About The Holiday

(Slowly realising that if I do ever write my book about What We Do And Don’t Need To Know And Why, it’ll be for the most part anecdotal and solipsistic, something akin to Perec’s Je me souviens, and what’s wrong with that?)

Jude Law was being interviewed on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House yesterday, plugging his latest, rather grim-sounding movie, which is clearly yet another attempt to break away from his pretty-boy image. Unfortunately, Paddy O’Connell chose that moment to bring up the seasonal romcom The Holiday, which he loves and, according to the bantery exchange they had to plug the lunchtime news, so does his BBC colleague Johnny Dymond.

Which gave me a slightly odd feeling as I sipped my Sunday morning coffee, as I realised I’d never even heard of the movie, let alone seen it. And as Paddy and Jonny oohed and aahed about the doubtless hilarious and/or heartwarming goings-on, and Jude just sounded embarrassed, I wondered whether the whole thing was some sort of arch postmodern joke, “quick, let’s invent a movie and make Tim wonder how he missed it” but no, I Googled it, it’s real, it’s packed with people I recognise, whose work I’ve enjoyed elsewhere but... no. Nothing. No bells rung. Except that the casual way they discussed it, with no scaffolding, no context, implied that I really should know and that I’m somehow culturally deficient by not knowing, like someone who appears on a quiz show and gets castigated on social media for not having heard of Hamlet or Buenos Aires or nitrogen or artichokes.

Normal service was resumed later in the day, during an amiable TV show involving the unlikely duo of Bill Bailey and Shaun Ryder ambling through the Somerset countryside, when a pub landlord mentioned that Henry VIII was rumoured to have stayed at his establishment, “during the disillusionment of the monasteries” and I laughed and then wondered how many other people I know might get the (inadvertent?) joke. Indeed, how many people reading this? 

PS: In news that may or may not be relevant, the Oxford word of the year is “brain rot”.