Black Magic

This Easter has mainly been spent catching up with old friends and it's been lovely. My friend Paige who moved to Leeds in September has made the effort to meet up with me twice, and we've spent hours having really intense conversations about everything, from what we want to do with our lives to religion. Usually we're either having nights out or gossiping about boys, and while both of these things are of course fun, it's been lovely to really get to know each other on a deeper level and realise that we're far more similar than I (and probably Paige) previously thought. I've also met up with Steven for the first time since before Christmas, and it was wonderful to be able to sit and sip a Bloody Mary, eat curly fries and have him talk to me about comic books and whatever else we covered on Saturday evening.

However, Easter hasn't all been about cocktails and coffee with old friends. I've also seen some wonderful films recently. The first is Wilde, a film that tells the story of Oscar Wilde's private life from his early days in England, to the trial which cost him his health, marriage and career. It was both poignant and wonderfully scripted, and I'd recommend it to anybody who enjoys a good period drama. I've also seen two anti-love stories that, while interesting, left a bitter taste in the mouth. Like Crazy and Blue Valentine are both depressingly accurate portrayals of how relationships can often go, and while they aren't the best films to watch in bed with your boyfriend after spending a lovely few days with him, they're definitely worth a watch if, like us, you're sick of Hollywood romantic comedies that destroy your soul within the first ten minutes.

I've also just finished reading Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay as part of my degree and it's genuinely been a pleasure to read. Prior to reading the book, I didn't know much about Jackie. I'm a fan of her ex girlfriend, Carol Ann Duffy, but I'd never read any of Kay's work, and after reading the blurb of Red Dust Road and hearing that there wasn't any steamy lesbian love scenes in it, I wasn't expecting to enjoy it nearly as much as I did. However, I was pleasantly surprised. Kay's depiction of meeting her fundamentalist Nigerian father and getting blanked by him, as well as her birth mother insisting on her existence being kept a secret was so frustrating that I wanted to walk right into the book and confront the people myself. Kay's timidness and compliance was downright annoying. I was practically screaming at her to stand up for herself and refuse to be treated the way she was, before almost crying tears of joy when Kay finally met up with her biological brother and was acknowledged in the way that she should have been by both of her birth parents. Although I wished the book to be a little longer (it seemed to end at the beginning, if that makes sense), it was a fast paced, wonderfully written book that is really worth a read.

I've just started to read Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris. Harris is my all time favourite author, and so far, FQOTO is just like Chocolat in that it's bursting with colourful and mouth-watering descriptions of the smells and tastes of all the foods in a French kitchen. It's the kind of book that makes you want to pack up your things into a suitcase and move to France to open your very own cafe, leaving everyone and everything behind. I'm not quite sure what the book is actually about as of yet, because as with all Harris' novels, it's the kind of story that unfolds slowly and finishes when all the loose ends are neatly tied up and the characters issues are resolved, but so far the beautiful prose and engaging narrative are not letting me down.