Film Diary: A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

True originality, somebody once said, means authorship being instantly recognisable from even a short fragment. Actually I'm pretty sure that it was the poet Gavin Ewart, arguing for the admission of Willam McGonagle to the canon. To bracket one of the greatest of film directors with McGonagle is just plain silly but nonetheless, if you didn't know that Stanley Kubrick had directed A Clockwork Orange you'd be convinced within a very short time.

We are in a chilling near-future dystopia not terribly far removed from the then-contemporary Soviet Union (Alex and his friends speak in a slang heavily larded with Russian words) through which Alex, a kind of Billy Liar on speed (or, in this case, a kind of supercharged milk called 'moloko vellocet') cut a psychopathic swathe along with his 'droogs' (friends). Until, that is, Alex is betrayed by the droogs, arrested and imprisoned for the senselessly brutal murder of a woman with an oversized ceramic penis in furtherance of theft. From there he is picked out by an authoritarian government as a guinea pig for a drastic course of aversion therapy. But will it work in the long term?

I stayed well away from this when it was new: the idea of rape and violence as entertainment was - still is - repellent. For many years, until Kubrick's death, it simply wasn't available. This time I wanted to see it because, despite all the violence, people I otherwise respect regarded it as a fine film. And In the end I very much enjoyed a film from one of the true greats: the frisson of Lolita; the surreal black comedy of Dr Strangelove; the use of familiar music in incongruous settings. Alex's friends, beating up an Irish tramp to Rossini's Thieving Magpie overture, look uncannily like the apes from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It made me think that I'd have loved to have seen Kubrick's interpretation of Joe Orton.

Running Diary

I bet you were were wondering what happened to my running, weren't you?

I've been off it, for about six weeks now. First it was the hot weather, and then I was plagued by hay fever, and just when I was resolved to get going again I had my broken toe.

Today I grabbed myself by the scruff of the neck and set out to see what I could do. I've been feeling distinctly overweight lately so I was prepared to go back to first principles, but in the end I ran for a full thirty minutes, non-stop.

It wasn't easy, and I think I might not have managed it had I not been trying an experiment. I put my PDA in the money belt that I used to carry my valuables round Europe, and put it on under my Reading Roadrunners vest so that I could play music through my Skype headset. I'm sure there has to be a more elegant way of doing this (I have no intention of buying an iPod though) but it did the trick. The strains of Steely Dan at high volume masked the sound of my panting and the rhythm distracted me from the pounding of feet on gravel/tarmac as I plodded my way from Sandy Gap, along the shore to Thorny Nook, inland to Biggar Village, and thence back along the marshes until my thirty minutes was up.

I bet I suffer for this in the morning!