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You owe me twenty quid: Tyres in Spaced

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15 May 2020 Last week Becca Harrison tweeted about re-watching the turn-of-the-millennium Channel 4 sitcom, Spaced , and some of its most quotable lines (concerning jaffa cakes in coat pockets) and imitable actions (mimed shoot out). Being an Ulsterperson, my fondness for the show often homes in on Tyres played by Belfast-born, Holywood-bred actor Michael Smiley (if you're a Ben Wheatley fan, you ought to recognise him). This train of thought, not for the first time, got me thinking about the significance of Tyres. When Spaced first aired in September 1999, Northern Ireland was a year-and-a-half into its fragile official peacetime following (and not quite yet distinct from) the prior thirty years of conflict. I was in my mid-teens and it was only when I reached my early and mid-twenties that I fully understood the characters in the show, especially the oddities of being a grown-up but feeling not as mature as your age suggested, of feeling the ageing process but still being...
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Spirited Away

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22 May 2020 Back in what feels like the beforetimes in February, Netflix began a staggered release of Studio Ghibli films, which put me in the mood to revisit many of them as well as see the few I'd missed for the first time. As the Covid-19 crisis became more apparent and lockdown was (finally and suddenly) introduced in the UK, the desire in particular to find comfort in Sprited Away (dir. Hayao Miyazaki, 2001) grew all the more. It's a film I've watched a few times before, and I enjoy the experience of seeing the works in both the original Japanese and English dubs. When Channel 4 ran a Studio Ghibli season, oh goodness, 10 to 15 or perhaps more years ago, only the dubbed versions were shown. But Netflix gives fantastic options for audio and subtitle combinations, and this time round it has to be the Japanese. In early April my anxiety concerning the pandemic was overwhelming, and getting it under control led to fatigue. One afternoon I had to admit defeat and lie i...
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The life is in the eyes: viewing A Monster Calls (dir. J. A. Bayona, 2016)

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Having earlier this year received counselling for mental health issues, I found the many topics raised in A Monster Calls deeply affecting and cathartic. Like Conor O’Malley (Lewis MacDougall), I was a child who lost a parent to illness and at around the same time experienced extremes of either being bullied or being ignored at school. The other kids either didn’t know how to treat me, or thought I was an easy target. I was placid, and big for my age. Aligning this with hardwired gender constructs, they decided I was ‘manly’, stoic and strong, never once considering that I was breaking inside and needed my pain to be treated as normal. It was easier to shut me down and confuse me about my gender identity than to dare disrupt their safe assumptions that parents lived to old age. At 32 years old, I was still getting bullied, this time in a bigger playground by people who could exert even more power over me. Like my childhood experience, when I defied their expectations and stoo...
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