Oppenheimer ...

For all that this day began so long ago (it's past midnight; I can explain...) when I went out in the rain for the shopping at 8.20am, the main event really was that we went to the pictures in the evening. (I like calling it "the pictures", as I did when I was a child; I suppose I could say we "took in a movie" or (very dated) "went to the flicks" or (neutral) "went to the cinema"). We rarely go out in the evening these days, if you don't count choir, though we'll be out again tomorrow evening, but we felt that Oppenheimer probably merited the effort of seeing it on a big screen ...

I'm glad we went. It's a tremendous film, with some great acting and some terrifying moments, all the more terrifying because you've been waiting for them. The sound was at times too big for me - Dunoon cinema has come on in the sound department since the time I had to go and ask a former pupil if they could turn it up a bit as we couldn't make out what they were saying on screen ... As you can see from my photo, surreptitiously taken before the Big Picture started, it's not a big place, and Thursday night isn't a riotous occasion in a very wet Dunoon, but it was warm and there was a great choice of where to sit and no-one stirred for the whole three hours we were there. There was a joyous moment when I suddenly realised who was playing Einstein  when we were almost at the end of the film: Tom Conti, from Paisley (why do I find that incongruous? ) whom I've been seeing in movies all my adult life.

We emerged, shell-shocked, into utterly torrential rain and staggered up the road to the house, deciding that the hill was steeper tonight than it's ever been. 

Apart from the shopping and making dinner, all I've done in the rest of the day was write a poem about Gaza. I'll maybe share it another day, but right now my head is full of visions of the other hell unleashed by the ability to split the atom. When theoretical physics become explosive reality ...