NaBloPoMo: one post every day throughout November

Holy Cow, Richard Curtis, you don’t do things by halves, do you? I was warned about this one but still I never expected that when the film ended I would have to clench my legs to stop them from leaping in a cab to the airport and boarding the next flight back to London – then popping on the Piccadilly line to Paddington to catch a train to Cornwall.

Instead we went for lunch and watched the hot rain falling down over the sea, sat in a Japanese restaurant in the mall we like to go to, peering out at the cable cars and palm trees waving in the breeze, trying to equate what we could see with what we had just seen – nothing like those familiar chilly London streets. At times like this I know I am very far from Kansas (Camden, Treburrick whatever).

Homesickness comes and goes. Mainly, this year, it has gone, but when it comes back it comes back with a force that only the knowledge of future repatriation can appease. These sorts of films don’t help.

First you’ve got your streets of London: wet and drizzly, with the sort of rain that you know is needle-thin and cold and gets down the back of your neck – not like the fat warm drops pelting down sideways in a milky film just outside my sushi window. Streetlights blurry, Golborne Road, brick walls and London traffic, a soundtrack just beginning to be slightly retro, and what can ONLY be Maida Vale tube: and at this point you can’t help having a little wriggle in your seat because you know those stairs down and that exit, and when it’s somewhere you used to live – just down the road from that very tube, for instance, with the nice young chap who just happens to be sitting on the other side of his aunt from you (during a daytime bunk-off thanks to a nice spot of garden leave) – anyway, when you know all that it takes you back, doesn’t it, because we were right there, just like them. I know we held hands on an up-escalator just like they did, too, probably the same one. So that doesn’t help. I KNOW THAT, you want to shout, I KNOW ALL THAT! Aww, home…

Then there’s the sea and the fields, fudge-box vistas combined in a way that only your own personal Cornish coastline can do, and in front of those creamy views is a dusty, happy family with jolly nice accents, a ramrod eccentric but kind mother and a gentle, academic father in a house full of cr@p, plus the sort of mentally dotty sister there always has to be in these films (I’ll take that role, no problem). IT’S CORNWALL, you want to poke Mr PC, but he knows it’s Cornwall, he’s already making a point of sticking his face back in the popcorn box to make sure you don’t notice that his eyes are a bit shiny. He knows.

I won’t spoil it for you. If you’ve ever seen a Richard Curtis film you’ll know the format. It’s a good one, though – it works. By the time they get to my very own [SPOILER ALERT] Cornish funeral scene I am finding it hard to breathe, and fighting off the sad thoughts by sucking tears back between my teeth and digging my nails into my palm. As we all know, though, resistance is useless during beautiful films like this and later, in the restaurant, Mr PC leans over and tells me I have a dirty spectacle lens: ‘Looks like salt water,’ he says, and gives me the kind of fluffy warm smile you only get in those awful Richard Curtis emotional (ARCE) films; the kind of smile you actually need if you’ve just seen an ARCE film.

I now have to get over it all over again, the displacement thing AND the funeral thing. So thanks Richard Curtis. Thanks a lot.