Sunday

Last night was fairly quiet. I watched the latest episode of Doctor Who, next week is the final episode of the current series. I also watched a 1964 film called Marnie from the Alfred Hitchcock box-set I bought yesterday. The film stars Tippi Hedren as a deeply disturbed young woman who is a compulsive thief and liar. Sean Connery plays her latest employer who catches her stealing from him and blackmils her into marriage. It was a good film. I've seen it a couple of times before.

This morning I had an e-mail from my Mum with a draft of the eulogy for Gran's funeral. My cousin Ian is delivering the eulogy because he is the eldest of the four grandchildren, and the text itself is being written by Mum and my Uncle David, but she wanted me to have a look at it and add to it. That was pretty emotional.

I only went out once today and that was to the corner shop for a paper. The weather has been really dull and very wet.

I've read two books in the course of the weekend: Choke by Chuck Palahniuk which I bought last week, and Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis. Choke is about a man who works as an 18th century servant in a "living history" theme park reconstruction, while running a scam in which he pretends to choke on food in restaurants and maintaining his mother's hospital care. He also has an addiction to sex. The story moves between his various activities to memories of his childhood on the road with his eccentric mother. It's quite good, well written and often very funny.
Lunar Park has the book's author Bret Easton Ellis as it's main character. After experiencing the height of literary success in the 1980s, Ellis' excessive lifestyle almost destroys his career and himself until he marries a famous movie star, who is also the mother of his son, and swears off alcohol, drugs and casual affairs. However, not long afterwards Ellis notices that the house they are living in is subtly changing, his daughter's doll is violently malfunctioning, there is a spate of mysterious murders and disappearances in the local area, and Ellis notices the appearance of his most notrious character Patrick Bateman (from Ellis' most famous novel American Psycho). It was one of Bret Easton Ellis' better books in many ways, with an interesting story and lacking most of the lurid excesses form books such as American Psycho.