Never short of discoveries, friends to keep, semi-organised heaps of stuff to read and ideas to explore, I find the hard part of definitively returning to the Factory after a fragmented summer break isn't the work and the company. Both can be great fun.
Will I ever happily accept the intrusion of time and schedules into my days, though? Reason says such "constraints", like work, are essential, that I'm lucky to earn a living in ways I enjoy and mustn't resent what Tony's called sworn enemies of the serious drin- thinker.
I do too much thinking anyway. But ye gods, how I look forward to eventual retirement". Again, I'm fortunate: I've no excuses to get bored.
This notion was brought to mind by recent words with some of the annual lot of those whose "careers" have just drawn to an end. It's evident that what a few fear is less tedium than being cut off: that I can understand.
Before the iPod, vast tracts of my music collection sat there as highly recommended or promising sounds I was saving to hear and sometimes write about after my own time to quit comes. The little, white 20 GB design masterpiece changed this; every day can bring surprises, many worth writing up ... but when?
I felt the same on seeing the whole of Paul Verhoeven's notorious 'Basic Instinct', rather than just catching steamy bits on telly. I loved it. Many don't, considering the tortuous plot absurd, repugnant, slick and twisted. David Perry was kinder, but still found that Verhoeven "hasn't the slightest restraint from making this film into a teenager's wet dream" (Cinema Scene).
I wasn't quite such an imaginative teenager. Not that way, anyhow. Since a journalist's job includes finding an angle, the review I most enjoyed is by Ian Waldron-Mantgani, who bit the bullet -- or took an ice-pick to the heat -- in February 2003, declaring:
"the sucker is almost eleven years old. Could we be ready to stop sniggering about it and admit to its status as a modern classic?" (UK Critic)
It's nice when somebody says things to save you breath.
Meanwhile, I find the magic musical box's hard-wrought store of sound for every occasion, place and mood proves to contain a prodigious number of love songs, many well written and often in French. Probably I'll soon blog more on this year's exploration of the voices of women round the world.
Yet something lacks. Lots of fine singers express feelings on love from all angles, frequently when it's all supposed to be over; but I'm short on songs by and about people who willingly lose their hearts to a lifelong dream come true, find this conviction can't be completely shared ... and still don't want their ticker back.
Given my insatiable curiosity for what people say with music, this can mean only one of two things: either virtually nobody else is quite so silly or I should maybe try to write some. What I won't write about gave me, far and away, the best hours of pure joy I've known in ages.
 There's no telling what'll come in the end of a stubborn bid to make a small, hopelessly spectacular contribution throughout spring and summer to the improvement of Franglo-American understanding.
My tracking down of work done by one of the special women who first set me on one unexpected path has taken me well into the 13 episodes of a superb story of a time when Anglo-US relations had to grow and did.
If it weren't for Susannah York's presence, I'd be unaware of 'We'll Meet Again', a 1982 British television achievement she starred in. The World War II drama about what happens when a Flying Fortress bomber group lands to disturb the peace of a Suffolk village has a few of the flaws of a series, whose episodic nature must affect plot structure.
It remains a first-rate change from movies, with a real grasp of the complex relations between the arrivals new to England and mostly to warfare on one hand and on the other, the class-conscious world of wary villagers grown used to making do without bananas, ice cream, coffee and cigars. They are accustomed to the absence, if never the sudden bad news, of those they love.
Initial clashes and high friction are inevitable, but what's particularly well handled by the three writers and four directors, a team headed by Tony Wharmby, is the persistence of misunderstanding and resentment alongside the slow birth of mutual respect. Only after episode four did I take a willing rather than sensible break, when the end was less of a cliff-hanger than some.
The format makes for some predictability -- the way a few villagers react to the bomber group colonel's surname, Krasnowici, or how US flyer gets timid local girl with hostile father infatuated and pregnant, leaving one guess what happens next -- and very strong character development.
York as village doctor Helen Dereham and Michael J. Shannon as the air base's executive officer Major Jim Kiley are superb leads, while the rest of the cast (IMDb) I've seen so far turn in performances ranging from the merely acceptable to outstanding.
If it's fight-filled war film you like, 'We'll Meet Again' isn't it. Neither the budget nor the intention show us much more of the dangerous bombing runs deep into Europe than the villagers and ground crews see.
Such scenes as there are integrate wartime footage into freshly shot aerial sequences, which on the whole works. I guess it's one of the reasons for the occasionally grainy texture that swiftly ceases to bother you as you're drawn into an irresistible drama.
Any shortage of big surprises is no loss to a realistic, often subtle story about bridging a culture gap which is engaging and usually manages to avoid melodrama. I've stumbled on a classic well worthy of its shelf-space.
For all my sometimes blogged wrath at some appalling forms the ties take today, I suppose I must admit, like any other resident of continental Europe, that there is a "special relationship" linking the United States to the Britain I left behind, whether or not we like it.
I don't know what Americans make of 'We'll Meet Again'. This dramatic account of the wartime origins of that invisible bond may make me more generous about a confounded, sometimes confusing alliance. I've perhaps too long been persuaded that if the Britain I grew up in became politically good at anything, it's the art of balancing on hedged bets, to the lasting admiration and exasperation of neighbours on either side.
No wonder British humour is sometimes utterly incomprehensible to anybody else. Wouldn't yours be if all you often had to sit on was a fence?
6:54:45 PM link 
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