The other night…I couldn’t sleep.
Now I appreciate that as far as topics for a blog post go, this one is admittedly (and ironically) a bit, well...'yawn!’
Rest assured, however, there was a somewhat more interesting take-home from this particular bout of insomnia, if I do say so myself.
What it centred on, was the realisation that at 3am, there’s no greater compensation for the absence of sleep, than a good old noughties chick flick!
I’m talking about the likes of Bridget Jones, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, My Best Friend's Wedding… the kind of movie that, let’s face it, they just don’t make anymore!
In the lonely land of nodless-ness, I find it’s these movies’ of-the-era cheesiness - and the light relief it provides from the heavy weight of a middle-of-the-night mind - that makes them soooo much more appealing than counting sheep!
Granted, sleep experts might not agree with this give-up-and-put-the-kettle-on tac, and this blog certainly isn't prescriptive... just so you know!
However, I defy even the most restless of ruminators not have their frayed insomniac nerves tempered by the synapse-soothing simplicity that is... Dirty Dancing.
Maybe it’s the cliches, the predictability… the sheer lack of in-scene technology and smart phones, the nostalgia of which somehow hits different, under cover of darkness.
I wonder, in observing these films' obvious evergreen appeal (among my generation at least!), why it is that the chick flick genre that made a whole generation of females want to dance barefoot on a befallen tree, has fallen somewhat into obscurity....
It feels like a sad indictment of modern entertainment culture, maybe, that the time-honoured boy-meets-girl blueprint... no longer tastes quite so sweet.
Nowadays, the first sign of any star-crossing seems schmaltzy at best... and a bit 'ugh' at worst, or so I fear!
Todays movies are, by all accounts, so much louder, longer and more concentration-demanding, which to me, only adds to the value that the old 'you had me at hello' mush adds to my SKY planner.
At 3am especially, when simple finds new-found importance, I’m grateful for the forethought of 'festive' me… for recording anything and everything on the Christmas TV schedule that featured either Julia Roberts or Rachel McAdams!
With any luck, the other night was a blip in my ordinarily out-like-a-light track record.
I say this quite loosely, however, as against the very real need for sleep, there is a small, every-cloud-shaped part of my rationale, that will always see those nights when the cogs won’t stop spinning, as a Notting Hill shaped blessing…in baggy eyed disguise!
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