The Big Digs

                                                                     The Dig

 

Stephen and I found this film whilst searching for something a bit different to watch as a change from all the series of crime productions, usually involving the FBI or MI5 and featuring murder and gun-fights galore bolstered by umpteen car and helicopter crashes. These have served to keep us entertained during this last truly rotten year.

 

Once we had finished dinner the other night and settled into our comfy chairs, a couple of hours before our regular bedtime, Stephen was whizzing through the films that were on offer and I spotted, The Dig. It probably attracted me because I had very much enjoyed the programme on BBC Two: Stonehenge, The Lost Circle Revealed. Now I admit that I enjoyed that programme a lot more than Steve did, since he couldn’t get his head around the idea that a large team of people had spent ten years of their lives looking for the place where Stonehenge might have stood originally in North Wales and was moved with an unbelievable effort to Salisbury Plain. Ten years then, looking for a place with holes where The Stones were moved away from, to their present home. I loved that programme to pieces watching and every now and then feeling Steve’s eyes on me and when I glanced sideways, he would crack a smile as if to say, “What are you like woman, watching a documentary about these people wasting their lives? Once he even said, “I bet you wish you had been there with your little brush and child-size scraper don’t you”?

 

Well yes, I did. That has always been I pipe dream of mine; taking part in an important dig. I admit to my own geekdom; I would have loved it had I ever been given that joyous chance. As it is every time we pass along the road at Stonehenge I do say, “All Hail The Stones” and mean it.

 

Inviting viewers to watch this programme in an email that comes to my in box weekly the BEEB state this little tempter…..

The Welsh circle, believed to be the third biggest in Britain, has a diameter of 360ft (110m), the same as the ditch that encloses Stonehenge, and both are aligned on the midsummer solstice sunrise. We watched that, one of us more rapt than the other, about 5 days ago.

 

So when I spotted The Dig, which is a new movie and also noted that Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan were the stars, and further, that it was a true story about the Sutton Hoo Excavation in Suffolk I got more and more keen. Carey Mulligan plays Edith Brown who was a wealthy landowner and employed Basil Brown played wonderfully by Ralph Fiennes. I got very interested in this for our entertainment that evening. Though I was a teeny bit worried that poor Steve was on another hiding according to his own TV tastes.

 

Once the story unfolded, it had another area of interest to me since the story begins in the last few months leading up to the start of WWII and continues on into September of that year. I was born on August 14^th 1939 just three weeks before war was declared. I was feeling emotional quite early on in the film and was glad that we had not been in a cinema when I sobbed my heart out at the end. Actually, this time Stephen loved the movie every bit as much as I did and we haven’t yet knocked the discussion about it on the head yet either.

 

Strangely, to our ideas, the reviews were not as struck as we were by the story and the telling of it, whereas we thought it was the best movie we had seen this century.

The treasure that was uncovered was priceless and was donated to the British Museum.  

Here is an extract from the Guardian writer Peter Bradshaw’s review:  

 

Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes unearth an Anglo-Saxon burial ship, but leave their emotions interred, in this robustly English drama.

The Dig is actually not a very earthy film, though there is intelligence and sensitivity and a good deal of English restraint and English charm, thoroughly embodied by the fine leading performers Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes. But the passions mostly stay buried, and the movie is disconcertingly structured in such a way that we are first asked to invest in these two intriguingly complex personalities, but then – just when their emotions might get disinterred – the focus shifts to a younger pair with more obvious romantic potential, played by Johnny Flynn and Lily James. Mulligan and Fiennes look like two characters who have been written out of their own soap opera. This doesn’t stop The Dig being engaging, and with a beautiful sense of landscape.

 

This sounds to me as though the reviewist and ourselves had seen too completely different movies. Maybe he had indigestion or maybe we are just a pair of old softies.

It is based on the true story of the sensational Sutton Hoo excavation in Suffolk on the eve of the second world war; an Anglo-Saxon burial ship was found by the self-taught working-class archaeologist Basil Brown, whose historic discovery the academic establishment instantly tried to appropriate, without credit. He had been hired by the local landowner and widow Edith Pretty, who had long nursed an instinct that there was something in the “mounds” on her property. The movie is vigorously adapted by screenwriter Moira Buffini from the 2007 novel by journalist and author John Preston – whose aunt Margaret Piggott was involved in the dig.

 

What Dreams May Come

Elsinore Ironman 70.3 European Championships 2017 age group winner 75-79

 

Most of this morning was spent trying to keep our hopes and aims in sight. This means that we were sitting on our turbo trainers doing our best to be ready, if and when a race actually goes ahead sometime this year as hoped for in our hearts. We are focused mainly on Ironman 70.3 but fear that the early races in May, Venice-Jesolo at the beginning of May on the first weekend, then a 5150 the next weekend in Poreč, Croatia, that looks so beautiful, then another Ironman 70.3 in Graz, Austria on May 22nd, are still under a shadow of doubt or so I would think.

Steve racking his bike with Hamlets castle, Elsinore in the background, the run did loops of it.
 

We were both so looking forward this three-race trip, What A Holiday it would make; just as we were thinking last year, before all three races were put on hold for this year. We will be ready when the day finally comes and we’re feeling good and sure of ourselves since our Sunday mornings are regularly being spent reminding ourselves that we can still work hard sitting in the saddle for three or more hours, which will be the requirement on the day when it finally arrives. The thought of racing in three totally different places where we have never racked our bikes before is particularly exciting.

 

IF and that is a BIG IF the early much dreamed of races are cancelled yet again, I will be looking at some later in the summer events and top of that list would more than likely be Ironman 70.3 in Elsinore, Denmark which was most successful for me in 2017 when I won my age group. This year once again Elsinore will be Ironman 70.3 European Championships and I would like very much indeed to be there competing. Other races that I would be thinking about, would be the ETU Standard, Middle distance and Sprint events, though they are not even announced as yet. Steve and I are both qualified for at least the Standard distance from Brighton and Hove triathlon qualifying event in 2019 for the 2020 race, again it should be held over. 

 

We are keeping or legs spinning by watching something else that we find exciting and inspiring. There is another reminder here though as we watch our favourite winter sports stars doing their own darndest to succeed. Only on TV though again is the downer, that we might have been there as real spectators whose cheers would have been heard, (well mine would anyway, I am a pretty vocal supporter) at one or two of those events during the winter, that idea is also scuppered by the disease that has dominated our lives for far too long now. No travel indeed! Bummer and a half.

                                                               Team Treichl of Austria

 

This morning we watched some events that Steve had recorded and some live. The new treat was the first Ladies Mono-Bob World Championships from Altenburg , Germany. Altenburg looks like a lethal course and indeed there were crashes on the course in both events that we watched this morning. Mica McNeill for GBR finished 13^th. And it is without question that the first World Champion in this sport, Canadian-born Kaillie Humphries representing the USA earned her laurels with the classiest driving we saw in the event on her last run. Then we watched the first and second heats of the men’s four-man-bob and thoroughly enjoyed that since we cheer for several other teams as well as our own GB men. We just like to see the best athletes win but always hope they will be our boys and girls. Still, we are supporters of both Austrian teams, Team-Meier and Team-Treichl and the Swiss teams since they have purloined our previous British training teams with whom Stephen and I are when we are there, on speaking terms with, since we have been the only British supporters on a number of occasions. I watch what our GBR teams members are up to both in training and events and all of whom I fan follow on Instagram, along with the Austrian and Swiss teams.

 

We are saving the third and fourth 4- man-bob round for our next turbo session so for sweet Christ in Heavens, sake to NOT tell me what happened before Tuesday.

 

Rams; the Movie, book and this morning's run review

This morning when Steve and I started out for our run, we thought we would take a different route and try to stay on half decent paths or even road, which we usually avoid since I much prefer to run off road. We started out more of less letting our trainers select the way we turned and it was not long until they turned into one of the many woodland pathways that for a month or so had been so very wet and muddy that we had crossed those routes off our list for a while, since neither of us can do with trying to run on very slippery surfaces with a danger of falling and injuring ourselves. I do think that in my case at eighty plus I need to be a little more cautious.

 

With the number of storms and heavy rainfalls of late, some of the narrow ways had become pretty much impassable and there were more deviations of the line to avoid very boggy patches, that we stopped even trying to negotiate and have stuck to wider pathways. However; this last week or so the whole of the woods has frozen hard and so what was muddy, leafy ways, now hard as rock but terribly rutty after horses and mountain bikes. Still, we were able to get a half decent run session in today with a little care……. Until, having taken a path that we had never used before after about thirty minutes, we arrived at a heavily fence, wired and gated place that bore signs saying Strictly Private, no public access. There was a pick-up truck parked not far along and an estate house on one side. It was our good fortune that the driver got out of the truck and waved to us then came to the gate and chatted for a moment; we have been regular runners in his private parkland for nearly fifty years and know by sight many of the estate staff.  This man was one that we waved to often somewhere along our run route. He came and let us through and told us exactly where we were and said that that was where he lived. So that saved us having to backtrack a mile or so to where we had turned off.  

 

It seemed to me to be colder still today and so I added yet another layer, a fourth layer that is, to my poor old body. Still there was no question of over heating on such a cold early morning.

After that, we stayed on the road for a mile or so until we turned back onto a known path that was not too bad for the last stretch of our run.

 

It was wonder that I even woken up this morning because I had a yet another very bad night sleep-wise, I had got up and sat in an armchair and read some of the book that I am enjoying at the moment which is one by one of my favourite authors Nora Roberts, called The Art of Deception. It isn’t a new one but none the less one that I have missed, it’s a paperback and at the bottom of the cover there is a quote from the Washington Post that claims Nora Roberts to be: The Most Successful Novelist on Planet Earth! Well, I’m enjoying is very much anyway.

 Since we the masses, need to be kept busy in the light of the troubles of the day, I have another recommendation for anybody with time to read this page of mine. My husband and I watched a new movie on TV last night, it is called RAMS and stars Sam Neill, Michael Caton and Miranda Richardson. It is an English language version of the original Icelandic film of the same name that Steve and I had watched a few months ago with subtitles and loved it even though it was very harsh compared to this new production. It is a most unusual story about a pair of New Zealand sheep farmer brothers, who have not spoken to each other in forty years since their father died and left the whole farm to just one of the brothers. They lived and worked next door to each other having split the property but never spoke a word until a disaster occurs. It may sound like Dulls-Ville but it is utterly brilliant, funny and sad.

 

I can also make yet another confession at this point. This secret is that whilst out on my runs, I also speak to the sheep as do these farmers. I often tell them how pretty they are and that I like their earrings!