What I Learned Last Weekend


Amy is a spectacularly depressing film. Having watched every dreadful film on the way out (Vacation, Get Hard, and others too numerous to mention) on the way back to Singapore I watched … Hot Tub Time Machine 2. Which was even worse than my wife warned me. But I also watched Amy, a documentary about Amy Winehouse.

I bought Frank, Winehouse’s first album, off the back of hearing her on Radio 4 about the time it was released. My boss at the time saw it on my desk, and remarked on how rough the woman on the cover looked. But to be fair, we were in deepest darkest Kent, and a gobby, pale North London girl wasn’t what was meant to occupy the pantheon of pop personalities. Then again, this was long before she transformed into the wildeyed tattooed terror who would be all over the tabloids later on. Back with the first album, she was just this totally incongruous voice, as if an enormous black woman from a 50s jazz club was hiding behind this slip of a girl, belting out songs.

This actually becomes stranger once you start to watch the documentary, the unexpected contrast between her off-stage voice, glottal stops and Laaahndan Taaan accent, and the huge, belting voice she brought to the songs. Apart from that Radio 4 interview (on Woman’s Hour?) I never heard her speak, so at the time it passed as normal. As normal as any young thing with the voice of a century can be.

In some ways, the middle of the last decade wasn’t good for me, or I wasn’t very good for it. Not just things like having an articulated truck knock my car off the motorway, or my replacement car deciding to malfunction whenever it felt like it. There were various dreadful liaisons in nightclubs, unresolved emotional baggage and the occasional worry that I’d never be happy.

And the stripping. Maybe that’s for another time.

However gloomy I might have been, I didn’t end up smoking crack with a terrible man I met in a pub in Camden, so I suppose I had that going for me. Watching Amy is monumentally bleak, because you know exactly how badly it will end, and there’s never really a point in the film where you feel it could go another way, what with all the self-sabotage and the saboteurs around her. By the end I was almost in tears, although who can say if that was the sleep deprivation, flashbacks to the mid-Noughties prompted by the music, or just the utter bleakness of all that crack-fuelled doom.

More cheerfully, Kevin Hart is awful in Get Hard, but watchable in The Wedding Ringer. Which gives me some faith in the decisions of casting directors after all.

It’s worrying how quickly you get used to special treatment. I sat in seat 1A on the flight to Singapore, and I was strangely annoyed that the seat on a 767 doesn’t have as nice a foot rest as on the 777 that I flew in from New York to Tokyo.

Maybe next I’ll start complaining that the complimentary champagne isn’t as good as I expect, or that I now expect multiple blankets rather than just one of these lovely Westin items.

I didn’t sleep much on the flight: my assumption was that I needed to stay up to fend off jet lag. By the time I made it to Narita I was knackered, of course, and it was only 5pm in my final destination, so I didn’t know what that was going to do for me. (I found out, of course.). The layover in Narita was very short: I thought I had several hours to kill, but in fact there was just enough time to unsuccessfully Skype my wife, then to board. At least that got me home quicker.

You can’t trust strange men you meet in bars. Also, never say your room number out loud when you’re paying for meals in a hotel.


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