Sadly I’m not wearing this outfit now. Although, given it would have taken five minutes to put on again, I rather wish I’d made the effort. Father-Daughter film night resumed with ‘The English Patient.” Undoubtedly one of my favourite film.
Irregardless of the film. What I like most about our film nights, always moreso than the film itself, is the time spent together — often in conversation.
There’s no — in the words of Ralph Fiennes’ Count Almásy to Kristen Scott Thomas’ Katherine — “I once travelled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didn’t speak for nine hours. At the end of it he pointed to the horizon and said “Faya.” That was a good day” between Father and Daughter.
As we sat, lit by a few candles and the glow of the screen, I used the scene where Katherine tells the story of Gyges around the desert campfire, to explain to my daughter — in my seemingly-wise fatherly way — that she “should learn a similar party trick — perhaps a beautiful poem.” Staggeringly, she quickly countered, by recounting the whole of Dickenson’s ‘“Hope” is the thing with feathers’.
As a poem I’ve always taken to heart, it was a wonderful thing to hear, spoken entirely from memory, especially out of the mouth of one’s offspring (with the subsequent back story of how and why she’d learnt it too).
Given the talk of the various winds in the film (one of the most beautiful scenes written in script), and (which I’d forgotten) the talk of Almásy frequently singing, it is also undoubtedly a poem that couldn’t be more poetically apt. One of those truly rare moments in life.
Whilst I couldn’t then compete with that (even whilst gifting her ‘The English Patient’) during the following scenes in Cairo, where someone remarks that Katherine might be pregnant, I told her that her great-great-grandfather was actually born in Cairo (during wartime too). Personally, this was something which I discovered later in life, and for me always expanded my own sense of history and place in the world. I Hope then that — especially after seeing the film — it did for her too.