Orages and Sunshine

Technically, there haven't yet been any orages in London today although there was plenty of heavy rain after hours of sunshine. I'd been planning to spend much of the day reading and sunbathing in Regent's Park but it started to cloud over, around four o'clock, I decided to have a wander through the shops instead, this being the last day of my Lenten shopping ban. After I had resisted final temptations from Top Shop, Uniqlo and, of course, Anthropologie, the heavens started to open, slowly at first with sporadic but heavy drops.

I ducked into the World of Cine and went to see Oranges and Sunshine (at last), hoping that by the time the film had finished, the rain would have stopped and I could walk home. Sadly, it was even worse when I got out so I sprinted to the tube. It was still extremely warm and muggy, so it was almost possible to believe I was in Miami instead of London. The area by the ticket gates at Piccadilly Circus was absolutely rammed with people and I was worried there would be a long queue to get on the Bakerloo line but instead, people just seemed to be milling in an incompetent manner upstairs.

As for the movie, it was good, hard-hitting stuff, with solid performances from Emily Watson and Hugo Weaving. The organised deportation of thousands of British children to Australia isn't exactly light-hearted, bank holiday weekend fodder but then I rarely go for light-hearted films anyway. I was expecting the ending, at least, was going to be fairly uplifting but then, as Watson's character Margaret Humphreys (the Nottingham social worker who discovered the deportations in the 1980s and brought them to public attention) puts it in the film, "there is never going to be this one cathartic moment, after which everything will be OK."