SomersTownLisa

London Life
2021-05-18 11:38:21 (UTC)

Nomadland (17/05/2021)

We went to lunch at Neighbourhood Organic, having forgotten that you can sit inside restaurants from today - but we preferred to sit outside in the sun, before going to the park where we used to take our food to eat during lockdowns. They do tasty sourbread and a good salad.

There were bouts of heavy rain during the day, so I got the Tube to the task at Hollybush, didn’t allow quite enough time and arrived a couple of minutes late, so I missed some chit-chat - my favourites Becky J and Sree were already there. I spent the time shovelling woodchip into a wheelbarrow with Sree and Aine, a chatty Irish girl – we spent a lot of time talking about the Gaelic language. Aine had been with her parents for two months but had to return for PAYE reasons.
When I said I was going to see a USA film, they suggested a couple of films which would be out soon. At one time, we had no supply of empty wheelbarrows from the other helpers, so I went searching with Sree down a curvy path through a nature area, but we they weren’t there, and we had to come back in the end. But when they did arrive, I watched where they went (to the site where we met!), so next time I intercepted Becky and Chris half-way.

I got a bus and Overground to the Rio. There was a queueing system and Jack was already in the cinema in his seat when I arrived. I had to queue outside for about fifteen minutes, but the film didn’t start until nearly half an hour after the advertised time. As we wanted to make use of the first day of re-opening, and there were no British films showing yet, we saw a USA film, Nomadland, in a very North-American setting, with a featureless, very remote backdrop (apart from some amazing rock formations) and mountains in the distance.

It wasn’t my sort of film as it didn’t have a story, and it was about old people – I remember a particularly boring Michael Caine film a couple of years back. I didn’t realise until afterwards that it was a semi-documentary – a lot of the characters were real people, living in caravans in a mutual community. The lead woman was contrasted with her sister, who’d married a property dealer and lived in a too-pretty detached house, but this aspect was only touched upon. However I managed to avoid getting bored, though it was hard to understand some of the dialogue; the accents didn’t help.

Afterwards, we were sent down stairs straight into the street, making me realise how much I missed sitting with a snack in the foyer with the other customers, usually an essential part of visiting independent cinemas. Putting everything into the pocket at the back of my cycle jacket, and trying to hold a coffee cup and a vest in my hand while accessing my travel card, I managed to lose my favourite face-mask, but we went back and retrieved it from the pavement near the cinema, before getting the train home.

I noticed three language differences, where the phrase did make sense to a UK audience, but isn’t how we would say it. “Substitute” teacher rather than supply teacher, saying “counter” to mean a shelf in a home rather than a shop counter, and “have you got an extra cigarette?”, rather than a “spare” cigarette.




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