Month: January 2026

A Day Out in London – The David Hockney Exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art

On By samanthaIn GOING OUTLeave a comment

I am writing this on the 31st of January but, honestly, it feels more like the 60th of the month. I haven’t had the best start to 2026 with a health scare, which I suspect was brought on my my HRT . I have made the decision to go cold turkey and stop taking it. Anyway, I went for a scan and all seems to be well so that is a weight off my mind.

I visited the David Hockney Exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art which is showing until the end of February. The gallery is located near Hanover Square. I took the Tube to Bond Street and then it’s just under a ten minute walk. The gallery is inside a handsome Georgian townhouse. Admission is free. Upstairs there is the “Moon Room” which shows fifteen paintings composed on an iPad. Each painting depicts a countryside scene illuminated by moonlight, there is a particularly gorgeous painting featuring a Christmas tree festooned with brightly coloured bulbs. They ae stunningly beautiful and luminous and were created in Hockney’s studio in Normandy, France. The walls of the gallery are painted in a deep midnight blue which perfectly sets off the artwork.

The paintings in the exhibition are absolutely brand new, the eighty eight year old artist is still producing amazing art although some of the brush work looks a little shaky. Downstairs in the gallery there are hugely colourful room scenes featuring mixed media where the perspective is intentionally “off”. The subject matter, chairs and flowers are of course completely conventional but nothing else about these works is. There are a series of portraits including a self portrait of Hockney in a wheelchair.

After the gallery my friend and I had lunch in the nearby John Lewis which was pretty awful. We then looked in a couple of shops in Oxford Street. I went into Stradivarius where I unnecessarily added to my stripy shirt collection. In this store there are a couple of security guards but I could find no actual shop assistants. The checkouts are self serve and you even have to remove your own security tags. Those jobs, traditionally filled by young people are all being done by technology. Who is going to employ humans who require paid holiday, national insurance contributions and pensions when machines can do the job? As the parent of young adults, it is very worrying.

The weather in London was abysmal, raining and freezing cold but it was a nice to have a change of scenery and to see my friend. When I got home I saw that my snowdrops had made an appearance, they never fail to remind me that winter is almost behind us for another year

Thank you for reading

Samantha

Time Flies at Supersonic Speed

On By samanthaIn FAMILYLeave a comment

Can I sail through the changin’ ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
Well, I’ve been ‘fraid of changin’
‘Cause I’ve built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I’m gettin’ older, too “Landslide”, Fleetwood Mac

I had a very strange experience yesterday. I was at a routine hospital appointment, waiting in a corridor to be called in. I suddenly remembered sitting the the exact same spot, outside the same room with my daughter when she was about seven years old. She will be twenty two tomorrow. I was overcome with the feeling that, if I turned my head, I would see my little seven year old daughter, wearing her stripy school pinafore, floppy hat and navy blue leather T Bar shoes sitting there next to me. I could feel her there, swinging her little legs, so palpably. I felt almost overcome by sadness at how quickly the years have passed.

In June 2025 I had three children living at home. My daughter was on work placement for her degree, my oldest son was preparing to move into a house with his partner and my youngest hadn’t yet gone off to university. Now they are all living away from home and my husband and I are rattling around in our house. Seeing my youngest go off to catch the train back to his university town after Christmas was hard, he has a whole other life that I know almost nothing about now. He is quite guarded about what he shares, everything is “chill” and fine apparently, I hope so.

I went to a drinks party at London Bridge on Saturday and, on the train back, there was a family of four sitting next to us. I could only see the husband and two grown up children as the mother was in my blind spot. All I could see of her were her badly scuffed boots, frayed trousers and shabby handbag which was odd because the rest of her family were dressed head to toe in expensive clothes. When we reached our destination the family stood up to get off as well and I saw the woman’s face and immediately realised that I knew her, she and I even had coffee at each other’s houses when my youngest son and her daughter were tiny and attending the same play group. I wondered if she spent all her time looking after the rest of her family and had failed to notice that she could do with a bit of TLC herself. I nearly said hello but then the penny dropped that it had been seventeen years since we had last spoken. We did that polite thing of pretending not to recognise each other. She was probably thinking that I haven’t worn too well myself! How could almost two decades pass so quickly?

I am feeling a little melancholy after Christmas. I think I probably also have a touch of Empty Nest Syndrome. It is my day off and I visited my parents who now need my help far more than my children. There is a solitary snow boot in the corner of their bedroom, it is covered in a thick blanket of dust. It’s been there for years. Today I decided I was going to insist it is finally thrown away. Dad stopped me saying Mum, who is totally housebound, might decided to go for a walk in the snow. In one boot? My highly intelligent Dad seems to have convinced himself that Mum is going to miraculously recover from her Alzheimer’s disease if he looks after her well enough. I did manage to throw away a dozen cans of air freshener though so my visit wasn’t a complete decluttering failure.

I have a letter from my grandmother in which she says time passes so quickly. It has been in my jewellery box for forty years and I have never been able to bring myself to re-read it. Now I know exactly what she meant. It seems as if in the blink of an eye a year has passed. As I drove home from the hospital a beautiful song called “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac came on the radio, it summed up my mood perfectly.

Thank you for reading

Samantha

Cover photo – A timepiece from the V & A Cartier exhibition

Film Review – Hamnet

On By samanthaIn GOING OUTLeave a comment

I haven’t read Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel upon which this film is based neither have I seen the West End production so I actually had very little idea what this film was about. The film has received excellent reviews and just last night Hamnet won Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture, Drama and Jessie Buckley won for Best Actress for her role as Agnes.

Is a film about Shakespeare going to appeal to audiences in 2026? The answer seems to be a resounding yes. Instead of focusing on the Bard’s work the book/film focusses on his family life, particularly his feisty free-spirited wife Agnes and his little boy, Hamnet. At the beginning of the film there is a note to say that in the 16th century the names Hamlet and Hamnet were interchangeable. Hamnet is one of a set of fraternal twins, Judith his twin sister is a fragile child who almost died at birth. They have an older sister, Susanna. Agnes, like her mother before her, has the reputation of being something of a witch and she has some precognitive ability. Agnes has a vision of there being two children at her deathbed and convinces herself that Judith will die before she does. There is a strong supernatural current running throughout the story.

Agnes and Shakespeare meet when he is engaged as a Latin tutor for her brothers, a role he has been obliged to take on to pay off his violent father’s debts. He sees Agnes, resplendent in her red dress with a hawk on her arm and makes a pass at her not realising that she is the daughter of his employer. He woos her with the tale of lovers Orpheus and Eurydyce and she appears to have a vision of his future . The director Chloe Zhao makes great use of the lush forest location and it is here that Agnes belongs while Shakespeare feels constrained and wishes to go to London and pursue his dream of becoming a playwright. The separation is problematic and it soon becomes clear that Agnes has no intention of ever living in the city.

Jessie Buckley is really the star of Hamnet with her powerhouse performance. She plays Agnes with a fierce strength at the heart of which is a fear of losing one of her children. Paul Mescal is a wonderful Shakespeare who deeply loves his family. Chloe Zhao really gets to the crux of what makes each character tick and I especially liked Emily Watsons performance as Shakespeare’s mother, Mary. I am not going to give anything away about the plot other than to say that Hamnet is devastatingly sad film. Mary tells us how she has lost three children, one aged seven and two as babies. In a time when infant mortality was so high, women, especially, learned to live with the burden of grief.

I don’t like it when I feel that books or films are trying to manipulate me into feeling something and unfortunately I did feel this about Hamnet. I think a little more subtlety would have worked, we didn’t need to be hit over the head with the character’s emotions, the subject matter was sad enough. I almost felt that I had failed the assignment by not crying by the end.

My favourite scene was set in the Globe Theatre. Like the scenes set in the streets of Stratford you really feel that you have been transported back in time. You would require a heart of stone not to be moved when Agnes first sees the play that her husband has written about the darkest time in their lives. A time when he was absent from the family because of his work commitments. I did enjoy Hamnet, it is a visually beautiful film told through a mix of fact and imagination.

.Thank you for reading,

Samantha

Cover Photo by Myke Simon on Unsplash

Film Review – The Housemaid

On By samanthaIn GOING OUTLeave a comment

This review does contain some spoilers. A friend of mine lent me two of the Housemaid books written by Freida McFadden. They are psychological thrillers and we have both been looking forward to watching the first film of perhaps a series. We went to The Stag Theatre and Cinema to watch the film. it is nice to support small independent venues where possible.

Sydney Sweeney plays, Milly, the housemaid of the title. I know that she is fantastic actress, her performance in Reality proved that as did her role as fourteen year old Eden in the Handmaid’s Tale. Eden’s story was one of the saddest and most memorable in the entire six seasons. The other thing that twenty eight year old Sweeney is known for is of course her amazing figure. I feel that in the Housemaid she wasn’t even trying to act, she just put on a lot of sexy outfits and said her lines. There are a number of sex scenes where she isn’t wearing any outfits at all. Amanda Seyfried on the other hand, who plays Nina Westchester, Milly’s seemingly deranged employer was fantastic. Her coming off the rails was disturbingly fun to watch.

I was a little confused as to why Enzo, one of the main characters in the books, has been so sidelined in the film. He is there, broodingly played by Michele Morrone but his screen-time is very short. If the sequels are made into films then he will have to be featured more heavily. In the books Nina’s daughter CeCe is very standoffish and makes a lot of trouble for Milly but but this didn’t really translate to the film. Andrew’s elegant, cold and steely mother, played by Elizabeth Perkins provides a hint as to what is really going on. The scenes with the bitchy PTA mothers are, unfortunately, genuinely representative of how spoiled woman who have nothing better to do than gossip, behave.

No one in this story is really what they appear to be. Is it really Milly’s dream to clean rich people’s fabulous houses or is she in desperate need of this job? Nina’s husband, Andrew, played by Brandon Sklenar, is far too smarmy and good looking to be anything but a bad apple and then there’s the most interesting character of all, Nina. Nina in her head-to-toe cream Ralph Lauren outfits and her almost perfect blonde hair, apart from the visible roots. Seyfried and Sweeney look disarmingly very alike, with their big eyes and long blonde hair.

The film is two and a quarter hours long but I have to say I was engrossed. There is some gore and lots of sex. The tension is there but at points it almost crosses over onto comedy territory, I am not sure whether this was deliberate or not. It isn’t the most intelligent movie you’ll watch but, like the books, it is very entertaining in a trashy sort of way. Sweeney has had a couple of flops on her hands where she played plain Janes, in Christy she played a boxer, and I heard one podcaster say that she is too young to be uglifying herself. A rather misogynistic way of looking at a young woman’s career but The Housemaid is already proving to be a huge new year hit with Sweeney in full sexy mode.

Thank you for reading,

Samantha

Cover Photo by Myke Simon on Unsplash