Brigid Jones' Baby & A.A. Gill's Film

B.A. suggested it, and I crumbled at once and said we could subscribe to the super-basic version of Netflix. Then, after a companionable watching of "Suits", I watched Bridget Jones' Baby after B.A. went to bed.

Although it was a funny movie, it made me very sad, and I had a hard time getting to sleep afterwards. It was not just that Bridget looked so old, it was also that Mark Darcy looked so old. The ending of the film was mostly satisfying, but I got the sense that both Bridget and Mark had squandered so much of their lives. Also they looked terribly old, and if Renee Zellweger looks like that in her mid-to-late 40s, what must the rest of us over-40s look like?

I mean no disrespect to Ms Zellweger, by the way. I have no interest in resurrecting the what-did-she-do-to-her-face debate. And I wish to emphasise how old Colin Firth also looked. If he meant to play Mark Darcy as a man who was outwardly successful but was inside a howling void, he succeeded.

"It's so awful getting old," my grandmother told me, but it is also awful to watch others getting old. Well, such is the human condition, and we must be brave about it.

As I was feeling very wired from watching aged Bridget have a baby at 43, which I myself was not able to do--something else to be brave about--I picked up volume called  The Best of A.A. Gill.

A.A. Gill indirectly saved B.A.'s life by writing that he went to the doctor with a neck-ache that turned out to be cancer. After reading that, B.A. went to the doctor with a neck-ache that also turned out to be cancer, only the non-malignant kind that doesn't spread. But as I have written many times before, it is not wholly benign. Had B.A. not had his pains checked out, he would have died of hydrocephaly by now, probably in his sleep, and I would have woken up beside a corpse. Not a happy thought.

Anyway, besides indirectly saving B.A.'s life, A.A. Gill was a very clever and amusing writer, whose works I would recommend wholeheartedly, were it not for the fact that he wrote a p/r/on film. While reading his essay on the topic, I wasn't sure exactly what he was describing, and then I was sure, and I was neither impressed nor amused. It astonished me that someone who could write so passionately about the sufferings of refugees could be so indifferent to the acute degradation of the performers in his film.

Once again I am decidedly underwhelmed by contemporary British artefacts/pop culture, but at least there will an exhibit of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts at the British Library this winter so splendid that it will be worth our while to travel down to London to see it.