Sleepless in

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 25 May 2004 22:53:14

A pity, because during the day I'm so tired that you'd think that I'd fall asleep in an instant (as daughter did tonight). But maybe the current favourite night-time music doesn't work so well for me. A bargain CD of Swan Lake, narrated by Angela Rippon - glorious music, but as it rises in intensity, it hardly soothes. And how can she say that 'they lived happily ever after', as the music blares a different story?

Why do we nowadays require a happy ending? As Hans Christian Anderson's tragic heroine becomes Disney's Little Mermaid, and I've just read that the film of Captain Corelli's Mandoline ends happily (although I have to admit that I stopped reading the book because I couldn't cope with what was probably a minor tragedy early on). And I've always hated the story of Shakespeare's Othello.

What I particularly dislike are films that are miserable for almost the whole duration, but somehow the 'happy ending' makes it all 'OK'. I have to say that I 'enjoyed' Shadowlands, perhaps because on the whole it remained true to what really happened (we believe).

As for us. We're still averaging a medical visit a week, though the next one is a mundane trip to our GP on account of a wart on daughter's foot. I believe that the path just now is upwards, though I still find myself digging deeper into my own reserves to make progress. It's a 'sair fecht'.