Aurel's laurels

Friday again. Tomorrow we are off with William to the family Christmas party where there will be about sixty of Cathy's mother's descendants more than half of which I will not be able to name, although they can all name me, the eccentric English man. I will try to sit with a group of mainly women, as the men intimidate me with their talk of sports and cars.

I just took Cathy's car in to the dealership to be spruced up for the winter and the depth of my ignorance is embarrassing. Still Paul at the service desk there knows me well and fully cooperates with my ignorance of all things engine or car.

Sunday I will go to the fitness club again, not to feel superficial in the Pilates class, but just to use the machines when there are mercifully fewer perfect bodies about. Sadly the steam room has been out of order since my first visit, however the sauna alone is worth the price of membership and the luxury showers with sprinkler heads the size of dinner plates. My rosacia/ psoriasis is a lot better with all that sweating and there is also a cold room if I want to be truly Scandinavian about the sauna process. No sprigs of laurel leaves as yet.

JS at work asked me if I had seen The Seventh Seal. That incredibly boring film about chess and death, I said, just to offend him, because, of course, he thought it was a film of great philosophical content. I looked it up and, in fact, had fond memories of it and even fonder memories of Wild Strawberries and Summer with Monika.

Back then I was discovering that there were some very good films as well as the hundreds of mediocre films I had seen as a teenager. I went to films four or five times a week, as if I were returning to the womb in those dark rooms of London.