Thursday 27 March 2014

Women in Black and White

Lately I started watching old black and white films and I was struck with how mysterious and sexy the women characters appeared.  This is particularly true of the films of Ray Chandler's novels.  The one I watched last night was Farewell my Lovely from 1944 - it was originally called Murder my Sweet and it featured Claire Trevor as the blonde bombshell.  The acting in general might not have been up to much - in the later version Robert Mitchum was much more convincing as the world-weary Philip Marlowe than Robert Powell - but it was fun to watch it.  In his novels Chandler nearly always featured a mysterious blonde with a pouty mouth who while eminently desirable was a bad girl at heart trying to lead the detective astray :  "a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window" as he describes it in Farewell my Lovely.  This film didn't disappoint in that regard.

I think that the women heroes (we aren't allowed to call them heroines any more are we?) in today's cinema are a different breed, even the ones who seduced Michael Douglas in past films.  There seems to be a lack of that smouldering subtlety that characterised the black and white era.  There were no bedroom scenes but there was no need for them as every gesture told a story and had everyone's imagination working overtime.  I think modern cinema does an overkill on sex and violence, those two motors of the film industry.  In effect it tells us that we don't have the wit to work it out for ourselves.  Mae West is of course one of the best examples here and her "why don't you come up, see me some time?" said in that husky voice is surely one of the best temptress lines recorded.

And the women were more than simple sex objects.  They might have been bad and nearly fooled the detective but they were intelligent, had their own agenda, and defied the role of wholesome stay-home-at-the-kitchen-sink housewife and mother which was so prevalent at the time.  They certainly would not have fitted comfortably into life on Walton's Mountain any more than women in our modern culture do.  I don't want to go back to earlier cinema stereotypes but I think we may have lost something in glamorous femme fatales along the way. 

Sunday 16 March 2014

Dieting and all that

I've read so much about The Right Diet -  eat  less carbohydrates and fat and oh let's not forget sugar and then everyone takes too much salt - that I am considering giving up reading, at least about what's good and bad for you in the food chain.  I recently bought "low salt" soya sauce but when I compared the label to my (nearly empty) "regular" soya sauce, I found the "low salt" contained more salt. Yikes, who do you believe? How about an investigation titled "Is your food label telling you the truth?"

Of course food has to have something added to it to preserve it.  Even naive little me knows that.  Assuming the manufacturers are telling the truth about "standard portions" and "100 grams" worth of their products, it really means studying the labels and making an informed decision.  So there I am standing in the aisle of my local supermarket, blocking the mothers with trollies and grizzling toddlers, reading food labels.  It takes ages and you really need a pencil and paper or something more technical like your I-phone or what-have-you. 

You really have to understand what goes into a product, though, and this requires a lot of label reading.  On bad days and even some good days, I envisage a Reading Room at the supermarket where you can take all the products, read the labels and add up the sugar, salt, fat and calorie content of each one and make your decision accordingly.  By the time you've finished you will either a) have fainted with hunger and been shipped off to the local A&E, b) been shipped off to the local A&E because of supreme agitation, c) decided you will never buy a packaged product in future even if you don't know how to cook the next meal or....  but let me stop there.  I think you get the picture. 

Having driven myself crazy for a few weeks, I now just do an "informed estimate".   I check the recommended daily portion for fat, sugar and salt on each label and go for the lowest.   It's surprising how much more fat there is in some low fat spreads than in ordinary ones, for example.  I give starchy foods a wide berth, only buying wholegrain bread, rice and pasta.  But I do allow for treats now and then - life is too short to cut everything you love out of your diet.  Knowing that Friday night I can have half a bar of my favourite chocolate is a real incentive to bypass the stuff for the rest of the week.  The real solution, of course, lies in limiting the damage and enjoying your meals. I've combined this with exercise - just walking and climbing stairs - and I have lost a few pounds in weight, a fact I enter in my weight diary.  The feel good factor associated with this is a powerful incentive to continue and to have fun at the same time.

Sunday 9 March 2014

Finding Yourself - Who are you really?

In the 1960's and 1970's a lot of young people set out for far flung places in search of their personal identity. They sat at the feet of a guru in India or studied transcendental meditation, they believed in flower power. Nowadays, there are people who take a selfie and post it on Twitter, letting others find them as opposed to finding themselves.  Sort of like the guy who joined the Navy to let the world see him as opposed to the old British recruiting slogan "join the Navy and see the world".

I thought about this yesterday when I attended a seminar to celebrate International Women's Day.  I have to ask myself if we need an International Women's Day but let's skip that debate.  Anyway, one of the questions the facilitator put to us was "who do you see yourself as?"   This was a tricky one, actually.  Most of the women saw themselves as wife and mother figures.  I had a problem with that.  Yes, I am an ex-wife and a mother but my children are grown up and have their own lives.  I am very proud of them but I don't feel the label "mother" fits any more.  So who am I now?  Retired lady?  Reader, writer, walker, lover of the sea?  Yes, all of that but the facilitator wanted a one word definition.  I plumped for "free spirit" - admittedly the other women gave me some looks of surprise. But I reckon that's what I am and I hope that is what my readers are.  You can be what you want to be but you must make time for it, the facilitator said.  Now, when I was working full time and my children were growing up, there wasn't much time for me.  I probably could have used a seminar like this one to gain a few insights into being there for yourself.  But now I can relax and do my own thing. As I live alone I don't have to put meals on the table, I can stay in bed all day if I want to (I don't), I can even stay up all night without fear of waking someone else.  Don't get me wrong.  I enjoyed my busy life as a mother but now I feel I have deserved my holiday from all that.

It's Sunday, so when I have finished writing this, I'll make myself a pot of tea, put my feet up and read the Sunday papers - I've already been for a walk to the beach.

 Cheers everyone and I hope your Sunday is just as enjoyable.