I’m always touched…

I was asked to write about touch by my Loose Bloggers Consortium mateys. (You’ll find them by scrolling down the right hand side of the screen and clicking on their links..)

Touch – it’s wonderful. Not the “soft touch” (easy to trick), not the “touched” (bit bonkers), not even the “touche pas à mon pote” (hands off my pal) slogan from the French organisation SOS Racisme.

But to me – dear reader… (I’m just changing into my smoking jacket and cravat, lighting the fire and preparing my pipe. There. Ready.)  As I was saying, to me, touch is all about you, wherever you are in the world.  (Except China – not many readers showing up as from China.) As the woman said, I’m just touched by your presence here/dear.

PS: A Christmas joke

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When have you last walked out of a film?

Ah Holy God. No! Please no!

When has a film been so tedious, so unimaginative, so stultifyingly boring that you decided life was too short to continue watching? I tend to want to finish what I start, not rely solely on first impressions and give things a chance to breathe and settle. I’m tolerant. But this week I encountered a film that was beyond even my broad Pale.

I’m not complaining. I’ve been lucky lately. I’ve seen Up In The Air this week (beautifully shot, very calming, George Clooney plays a corporate downsizer), Sherlock Holmes (a radical new approach to the franchise which works – full of action, humour, Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law), Astroboy (cartoon hero with machine guns in his butt – the 10-year-old boys I was with liked it) and Caramel (a Lebanese film by Nadine Labaki with no subtitles in English, but full of sympathetic characters and a good trick with a telephone conversation).

But my good run has just come to an end. Drowned in Holy Water.