New Moon

It was amazing last night that I was able to see the moon, all day long it had rained and been cold, then early evening, it just cleared up and the sun came out in order to give us a truly magnificent sunset. I was pretty glad, I had put my quite healthy looking tomato plants outside and they immediately started looking a little peaky.

The eagles are overdue with their egg hatching now, the world waits with bated breath. Personally I think they're waiting until my friend Canadian Karen leaves for England, which she does this evening, so then the little eaglets can relax and come out, safe in the knowledge that she won't be after adopting them.

During the new moon monsoon yesterday afternoon, Kevin and I went out looking for a receiver for our television setup. I abandoned him and made for the shop's pretend living room where you could sit in a comfie swivel chair and watch 'Revenge of the Sith' on a high definition plasma screen TV. Hayden Christensen's acting wasn't any better in hi-def, and people didn't get any wiser. For example, why, when you live really high up in the air in a city where passing Jedi are likely to come into your front room and fight with light sabres, don't you have windows made of something more than regular glass? Likewise, haven't these people ever heard of the saying, 'Don't put all your younglings into one basket'? Then they look surprised when a passing Sith lord comes and kills them all. And if you are some kind of psychotic lizard with not very much protection for your internal organs, why would you only half enclose said organs so that any old Jedi can come along, open your metal ribs a bit further and then send a quick phaser shot in to finish you off? Doesn't matter how many light sabres you can hold at a time, that's gotta hurt pal.

Why, I wonder, does John Prescott feel bad that the country knows he had an affair. No-one cares, it's between you and Mrs. P if there is one John. The whole point is that unlike when we had a Tory government, the Labour Party hasn't spent twelve years droning on about 'family values' and then being continually caught with its trousers down. So you had sex in your office and various other places. Duh, having sex is what people do when they have an affair, like I said, twixt you and the missus, not the country.

Jenny Colgan, in the Guardian this week, is sourly amused by the idea that FHM magazine had voted Keira Knightley as the 'sexiest woman in the world'. In fact, I was made aware of this earlier by the sound of a huge guffaw from Kevin who was equally unenthused at this choice. Colgan describes Knightley as "Beautiful of face, Keira Knightley has the body of a hungry nine-year-old boy." Kevin was even less complimentary, his comment was,
'Keira Knightley and sexy, you can't say the two in the same sentence.'
I must say, it is an odd choice, Knightley is pretty and looked promising in 'Bend it like Beckham', but her ability to deliver lines seems to have gone downhill, mirrored by an irritation factor in her need to be überenglish in every interview. Maybe her figure will develop when her acting skills do.

While the new moon raised one eyebrow at us, we watched the elusive Deepa Mehta film 'Earth'. The DVD shop got it in after my enquiry a couple of weeks ago. This is a snapshot of India at the time of its partition from Pakistan as the British left. I find the whole history of Britain's involvement with India interesting. Many modern sci-fi storylines predict a world governed more by mega-corporations than States and yet this is the India of the 17th Century. The East India tea company had its own armies and its officials were like rulers, in fact they were sought out as allies by warring Indian princes. But 250 years later, when India, now a unified country felt it wanted to rule itself, just as the British were welcomed in, they were asked to leave, and financially exhausted from the second world war, there was no option but to do so.

Mehta shows us in this film, the uncertainties and conflicts. We see families who do not want the British to leave, we see factions who do. Many Muslims had been campaigning for a separate muslim state since the end of the first world war. We see the strength of that separatism, but we also see the strength of long standing friendships between Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus who had seen diversity rather than division. The action takes place in Lahore, a city that was ultimately to be part of Pakistan. A debate around a dinner table focuses on whether Lahore will become Pakistani since the majority of its citizens are Muslim, or whether it will go to Hindustan (India) because the money in the City is mostly in the hands of Hindus.
The savagery perpetrated by the Hindus and Sikhs and the Muslims on each other is just horrific. One of the characters wonders whether they have learned anything in the 250 years of British stewardship. Another retaliates with the notion that before the British came, there was no syphillis.

I have found all three of Deepa Mehta's films extraordinarily thought-provoking. In 'Earth' we are shown how when dealing with matters that should be deeply spiritual, humans are so completely earthbound.

We needed so much expertise, time, money and energy to put humans on the moon, but the moon, well it just sits up there in the sky and pulls the tides. Who knows what other earthly things it meddles in.