Hell's bells! It's already October. Time surely flies. I've even spotted the shops doing that cheeky thing of strategically placing Christmas wrapping paper rolls in boxes around their stores, in the hope of achieving some subliminal messaging, kind of like in Fight Club, where Brad Pitt pops up for one frame, to inform our subconscious minds. Of what, I'm not quite sure. Never did understand that movie.
But I digress...
Now that it's October, the nights are drawing in. It's dark by tea time, and the pathetic excuse we had for a summer has well and truly disappeared. Strictly Come Dancing is back on the telly, waging its annual war with the X Factor...again. Yes, it's that time of year when we hibernate. We stay indoors, except for a brief moment on November 5th, where, like the English wallies we are, we venture out into the chill night air. It's the time of year to bed down, snuggle into our duvets and spend time wishing we had a multi fuel burning stove in our fireplaces instead of an aquarium. Oh, no, that's just me.
Personally, I quite like this time of year - it's the lull before the festive mayhem, when you have time to slop around the house on the weekend in your slipper socks and cosy bathrobe. I've been getting into the idea of 'stopping in,' instead of 'going out' to summer barbies, and I recently bought (on the recommendation of some fellow writers - they know who thay are) 'Lost in Austen' on DVD, for those cold nights, when my partner is fighting imaginary snipers on his computer, and I need some heartwarming, eighteenth century fluff.
OK, so the series is only four, fort-five minute episodes long, but enough, I thought, to last a month. One episode a week - quite sufficient. Oh how wrong I was! I thought I did quite well to stretch the series across two sessions, but that was all I could manage.
In case you don't know, the basic premise of the series is that a modern day woman (Amanda Price) escapes the stresses of her everyday existence, by reading Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. One evening, she finds Elizabeth Bennet in her bathroom, and a doorway that leads into the novel itself. The 'fish out of water' situation allows for plenty of humourous moments, and the clever casting permits quite a bit of eye candy - Darcy, Wickham, Bingley.
Yes, it's romantic fluff. Plenty of die-hard, purist Austen fans will be disgusted that the plot of Pride and Prejudice is skewed and meddled with, but for somebody like me, who has never read the actual novel, I was immune to it. I totally loved it!! It's a girlie thing. It makes you want to eat chocolate and ice-cream. It makes you feel like Bridget Jones. It makes you all romantic and silly inside.
The best bit is, naturally, the 'lake scene,' which has now, thanks largely to Helen Fielding, become an iconic moment. The Lost in Austen lake scene does not disappoint, and is even better, I hazard, than the Colin Firth version. The unsung hero of the piece, in my humble opinion, is Hugh Bonneville, who fits the role of Mr Bennet as though it was written just for him.
Bravo! Bravo! Now I need to find something else to warm the cockles of my heart of an autum evening. I wonder if the Thornbirds is available on DVD?
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