Saturday 29 September 2007

Knocked Up

Bloody marvellous film, and a perfect counter-example for anyone who claims Hollywood only mass-produces rubish. Yes there are plenty of silly, smutty lines which you could cite as evidence of immaturity (e.g. our hero in a club having bottled chatting up our heroine, justifying himself to his friend: "Ah, I'll just jack it off later") ... but even these are sharp and delivered fast, almost thrown away, which I find quite classy.

My favourite line wasn't actually a funny one. It was the brother-in-law of our heroine, father of two: "I wish I loved anything in life as much as my kids love bubbles." There were loads of acute observations on parenthood and ... er ... beards, and it was fantastic.

Thursday 27 September 2007

Weekend O'Cricket

En route to drop him at Mum's house, I took B to The Oval for the last day of first class cricket this season for Surrey. I love that he's become familiar with the place and finds it entertaining, from the horses playing cricket (totesport posters) to "the picture of all the mans who come to watch the cricket in the old days" (huge oil painting in the pavilion).

In fairness he's never exactly glued to the on-field action, but we tend to get a good few overs of conversation about what we can see, who's the bowler, who's the umpire etc before the inevitable "can we have some lunch?"

It was a moment of contentment while it lasted, though, sitting in the sunshine in, at B's request, the "B" block of seats (spelling out "Brit Oval") in the OCS, for once not roped off, with the bean sitting on my lap. We watched VVS Laxman stroke a crisp and classy half century (he went on to get a ton) and paid our considerable respects to Mark Ramprakash the day after he made 2,000 runs for the second successive season.

The Mighty 'Rey will need to find a decent seam bowling attack from somewhere if they're going to get anywhere near the championship next year though.