The Script

For years my life read like a grainy script for a film that may (or may not) be worth making. "You should write it all down", friend told me. Frankly, I was simply waiting for the drama to abate and made a more sensible choice.

I made a garden.

Twenty years on, forty varieties of early flowering and moss roses are about to perform a Baroque dance in our little suburban plot and there is still time to set to and write.

But not too often...

Mostly I am a consumer of the Arts and yesterday, being a typical rainy June day in Dublin, we went to Imma to look at the latest exhibition. I was not much in a mood for the visual arts, however, and hearing a droning voice from beyond a dense white curtain, entered a seatless space where I spent the next uncountable minutes listening to Robert Towne sharing insights into the art of the script writer.

He wrote the script for "Chinatown" and was mightily entertaining on the subject of "Shampoo", a film that I do not know and which I must now find to see if it is as funny as he thinks.

The outing set me thinking about the place of film in all our lives and how the images writ large on the silver screen feed our dreams.