Chin Up

For a long time, the leading light of our village film club was a prison psychiatrist, and it had a reputation for showing morose and introspective films about the darker corners of the human psyche. Tonight's screening was firmly set in that solid tradition. The Guardian's 4* review described it as "sombre and difficult"

More amusingly, the same review points out that this is not the only film in which the director uses "redecoration is a symptom of dysfunction". Our living room remains an unoccupied repository of paint pots, wood filler and disassembled fittings ("analysis is literally taking-apart" the review says), so draw your own conclusions

A day of chores: lots of admin preparation for an upcoming trip, then trying to create some order in the garden, in the same spirit of preparation. Mid lawn-mowing, I realised spring has reached the wild cowslip stage, so this snap is an entirely unrepresentative cheerful moment between a morning of wrestling with the minutiae of journeys and accomodation, and a 'sombre and difficult' evening

(The film is The Past (2013) - as it's 10 years old, you have probably seen it)