Thinkpiece
Robin Downie
Well, actually, it’s me
Life of George
‘Say what fella?’
Three traditional shops
Islay McLeod
Film
Dharmendra Singh reviews ‘Rabbit Hole’
Rating: 4/5 stars
‘Love will get you through’.
I couldn’t convince my wife to see this one with me. She had a point, though. Not all soon-to-be parents would want to watch a film about parents who have to cope with the loss of their four-year-old son.
The untimely death affects Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) in different ways. Becca finds that she can cope with the loss by engrossing herself in a domestic routine. Howie, who is more practical, is eager to try for another baby, citing their ages as a reason.
They attend a support group for grieving parents. Becca, a religious sceptic, grows weary of remarks made by the ‘God freaks’. Howie attends as a matter of course.
I’ve never been a big Nicole Kidman fan, but it only takes one great performance for me to change my mind. She is utterly brilliant as the angst-ridden mother. The pain she suffers from is visible in that striking Victorian face of hers.
Similarly with Aaron Eckhart. He’s had a few hits, but I’ve never considered him a lead actor – until now. Here he plays a tender, uncomplicated husband who stores his anguish and erupts only when pressure is unbearable.
There’s a touching yet disquieting relationship between Becca and the teenager, Jason (Miles Teller), who knocked over Becca’s child. They convene secret meetings as they find comfort in each other’s reassurances. I noticed a look in their eyes. They don’t look at each other; they look into each other. Is this an oedipal reference? There’s a possibility.
Where the drama comes alive is in the scene where Becca and Howie argue, fiercely, over who was responsible for the death. Rather than blame each other, they blame themselves.
This film is challenging because it doesn’t resort to cliché when it would be so easy to do so. It makes the difficult choice of showing the horror of this awful situation and forcing the characters (and us) to move on from the tragedy.
I have a feeling Becca and Howie will continue to argue, and may not have another child for some time. But at least they know they love each other. Time will sort out the rest.
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Health
Bill Boyd
‘How would you describe the essence of a flavour that only two people in the world know? One that is such a closely guarded secret that it is held under lock and key in a vault in Switzerland? A taste so precious, so unique…There is only one word to describe it. Phenomenal.’
So runs the blurb on the website of our self-proclaimed ‘other national drink’. You know, the one allegedly made from girders. And yes, according to the FAQs, since the original recipe was launched in 1901, it has always contained a small amount of iron. Cue pictures of tough, healthy kids with red hair and phenomenally clever advertising campaigns.
I first encountered the expression, as a piece of smart-assed graffiti, in my student days at the tail end of the so-called ‘hippy era’, but more recently ‘You Are What You Eat’ has been the title of a TV series and a book by the Scottish nutritionist Gillian McKeith, she of the nagging presentational style, obsessive interest in other people’s stools, dubious qualifications and grossly overweight bank balance.
The aphorism had been long-established before any of that, however, dating back at least as far as 1826, when Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, writing in ‘Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante’, observed, ‘Dis-moi ce qui tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es – tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are’.
The precise phrase didn’t enter the English language until more than a hundred years later when the American health food and weight loss pioneer Victor Lindlahr, who was a strong believer in the idea that food controls health, popularised it and brought it to the public consciousness through his own book of the same name.
It was given a new lease of life in the 1960s when adopted by advocates of macrobiotic wholefood as a slogan for healthy eating. Belief in the grain-based natural diet was so strong in some quarters that when Adelle Davis, a leading spokesperson for the organic food movement, contracted the cancer that later killed her, she attributed the illness to the junk food she had eaten at college. Since then, with a few honourable exceptions, all of us have succumbed to a greater or lesser degree to the growth in mass production of processed food.
The knock-on effect is that an unacceptable number of young children in this country face an uphill struggle at school even before the first bell rings.
Bill Boyd is an independent learning consultant, specialising in literacy and English. He has been an English teacher, principal teacher and depute headteacher, and spent four years at Learning and Teaching Scotland where he was an education manager.
