Shiny : How to make one billion pounds sterling sound like a large amount of money !

Shiny : How to make one billion pounds sterling sound like a large amount of money !

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

Winter Solstice (21 December)

Shiny : How to make one billion pounds sterling sound like a large amount of money !

* It was 6.0m SMEs in 2020, but seems to be 5.5m in 2021 ? :

£1,000,000,000 divided by 5,500,000 = £181.82.

** What are the admin costs of both administering and obtaining 'the available' £1bn ?#TwoHundredQuidBailout

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— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 21, 2021

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Experience, though noon auctoritee

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

15 May (Posted at Paddington Station) [re-edited 31 October 2021]

So Geoffrey Chaucer had the Wife of Bath say. Chaucer was a poet, but also a civil servant, diplomat, ambassador (Ambassador, you’re spoiling us !), and knew a bit about life, and Boccaccio, French dream-poetry, Latinate Christian (?) philosophy…

His Boke of the Duchess, so magical, mysterious, moving – this persona he developed of a slow-witted dreamer, a little resembling Dante’s of himself in the Commedia, but less knowing, more innocent, and so stumbling across the man whom we suppose to be the inconsolable John of Gaunt (a nearby golf-club is named after John), weeping over the death of Blaunche.

Does Chaucer tells us, in the guise of the Wife of Bath, that we keep making the same ‘mistakes’, falling in love with the same woman, with a dream of a woman, the scent (or ghost) of a woman¹ ? Probably, as he has so much to say that I don’t know why people don’t seem to read him more – how about Brush up your Chaucer – start quoting him now !, and, if I weren’t drawn to that story about the man in black, I’d go to his House of Fame :

We think, in this emotionally, mentally and financially impoverished world, that we know it all, with our smartphones, Internet², and high-frequency trading. I suspect that Chaucer knew more in the fourteenth century, if we just hear what the poet has to say about spin, smear, slander – forget The Prince, for this man really knew what power and repute / reputation are, and how they are won, lost, granted and revoked.

So, in what remains of May, I’m going back to these works, to witness Chaucer - as wordsmith - wrestle with sleep, meet a goddess all in white, overhear the birds pairing up, and, if I’m finally up to it, let him tell me how to use an astrolabe³…


End-notes

¹ Only a surprisingly dirty-minded person (such as one woman with whom I once worked…) would think, nay openly insist, that to be an obscene and crude film-title.

² I knew someone else who aspirated it – is it really, though, the Hindernet (the technological equivalent of Hindemith), full of Blind Alleys, Red Herrings, Love-on-a-Stick ?

³ The former colleague in the first end-note should heed : if you don’t know what an astrolabe is (or aspirating²), don’t make up some coarse idea !


Post-script :

Chaucer's telling of the story of Chaunticleer ('The Nun's Priest's Tale') has more potential ? !

Or, if one has not deliberately misunderstood one about Constance ('The Man of Law's Tale'), there's that concerning Griselde ('The Clerk's Tale')...https://t.co/QyX72QYkS1

2 / 2 https://t.co/SpmzljCnQq

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 31, 2021

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