Tright here’s a beautiful novel by the Japanese author Yōko Ogawa known as The Reminiscence Police, which portrays an island neighborhood dwelling underneath a wierd type of repression: each on occasion, one thing is taken from them – it may be pictures, or rose petals, or hats – and never solely do the objects disappear however all references, reminiscences and language related to them.
I remembered it final week, as stories circulated that the streaming platform HBO Max had been eradicating titles from its catalogue following a merger with Discovery+. Have been we in a superbly suggestive allegory of cultural authoritarianism, the anguished howls which have greeted the disappearance of reveals akin to Vinyl, An American Pickle and The Witches would have themselves been silenced; as it's, that is simply enterprise and a few of them are even now popping up elsewhere.
No such luck for the celebs of Batgirl, together with Leslie Grace, Michael Keaton and Brendan Fraser, whose endeavours have been decisively nixed by Warner Bros, itself merged with Discovery+ in April. The artists v the bean-counters is simply ever going to have one winner.
By coincidence, I used to be studying concerning the Portuguese dictator António Salazar, who, earlier than his dying in 1970, had been severely incapacitated by sickness for 2 years. Moderately than inform him he was now not in cost, his inside circle maintained the fiction that his rule maintained. Would it not have killed Warner Bros to do the identical?
Feline oppressed
I didn’t have a cat till I used to be over 50 and had gone to stay within the countryside and even then it was accidentally. A letter left by our home’s earlier proprietor advised us a gingery-brown cat known as Hector often stopped by and preferred a dish left down. Lengthy story brief, Hector, a feminine Norwegian forest cat, has now been dwelling with us for some years.
Not lengthy earlier than the pandemic hit, she was joined by black-and-white ZsaZsa – these of a sure age will recognise names from the vintage youngsters’s TV programme Hector’s Home, through which a canine, a cat and a frog pottered round a backyard collectively. Being French, and impressed by the movies of Jacques Tati, it was fairly odd; Kiki the frog, for instance, is a meteorologist.
We’ve lately acquired our personal Kiki, a tabby kitten, at present considered male. Hector, now solely blind, is unbothered; ZsaZsa, by no means probably the most clubbable and at present made extra irascible by a torn cruciate ligament, is in a state someplace between outraged betrayal and unfettered aggression.
Every morning I have to wrap blood stress tablets in ham for Hector, persuade ZsaZsa to drink a foul-tasting concoction to ease her juvenile arthritis and stop the solely wholesome kitten from partaking of both. “I'm not a cat particular person,” I mutter.
Twiddling with my dahlias one afternoon, I regarded as much as see Kiki balancing precariously on a slender, first-floor window ledge, having escaped to the forbidden upstairs the place he discovered an open window. “Far more of this and I’ll be becoming a member of you,” I mentioned to him as I went to fetch the stepladder.
Fever pitch
Everybody in my world, it appears from a cascade of out-of-office replies, is on vacation – besides the freelancers choosing up scraps. And, oddly sufficient, skilled footballers. Due to the Qatar World Cup being injected into the center of the European season, their schedule begins earlier, with the Champions League hauled into the autumn and new guidelines for substitutes which means that extra males will get on to the pitch. Outcome: decreased time for golf tournaments, the launch of latest clothes ranges and the inking of elaborate tattoo “sleeves”. Take notice, hard-pressed public sector staff: the battle shouldn't be yours alone.
Alex Clark is a columnist for the Observer and the Guardian
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