Month: November 2020

Empty Suitcases

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We, like the rest of the world it seems, loved The Queen’s Gambit but there is a small, but oh so significant in our house, caveat.

Why would Beth would arrive back from one of her many chess triumphs (during which, especially in Paris,) she was wearing some amazing outfits, was she carrying small – and more importantly – empty suitcases.

Inside the House From Netflix's "The Queen's Gambit"

She is not alone, I have to say.

There are empty suitcases being carried by actors in hundreds of films – indeed we rarely watch a film without the Best Beloved harrumphing at a clearly empty suitcase.

Recently, on a wet afternoon diverted from gardening to binge film watching, Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson played about with empty suitcases in As Good As It Gets.

Previously, in To Catch A Thief when a youthful Leonardo di Caprio, who surely could manage to carry a suitcase with a little bit of stuff in it, swung an empty case as he strode along.

And that is to name but two.

(So, our film watching is punctuated by a combination of who can spot the empty suitcase first and name that actor.

‘Oh, that’s the woman who ran the antiques shop in Three Billboards, isn’t it?’

‘He was in that thing we watched, you know that thing with what’s her name from that thing based on JK Rowling’s book, Strike, that’s what it was – what was she called?’ )

It turns out we are not the only people to note empty suitcases – mentioning this to my good friend on a dog walk this morning, she was, well I can only say, enthused, that the BB was the other sensible soul in the universe who got outraged at an empty suitcase.

So, why when film makers expend a great deal of time, energy, effort, thought and money on making something look so real, do they fail to manage to get even a few clothes in a suitcase?

I stated to google about and looked up the role of continuity. I am no film expert but I would have thought this issue might fall into that bag (or case.)

Apparently, I was wrong and if you want to wade through some of the more arcane/academic explanations of continuity you could go here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3208769/ where you can find sentences like this: 

‘These camera shots are often filmed at different times and locations and may have little feature overlap, and as such, flow of information across shots often bears little resemblance to the perceptual flow of information as we interact in the real world.‘

But just in case you don’t, here is a short version, ‘Continuity in filmmaking is the practice of ensuring that details in a shot are consistent from shot to shot within a film scene. When there is continuity between shots, then audiences have a greater suspension of disbelief and will be more engaged in the film.’

Now, the problem with blaming continuity, is that you don’t get a shot with a proper heavy suitcase and the next time you see it, it is as light as a feather – they are always like that.

Presumably can’t be props as they must just supply the suitcases….

So, who knows who is responsible?

I googled ‘empty suitcases in films.’

It turns out I am not alone in trying to find an answer:

From The Guardian in 2013 in a section described as

‘Readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific concepts’

John Benseman, from Auckland, New Zealand asked,

‘Given all the care that film-makers take to make things realistic, why do they never seem to put any weight in the bags and suitcases that actors carry?’

I am really hoping that John Benseman got his answer eventually because no one, not one reader answered his question on The Guardian’s site. 

(And I am tempted to ask him as I found him on Google too but that, dear reader may be going a step too far….)

Likewise Mavieen Rows asked on her blog ,where she described herself as a spending life watching movies,

‘This drives me crazy.  What is so hard about actually putting clothes in them?  Hell, even putting pillows in them would give an extra dimension of “full” that doesn’t exist in a sides-caving-in typical Hollywood suitcase.  I want answers!’

As far as I know, she didn’t.

The rest of that google page search is full of references to a film called Empty Suitcases by Bette Gordon and should you need a review:

The “empty” suitcases can be inferred as letting go of all the unnecessary thoughts and feelings of a person’s past. After the film was over Bette Gordon talked about her desire to work with the empty spaces of the frame and put in items outside of the frame of view.

Mmmm, well it will have to be a very long wet Sunday afternoon before I pick that over a re-run of The Railway Children.

So, dear reader I would love to be able to answer the question of empty suitcases but I have found out nothing.

But here is a nice ending:

Apparently, it is a tradition in Colombia to carry around an empty suitcase on New Year’s Eve in the hope that the next year is full of travel and excitement and that over the year those cases will be filled with precious memories…….

Dilemmas and Bread and Butter Pudding

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There weren’t many moral dilemmas when I was at the Oxfam bookshop. Once you got over the difficulty of throwing away books – and you had to – it all fell into place.

Sell books, make money for a good cause, go home.

The Free Shop turns out to be a minefield of such dilemmas, and Christmas is bringing more and more of them.

The Free Shop was initiated, planned, and runs as an anti-food waste project. So, we get leftover food from local supermarkets, allotment growers, those with too many apples, and we offer them for free to anyone who wants them.

We are not a food bank and we do not ask for anyone to prove they are in need. 

But when I turn up on a Saturday morning with some soup I have made from some of the (rather surprisingly) 20 celeriacs we had donated last week, to find 15 people queuing up in the pouring rain half an hour before we open, you know they are not there to polish their eco credentials.

One of the local pubs, shut obviously, has turned its kitchen over to making food and I have to tell you it looks a whole lot more professional than the savoury bread and butter pudding I have made this week. (But more of that later.)

I am in the shop on a Wednesday afternoon.

Ostensibly, we are open from 2 to 3.30 but often my lovely colleague and I, have ‘sold’ out by 2.45.

So, back to the dilemmas.

If you are anti food waste, can you/should you ration what someone takes?

Do you make judgements about the person who comes in with two really big carrier bags and literally sweeps food into them? 

What do you think of the man who walks three miles to get to us along the main and rather dangerous road? Well, you get the best beloved to print off an ordnance survey map and highlight how to walk off road. When the man says it will be muddy and points to his loafers and you ask what size feet he has so that you can ‘source’ some wellies, and he says he wouldn’t be seen dead in wellies and by the way do you still not have any decent green tea available? Do you laugh and save him the only packet of green tea we get that week. Well that is what I did.

When you have five packs of cornflakes donated one week, and one person takes four of them, do you ask her to just take one as there are other people with kids in the queue, well I did.

Do you get just a bit cynical when people say they are ‘shopping’ for their neighbour as well as themselves. I do. If every person who said that in our ‘shop’ was actually doing that, then there are a lot of well fed neighbours.

Yes, I am not proud of those reactions and I know that I, as an extremely privileged person, can know nothing of what it is like to try and make very thin and far away ends meet.

I am just explaining that, for me, it is very hard not to make judgements.

So, Christmas.

I was charged with making a Christmas happen in the ‘shop.’ 

Being me, I flapped my hands and asked for help and contacted my sewing group ( the people who made a sterling amount of headbands and scrub bags during lockdown – I didn’t sew I need to make clear.)

I asked for those gifts that people have given you and they are perfectly good quality but you are not going to use them.

Anything they fancied making.

I was clear that everything had to be good quality – just because you are poor or you have found yourselves falling from ‘just managing’ to not, or you both worked in hospitality on a zero hours contract and those not longer exit, you shouldn’t be expected to be grateful for a half empty bottle of body lotion.

As ever, I have been so impressed by what I have received. 

Handmade stockings and puddings and teddy bears, a chess set, endless good quality ‘smellies’, candles akimbo, there is Christmas bunting on the way, lavender bags, a pristine Paddington, and so on.

One of ‘my’ sewing group said although she did sew, she was really a potter and would make some porcelain tea light holders. And she has.

And there is more to come.

My dilemma is how to sell/distribute these lovely things.

This is not anti-waste. This is re-distribution of wealth and luck.

Do we ration? Yes. 

How – not sure. 

Should you be interested, I will let you know what we do.

Meanwhile, one thing we are never short of is bread. The local Tesco in particular, is rubbish at the bread baking and ordering so there is always lots and lots and lots.

What can you do with stale bread.

Well you can make savoury bread and butter puddings which seem to be popular and when I do them, they fly off the shelves – all so very gratifying.

So, take some stale bread. Make some garlic butter. Cook some mushrooms, chopped and cook in oil and a knob of butter for quite a long time ( say half an hour).

Add some defrosted spinach or fresh spinach cooked down you fancy it.

Either make a ‘sandwich’ of bread and butter and mushrooms ( spinach maybe) and top with tomatoes. Or do them in upright triangles with mushrooms and tomatoes scattered.

Of course you can add ham, or whatever you fancy.

Mix some milk and eggs together and pour over. Scatter with grated cheese and put in the oven ( 180 degrees) until cheese is bubbling.

Yes I know it is not a proper recipe but for me, it is not full of moral dilemmas.

Pink Priests

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I don’t want to harp on about my holiday in Italy and visiting churches, but hey ho you need to know about the pink priests.

A warning though, the pink priests come at the end.

As I mentioned before, I do like visiting a church.

So, on a recent trip to Italy, (I may have mentioned that before too) there was one church which had a lot of confessional booths. 

When I say a lot, I don’t mean a few, I mean about 20.

Yes really. 

The comedian Zoe Lyons recently said of confession, ‘ You were locked in a wardrobe with a priest, and then you had to tell him what you had done wrong. The irony.’ 

Well, the people of Lucca had clearly got a lot to talk about and they didn’t have the privacy of a locked in wardrobe. No, you had to kneel so that everyone else could see you.

Mind you, you did have a choice of venue booths, as it were.

That same church had a lot of plaques on the ground (I am sure there is a technical church term for them) which had once shown the likeness of the dead person but had been worn smooth.

I’d just like to say at this point that they may have been worn smooth as much by tourists as penitents but when I was there, I was one of the few visitors. ( Yes, I know I shouldn’t have boasted.)

But hey ho.

Anyway, so what was there about the people of Lucca which was so reprehensible that they need so many confessionals?

Well, I don’t know, but I did Google ‘Lucca scandals’ to find out if there had been anything which would have swept the populace into the confessional and came up with something on the Daily Mail online (of course).

“The Italian city of Lucca was today accused of ‘culinary racism’ after it banned new foreign eateries from opening in its historic centre.”

Further ( much further) down the article, there was this comment from the town’s authorities

“A spokesman for Lucca’s town hall defended the new rules, saying they were meant to safeguard the city’s traditional and cultural identity and that it also applied to sex shops, fast food restaurants and take-away pizza parlours.

‘The ban targets McDonald’s as much as kebab restaurants,’ he said.

The town council is also urging foreign restaurants to include on their menus at least one course typical of Lucca, prepared exclusively with local ingredients.”

I am not sure if the confessionals need to be used by people who are not offering sex with a traditional Luccan menu, but you never know.

Looking further back, (courtesy of Wikipedia) it turns out that Lucca had a busy time in history and within that plenty of scope for people to do things they might later regret:

‘In 1408, Lucca hosted the convocation intended to end the schism in the papacy. Occupied by the troops of Louis of Bavaria, the city was sold to a rich Genoese, Gherardino Spinola, then seized by John, king of Bohemia. Pawned to the Rossi of Parma, by them it was ceded to Mastino II della Scala of Verona, sold to the Florentines, surrendered to the Pisans, and then nominally liberated by the emperor Charles IV and governed by his vicar. Lucca managed, at first as a democracy, and after 1628 as an oligarchy, to maintain its independence alongside of Venice and Genoa, and painted the word Libertas on its banner until the French Revolution in 1789.’

Now, you could confess to being one of the people who sold your city to the Genoese, helping John of Bohemia to seize it, being involved in pawning it, selling it to the Florentines and as I am not sure of the dates of all this, your family could have done all of the above.

If you surrendered to the Pisans, you might feel a bit guilty, and if you helped Charles IV you might feel you needed to show to his vicar that you were someone who knew their way into a confessional.

So, who knows why there are so many confessionals but leaving aside food racism and everything from selling your city to wresting it from democracy to oligarchy, there must have been a few adultery, theft, gluttony, sloth, pride ‘issues’ to bring along – and maybe that was just the priests.

Talking of priests,  we have finally dear reader, got to the pink ones.

So, yet another church but this time acting as a gallery for photographic images of the Volto Santo procession.

(The Holy Face of Lucca (Volto Santo di Lucca) is an eight-foot-tall (2.4 m), ancient wooden carving of Christ crucified in Lucca.)

According to medieval legend, Nicodemus, a figure often referred to as a Pharisee and is rumoured have met with Christ, carved from memory the face of Jesus. However, he hesitated to complete his carving for fear of not doing it justice. Exhausted from the work, he fell asleep.  When he awoke, he found the face was finished and claimed it to be the work of an angel. The story then tells us that the Crucifix of the “Holy Face” was buried in a cave for safekeeping, where it remained for centuries. So you may be wondering if it was buried in a cave then how did it get to Lucca?

It was rediscovered by Bishop Gualfredo, who was on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land when its location was revealed to him in a dream. To allow God to decide where the Crucifix should be kept, the bishop set it adrift on an unmanned boat in the Mediterranean Sea. The Volto Santo arrived on the shores of northern Italy, where the Bishop of Lucca, also prompted by a dream, put it into a wagon with no driver to determine its final location. The two oxen pulling the wagon stopped of their own accord at Lucca in 782.

The story doesn’t stop there, it is also said that the Volto Santo was placed in the Church of San Frediano, but the next morning, it was found  miraculously in another church, that of San Martino. Therefore, San Martino was designated the cathedral of Lucca and the wooden statue was left in a special chapel within the church.) Wikipedia.

So, that is the background story, and the festival is all about people from their districts of Lucca and their priests walking to the meeting point with the populace watching, and there are lots of candles and people crossing themselves and celebrations etc etc.

Now, just before I show you a photo of one ‘set’ of priests setting out on their walk with the Volto Santo, and you might think pink and lace on men might just, just, be thought a little bit gay, and you might want to ponder on the Catechism of the Catholic Church which says:

Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity (Cf. Genesis 19:1-29; Romans 1:24-27; 1 Corinthians 6:10; 1 Timothy 1:10), tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Persona humana, 8). They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.