Love, actually

Love, actually Post-Christmas visiting with mum in Birmingham, and a trip to see Love, Actually, a feeble movie, but unquestionably entertaining.

Or is there a hard core to this apparently soft confection? Director Richard Curtis throws it on the screen right at the start: we think love is so hard to find, but it's all around us if we'd only look. Actually. By the end I felt I'd overdosed on sugary sentiments. But perhaps this is Curtis' idea of radical cinema: shove it in their faces?

Meanwhile been reading Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby. Here too the author takes a stand against the Good Joe Theory that we are all rascals deceiving ourselves we are Good Joes. Dickens certainly provides plenty of support for the theory: cruel schoolmaster Wackford Squeers excuses himself with great generosity of mind. But his chief villains, Ralph Nickleby and Sir Mulberry Hawk, delight in their own thorough badness. And, in contrast, the hero and his sister are models of noble good nature.

Curtis' characters conform well to the Good Joe Theory. They are hapless self-deceivers entangled in romance and desire. The best of them plod gallantly on, holding to their ideals as best they can. Pace Dickens, this is the best any of us can do.

Kelvin cool High on my personal list of Good Joes is the Kelvin family, whose youngest daughter Nadia Kelvin brought her boyfriend Nahd round for lunch yesterday. Our first entertaining this holiday season, and we were able to do it in style as my mother has now passed on to me her late mother's silver and Rosenthal crockery, and gave us steaks from Donald Russell Direct for Christmas. Miki acquired a taste for mulled wine, and roasted chestnuts over the fire.