You're nicked, son!

 Considering how many films are available through Amazon Prime, it can feel like a bit of a wilderness sometimes when you want something to watch that will entertain without giving flashbacks and dreams that you don't want.

So when I saw they had the Sweeny (70's TV cops and robbers series set in sarf Lundun) I had to watch it.

It's slightly shocking actually. Everyone smokes, all the time. Everyone drinks in the way I remember people drinking (not my parents FWIW) with nasty blended whiskies, dodgy fizzy wine to look posh. The clothes, the motors, it's all there guv. 

In 1977 when this was shot (IIRC) I had just left school at 16 - this is how I remember it was. People seemed tough, violence had been a part of being at school and certainly some of the kids I knew planned a life of crime - were quite open about it. In some ways it was a time of optimism, a time of discovery, a time of peak-excess when very few thought that we needed to be careful about the future. We imagined there would be colonies on the moon and maybe further by now, rather than the West becoming self-absorbed and the East crumbling into kleptocracy.

Talking of seasons

I was sorry to read that a fellow blogger - Fernando Gros - lost his mum last year. Seems to have been a bad time for parents.

In his own inimitable way he asks about how we process things and uses an analogy of a time machine. Sadly comments now seem to have been disabled, else I'd have left some words of condolence. 

This time of life is very strange in the way things change, but at least I've had role models. Being 'grandad' I find more difficult in some ways, my father having never lived to model the role for my children, and my own grandfather no longer 'being himself' due to the ravages of dementia and his own losses in my adult years.