There’s a new movie coming out called ‘What if…’ and it stars Daniel Radcliffe and its a rom-com. They’re calling it ‘when Harry Potter met Sally’. Which is rather clever. As poor Daniel, billionaire by the time he was 7, is now paying the true price of that precocious fame and stardom as he can never, ever cast off fully the robes and wand he used to kill Lord Voldemort. You have to think twice when you hear the name ‘Daniel Radcliffe’ but at the merest mention of ‘Harry Potter’ his little face, zig-zag scar and all, springs to mind.

And much as I love rom-com books (that’s the most tragic admission of this lifetime; almost pathetic really), I’ll walk twelve miles to avoid the genre in the movies. The films are rubbish. The books are wonderful and if I’m not crying by page 7 I can abandon it and download another. They’re all free cos they’re all shite. So any film with Matthew McGonaghey before Dallas Buyers Club, is off limits. Anything with Meg Ryan, Sandra Bullock, any limp pretty boy with a quiff instead of a personality, Richard Gere, Meg Ryan or Kate Hudson is not so much a guilty pleasure as guilty-as-charged.

And the young wizard from Hogwarts has apparently ‘re-ignited the rom-com flame’, and made it respectable once more. Yeah. Right. Pass the fire extinguisher. And rom-coms have a simple ‘plan’. Without being homophobic; Boy meets Girl and they fall madly in love. BUT; and this is what makes it a rom-com and not just slushy chic-flick bollocks, there needs to be ‘an obstacle overcome’. Typically they hate each other at first sight. They run competitive businesses. One of them’s married to someone else. One of them’s dead. Or, in the case of the original Harry/Sally and this new Potter flick, the ‘obstacle’ is that ‘your true love is your best friend’!!!! Oh my. We’ve been there and done that, and cried, and screamed, almost vomited and even had an orgasm in Katz’s Deli. And it was stupid then and it still is.

The only man that has a woman for a best friend is gay. No exceptions. Men are only friendly with women because they desire them. Single men that is, darling wife. Obviously. If men have no such cravings, there is no friendship. This is not me, this is how it is. Its historical. At times hysterical, (the rom-com bit), its evolutionary, its procreational. Except in Hollywood where anything can happen.

When Mel & I met she was engaged to another and I was living with yet another-nother (would have been odd if her fiancee was the woman I as living with; really odd. Though possibly fun). Real obstacles. And I suppose at times it was quite funny. Our own rom-com. But love conquers all. Except ISIS. For them you need bombs. Loads’a bombs.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx