wordsmith.social/jonbeckett

Last night we went out for the first time in 18 months.

A farm perhaps a mile out of town has several vineyards, and is owned by one of the bigger wine producers in the country. They had cleared an area of one of their fields, erected a huge cinema screen and sound system, surrounded it with bean bags and deck chairs, and setup a wonderful bar serving their various wines and local beers.

We walked from home. The walk probably took half an hour, with the final mile through farmers fields and finally through vines to the screen we could see looming above them.

Most of the evening was wonderful save for one thing – the food. We had pre-ordered pizzas, and arrived an hour before the movie to have time to eat. The catering company drafted in to make the pizzas on-site had some sort of disaster and ended up cooking elsewhere and ferrying the pizzas to the field. We finally received ours half-way through the movie, and most of the way through a bottle of champagne on an empty stomach (we were celebrating being “out out”).

Apart from the movie, the queue for the pizza stall was perhaps unintentionally the most entertaining part of the evening. I've probably mentioned before – we live in a very wealthy area, which is populated with a great number of privileged, self-righteous, self-interested people with little or no empathy for anybody or anything other than themselves. The next several people in the queue for the pizzas ticked all the boxes, and then some. I'm surprised they didn't call their lawyers from the queue.

While aspersions were cast, I quietly expressed my disbelief with my other half – feeling very sorry indeed for the two teenage girls taking pizza orders; obviously drafted in on a minimum wage to do a menial job – and who were muttered about, shouted at, and treated pretty horrifically. When we were finally called to collect our pizzas, one of the girls smiled uneasily as she handed them to me, and I tried to find some words to let her know we were on their side. She looked like she might start crying.

Imagine a field full of 100 “Lady Totty” characters from “Wallis and Gromit and the Curse of the Warerabbit”, and you get some idea.

The movie was the salvation of the evening – “The Grand Budapest Hotel”. I had a vague recollection of watching the first few minutes of it some time ago, but couldn't remember much. If you've not seen it, you'll either love it or hate it – I suspect it's something of a marmite movie for most people (you might not get that reference either, thinking about it). I loved it. I love marmite too.

Here's the trailer:

Anyway.

On that note, I'll bid you farewell for the moment. It's late, and I need to get up in the morning for a run, and then work. Thankfully the weather has sorted it's life out and had dropped a little below the “surface of the sun” antics it's been playing around at recently.