Mirror

Conversation regarding baby photos:

Fella: “you’re not allowed to see the ones where I’m drooling and looking dopey”.
Mike: “well, to be fair I see THAT first thing every morning”.

Fella sulks. Cheerful fairy congratulates himself on wit. Diverse alarums…

I have heard it said, Gentle reader, that art holds a mirror up to life. And if so the two films Fella and I saw this week reflected a lot back to me.

The first was Away We Go. One of my favourite films ever is Happy-go-Lucky, and Away We Go is in a similar vein. However, it’s much more of a laugh-out-loud comedy and brilliantly acted. In it the main characters go on a journey and meet various friends and family members. Each relationship they encounter is flawed in its own way but as the couple struggle to come to terms what might become with them they, perhaps, realise they need to make their own paradigm that celebrates and encompasses their flaws…



Well, I hardly need Freud to point out the parallels between this and my posts here on this blog. It touched me in many ways and I loved it. Hooray for the Haymarket and Orange Wednesdays!

On Sunday we saw Up. A new Pixar animated adventure that, in all honesty, Fella and I had waited to see for an absolute age! And so, there I was, in a room full of four year olds, with tears running down my face. Gosh-darn. That’s no way for a cheerful fairy to behave!



You see, at the beginning a couple meet, fall in love, grow old and eventually die. Ordinary people, whose lives were touched by ordinary tragedies and yet never lost their sense of adventure. Very beautiful; and obviously very touching. So why did I cry? Well, two main reasons.

The old couple reminded me very much of my (maternal) grandparents. The finest people I ever met; now in the winter of their lives, they are universally loved, raising four fin children under fascism and then communism and still somehow being good people. I love them to most in all the world; we don’t even speak the same language! Yet I don’t know how I will bear their loss when, in perhaps 10 – or more – years time (well, their 85 or so, and it’s been 70 years of beer, cigarettes and lard… you do the maths…) when they are gone. They’ll never know, of course, but it’s respect for them and the family they built that gave me the strength to come out to my family at all. Better late then never, I suppose!

But also, I saw the potential to be like them and have that “forever”. Soppy old fairy that I am. But, well, you know… when you fall in love with someone it’s an adventure all its own and, really, do you want to have every adventure all by yourself? Things aren’t just mirrored in glass after all.