The Book of Write-On: Day Four

 I’m torn between saying ‘Hell, I’m not getting anything done’ and ‘Today has started slowly.’  But I did run four miles this morning and driven into Chipping Norton so it's not all that bad.  And and and: I did read another excellent P.G. Wodehouse story called Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo and it was just as dazzling as The Spot of Art.  This one’s about a ‘very young and extremely pale’ curate called Augustine, and to add to that description, a rather sickly and meek curate at that.  His superior, the Reverend Stanley Brandon, is a tempestuous former boxer and a big personality. Augustine happens to be in love with his daughter and the feeling’s mutual.  That’s the set up and the story doesn’t let the reader down.  The Bishop, whom the Reverend has known since school, is due to visit to give his former classmate a dressing down over the excessive embroidery on his cloak.  Stanley Brandon is gearing up for a terrific argument with his superior.   On the evening before the Bishop’s visit,  Augustine resolves to ask the vicar for his daughter Jane’s hand in marriage.  Jane dissuades the curate from doing so on account of her father’s irritability of the Bishop’s impending visit.  That night, Augustine receives a package from his aunt.  His uncle has been developing a miracle tonic called Buck-U-Uppo that seemingly cures the ailments that Augustine himself is afflicted with.  He takes it and it propels the story into a riveting second half.  I won’t spoil anymore.  You can read it yourself here, unabridged and with some wonderful illustrations!  

After this story, I was thinking of going back and giving the Oscar Wilde stories another shot but I read a random half-line and decided against it.  It’s hard-going and very much of its time, and being a comprehensive school-educated fellow of average intellect, I prefer my stories on the lighter side.  I appreciate Oscar Wilde – so much so that if I passed him in a dream street, I’d tip my hat and say good day to you, sir, but I’m afraid those stories are just not for me.

I am sitting in my new favourite place: The Living Room Cinema in Chipping Norton.  My Name is Alfred Hitchcock, a documentary about the great British film director, has just been delivered by motorcycle courier.  In true motorcycle courier style, he didn’t remove his helmet when he delivered the parcel.  There is always a sense of urgency about a man’s work when he enters a premises without removing his helmet.  It had the feeling of a heist about it.  A heist in the sense of a happy non-heist.  His schedule didn’t permit him to remove his helmet and that’s absolutely fine.  I wouldn’t want to remove my helmet if I was in his position.  Rather than a smash-and-grab, it was an unsmash-and-politely-give.  He was leathery, he was helmeted, he gave the parcel, got a digital signature from Manager Simon and was gone.  It was a smallish box, not too dissimilar to the size of the 600-page FUNNY HA HA book.  It was too small to contain a film reel, but too large to contain a USB stick.  My curiosity got the better of me. 

I pointed at the box.  ‘Is that a film?’    Simon was opening it as I asked.  It looked like a hard drive.

‘It’s a hard drive with the film on it.’  Simon handed it to me. 

I wasn’t au fait with the weight of hard drives.  I couldn’t say whether it was overly heavy or overly light, or indeed just an averagely-weighted hard drive.  The weight seemed to me to be the most important thing in that moment, but then I thought that weight is probably of the least importance.  Minutes don’t add grams.  I didn’t think they did.  Do they?  I handed it back to him after a few seconds, scared that the longer I held it the more likely it was that I’d drop it, like a friend’s newborn baby.  Like a baby, this thing was important to the future happiness of lots of people and nothing bad was going to happen.  Not on my watch.  I returned it swiftly and without drama because he was keen to whisk it up to “the room” – presumably the room with the projector in it, but I didn’t know how these things worked.  Is a film uploaded from the hard drive or is the film downloaded onto the computer?  Is there a difference?  He was the perfect person to ask, but of course I didn’t ask him.  Best to stay quiet and pretend to know things.  But the thing about this episode that fascinated me most of all was the term Simon used. 

‘I’ve just got to pop this upstairs.  The screening’s at 5:30 and it takes a few hours for the film to be ingested.’

I went quiet at that final word and blinked a few times.  Ingested.  Dear reader, you’ll never understand the images that this word conjured up.  It wasn’t so much the word ‘ingested’ - although it was a terrific surprise within the context of what was being described - but rather its closeness in proximity to the word film.  Films get ingested.  Okay, that’s a bit weird.  Is it a new thing?  Have they always been ingested?  Were they ingested in Hitchcock’s day? 

A development: Simon has shown me Screening Room 1 because I haven’t actually seen a film here yet.  He’s said that My Name is Alfred Hitchcock has been 68% ingested.  He added that the hard drive gets ingested into the projector (and I’m almost certain he said this) ‘by taking the roof off.’  I nodded as my brain was forced to restart. 

I used to read and write in a greasy spoon café just down the road.  This place may just be my home-from-home during this month-long writing adventure.  Absorbing - rather than ingesting - the general splendour of this cinema café.