I walked to Notting Hill in the sunshine, planning to have a coffee and do some work (I would have got the tube, but there are no number-plates underground - I think the vast scraps of my sanity have fallen into the dust).
I managed to do a bit, but then started feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude and number of the tasks that lie ahead of me (that's good- I shouldn't want to have to do any of them. The 50 dates is the one that fills me with the most fear and which in all probablilty will prove to be the most arduous and dangerous of them all). I also still have to come up with a few more things to do, though feel sure that these will come to me. I do then also have to write and rehearse and learn a show about it all (and although that will be difficult, I think it would be wrong to include that as one of the tasks, as it is after all my job). Ah well, it will keep me off the streets. Or it would if one of the tasks wasn't CNPS.
The problem with being overwhelmed is that it sort of puts you off working and so I decided to do something I haven't done for a while and enjoy the delicious naughtiness of going to the cinema on my own in the afternoon.
I chose to see "Shaun of the Dead". Given it was 4.15 the place was hardly packed. Two or three other men on their own were dotted around the auditorium. They looked a bit strange and sad and alone. I realised that that was what I must also look like to them. But I was skiving and being a rebel, so they were wrong to think that of me. I was putting two fingers up to my boss and saying "Screw you and screw your job!" As my own boss I found my actions reprehensible and made a note to give myself a firm talking to in the morning.
The film is (unusually for a British comedy) pretty damned funny, but although it's mainly a fairly silly take on what it would be like if zombies took over the world and it took you a while to notice, it did also make me think a bit. And actually made me a bit depressed and unsettled and leave the cinema looking at the world in a different way.
We are all so sure of the basic solidity of our world and our society that it is actually almost impossible for us to realise how fragile everything is; how it could all get fucked up and go wrong. The way the characters merrily carry on with their fairly useless life without realising that the world is possibly ending clearly demonstrates this.
But as the people of Pompeii would testify if they hadn't been covered in all ash and stuff. Terrorists, meteorites, bombs capable of destroying cities, viruses, global warming - all lined up ready to put an end to everything we know and understand. And now I have to worry about zombies on top of that.
As the lights came up at the end and the other three single men lumbered out of their seats, it was very easy to see where the creators of this film had got their ideas. I needed to go to the toilet, but one of the others was in there by now and I worried that if I followed him in he would attack me and eat my intestines.
Yeah, like I say, really funny film.
