My holiday reading and watching was wide-spread, flitting between high-brow and entertainment. All necessary. All good. I've been reading (in no particular order) Witch Hunt, a thriller by Ian Rankin, The Cuckoo's Call by Robert Galbraith and In Balance by Adam Phillips. All three are worth delving into for entirely different reasons. I also started to read The Prince by Machaevelli after watching this documentary.
Screen-wise, I got all addicted to the Imagine BBC series of documentaries, including this brilliant film on artist's Gilbert and George. They live in a street that I know ever so well. My great-uncle in-law frequented them and Stanley lived in an identical East End flat ( albeit less renovated) just around the corner from the artists. Whatever time of day we arrived at Stanley's bachelor three-storey apartment ( a dusty residence topped by an abandoned tailor's workshop), he instantly produced a plate of food - normally a round of smoked salmon sandwiches - from the drawer of a wooden cabinet. We ate at a huge polished table, next to a stack of three or four TV's, surrounded by sofas and the black and white wedding photos of his eleven siblings.
Stanley was a militant urban rambler; in a psycho-geographic fashion he wandered around country and town and read the East End like the palm of his hand. The Gilbert and George documentary is called No Surrender. Stanley would have appreciated those words, it's good advice for 2016!
