Weekend

It feels like such a treat to arrive at the weekend and enjoy options! No jobbie, no kiddos, no duties, no incoming fire!

Through happenstance and acts of God, I'm sometimes back in that seventh circle of hell called 'middle management'. This is a place/headspace where one owns all problems yet lack resources to solve any. Middle management hell can incorporate (if you let it) a jobbie, a Big Wan's school performance, friendies' life events, neighbours' noise complaints, an ambulance nee-nawing to a stranger, the result of a national election, and the wound from your singular failure to fix all these.

What have we learned?
a) Entrained behaviours are not necessarily adaptive
b) Sweeties taste nice but can make you diabetic
c) You can fix some broken stuff, but others need thrown out

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What a lovely Saturday I had! R. and I daundered in the Botanics picking up autumn leaves. The chestnuts, maples, beeches and birches (Castaneae, Acer, Fagaceae, Betula) are quite magnificent at the moment. It was clear, sunny and sharply cold, a high wind chasing clouds across the sky.

Then we caught the new Coen Bros film, Burn After Reading. For once, we both loved a film and roared with laughter throughout. This is one I could and will watch over and over again- a complicated black comedy involving espionage and romance. No learning or hugs: relatively good people get stuffed and relatively bad people walk out scot-free. Intelligence is not rewarded and God is dead in this film.

The cast is superb (John Malkovitch, Tilda Swinton, George Clooney, Brad Pitt), with a beautifully crafted narrative and the disparate characters delivering pithy one-liners. It's going to be a slow burning cult film like Big Lebowski, with the cogniscenti throwing around catchphrases from the film in years to come.

"Tell Dr Cox I've got her new key", "I'm an American citizen", "I haven't had a run in 3 days", "This is a clusterfuck" and "What have we learned?". I want to go again next week- it's just going to get better and funnier on repeated viewing.

Even Downstair Neighbour's pithy note on the main door couldn't spoil my evening. "Could whoever trailed cat litter down the stair clean it up immediately. My landing stinks of cat pee". Needless to say, I (or rather Big Wan) was the culprit, though there was no smell of cat piss from the very light sprinkles that Wee Wan had failed to sweep up. He's such a drama queen in writing, and such a feartie in person.