How you make me feel; projection and its identification.

Why do we trust some people and not others?  Why do we admire some people?   Why do some people make us uncomfortable?  Is it because they remind us of significant figures in our lives; our mother, our father, a brother or sister, a lover, a husband, wife, a teacher?   Are... Read more »

Design for Living? I don’t think it will work.

It should be easy, you know.  The actual facts are so simple.  I love you.  You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto.  Otto loves you.  Otto loves me.’ Oh My God!   Or as Mrs ‘Odge might say,  ‘Well, ‘eres a pretty pickle.’      So why isn’t it easy?    Why shouldn’t... Read more »

Keep on dancing

Every Saturday evening,  sixteen million people turn on their televisions for two hours to watch Strictly Come Dancing, and turn on again the following night to see the results.  But why?  Why  should a dance competition captivate the nation so much?  It’s not Brucie’s jokes.  And I can’t really  believe... Read more »

Catherine; the tragedy for Jules, et Jim!

Catherine was one of those entrancing women, so full of life and fun, a free spirit, brave, sparky, vivacious – the kind of lively, fragile personality who lives on the edge; exciting, impulsive, passionate and very dangerous.  Like a candle in the wind, she was never going to be tied... Read more »

There, but for the grace of God; a perspective on psychosis.

You’re driving me mad, I’m going crazy, I’m losing my mind, he’s just daft, it just doesn’t make sense!  How many times a day do you hear such sentiments?  How often do you express them yourself?   Our lives are so complex, so pressurised that we have to work very hard... Read more »

You shouldn’t ever go back

I rarely watch television.  Most of it is rubbish; idiotic game shows, predictable soaps, tedious news commentary and mind numbing adverts.  But ‘The Song of Lunch’,  the dramatisation of Christopher Reid’s narrative, superbly performed by Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson,  was something different.    Shocking, intense and bleak, the poem is... Read more »

Because – you’re worth it!

She didn’t believe in anything very much.  Communism, fascism, altruism, capitalism, collectivism; they were all the same to her; forms of subjugation and oppression.  No, what Ayn Rand believed in was objectivism, "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life,... Read more »

Je t’aime.

In one video,  the artist stopped people in the street and asked them to look into the camera and say  ‘Je t’aime’ (I love you).   Her subjects found it so difficult.  Their body language was so defensive.   They laughed, looked away, crossed their arms, shuffled their feet, lit a cigarette.... Read more »

The Real Thing

I thought it was going to be too clever by half, a criticism so often levelled at Stoppard and parodied in the character of Henry, the playwright.  Was his writing the real thing or just or just the defensive manipulations of an expert wordsmith, obfuscating, confusing, keeping everything ambivalent.  Or... Read more »

Emma Bovary; incurable romantic or dangerous hysteric

Flaubert’s heroine didn’t start bad.  She was a lively imaginative girl.  She might have benefited from a bit of maternal constraint, but her mother died when she was just 11 and she was sent to a convent.   There her religious fantasies took a romantic turn.  She began reading the romantic... Read more »

Love and Glory; the wondrous madness of it all.

'It’s still the same old story; a fight for love and glory; a case of do or die.’  It is 1885 and there’s  trouble in the Balkans – as usual!  Sergius, so ambitious for glory, leads a foolhardy cavalry charge against the Serbian machine guns.  He’s not to know that the... Read more »

Beauty with Balls; an appreciation of Ingrid Bergman

I think I was in love with her from the start as she gazed steadily at me with moist lips and knowing eyes from the flickering monochrome  screens of such classics as Casablanca, Notorious, Spellbound, The Bells of St Mary’s,  and For whom the bell tolls.   Her face expressed vulnerability and innocence,... Read more »

Charmed! The irresistable attractions of Violet Gordon Woodhouse.

Some women just have it, that magic; the ability to evoke adoration in others.  Violet did.  How else could she make four men fall in love with her so deeply that they devoted their lives to her.  First there was Gordon, whom she married, then Bill, the love of her... Read more »

The dread of feeling too much; Edvard Munch and his women

‘I was out walking with two friends.  The sun began to set.  Suddenly the sky turned blood red.  I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence.  There was blood and tongues of fire above the blue black fjord and the city.  My friends walked on  and I stood there... Read more »

It’s a Dog’s Life!

‘A dog is a man’s best friend’, so they say.  They are our companions. They are, like us,  social carnivores that hunt in the daylight. We were made to collaborate. How much more effective we would have been as hunters with dogs to detect and chase our prey.  And dogs... Read more »

When the dream fades, kill it off!

Frank and April Wheeler had it all.  They were a charmed couple, or so it seemed to their neighbours and friends.  He was virile and handsome, a whizz in the city, she was beautiful and an actress.  They owned a pretty clapperboard house in the leafy suburbs.  They had two... Read more »

Haunted! ‘Trauma’ and McGrath’s ghosts.

Charlie is a psychiatrist, an expert on trauma. His marriage to Agnes broke up after her brother, Danny, committed suicide.  Danny was a Vietnamese veteran whose buddy was killed by a booby trap device right next to him.  He was also Charlie’s patient.  He blew his brains out after Charlie... Read more »

Dr Haggard’s Disease

It was 1937; and there was trouble on the horizon.  They recognized each other at a funeral. There was a spark.  Then they found they were sitting next to each other at the Cushing’s dinner party.  He was Dr Edward Haggard, house surgeon at St Basil’s and a bit of... Read more »

Madly in love

When her husband, Max, is appointed director of an asylum in Essex, Stella is not overjoyed.  She is bored; ‘dying of chronic neglect’.  She resents the restrictions of her position and the limited perspectives of the other wives.  To relieve the monotony, she develops an attraction to Edgar, a handsome... Read more »

Capturing the Look of Love; Waterhouse’s Women.

   The long neck is bent, the skin pale, the gaze serious and sustained, sad yet determined, the lips are slightly parted, the body lithe, nubile, not a child but not yet a woman.  Waterhouse's depictions of women express an ambiguity, an inscrutability, a mysterious, thoughtful reflection that enthrals and captivates.... Read more »

Bliss

And after I had washed the mud from my legs, I stood naked on the step, in the cold rain that swept up the valley from the sea, while you poured warm water onto the back of my neck and the shivering skin between my shoulder blades. Do it again, I cried, and you did until the... Read more »

Failing Better.

  'Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter.  Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.'                                               Samuel Beckett   Don't give up! Learn from your mistakes. Do better next time. Remember Robert Bruce and the spider, Alfred and the cakes.  Just pick yourself up, dust yourself down and start all over again.  That seems be the message... Read more »

Don’t play with fire.

Giver of life,   You chuckle, crackle, inspire  Your energy moves me, You offer me light and warmth You are my sun, My reason, my creation.   Never the same,   You sway, dance, hypnotise Seduce with your desire. Your provocative play, Makes me steam, melt, Burn with temptation.   A greedy mistress, You roar, consume, require   Nought but disintegration, Your hot breath, your hiss, Reduces me... Read more »

The Dark Side of the Moon

  You rise alone at dusk,  sick with longing; a melancholy romantic,    pale reflection of desire, intent on seduction.   Your glance, inscrutable, beguiles with suggestion, creates shades of possibility, among fragrant borders, transplanted with lust.   You suck tsunamis from the deep That sweep me from the beach     to drown in your mystery, that cold, silent accomplice that fate... Read more »

Show! Don’t tell! An appraisal of The Reader.

Show! Don't tell!  Let the reader decide why the characters behave as they do.  Keep them guessing. It's what can turn a good book into a great one.  But, to be honest, I didn't think The Reader was a great book when I first read it about three months ago. ... Read more »

Death, desire and despair at the Odioun; the pholly of Phedre

She has desired Hippolytus since the day she married his father.  Proud,  aloof, disdainful of women; he has all the strength of the father but none of his sire's weakness for sexual temptation, or so it seems.  He is a real challenge.  She has to possess him, but Hippolytus is... Read more »

Not for you

Not for you, the intimacies of the night,   you like the light, the freedom of dawn, when scampering winds shepherd clouds over the hills of your dreams.        Not for you, the beguiling song of the blackbird, The one you cannot trust.   You prefer the high rise worry of larks, the pied piping of oystercatchers, the querulous... Read more »