Le Havre

Just a quick one because it's a day-stopping night in the English cultural calendar this evening--the Eurovision Song Contest First Semi-Final. Me and the girls are going to have a party with scorecards and crisps and other equally nutritious "food", while Kirsty squirrels herself upstairs and packs for Italy. Dads get all the best jobs.

But Le Havre. Partly because Nursey mentioned it in a comment.

Sixth Form Girl had had her hair cut short, which set the pattern of the evening. Of course I said I liked it--it's her decision and it's not me she's after--but seeing her cropped, rounded hair, I had to compose my face to hide my disappointment at not seeing the untrammelled black hair falling over her shoulders that I have liked about her since she was seventeen.

She went into the cinema first and I clambered over the seat behind her to avoid disturbing the two lesbian people sitting next to us. They looked at me with some surprise. "Yes, I know, she is good-looking isn't she? Up yours."

Always beware of films that reviewers describe as "heartwarming."

The black child protagonist was accorded little agency or roundness of character, positioned instead as a visual source of images of poverty and blackness, and a narrative hook upon which to hang some clichés of film. The film ended with the previously hard-hearted Inspector melting with forgiveness as he looked into the hold of a boat and saw the child's supplicating face, like the opening scenes of charity ads seeking standing orders for Africa, before your £5 a month has an entire village frollicking under a standpipe.

There was the unexplained sudden appearance of an old flame, who rekindled--to doubtful advantage--the singer Little Bob's ability to run through some off-the-shelf rockabilly-lite--with the vocalists managing somehow to be heard over the band without the use of microphones. Then there was the equally filmically lazy sudden recovery from a fatal illness of Marcel's wife Arletty as soon as the refugee saving mission is complete.

The company was intelligent and pretty, but the Ringwood Bitter and the craic in the pub afterwards were the best part of the evening.

I intercepted Gillian at the breakfast table this morning and asked her, trembling tinily, ashamed at my lack of fine motor control and resolution, whether she'd be OK to give me the money tomorrow. She said yes casually and I sat with some coffee and we had a pleasant enough chat, marbled with my uneasiness.

Montenegro's entry includes the words "analphabetic" "hermetic" and "dialectic", and includes a scene of a man massaging a donkey.

Montenegro 2012: Rambo Amadeus - Euro Neuro