Closing credits

Everyone in the house has been ill. We’ve missed church two Sundays. We did go to a special Christmas service in the middle of the week (it seemed, briefly, that we were OK).

My fever broke last night. I’m still coughing. Please excuse the less-than-effusive presentation of this year’s credits list.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I thank:

Karin;

Jasper and Ziva;

Samuel, Daniel, and Abel;

other relations;

Samuel’s teachers and bus driver;

Daniel’s teachers (the Numberblocks);

our church;

our neighbors;

our librarians;

my reading group;

the Psmiths, for their book reviews (see their latest);

fontsmiths, for their fonts;

poets, for their poems;

Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, for domestic fiction;

Sue Townsend, for her “Adrian Mole” books (see, also, the “secret diary” of fourteen-year-old Margaret Thatcher …

… a work of hilarity, not charity);

the Ecuadorian national soccer team – especially, Moisés Caicedo, Pervis Estupiñán (whose year was actually rather poor), Alan Franco, Hernán Galíndez, Piero Hincapié, Willian Pacho, and Enner Valencia;

the Criterion Channel, especially for the Chinese crime dramas Black Coal, Thin Ice (now unavailable) (set in Harbin) and Only the River Flows (rural Jiangxi);

the Fox Corporation (!) for Tubi – especially, for Crime Stories, Da Vinci’s Inquest, From Hell (now unavailable), Lake Mungo, Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry (esp. cartoons with Droopy), and, way back in February, the Super Bowl;

just about every streaming service, for Peppa Pig;

Goodwill Industries, for books and stretchpants;

Jarritos, especially for Mineragua;

and

Taco Bell, for soft tacos with potatoes, lettuce, cheese, spicy sauce, and supplemental guacamole.

High hopes

Please, all of you, don’t watch it at the same time – I don’t want YouTube to take it down – but Mike Leigh’s High Hopes was uploaded a couple of weeks ago. There are precious few movies anymore that I’ve been waiting for years to view. High Hopes is the foremost of them.

The movie features the great Mike Leigh regular, Ruth Sheen; and, even better, the great Mike Leigh occasional, Philip Davis. Young, woolly Philip Davis. Sheen and Davis star as Thatcher-era hippies.

(Leigh depicts hippies brilliantly in Nuts in May, also viewable on YouTube.)

Philip Davis is one of the world’s best actors, along with, oh, David Gulpilil, Noah Taylor, and Robert Mitchum. You may have seen him in “A Study in Pink,” the first episode of Sherlock (he plays the cab driver). He’s also in the TV show Whitechapel and Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake.

Here’s another still of him in High Hopes. See how sadly he regards the kettle.

I plan to watch this movie tomorrow, first thing after work.