blanchett, dirt, issa