The smell of popcorn
Ever since I was little I’ve loved going to the cinema. The small town I grew up in had one cinema, with one screen and showed one film a week a good month or so after they were released. But that didn’t matter, most of the town being a good ten or twenty years behind the rest of the country, only waiting a month or so for a film was considered something of a luxury.
When I was very little my Dad, it was always my Dad, would take me, and when he was old enough, my brother, to the cinema once a year to see the latest Disney movie. My child hood memories are full of Peter Pan and Basil the Great Mouse Detective, Cinderella and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And every time, before the movie itself there would be a short cartoon, often Winnie the Pooh, sometimes Mickey Mouse and Goofy.
And half way through the film there would be an intermission, a lady, usually the owner’s wife would walk down to the front, and wait holding an ice-cream tray, with a strap around her neck for us all to queue up in an orderly fashion and choose what we wanted from the tray. We always had ice-cream at the cinema, never popcorn, vanilla ice-cream in little round tubs that came with wooden spoons, wrapped separately in paper.
Now Laurie and I go to the cinema and we are the people you’d least like to sit next to/in front of/behind. We dance to the ‘orange’ music before hand and at any music throughout the film, we comment on the attractiveness of the people around us, have been known to hold loud conversations about throwing popcorn at the cute men sat several rows in front, we whisper throughout the movie, commenting on everything from the attractiveness of the actors, to the quality of the special effects and the gapping plot holes. We have a great time, the rest of you may hate us, but we don’t mind that.
But still I always have ice-cream, although now it’s little tubs of Hagen Dazs with plastic spoons that are less likely to give you splinters as you eat and still I half expect there to be an intermission. And as far as I know the cinema back home, although it now has three screens and endeavours to get films only a week or two after they are released, still has an intermission half way through each film and the ice-cream lady still sells little tubs of vanilla ice-cream with wooden spoons.
Giving up on: BB
Watching: Newsnight instead
Listening to: Lauren Laverne on Xfm