Nothing is wasted

It is with some trepidation that I start a blog post when I know I must be unrelentingly positive about something. It is soooo much easier to bitch and whinge than praise. But praise I must, in the most emphatic fashion. Last night, Kate and I went to Pure Groove Records opposite Smithfields market, and, for the price of zero pence, watched a screening of the Blur movie, No Distance Left To Run. In the middle of this unendingly cool city, in the middle of a room full of interesting people crowded together on wooden chairs and mismatched sofas, without spending a single penny (except on wine), we were able to see a movie I've desperately wanted to see since I heard it was being made a year ago. And my god it lived up to my expectations.

I think it may have been a perfect film. I laughed out loud. I had goosebumps almost constantly. I felt shocked. I was educated. My prejudices were challenged. There was a narrative arc but it was firmly wedged in real life. There was - of course - seminal music throughout: Blur's hits played at gigs over the course of the past two decades - and then, gorgeously, Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending accompanied the reunion talks, fresh, clear, soaring into the future. The camerawork was truly fantastic throughout. Journalists, pleasingly, came across as dicks. The four men were touchingly honest and managed to love each other without seeming cheesy. I felt proud of having been their fan in the nineties, proud of buying three copies of Country House to ensure they went to number one and beat Oasis, proud to live in London, proud to have been at their gig at Glasto last summer, yelling Tender with the other thousands, feeling part of something both simultaneously fleeting and beautifully timeless. I didn't want it to end, not last June, nor last night. The last time I felt that, oddly, was while watching The September Issue. And the time before that, it was Anvil. And suddenly it seems clear that, for me, truth blows fiction out of the water every time. Reality rocks.