Not A Day Off

One of the joys of being self-employed is the ability to keep your own hours. By the time you factor in a bit of prevarication, bad habits, creative wrestling matches and time spent chasing jobs, the downside of this is you often end up working seven days a week. This isn't a moan about how working for yourself is "the hardest game in the book" but rather a simple acknowledgement that if you're not too hot on time management, then the working week can stretch out way beyond normal office hours.

So, the upshot of all this is, weekends where Debbie and I get to relax in each other's company are fairly rare. When they do happen however they feel really special.

Today the plan was to go Newcastle, have breakfast at Blakes, read the Sunday papers and then take in a couple of movies. And that, dear reader, is exactly what we did.


Newcastle was positively sparkling after the morning's rain as we made our way down Grainger Street towards Blake's.





After a couple of hours of drinking tea, reading The Sunday Times, The Observer and The Independent, we head back out onto Grainger Street...

and onto the Tyneside Cinema for our first movie of the day...

The White Ribbon was a bleak, unflinching account of a German village on the eve of WW1. Beautifully shot in black and white it gripped us from the first to the last frame. Spellbinding stuff! After this, refreshments were required in the cafe. Bernard and Lesley, who had seen The White Ribbon earlier in the week, were waiting to join us.


After an hour of chinwaggery, it was three floors down to the Classic...

where we were scheduled to see...

What I like about the Coen Brothers is that you never quite know what you're going to get - much like the eponymous hero! Superb stuff and much better than the likeable but absolutely lightweight Burn After Reading. On the Metro back to Whitley Bay the two movies gave us plenty to talk about and ponder on.

Whatever messages may have been contained in the two films we'd just seen, the lesson that was laid out for me today (my late mother's birthday incidentally) was that it's not about having a "day off" but actually having a "day on" spending time with, and paying attention to, the ones you love.

Amen to that!