Tom Burke’s Blog

We are currently having our garden rebuilt. I’m ashamed to say that although we have lived in our current home for almost 24 years, we have never got to grips with the garden. We are not gardeners, and other than keeping the lawn under control, we’ve done nothing to it. It doesn’t help that we know nothing about gardening; and just to make things worse, we have the longest garden in our section of the street.

All this is now changing! We employed a garden designer during the spring and gave her a brief something like this: we want a garden that we, non-gardeners, can enjoy for sitting out in; we want it to be child-friendly for when we sell the house (we live in a family home area; when we moved in our daughters were small children); it needs to be low-maintenance, or it won’t get looked after at all; and we want lot of different textures and shapes, to maintain interest. And our designer produced a wonderful plan with a mixture of paved areas, lawn, pebbled areas, a dry-stone river bed (that was my idea), some decking, paths of various types & materials, including stepping stones through the lawn, something that looks like sawn-off stones & pebbles but is actually concrete, and wooden sleepers.

Our groundwork contractor was able to start just a couple of weeks ago, and I have been taking pictures as he has gone along. Here is a link to the page I’ve created about the ongoing work.

Well, this was possibly our favourite cruise. What we especially enjoyed was that it was so sociable. And the ship also, although small, was very intimate and fun.

Review: I posted a review of the cruise here.
Pictures: I posted various pictures: first, Braemar herself; Bayeux; and then Honfleur. No pictures of Cherbourg; sorry!

Braemar is being stretched early next summer, and its capacity will increase from about 750 to just under 1000. I hope that doesn’t spoil the atmosphere on her. After that she do fly-cruises in the Mediterranean. This is unusual: Fred Olsen have not done Mediterranean fly-cruises before, but next year they will have two ships doing them – Balmoral (ex-Norwegian Crown) in the first half of the summer, and then Braemar will take over for the second half.

We are already fully booked for cruises next year (it’s going to be a P&O year for us, with cruises booked on Oriana & Ventura) but perhaps we will go back on Braemar in 2009. We would especially like to do either a Norwegian fjords cruise or a Baltic cities cruise, and Fred Olsen do both of these, and from north-east England, and generally use Braemar for them. So we will look forward to the 2009 brochure when it appears.

Not much to say about cruises at the moment – they’re over for this year – so on to other topics, and a return to another of my great interests, the movies.

On Saturday we went to see ‘Michael Clayton’, the new film starring George Clooney. It’s one of Clooney’s serious works, more like Syriana and Good Night & Good Luck than the ‘Ocean’s n‘. Clooney plays the eponymous character – a lawyer with a major New York law firm, who is in fact their ‘fixer’. He’s a cop to his fellow lawyers, but a lawyer to the cops; he works in the middle ground between law enforcement and the legal profession, fixing things to the advantage of his firm, their clients, and (if possible) third parties such as the police. He is very good at his job, but apparently not at anything else: he is divorced, not the best parent, he is fighting an addiction to gambling, and he has a failed business venture. So we are (purportedly) anchored in reality.

During the course of the film we see him at work as he attempts to fix problems between his firm and a major client. The firm is defending the client in a law suit for $3 Billion, and as the film progresses we learn that the plaintiffs have a very good case and ought to win. However, this is not a legal drama – it is set in that environment but the focus of the film is the character himself, as he performs the mental gymnastics he must in order to separate his appallingly amoral work from his personal problems and later from his conscience. By the end of the film he may have changed – we are not quite certain, there is a suggeston that he won a few major personal victories – and the lives of all those around him have been deeply affected by the fallout from the fixing he has done, and others’ response to it.

The performances are uniformly excellent, including Tom Wilkinson and Sidney Pollack, but I have to make especial mention of Tilda Swinton. She plays a character who is totally out of her depth as Chief Council of a major corporation, and by the end of the film all her nightmares – personal as well as professional – have come to pass. The final scene, with her shuddering as absolute disaster crashes around her, is rivetting.

This film is an excellent example of intelligent adult film-making.