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We went out for lunch at a nice local restaurant. There were two tables celebrating 30th birthdays on opposite sides of the room. On the way home I mentioned this coincidence and the kids thought that maybe both parties were celebrating the same birthday. It seemed unlikely that they’d be sitting apart in that case. So Phoebe thought that it might have been twins - again I argued that that seemed implausible as wouldn’t they have had a party together and also there was no one one either table who looked like anyone on the other one. But even I had to concede that it’s possible to have non-identical twins.
Surely if they didn’t like each other they’d have their parties in different locations, though it could have been an hilarious sit-com style coincidence. Or the place might be special to both of them and neither was prepared to back down.
I still felt the most likely explanation was that two unconnected people had both turned 30 today or this week and had coincidentally chosen the same place to celebrate, but I was actually most impressed with the kids’ a ability to come up with only mildly irrational possibilities. For the next few years they are going to be very useful improvisational sounding boards for comedy. I am looking forward to making some of my investment back on these two.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Natalie Haynes about her book Stone Blind and Greek myths this afternoon (podcast out on Friday). Medusa is an amazing character, even if I think that some of my memories of the story are mixed up with the Queen from the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I have memories of soldiers who had tried to kill Medusa lining the route to her cave, but in fact (or fiction) Medusa never killed anyone - only her decapitated head was used as a weapon. But Clash of the Titans also played a bit fast and loose with the story so maybe there’s something from my vivid memories of going to see that. Though most of the vivid memories are of lovely Judi Bowker getting into a bath. I’d forgotten about Judi Bowker. How could I forget about Judi Bowker?
I’d love to see Natalie’s book made into a film, though she thinks it might be prohibitively expensive. Then again I watched the first episode of the Game of Thrones prequel tonight and money seems to be no object. And it makes the Judi Bowker bath scene look positively innocent. But you also get to see Dr Who’s bum because that’s equality.
