Read Online Love for Now by Anthony Wilson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Anthony Wilson
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Conscience-wracked student insomniacs who haven’t sorted their summer holiday plans? Over on Channel 4 at the same time was more munchies-telly, of the baggy snowboarding variety. It consists of watching a succession of 18-year-old Norwegian and Canadian men competing to outdo each other on their ‘two-seventy turns with grip’ on approaching what look like three-quarter-inch stair-rails poking above the snow while the commentator shouts over a heavy metal soundtrack. Everything is ‘amazing’, ‘spellbinding’, ‘hugely risky’ and ‘nerveless’. It cannot be sport, because only three people watching must know what is going on. If I were 19, however, and ‘studying’ for aSports Science degree five miles away from the nearest bus stop, I know which of the two programmes I’d be watching as I passed round the nachos.
Later
I watched
Planet Earth
, the Beeb’s latest big budget nature programme, with Shim last night. An advert for public service broadcasting from start to finish, it was all the clichés and more: sumptuous, painstaking, breathtaking. One sequence showed the ‘Amur’ leopard from Russia (I thought it looked a bit like Speyside) of which there are about 40 left. David Attenborough deadpanned: ‘A combination of irreversible climate change and inability to adapt to its new situation has pushed this extraordinary animal to the edge of extinction.’ The footage of it – the first ever made – lasted about a minute. Television enacting the metaphor of its own message is what we grew up hoping it would be. Somehow this felt graver, sadder, more urgent, an elegy not just for rare mammals, but a whole approach to and vision of the medium itself.
Shim tucked himself into me – we both went wow at the slowed down footage of the Great White leaping to attack a seal – and kept lifting his head up to look at my eyes, to check if I was crying. I didn’t, but he obviously sees more than I give him credit for.
He told me about his advert writing from last week on the way back from school today. ‘You know that advert writing, where I said I was encouraged by Cancer Research, well it worked, I got two stickers, one at the top one at the bottom. I think she felt sorry for me.’
He’s talking about school these days more than he ever has. ‘You know when you have no idea what you’re doing and it still goes alright? I had that today in writing. It was about fishing. I didn’t understand it but it went OK.’
Tuesday 7 March
Last day before next chemo.
A really crap night last night. Night sweats and coughing at 2, and no comedy telly. Just Women’s World Cup Skiing, which at least I understand, but hardly riveting. Perhaps this is just as well, as I nodded off more quickly than I had expected. At which point Tatty came to get me. ‘You must be really knackered,’ she said at breakfast, and I didn’t disagree.
A really crappy day out there. Grey low cloud and rain, thick oily pouring wet Devon rain, with cold in it, first thing; now just incessant unsmiling endless falling drizzle, heavy, and soaking.
Came back from the school-walk, did the bins, dusted down and watched a second of
Will and Grace
and a laugh-out-loud
Frasier
, The One Where He Pretends To Be Jewish.
Felt gloomy nonetheless so decided to cheer myself up by watching our
Shakespeare in Love
DVD (I still want to say video). It was perfect, a little working stopwatch of a confection: sexy, funny and moving. What more can you want? I cried the whole way through. I don’t care what they say about Gwyneth Paltrow, she can act
and
do the verse. Hoped, as it drew near to the end, that The Great Script Idea would plop into my head and make me rich
à la
Stoppard, but none did. I’ll have to settle for poems.
Was reminded that it closes with William Shakespeare moving on to the next project,
Twelfth Night
, inspired by Viola’s (Paltrow’s) journey across the ocean. It doesn’t matter that it’s balls, it’s
Later
I watched
Planet Earth
, the Beeb’s latest big budget nature programme, with Shim last night. An advert for public service broadcasting from start to finish, it was all the clichés and more: sumptuous, painstaking, breathtaking. One sequence showed the ‘Amur’ leopard from Russia (I thought it looked a bit like Speyside) of which there are about 40 left. David Attenborough deadpanned: ‘A combination of irreversible climate change and inability to adapt to its new situation has pushed this extraordinary animal to the edge of extinction.’ The footage of it – the first ever made – lasted about a minute. Television enacting the metaphor of its own message is what we grew up hoping it would be. Somehow this felt graver, sadder, more urgent, an elegy not just for rare mammals, but a whole approach to and vision of the medium itself.
Shim tucked himself into me – we both went wow at the slowed down footage of the Great White leaping to attack a seal – and kept lifting his head up to look at my eyes, to check if I was crying. I didn’t, but he obviously sees more than I give him credit for.
He told me about his advert writing from last week on the way back from school today. ‘You know that advert writing, where I said I was encouraged by Cancer Research, well it worked, I got two stickers, one at the top one at the bottom. I think she felt sorry for me.’
He’s talking about school these days more than he ever has. ‘You know when you have no idea what you’re doing and it still goes alright? I had that today in writing. It was about fishing. I didn’t understand it but it went OK.’
Tuesday 7 March
Last day before next chemo.
A really crap night last night. Night sweats and coughing at 2, and no comedy telly. Just Women’s World Cup Skiing, which at least I understand, but hardly riveting. Perhaps this is just as well, as I nodded off more quickly than I had expected. At which point Tatty came to get me. ‘You must be really knackered,’ she said at breakfast, and I didn’t disagree.
A really crappy day out there. Grey low cloud and rain, thick oily pouring wet Devon rain, with cold in it, first thing; now just incessant unsmiling endless falling drizzle, heavy, and soaking.
Came back from the school-walk, did the bins, dusted down and watched a second of
Will and Grace
and a laugh-out-loud
Frasier
, The One Where He Pretends To Be Jewish.
Felt gloomy nonetheless so decided to cheer myself up by watching our
Shakespeare in Love
DVD (I still want to say video). It was perfect, a little working stopwatch of a confection: sexy, funny and moving. What more can you want? I cried the whole way through. I don’t care what they say about Gwyneth Paltrow, she can act
and
do the verse. Hoped, as it drew near to the end, that The Great Script Idea would plop into my head and make me rich
à la
Stoppard, but none did. I’ll have to settle for poems.
Was reminded that it closes with William Shakespeare moving on to the next project,
Twelfth Night
, inspired by Viola’s (Paltrow’s) journey across the ocean. It doesn’t matter that it’s balls, it’s
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