Watching: Yesterday

Richard Curtis may have retired from making films, but he wrote the script for Danny Boyle's new film Yesterday, and it is basically like the most Richard Curtisy Richard Curtis film ever. By which I mean that, like pretty much every other film Curtis ever made, it's the story of a vaguely useless and slightly scruffy but basically decent bloke who spends a lot of time not realising that his gorgeous female friend is madly in love with him and then more time failing to find the words to tell her that he's madly in love with her too, but somehow still manages to end up with her, probably with the help of his completely useless and very scruffy best friend, whose purpose in the film is about 50% comic relief and 50% actually making the hero look good by comparison.

Yesterday's vaguely useless and slightly scruffy but basic decent bloke is Himesh Patel's Jack Malik, an aspiring musician who is on the verge of chucking it all to return to teaching when, after a road accident which takes place during a 12-second electrical blackout affecting the entire planet, he wakes up to find that he is the only person who remembers the Beatles (and also Coke and cigarettes). Passing off the Fab Four's songs as his own, Jack's musical career rapidly takes off, from playing local pubs to an appearance on local TV, to being drafted in to support Ed Sheeran at short notice and signing a deal with a major label which makes him the biggest star in the world, even though this means no longer being managed by the gorgeous female friend who's madly in love with him (in this case, Lily James's Ellie).

It's not a deep or thoughtful film. It doesn't really examine the full ramifications of the sudden absence of the Beatles from the world (it appears that Oasis also no longer exist, but Coldplay do, and the rest of the course of musical history is basically unchanged) or the enthusiastic reception of 1960s songs in 2019 (in one scene, Jack supports Ed Sheeran in Moscow and (obviously) comes out with 'Back in the USSR', which goes down a storm despite its reference to a country which ceased to exist around the time Jack was born; something which is lampshaded by Sheeran, but which still doesn't make much sense). There is one surprisingly poignant scene which, for me at least, gave the whole thing a slightly bittersweet cast, but overall it's a basically a light, fluffy romcom with some fabulous songs, and Patel sings them well.

Reading: Cranford

I was looking for something fluffy and comforting to follow The Stone Sky (human kind cannot bear very much reality), and picked Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford largely as it was the oldest unread book on my kindle; in fact, it appears that I downloaded a free copy from Amazon in 2011, five months before I actually acquired my kindle, when I was still using the kindle app to read books on my iPad (possibly because I had knitted so many pairs of Cranford mitts that I thought I really should read the book).

It was certainly the perfect choice for fluffy and comforting. Cranford tells of the daily lives and small domestic dramas of the ladies who make up the society of the village of Cranford, modelled on Knutsford in Cheshire where Gaskell spent much of her childhood (probably only known to most people these days as the namesake of a service station on the M6). For various reasons, Cranford's society is almost exclusively female, consisting of a small group of spinsters and widows whose stories are recounted, with gentle irony, by the novel's first-person narrator, a younger woman who has moved away from the village but returns frequently to visit her friends, particularly Miss Matty Jenkyns, daughter of the late rector of the parish, a gentle, kind, mild-tempered woman who is the central figure in several of the series of vignettes that make up the novel.

I enjoyed this a great deal. The ladies of Cranford may be silly on occasion; they're certainly snobbish and greatly concerned with appearances and proprieties, but underneath all they are full of kindness and can't do enough to help a friend in need (and even former enemies become friends when in need). It's an utterly charming book, occasionally gently humorous, and absolutely the kind of read that restores your faith in human nature a bit.