Lila’s in Berlin. This is her at Heathrow yesterday morning. She has a passport. Bunny (the blue thing) doens’t. Could that be a problem? Now we’re leaving Europe and losing the whole ‘borderless’ thing? How do soft toys feature in the Brexit negotiations? At least she’s handing in her bread roll, which certainly doesn’t have a passport. But she’s gone, with her mummy & daddy, to see Auntie Rachie, who is so excited by their arrival that she stayed almost sober for 2 nights beforehand. Commitment, dedication, love.

So we had a cultural evening. Which, as all culture should, started at Nandos. I haven’t been there for years but I don’t know why. Because, like any fantastically successful food chain, it starts with the food. And Nandos know their strength. Which is chicken. Which they do in a hundred different ways and all are really good. Ingredients all fresh, nothing is pre-cooked, salads are fresh (just thought I’d add that to impress you; because, quite frankly, you really don’t go to Nandos for salads) and cooked really well. Its not ‘fast food’ per se, because it takes 15 minutes to get to the table. But its priced as fast food because it is almost ridiculously cheap for what you get. I would go further and say that, being chicken-based, the food is ‘healthy’. Not that I give a shit but its amazing how food-snobby people get about Nandos. Yet they willingly go to the over-priced, overly-pretentious Ivy cafes and eat half-cold, poorly prepared, badly-delivered crap and pay 5 times the price for it. I’m never eating anywhere else. Going to learn Portuguese so I can order in their natural language.

But we went there because its where the cinema lives. And we went to see ‘Black Klansman’. Which is a very good movie, but its not the ‘great’, the ‘wonderful’, the ‘5 star!’ offering that its been hailed. I liked it a lot, Spike Lee makes good ‘joints’ but not brilliant.

However, it was the trailers that interested me a lot. Because there’s a seed change occurring in Hollywood. Its started and I think its its response to the ‘me too’ thing. So they’re bringing out films which are basically: ‘behind every great man is a greater woman’. No more Jack Reacher, James Bond (who now has to actually ‘ask’ before he can have sex; to ‘send the right message’; tossers), male super-hero, love-em-an’-leave-em types. Now we have a new film out about Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. Or, rather, a film about Neil Armstrong’s wife without whom, we will learn, small steps for man… etc, would never have happened.

Then there’s another with Jonathan Price as a nobel laureate for literature who we will learn was NOTHING without the driving force of Glenn Close as Mrs Nobel Laureate. She’s come a long way from boiling bunnies (no relation to Lila’s bunny, thank gawd).

And being someone who enjoys a knee-jerk, over-reacting, Daily Mailesque generalisation; ALL movies now will HAVE to have a strong woman as the main story. We MUST move from just having respect for women to revering them. So starring as the rags-to-riches hooker (Pretty Woman), or the world-champ pole dancer (Showgirl) simply won’t cut it in this more enlightened age.

Society moves on.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx