We had a faint positive lateral-flow test in the family last Saturday and so have to self–isolate until next Tuesday, despite negative PCRs all round and no definitive Covid symptoms (although with Omicron it’s harder to tell). The chance of false positive LFTs is low, so we have to assume this one wasn’t, and Track and Trace want us to isolate either way, even with negative PCRs and multiple jabs. It’s not how we would have liked to spend the week running up to Christmas, but the rapid rise in cases was already putting paid to those plans; everyone here seems to have entered voluntary de facto lockdown in lieu of actual lockdown. The street has been unnaturally quiet all week.
What a fitting end to another difficult year. Looks as if January 2022 won’t be much better either. Hope you and yours can keep safe.
24 December 2021 · Events
I watched the last part of Get Back on Sunday, after working through the others during the week an hour or two at a time. By then I’d already reached the point where I didn’t want it to end, and an eight-hour cut felt too short. The first instalment at Twickenham was sometimes uncomfortable (seeing Paul belittle George without realising he had, and what followed), but the second restored the balance, with moments of pure joy in its final hour: the sense of what good friends they really were, and what good people they all, at the bottom of it, even on the cusp of the band’s dissolution, were, was profoundly moving. The full rooftop performance in Part Three only cemented that impression.
I spent the summer that I turned twenty-one obsessed with Mark Lewisohn’s newly released The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, and this has taken me right back to it: somehow all of their genius and personalities have been captured in these few weeks of fly-on-the-wall recordings and what Peter Jackson has been able to do with them. A wonderful artifact.
Get Back reviewed. On the trail of Get Back. Paul McCartney on the Beatles’ farewell. Why we’ll keep watching it forever.
7 December 2021 · Music
Although I visited Tasmania off and on throughout the 1990s, I spent most of it in Canberra, with trips to surrounding areas of New South Wales. As part of sorting out my old negatives, I’ve collected those trips into a few representative galleries at Detail…
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1 December 2021 · Memory
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