• Monday, 12 May 2025 9:22 pm

  Postwar

  by Tony Judt

  Published 2005 878 pages

  

  You know, for a nearly 900-page book covering the history of Europe from 1945 to the new millennium (or thereabouts), Postwar is a remarkably easy read. A long read, for sure — but an eminently manageable one. If anything, its straightforward telling-of-events narrative very nearly spoils it; Judt leaves it a little bit too much up to the reader to connect the dots.

  Maybe I'm just a idiot. Maybe the average reader of a 900-page history of a continent should be up to the task of finding the common thread that weaves that history together.

  Luckily Judt puts it right at the end of the book:

  All the same, the rigorous investigation and interrogation of Europe's competing pasts—and the place occupied by those pasts in Europeans' collective sense of themselves—has been one of the unsung achievements and sources of European unity in recent decades. It is, however, an achievement that will surely lapse unless ceaselessly renewed. Europe's barbarous recent history, the dark 'other' against which post-war Europe was laboriously constructed, is already beyond recall for young Europeans. Within a generation the memorials and museums will be gathering dust—visited, like the battlefields of the Western Front today, only by aficionados and relatives.

  If in years to come we are to remember why it seemed so important to build a certain sort of Europea out of the crematoria of Auschwitz, only history can help us. The new Europe, bound together by the signs and symbols of its terrible past, is a remarkable accomplishment; but it remains forever mortgaged to that past.

• ---

  Saturday, 3 May 2025 6:30 pm

  Bob Graham Round, leg 4 clockwise

  Last year I ran leg 1 of a friend’s anticlockwise Bob Graham Round with him as a pacer. This was in the catatonic lee of the Fellsman, and I was letting my fitness drain away a little bit, and my Fellsman training had overindexed on distance rather than elevation, and I was also wearing the wrong pair of shoes: so on the descent down Dale Head I sort of fell behind by a couple of minutes and only barely arrived at Honister before my friend set off again up Grey Knotts.

  Nearly a year has passed since then, and very little running in the Lakes in the meantime. I have, however, at least started to pay lip service to climbing in Castle Eden Dene and the North York Moors, so I was keen to see whether I could keep up on a group Striders run on a clockwise leg 4 recce over the bank holiday weekend.

  

  

  

  

  Pleased to report that it went well: either due to company, or fine weather, or dry conditions, or judicious use of salt capsules, I finished the 17-mile run in good fettle, a little tuckered out but not unable to keep climbing if necessary. A Bob is not in my immediate future, but I’m glad to know that I can at least dispatch pacing duties without catastrophe.

  Leg 4 recce with the all-stars on Strava

  Running Bob Graham Round Striders

• ---

  Thursday, 1 May 2025 11:14 pm

  Neptune relays

  First ever relay race, a 1.7-mile lap around Hardwick Park in Sedgefield. I love short-distance events like these; I always feel in the lead-up that I’m in the presence of minor Greatness. Young people with joints that can go for days and windswept hair and sunglasses and moustaches and reeking of the privilege of being a lifelong runner. Do I sound bitter.

  

  I finished in decent time, though at the end I felt that nagging feeling that I maybe left a little bit out on the course. Could I have eked another 10 seconds off? Another 20? Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll be back next year to find out.

  Running

• ---

  Wednesday, 23 Apr 2025 10:30 pm

  Macbeth (1623, 2025)

  

  Better than I remember. I read Hamlet and Macbeth at around the same time, a long time ago, and I remember disliking Macbeth. Thinking that it was a bit dark and messy.

  Still definitely dark. But much tighter than I remember. There's very little fat on the story — it's all propulsive and action-driven. There's not a ton of soliloquising or emotional gymnastics. No scenes where people go off and just mull around. I dig it.

  Just after reading it we went to see the film of the production with David Tennant from back in February 2025. It was good but some of the casting choices were weird. David Tennant was actually remarkably not good. Banquo was terrific, and Macduff got better and better as the play went on. The person who played Malcolm gave off the impression that they hadn't rehearsed at all, and in fact that there was a person with cue cards standing just offscreen. Rigid, table-read-type stuff. The visual language was very cool, but maybe not particularly original.

  Play, by William Shakespeare |
  Show, with David Tennant |

  Shows Shakespeare Reading

• ---

  Sunday, 20 Apr 2025 4:23 pm

  Kagemusha (1980)

  

  Kurosawa likes to do this thing where he makes a scene three or four times longer than it needs to be just to try and give the audience time to appreciate the gravity of what’s happening. It's on full display here, like during the nighttime battle at Takatenjin Castle, or at the end when the army is slaughtered and there’s like 5 minutes of slowmo shots of horses kicking their legs in the air.

  I know that in the 1980s they loved their slowmo shots. I don't mind these big atmospheric scenes, but I don't think that I like them, either. Kagemusha moves along at such a good pace for so much of its runtime, that when we're treated to 10 minutes of men shouting and running back and forth in the dark, you feel it. I wanted to get up and make a cup of tea and then come back when the story got going again.

  However, the parts of the movie where the story does got going are a treat. Visually stunning, dramatic, propulsive. And Tetusya Nakadai is a treasure as per. I could spend the rest of my life watching movies where he just stares traumatised into the middle distance.

  Movies

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