Not sure about that!

There is a book with the title of something like, “The World’s Most Boring Postcards” which contain a mind bendingly amazing series of inconsequential scenes which had been dignified with a postcard of their very own.

I have now joined this distinguished company by virtue of a photograph which has been commissioned and sent to Catalonia. It depicts, as you can see, the Clarks shoe outlet in MacArthur Glen. I could just as easily have sent a photograph of Matalan on the Newport Road in Cardiff.

Neither store is marked by its inventive marketing or by its innovative architecture: they are boring, run of the mill stores which sell things.

Their distinction, however, becomes clear when you place a few (or a couple) of shopaholic Catalans in their proximity. Then you see the transformation; suddenly the drab becomes exciting, the ordinary becomes enticing and the available becomes a craving!

Other people’s enthusiasms are fascinating at best and are surely contemptible in the ordinary run of things!

Mark Twain can make the minutiae of a Mississippi paddle steamer interesting; Melville – whaling; Zola - coal mining; Orwell – dish washing: but there are limits.

No one can ever make American Football anything other than what it is: tedious, bombastic, pretentious, overblown, unexciting and corrupt. It’s strange; part of that diatribe was provoked because of America’s inability to appreciate the superiority of real Association Football. I speak as one who is not an enthusiast for Football (though I can recite virtually all of the Barca team) but the superiority of Football above the game the over-padded hulks play is so obvious that it seems almost like arrogant, xenophobic blindness on the part of the Americans not to be able to realise it. Seems? I know not seems my lord!

Teachers spend their time with people who don’t really want to be listening to them and don’t really want to progress in their subjects. I know that there are those students who make the job worthwhile who do share an enthusiasm for the subject in hand, but the majority are ‘pressed’ rather than ‘volunteers’ and that should make us more liberal about the interests of the vast majority of the population who are just not like us. I sometimes think that if I can appreciate that there are people in the world who do not enjoy reading, and then any type of emotional identification is possible!

I have to say that this has not helped me to appreciate rap music any more convincingly. And I feel that it never will.

At last a film which I can truly say that I enjoyed: “Pan’s Labyrinth” a film by Guillermo Del Toro. It was set in Franco’s Spain in 1944 and concerned a young girl and her pregnant mother who were travelling to be with the girl’s new stepfather, a vicious captain in Franco’s fascist forces trying to eradicate a group of guerrilla fighters hiding in the forest. This story of personal and political struggle was intermixed with a magical realist story of the girl being a lost princess of a magical kingdom.

Any account of a Civil War usually points up the extraordinary cruelty which usually characterises such conflicts. This is no exception and some of the almost casual physical viciousness makes for very uneasy watching. The fairy tale elements seem to counterpoint the historical story: the cruel step-parent; the search for a child; loyalty in difficult circumstances; the making of choices; various forms of test; the loss of friends and the conflict of good and evil – all these have their place in both strands of the narrative.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” uses the high emotion which is a natural association with the Spanish Civil War and skilfully weaves a gripping story of moral struggle, perhaps best exemplified by the action of the doctor in giving a fatal injection to the captured revolutionary and then calmly answering the captain expressing his own concept of individual freedom at the cost of his own life.

The whole concept of a civil war invokes images of the family, so the story of the mother/girl/captain irresistibly presents the viewer with an image of the country torn by the divided loyalties and the redefinitions which a civil war inevitably forces on the people affected by the conflict.

At one point the doctor points out that the revolutionaries are involved in a struggle that they cannot win, and we are reminded by this that, historically, he was absolutely right: Franco won, and stayed in power for forty years; evil won.

The film however, is not pessimistic: even though mother and child die – the newborn is saved and will grow up as a denial of everything that his father hoped for him. The magical element of the story also allows the girl to be re united with her mother and to find he long lost father: the family is complete, just as, if you push the analogy; Spain was to find a new identity with the re-establishment of the monarchy and the espousal of democracy.

This is a film which invites interpretation and a solving of the puzzle of what historical or contemporary significance it might possess.

Something to watch again!