The championship

An eye test at the end of the day. The optician’s invite arrived last Friday at a moment I’d been struggling to see the screens so I booked the first reasonably practical appointment.  Fascinating to note that Specsavers is smart enough to send me a two year reminder, great enough to have an easy to use online booking tool but, somehow, still couldn’t link my appointment to my actual records (even after giving my date of birth and address when I arrived). In the end, the optician had to go searching for them when researching my prescription. 

It turns out that there is no change in my prescription, which is good. I did talk about difficulties I have when sat at my screens and a pair of “intermediate” glasses for working with were recommended. I will see how I get on with them. The biggest win of the appointment was getting my existing glasses tightened up so they don’t, quite as easily, fall off. And that was a free service. 

Wimbledon, the tennis championship, is up and running again. The big screen back in the centre of town had a good number of people sat watching.  I went home after my eye test but was back 60 minutes later as we were going to the cinema and there were still plenty of people sat or stood around watching a match. 

To the Odeon to see Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City.  I tend not to read reviews before see a movie. When I got home, I read both these delightful opposing reviews in The Guardian, 

Keemode: “Fans will doubtless be dazzled by its meticulous imitation-of-life-in-miniature visual aesthetic, yet I swithered between whimsical amusement, mild curiosity and outright irritation.”


Bradshaw: “The movie rattles cleverly and exhilaratingly along, adroitly absorbing the implications of pathos and loneliness without allowing itself to slow down. It is tempting to consider this savant blankness as some kind of symptom, but I really don’t think so: it is the expression of style. And what style it is.

It’s the first film we’ve been to see in the cinema for a long time. This is a pretty visual movie and benefited from the big screen. The colour palette is wonderful. The expansive desert appears huge and contrasted with the smallness of the town. I am not normally a fan of movies where the narrative/plot/story is almost unfathomable but this had just enough to keep me hooked while continually wondering what the message was and where it was going. I don’t know why I’d recommend it but I would. Perhaps, it’s so different from so much of what I watch (which can be pretty mindless) that it hooked me. It’s a delight.