This week was this blog’s sixteenth birthday, which in the UK brings a raft of new rights including changing your name (which in this case happened a little early, whoops), choosing a doctor, having sex outside of Northern Ireland, buying a lottery ticket and – famously – ordering alcohol with a meal in a restaurant. Congrats! Of course, most of these are off-limits during lockdown so it will just have to wait a little longer. And at the risk of adding insult to injury, I’m a little thin on the ground for blog content to celebrate with.

Last weekend we had a lovely catch-up with the Dietz family and Toggolyn, during which Portrait of a Lady on Fire was recommended as a good film to stream and I had to kick myself for missing the opening to joke about Robert’s age and personal experiences of eighteenth-century France. Nevertheless, Randi and I selected it for our semi-regular Friday pizza & movie night, and enjoyed it on three distinct levels:

1. It’s a good film!
2. It’s a French film, so there are plenty of gaps in the dialogue where the characters stare meaningfully at each other. I reckon this could make a decent drinking game.
3. It enables anyone to practice their literary film criticism by using lots of unsubtle visual symbolism (“the flowers have wilted!”). (Pro-tip: this combines well with #2.)

Todd would not have enjoyed watching this film with us. But we’re still grateful for the recommendation.

Side-note: I’m so glad I found the local cheap-and-delicious pizza place before lockdown! It was thanks to Katie, actually, during one of our Doctor Who/Picard combo evenings when we took a chance on London Pizza – a place so unassuming they haven’t even bothered to create a logo for their JustEat page. And yet they have rocketed to the top of our pizza preference charts, partly because they always phone in advance to clarify our primadonna requests about leaving such-and-such on the left and such-and-such on the right. Truly this is a worthwhile successor to my beloved Metro Pizza of Holloway Road from years gone by, where they once nipped out to buy some missing topping. Local pizza places are the best.

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