Thanks to Beth for setting me this challenge, designed - I’m
guessing - to release my inner teenager. I’m fairly sure it’s something I’d
never done before. Certainly not when I was a teenager - the town I grew up in
didn’t get a cinema until after I’d left home, so until I learned to drive I
had to go to see films with the unwelcome chaperones of my parents. And the
teenage me, in attendance at an all-girls’ school, didn’t get to meet many boys
to snog. I’ve probably been guilty of some flirtatious fumbling in a cinema
screening at some point in the dim and distant past, but never at the expense
of missing a film, and never on the back row. Partly because all my boyfriends
have been short-sighted (hm, a coincidence?). But mostly because the back row was
always a no-go zone for me. I saw it as somewhere that the bad kids hung out
and too far from the screen for my avid film-going eyes. I love going to the
cinema, and just want to immerse myself in whatever is happening on the screen.
Dave and I used to go up to three times a week in our pre-Charlotte days. When
Charlotte was little, it was my weekly treat to take her to the Big Scream at
City Screen on Wednesday mornings, and watch a current release in a cinema full
of wailing, bawling babies. There I frequently used to sit on the very front
row so I could put her down on the floor and let her roll about after bits of
fluff, crumbs of rice cake and other babies’ toys. If I was really lucky, she’d
drift off to sleep, curled up with Stripey under a blanket.
Nowadays, as we don’t have readily available baby-sitters, Dave
and I usually have to do a split shift if there’s a film out we fancy – I go on
a weekend afternoon, and he goes on a weekday evening after work, and
eventually we get a chance to have a conversation about what we’ve seen. (“What
did you think of it?” “It was quite good.”) So this challenge was always going
to be one of the more difficult to organise, assuming that it was my husband I
was meant to be snogging. It might have been easier to take myself off to the
flicks and launch myself at a random stranger, but this may have resulted in me
being arrested and Dave being rather cross. It also had to be a film that we
didn’t mind missing bits of.
I have a couple of friends that I do baby-sitting exchanges
with from time to time, so having baby-sat for my friend Sally and her husband
to go out for dinner earlier in the week, we suddenly had the offer of a night
out. Cinema screenings are always awkwardly timed for toddler world – 6pm
showings are too early, as the toddler is still up and about, needing tea,
bath-time and stories. (You see, by “baby-sitting”, we mean going round to sit
on someone else’s sofa and watching their telly - especially if they have a
better Sky package - while the child in our care is sound asleep upstairs.) But
the next round of screenings at 9pm is pushing energy levels and means a very
late night if you know you’ll be up before dawn the following day.
But we hit the snog jackpot with James Bond 007: Skyfall. A film that we reckoned would
probably have the same plot as every other James Bond (so therefore not
requiring much concentration), that would contain Daniel Craig taking his top
off, and that was still so new and popular in cinemas that it had extra
showings at suitable times, including one on Sunday night at 8pm. Perfect. We
had two free tickets left on our City Screen membership to use up and could
reserve two seats on the back row online. So off we went.
Sorry, folks, there’s no photographic evidence of this one.
And really, I don’t want to go into details for fear of being nominated for the
blogger’s equivalent of the Literary
Review’s Bad Sex Awards. (There was no sex, I hasten to add.) If I ever
write a novel, it won’t be a romance. It’s not in my nature. Having picked up a
revolting cough from our resident toddler, Dave and I currently sound like we
belong in a consumption clinic, and are now so middle-aged that snogging generally
gets interrupted by comments along the lines of, “Why did you put so much
garlic in dinner?” “Yuk, that cough sweet tastes disgusting”, “Take your
glasses off, they’re digging into my cheek” and “Have you quite finished?” The
screening had sold out, so instead of being full of pubescent reprobates, the
back row mostly contained responsible looking people that probably hadn’t
wanted to be there, or who had picked it because they knew it was the one spot
where they wouldn’t have someone kicking the back of their seats. We felt slightly
abashed in their presence. To make matters worse, there was a spotlight
positioned directly above us.
But unbelievably, a smooching Dave and I weren’t the most
annoying couple on the row. The prize for that went to the German girl sitting next
to me who (judging by the inane questions she kept asking) had plainly never
heard of James Bond and seemed under the illusion that it was a slapstick
comedy. She guffawed loudly every time someone fell over: either as part of a
death-defying stunt, a passionate clinch, or a non-death-defying death. I’m not
going to reveal the plot to anyone who hasn’t seen it, but there’s kind of a
sad bit at one point, and she chortled her way through that too. And when she
wasn’t chortling she was remaining oblivious to all the cutting one-liners, squealing
at scorpions and Tube trains, coughing even more loudly than us, doing her
hair, taking her very complicated lace-up stiletto shoes on and off, or wriggling
around under her scarf. She was using the scarf as a makeshift blanket, having
seen fit to come out in the world’s skimpiest dress, despite the temperature
being about minus ten outside. It wasn’t minus ten in the cinema (and surely
not with that hot and steamy couple sitting next to her!), but Germans are very
good at finding draughts.
So yes, last Sunday night, I was a very middle-aged
teenager. Thank you to Sally for baby-sitting, and thank you to Dave, my
long-suffering and lovely husband, and very fine kisser. x x x
