:: back to the minutae ...

Today and yesterday I finally got the quote for the shed doors sorted out and cleaned the carpets. Whew. The quote for the doors was £275. I had been hoping for £300 but expecting more, so I was thrilled it was less. That's for everything -- two fire doors cut to size, new "stannards" (jambs, I think), locks fitted, the lot. The joiner will probably do them Thursday or Friday. He will start at 8am. In the morning.

The carpet steaming worked reasonably well, especially in the hall. I might have another go at a couple of other patches. While I was at it I cleaned the floors downstairs too and did all my laundry and ironing. The house is gleaming! Apart from the bits I didn't dust.

Last night I went to see Far From Heaven, which I loved. It's set in the 50s and it's done just like a 50s movie, with stilted dialogue ("Say, Pop, guess what I did at school today?) and fabulous clothes. But unlike 50s movies it deals more honestly with attitudes to race and homosexuality. I read and heard a lot of opinions on the film before I went and didn't really agree with any of it, though they were all different. I think a lot of younger people can't understand that the main character isn't just a repressed housewife who realises how empty her life is. She's like the chairman of a highly successful company who discovers the CEO's been embezzling it and they're going bankrupt. Women back then were trained to be housewives and she had it all: stunning big house, two lovely children (boy and girl, polite and obedient), handsome, successful husband. She was a star, featured in the society pages, her dinner parties were fabulous. Then she discovers her husband's gay. He gets "treatment" and for a while, everything staggers along as normal, until he falls in love. The other strand is that meanwhile, she's finding that the gardener, a kindly fellow, is a good listener. But he's black. She's tremendously naive, doesn't realise that it's all very well for her to play at being liberal, treating him like any other person, but for him it is actually dangerous. It ends up with her being the talk of the town for being seen going into a restaurant with him, and with him having to leave town because the scandal kills his business. Also, his young daughter is injured by boys taunting her about her father. The thing is, they never even kiss -- a touch on the arm is enough to provoke disgust and horror in onlookers. Even her best friend is disgusted, more so than by the revelation about the husband's gayness. But it's not like the character, Cathy, is even very PC by today's standards: she never stands up for her friend, for example. When he grabs her arm during an emotional scene in the street and a passing man yells, "Hey! Hands off boy!" she doesn't say a word in his defence. When the NAACP comes calling, she gets her black maid to sign their petition for her. I thought it was a wonderful film, lots to think about in it.