Weekend is my favourite Jean-Luc Godard film - in fact it's one of my absolutely favourite of anyone's films. If you haven't seen it (and you really should, even given my throwaway description) it's a sort of Marxist parable about greed, infidelity and cannibalism. Oh and it has a traffic jam scene that lasts for as long as most traffic jams, and has to be among the most protracted tracking shots in the history of cinema.
Anyhow, that's not really the point here. This was simply an excuse to introduce a post about last weekend. As anyone who knows me well will attest, I'm not one for relaxing particularly, or for looking on the bright side of things, which makes it all the more remarkable that last weekend was just one of those times that makes it feel great to be alive. I don't quite know how to put it into words. It was a glorious time, the weather was amazing, there was some kind of unbroken positive spirit throughout, it was a little like a living breathing Polyphonic Spree song.
If you are to assume that the weekend starts on a Friday night then it started brilliantly with a concert by the singer Kathryn Williams in the exquisite surroundings of Wren's St. James's Church in Picadilly. She was great, and the hush of the church was the perfect setting. Then on Saturday we spent lots of time at the Country Fair in our local park. We went for breakfast and again in the afternoon with friends, walking round the stalls, admiring he sheep shearing and animals made out of vegetables, chatting with horticultural types and basking in the sunshine. Then to Bush Hall for another exquisite performance in a beautiful place: the sister duo Coco Rosie (their new record is now my most hotly awaited item on the basis of the songs they played), and after that for a drunken knees up at our local pub, the Prince Albert, to mark their closing for a refit. Actually, we'd been to the Albert before Coco Rosie too, partaking of their free barbecue ribs and chops, but by the time we returned it was a mass of merry regulars, the people I've seen and sometimes talked to since I first went there in 1987, and I even had a wee dance surprisingly. By the time I was kind of drunk myself and, chanting along to the Clash's Guns Of Brixton, I was suddenly overcome by a gooey feeling of how much I love living in Brixton, despite all of its annoying ways sometimes.
By this stage I'd usually suspect that this effervescence was too good to last, but we did it all again, with different people, on Sunday. Park, Country Show again (watching the parachutists and sinking a cold beer), barbecue in our garden, lovely music, then rounding it all off with a therapeutic bit of washing up and a lie in the deckchair with a chilled wine, watching the stars come out. Of course I recognise how Molesworth this is ("hello trees, hello flowers") but it was just a perfect weekend. Perfection with nothing to irritate me or spoil the flow. Didn't Aldous Huxley saysomething along the lines of "there is something unusually boring in hearing about other people's happiness"? Well, too bad. I'd like to commemorate 48 hours of joy, and give a big shout out to Kathy, Zara, Sylvia, Andy S, Joe, Simon, Marfa and especially Hitch for making it all possible.