When you hear people pronouncing vehemently on a person who came to power before they were born and speaking in terms of utter disgust and anger, you realise that you are no longer in the presence of history or debate, you are in the presence of folk mythology.

Just so with the myriad commentators on the death of Margaret Thatcher, who have for the last 24 hours heaped imprecations and opprobrium on the name. Couple with that the jubilation at her death and the whole “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” attitude of some commentators who were born after she came to power and who can barely even remember her, and you realise how easy it must be for the reflex of Jihad to be instilled into the minds of the young in the Middle East.

In the folk consciousness, the myth appears to be that a cruel witch really did land in this Happy Island and lay waste to it, without any prompting whatsoever. By this reading, her intentions were utterly malign and everything she did was the spontaneous production of an evil genius. Like The Terminator or a Macchiavellian creature from Dr Who, she materialised on this planet with the sole intention of wreaking destruction, a bizarre anomaly abominating against Nature.

The vilification heaped on her from these quarters undermines the case against Thatcher. Half truth and misinformation from a generation programmed to resentment by university lecturers and resentful parents – that you can expect as part of the knockabout. It is less comical when the national newspapers also fall prey to the same instinct. Yet they do. Thus we have Owen Jones in The Independent telling us:

“We are in the midst of the third great economic collapse since the Second World War: all three have taken place since Thatcherism launched its great crusade.”

Seemingly having forgotten that in 1976 the Labour Government had to go cap-in-hand to the IMF to seek a bailout of billions to prevent the UK from sliding into bankruptcy, Jones imagines Thatcher as a crusader who laid waste to communities that were previously filled with “secure, skilled industrial jobs”.

Partially true, in that we did have skilled workers whose jobs had been secured for years by unsustainable State subsidy, it appears that Jones falls prey to the psychological effect of nostalgia when he imagines Britain prior to his birth in 1984.

Thus from Jones we imagine Paradisia Britannica in which there was no class system (“Britain was one of the most equal Western European countries before the Thatcherite project began”) – and bizarrely no racism existed. Yes, read that last one again. Apparently  Margaret Thatcher invented racism, because here’s what he says  happened under her right-to-buy scheme:

“The scarcity of housing turns communities against each other, as immigrants or anyone deemed less deserving are scapegoated.”

Britain was a big multi-cultural love-in before “Thatch”, it seems. Perhaps the National Front,  in Jones’s world, came into being under Thatcher’s leadership, even though The Battle of Lewisham which marked the start of the neo-Nazi organisation’s decline occurred 2 years before “Thatch” came to power. Jones, it appears, is a good rhetorician, but a terrible historian.

Let me just give a few fleeting impressions of the Britain that elected Thatcher to power.

In 1976, the Labour Government upon receiving their bailout from the IMF were given a series of conditions they had to meet in order to stave off bankruptcy. Sound familiar? In Britain many of us snide quite happily about Greece and Cyprus, while forgetting we were in an analogous situation only 37 years ago.

Wilson and then Callaghan tried desperately to reduce the size of the State. But the unions, who paid for the Labour Party through their membership subscriptions, weren’t having any of it. As soon as cuts were attempted, public service workers went on strike. We had a Government that was impotent in the face of the union power that was inexorably driving the country towards destruction. “We’re all in this together” might equally have been the cry back then. And what we appeared to be in was a sinking ship that the entrepreneurs and innovators, the powerhouses of wealth creation and the creatives had all abandoned to escape the 98% upper tax band.

The streets during the Winter of Discontent really were piled with rubbish, as rats gorged themselves in the streets on the detritus the unions refused to take away. I’ve heard of “refuse collection” but I never thought that was what it meant. To the massive distress of relatives, bodies went unburied because council workers wouldn’t dig graves – another inability to deal with yet more discards, it seemed, as a mythological sense of horror and helplessness built up around those times in the folk consciousness.

Not a myth, but a truth, I remember back at home my mum sitting at the table week after week going though her shopping bill. She used to weep at the prices going up. I can remember her saying to the ceiling with tears in her eyes: “That’s butter gone up another ha’penny. That’s 2 pence this month.” At its peak, inflation in the UK was running at 24.2%, a figure that seems difficult to imagine in the post-Thatcher era, because her number one priority was to stabilise inflation and keep the value in the pound.

Into this scenario steps Thatcher. In the ensuing years she did some terrible things and she did some things that would transform this country into a modern economy. She deliberately set about breaking the power of the unions, yes. But when the unions won’t even let you bury your dead granny, then there is a mythology at play here other than “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead”.

And that’s the point that I’m making. Thatcher wasn’t Wonder Woman fighting evil union power, just as she wasn’t the Wicked Witch of the West murdering the Munchkins, either. For some reason, we are all prone (myself included, as can be seen above) to fall into half-conscious mythological constructs when we consider this extraordinary figure of female power. Perhaps it’s because we find it difficult to accept and understand her on her own terms. A powerful woman who knew her own mind. Fancy that? Much easier to call her “witch” or “goddess”.

What Thatcher did was neither all good nor or all bad. In fact those terms simply distort her and her legacy. What she was was a product of the most extraordinary times. Britain had been told quite clearly by our IMF backers that the country could not go on spending money it didn’t have. After the failings of Wilson and Callaghan, what she brought to the political scene was strict, rigid fiscal discipline. She was the housewife and dominatrix combined (see how easy the archetypes are to reference?). She looked long and hard at what was costing this country money and failing to give us influence in the world – and got rid of it.

It’s hard. It’s cold. It caused real pain and real hardship. It changed Britain forever, displacing families and destroying industry. It also freed people to think innovatively because it broke the union stranglehold on businesses, destroyed the closed shop and ended wildcat strikes.

To mythologise her and imagine her as the “dark shadow rising in the land of Mordor” is to maintain a child-like sense of good and evil that serves no purpose but to breed more ignorance and more stupidity, just as “Superthatch” is a nonsense, too.  Yet it is easy to do with her because she was such an extraordinary woman who caused such strong feelings.  In the minds of many who were her contemporaries, the emotion resonates. What chance for those born after her, who never experienced the awfulness of the years before she came to power?

With Thatch the psyche is activated. Well-established archetypes buried deep in our brains prevail.

Fairytales, after all, are so much more compelling than history.

After today’s Press Release by Professor Richard Dawkins releasing the results of a survey purportedly showing that there is only a tiny proportion of the UK that are really Christian, an atheist reacts.

I’ve got a bit of a rant today. And it’s probably not going to go where you expect it to.  It’s in response to Richard Dawkins’ latest shenanigan which is his continual attempt to devalue and denigrate important subjective experiences which for many give their lives meaning, fulfillment and happiness.  Those experiences can be summed up as religious ones, which it is clearly Dawkins’s aim to eradicate.  Like O’Brien, the Thought Police Officer in Orwell’s 1984, Dawkins bangs on relentlessly about it, generating ill-will, disharmony and acrimony wherever he goes.

Dawkins’s latest trick has been to do a survey which, though he is not claiming it himself, many will misuse to ride rough-shod over the beliefs that many hold important, by claiming that “the majority are not religious”.  As if weight of public opinion ever changed a convert.

Before I go on, let’s make it plain, I am an atheist. But if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s atheists who just don’t have a clue why they’re atheists.

Here’s a classic I heard a few days ago from an otherwise not unintelligent woman:

“They should ban religion.  Religion is the cause of all the warfare and strife and trouble in the world.”

Oh really?

If you are one of the people who believes that, think about what you’re saying, and consider the following:

1) Do you really believe that before there was religion, everyone was soft and fluffy and nice to each other, in some kind of mythical past?  Do you really?  What are you telling me? That  it was some kind of EDEN or something, before religion?

2) Although religion has had a grip on people’s imaginations for millennia, the 20th Century saw mass movements that had nothing to do with religion.  Now let’s have a look through history at what those secular mass-movements achieved.

Let’s do so by asking a simple question: Who was the biggest mass murderer of all time?

Was it the religious Osama Bin Laden?  I sincerely doubt it.

Was it Adolf Hitler, with his weird belief in National Socialism that twisted some Christian ideas and turned them into a rationale for killing 6 millions Jews, Gipsies and Homosexuals, among others – allegedly on a purely scientific basis?

Nope, not Adolf.

How about Stalin?  Well, with Stalin we’re getting somewhere. His purges caused the deaths of an estimated 15-30 million people. Wow! Look at all those deaths! That’s quite impressive for someone who had a belief system that had nothing to do with “the cause of all the trouble in the world.”

But hey, let’s not stop there.  Let’s look at Mao Tse Tung.  His rule, with its starvation, mass suicides and political persecution is estimated to have caused the deaths of 40-70 million people.

Not bad going for someone who was an atheist, huh?

So what were you saying about religion being the cause of all the trouble in the world?

3) Is it possible that people in the West have forgotten one of the reasons religion was invented? It can be quite cogently argued that big moral rules were designed to make psychopaths quake in their boots at the possibility that even they might be answerable to someone.

In this model, morals, a belief in an afterlife in which you will be punished or rewarded, were designed to try, however unsuccessfully, to control the savage at the centre of so many human beings.

Logically speaking, and looked at in the abstract, the fact that it has failed time and time again is not a sign that God does not exist nor that religion is wrong.  It is a sign that despite religious people’s best attempts, bad people do bad things in the name of whatever comes to hand. That is, their psychopathology finds a way to use religious belief for its own ends.

Which explains a lot about pervy vicars and warmongering imams.

And before you say – well that’s just an Original Sin argument – no – it’s not.  I told you: I’m an atheist.

4) One final point.  If, as you say, “religion is the cause of every bad thing that people do in the world”, are you seriously telling me that every time a football hooligan stabs a fan of another team, every time a skinhead knifes a black person and every time a burglar breaks into a house and beats the living daylights out of a pensioner, they’re doing it in the name of God?  Do you think they pray afterwards, reporting back to the boss man in the sky about how well they’ve done?  Do you?!

Fellow atheists: get your facts straight and stop being so lazy in your thinking.  If you’re going to not believe in God, don’t  just martial the incidentals of history to assert that God doesn’t exist.

You can debate whether the things done in the name of religion are good or bad till you are blue in the face – because doing that does not prove one way or the other a single thing about God’s existence or otherwise.  That’s like arguing that because people get killed in cars, cars are inherently evil. It’s just muddled thinking.

I am tired of Lazy Atheists.  To me, there is only one thing as stupid as believing in God because you are told a line, or you see something useful in it.  It’s not believing in God because you have swallowed a line and see something useless in it.

Lazy Atheists, prejudice is not proof in the same way that faith does not prove existence.

Finally, if you can’t find a well-thought-out argument that really works – then remember – every time you open your mouth and wheel out these ill-formed prejudices, it’s YOU who’s causing the strife, trouble, intolerance and grief in the world you’re so happy to accuse the other side of fostering.

Remember: knee-jerk anger and intolerance will turn you into the person you hate. Religious, or not.

Something of a different format today.  With all the looting kicking off in London, I decided to make a quick recording of this song of mine.  It’s called “Chance”.  We are seeing in Britain the first e-riots – the riots in “civilized” countries that are orchestrated by Blackberry and Twitter.  Interesting to note that e-riots is an anagram of Tories…

Chance – by Matt Wingett – (recorded on a cheap field recorder.)

The lyrics are:

In the old town the young men are shrugging their shoulders

Looks like they’ve killed another kid won’t make it to another year older

And they’re dragging the canal looking for the passing of angels

But they don’t stand a chance coz angels don’t leave prints where they walk

And the kids gathered round to throw stones

Are laughing at the uniforms

Waiting for a shot in the air

Like they’ve been waiting all along…

Well, down the shopping mall, the kids have kicked in another window

That spoke the buying sensation, only high they’ll ever know

And over-the-counter-culture the old rebel’s cash till rings

Filled with the forged notes of the songs he don’t believe but still sings

And the kids’ faces pressed to the glass

Of the stores are politely ignored

That old come-on: “Not till you’re like us

Will we allow you to climb on board.”

And: “Everybody’s equal in the eyes of the dollar”

Is the cry of the businessman

“But if you are not buying, then you are worth nothing to me, and for you I couldn’t give a damn.

And I will not respect you, until you have learned the lesson taken from the First Book of Finance

The parable I’m preaching’s called the Yardstick of Possession, says the worthless don’t deserve a chance

Not a chance, not a chance…”

Well, there’s an opening party on the new side of town

Where they built the shopping complex, everyone’s come down

But the kids who kicked the windows, well they’ve all been locked out

They couldn’t raise the cash… instead they raise the shout:

“If we can’t buy our self respect, we’ll steal it from you instead

And though you may try to deny, some of the blame’s gonna fall on your head…”

Coz… etc

“Darling, I think you’re special.  Special… like in Special Needs.”

I’ve said it myself when I’m feeling mischievous – and for anyone like me who’s got just a little bit tired of hearing all about the weird love-in that is going on between PM Cameron and the leader of the free world at the moment, it’s worth remembering that little spin that you can put on the word “special”.

Having just got back from the States to attend a friend’s wedding, the weird double-edged sword that is the relationship between Britain and America is right now as prominent in the Press as the Willis Tower is prominent in the middle of Chicago.  If you haven’t heard of the Willis Tower, by the way, try its old name: the Sears Tower.  Sound more familiar?  It’s just that it’s now named after the London-based company Willis Holdings Group.  And there’s the thing: Britain is America’s largest single investor, and America is Britain’s largest single investor.  The US and Britain are stuck with each other for some time to come, that’s for sure – so making that relationship work is absolutely vital for both of us.

But the “special” relationship is a strange one.  As a friend I spoke to in the US told me, the Brits aren’t entirely sure of what they think of the US.  “It’s not even right to call the relationship complicated.  It is,” she told me, “downright schizophrenic.”

Looking at it from my perspective, she’s right.

Growing up in Britain the 1970s, the son of a Naval officer, I didn’t quite know how to respond to the idea of America.

One day, my father took me to the Captain’s House at the shorebase, HMS Mercury, and stood me in front of a portrait of Lord Nelson.

“This man,” he told me, “changed history and allowed Britain to become the world’s most powerful nation.”

While for 150 years or so that had been true, by the time he told me this it was old news.  It overlooked 35 years of US global dominance.  Tales of a lost empire are a great way to set up a pointless rivalry – and I’m sure I’m not the only one of my generation to have heard them.

What did I know of America?  I loved the Superman comics I bought from the newsagent down the road starring a musclebound oaf flying around in a cape and lifting up whole planets.  At the same time I hated the American belief, manifested in countless Westerns, that might is right and that arguments could be settled down the barrel of a gun.

I loved the crazy antics of American rock stars like Jimi Hendrix with his free expression and creativity, at the same time that I hated the moment American kids opened their mouths to speak on tv shows.

Always, always, always in growing up with America I experienced that double edge – that “yes” and “no” both at the same time.

On my short trip to the States this time around, I was struck by the differences in nuance – the tiny things, that make our countries so very, very different.

Meeting a US police Sheriff I was impressed by his complete and utter charm, by his deep sense of humour and by his courtesy and manners.  Reading his facebook posts later I was surprised to find that he held what I and my friends would consider strong right wing political views – supporting the excesses of Israeli oppression of non-Jewish people, placing God at the middle of considerations about how to vote, and declaring that most homeless people don’t want to be bought food, but would prefer to spend their money on drugs.

These are opinions straight out of our worst right wing, intolerant newspapers, but in the US I think they are pretty mainstream.  And despite this, I liked this guy…  It was another “yes” and “no” moment.  I want to learn more about him, and drink a beer with him, while knowing that there are things we will never agree on…

That ambivalence is true, too, in the so-called “special relationship”.  My friend told me that while she was an exchange student in the UK, she had been shocked to be confronted by young Brits challenging her about her Americanness.

I suppose you think you came here and saved us, don’t you? – was one question she was repeatedly asked by angry Brits while she was a student in the UK.  If ever there was a sign of a “Special Relationship”, then American action in World War 2 would be pretty much at the top of the list of what the Americans might point to as an example of it.  Yet, the hostility aimed towards her was palpable.

The truth is, we Brits hate to be reminded that we couldn’t have made it alone, which is something we really need to get over.  And hearing an accent is enough to remind us, it seems!

There is no doubt that without Uncle Sam’s massive industrial might, without the sacrifice of American lives on European and Asian soil, the whole world would have fallen under a shadow of fascism almost unimaginable.  There is no doubt that American Industrial and Military sectors made a major contribution to saving the world, as US soldiers fought alongside their Allies from the British Empire, the Soviet Union and elsewhere.

Yet at the same time, for the Brits it was a mixed victory.  Although during the War the US had offered Britain its resources through the Lend-Lease scheme, meaning that we could use what we needed when we needed it for the duration – at the end of the War there was an invoice to be paid.

A bankrupted British Empire lay in tatters, while we borrowed a million dollars a day from the US to buy grain to stop the Germans from starving to death.  At the same time, the military heavy machinery and supplies that we had borrowed from the US for the duration of the War either had to be returned or paid for.  Even at the massive discount the US gave us (90%), our War Debt was only finally paid off in 2006.  During the course of the War, we had bargained away our patent on the jet engine to the US, numerous other inventions, as well as an array of military bases throughout the world.  These negotiations were to stand the US in good stead to project its massive military and trading presence throughout the world in the Post-War years.  Throughout the war, America was preparing to make the most of the peace.

When peace finally came and Britain asked the US to honour the agreement that it share its nuclear secrets with us, after we had supplied some of our greatest brains to build the first atom bomb in the Manhattan Project, we were given a straight “no”.  And when we decided to build our own nuclear power station at Calder Hall to start our own nuclear military project, the Americans genuinely drew up plans to invade Britain and destroy the facility – a plan that thankfully was never acted upon.

Meanwhile, the American policy of weakening and collapsing the British Empire remained active.  After all, while in the first half of the 20th Century there had been an arms race between Britain the US and Japan, the US alone owned the peace of the latter half of  the 20th Century.  When the old imperial powers decided to flex their muscles in Egypt, in a combined operation between France, Britain and Israel, to drive Nasser out of the Suez Canal, America pulled the plug on the operation.  It was a humiliating defeat that contributed to the further collapse of Britain’s crumbling credibility as a military power.

This, at least, is the way that the post-War years are sometimes presented from a British perspective, and it is part of this world view that informed some of the hostility that my friend from Chicago encountered whilst in the UK.  Spotty kids don’t know much, but what they do know, they know with absolute ferocity, after all.  And they knew they didn’t like Americans, although they couldn’t put their finger on why.

And so the story of the “special” relationship between Britain and America goes on.  At times of difficulty, Britain and America work together.  At times of peace, we are often rivals.  We adore American pop culture – but there is enough of it that we are bound to hate it, too. We admire American science – but sulkily bemoan the loss of our great brains to the States.

We often bemoan the dumbing down of British culture by American culture – while ignoring the fact that the phrase “dumbing down” is a symptom of American English entering British English vocabulary.  It’s a strange, complex, mix.  As my friend in the US said: “It’s schizophrenic.”

For her, the thing that I did find shocking is that the hostility she experienced came from a generation long past being post-Imperial: she was at University over here a good 25 years after my father had told me of Lord Nelson.  Old stories fade slowly, it seems.

And here’s the irony at the heart of it all.  The “Special Relationship” we Brits cling to like a neurotic girlfriend is a throwback to a time when we felt far more important.  It reassures us of our place in the world, while simultaneously reminding us of just how much the world has changed.

Part of the pointless resentment of young, uninformed Brits toward the US comes from exactly this: that 70 years ago, Britain as an Imperial power was Top Dog.

Many Brits just can’t quite swallow that it was both saved and superceded by that upstart nation – the Home of the Hot Dog.

I’ve just watched one of the least enjoyable movies I have ever had the displeasure of enduring, and it’s not what you might consider a “usual suspect” for such a distinguished honour…

It was as much a surprise to me that The English Patient, starring Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas was the culprit as it would have been if I had spotted a crashed biplane on the surface of the moon.

It’s funny, because it really did take years for me to get to this movie. Every time I saw it lurking in the DVD drawer, or scheduled on the box, something in me recoiled.  But I eventually decided I would have to succumb to its call.  Anthony Minghella was, after all, from the Isle of Wight.  I have eaten his family’s overpriced ice cream and sworn at the ice cream sellers who rip you off on Southsea beach, just across the water from “his” island.  We have things in common.  So watching it would be showing solidarity with a local boy, right?

Oh!  That I had left it out of the player!

So, what exactly is wrong with The English Patient? (- Apart from being hideously burned and looking like a mummy, obviously.)  That was the question I began to ask myself when I got about an hour in and found my attention wandering despite efforts to shepherd it back.  I had the feeling I used to get when reading worthy books that were supposed to be masterpieces, yet plodded on towards the most predictable of endings.  This movie was the filmic equivalent of something by Chekhov or Hardy: ploddingly dull.

Now, there’s no doubt The English Patient is beautifully filmed, although, somehow, not beautifully enough – despite all of the soft shadows on fleshy sands, implying the curves of a woman’s body.  It has pretty people in it, although they might have been either more real or more pretty.  And the costumes look authentic, down to the German uniforms, and the leather flying jackets, the white cotton dress.  The scenes set in Khan Al Khalili look real and sumptuous; the desert looks exotic – mostly.  Everything is visually engaging in a 1970s Turkish Delight tv advert sort of a way.  So that’s not where the problem lies.

Nope, the thing that did it for me was that I actually didn’t care one tiny little bit for any of the weird characters, who wandered about the desert having their affairs.  Not one of them aroused in me the slightest feeling of sympathy, whatsoever.  From the autistically deadpan Ralph Fiennes with that strange face he has that looks like it has the texture, flexibility and expressiveness of a crusty bloomer baked in the desert sun, via Colin Firth who comes across as neither hearty nor dull, through to the cold and emotionless Kristin Scott Thomas, nearly nothing engaged my sympathy.  Experiencing a series of emotionless faces on a sandy background simply left me wondering if this is what the English really were like before the War.  If it were the case, I decided to thank the next German I met for starting something that at least collapsed a culture that was so horrendously repressed that it didn’t once know how to throw its posture off the symmetrical, or put a glimmer in its eye.  I might as well have been on Tattooine, so alien were these Sandpeople.

Which of course, left the love affair that was to determine the fates of thousands to be a completely incomprehensible nonsense.  Why did Kristin Scott Thomas’ Katherine not recognise the weirdly distant Count Laszlo as a stalker?  Why did she cheat on her perfectly serviceable husband who had it all: money, looks, kindness and an aeroplane?  There’s no explanation.  I charge the film makers with deception.  And Exhibit A, your honour, is Breadface’s pulling technique.  Ready for this?

He stares at her a bit.

Yes, that’s it.  That’s what brings the erudite, brilliant, funny but cold Katherine to the conjunctive bath tub.  One would think that with so much going on in her head, it might take more than staring at her a bit to cause her to open her legs to him.

But apparently staring at her a bit really is enough.  As is talking in a dull monotone.  And not letting anyone know what you’re thinking.  Useful tips, which I am sure I have tried to less than erotic effect.  That Katherine woman is a singular individual, that’s for sure!  If only all socially inadequate stuffed shirts could meet someone like her!  I’m sure I’ve read of people in the modern age who’ve tried that staring thing, and they either got arrested, beaten up, or had a restraining order put on them.

And here is the problem with the movie: everything that follows from him staring at her a bit seems as nonsensical as his staring at her a bit does.  For another hour, a parade of faces looking disengaged and dull goes by, and I find myself looking once again for how much more of this I will have to endure.  At the end of two hours, I start talking to the living room saying: “Please, oh movie, just surprise me.”  By now Katherine has been abandoned by Laszlo in a cave as he looks for a doctor.  But we all know they’re going to die.  And the fact that he sacrifices most of Northern Egypt to the Germans for the sake of recovering her corpse does not seem such a romantic gesture. It just seems as inexplicable as the rest of Breadface’s behaviour throughout.

True, on the other side, Juliet Binoche does save the scenes set in a monastery where she has holed up with Laszlo, and she does have a fleeting romance with a Sikh Bomb Disposal Officer, which adds a medium amount of spice to the proceedings.  They talk a bit about Imperial attitudes, and then he talks to Laszlo about how much he dislikes Kipling.  But hey, big deal. Binoche’s caring, kind face that actually displays emotions is not enough to engage the attention, because a narrative would also be useful at this point.  This very point clearly perplexed Ondaatje and Minghella, who introduced to the plot the thumbless “Moose” Caravaggio.  But all he does is go around being a bit sinister in a half-hearted kind of a way and muttering about past lives and revenge, and that is meant to produce the narrative tension the film is lacking.

Once again it’s not enough.  There is no narrative tension.  Everyone lives these internalised, introspective lives, and then they die.  Of course, it was always going to end unhappily, as we knew it would from the opening scene.  Besides, we all know how the love triangle must end in this sort of a movie.  It all seems very French, what with all that predictable misery that comes from Breadface and the Ice Queen getting it together.  I wondered whether Binoche had been included because it might fire off a few cultural buttons about the Gallic obsession with doomed love affairs.  A kind of shortcut to class.

And that’s the end of the movie.  The Breadman becomes Toastman, the Ice Queen melts away in the cave of the swimmers, the Moose ends up getting married unexpectedly, and the Frenchwoman is left to seek her Sikh in a Christian church in an Italian town.

All very picturesque, but missing the passion, missing the feeling – and missing a cast of human beings that actually walk, talk and emote like human beings…

Perhaps a biplane really did crashland on the moon.  I just wish that someone had told me before I watched it that all the characters were meant to be aliens.