Things get ever more bizarre… I have been invited to be a judge at the Seville International Film Festival from 5th to 13th of November. Imagine… the last time Ana, the Wife, and I went to the pictures was back in the seventies when, in Leicester Square of London we went to see a film called Rosa Luxembourg. Neither of us understood a word of it, even though it was in english… it was all too bafflingly intellectual. This experience sort of put us off going to the pictures and since then we have more or less eschewed the medium. Cinemas are founts of infection (things have reached such a pretty pass that people no longer cover their noses when sneezing!), and of course, turpitude… why, I myself along with the then girlfriend was bodily thrown out of a cinema in Winchester back in the sixties for just that sort of behaviour.

Recently, with the acquisition of a DVD player and screen, we have been getting back into the medium a bit: we saw ‘The Godfather’ the other night – fabulous… and I have to have at least a monthly dose of ‘Withnail and I’. Apart from that there are the perennial offerings from Werner Herzog,  the hilarious ‘Les Visiteurs’ and the unfathomable ‘Last Journey of Judge Feng’.

From this you will gather that I know nothing whatever about films… but apparently that is what they are after:  I think I am to be the sort of ‘noble savage’ who saves the thing from becoming all too esoteric, and, if you’ll excuse the vulgar expresion, ‘up its own arse’. Anyway, they put us up in a fancy hotel in Sevilla for a week, and, I am told, force us to watch up to six films a day! Watch this space…