Ah, Withnail and I - ever fresh, after all the years.
For the benefit of those unfamiliar with it, the film has subtle references to Hamlet throughout, culminating in the great final scene where Withnail (Richard E. Grant) performs a stunning version of the 'What a piece of work is man!' soliloquy.
First saw it back in 87 or whenever it first appeared, and couldn't believe my eyes. I thought someone had penetrated down some temporal worm-hole back into the flat I used to share in Crouch End back in the glory days.
We decamped owing weeks of rent, carting tea-chests of swag through the back garden into my mate's waiting articulated lorry. We told the genial cockney neighbours, lolling in their deckchairs, that we were off to the Isle of Wight Festival (Hendrix's last, though we didn't know it then).
My mate used to run bananas from the docks to wholesalers around the country, dropping off crates clandestinely on the way to the grocers of Seven Sisters Road. We would drink away the profits in the Queens.
Half the people we knew in Hornsey became premies.
Bruce Robinson (writer and director of Withnail) is a friend of a friend. My friend was offered the role of Benvolio in Zefferrelli's Romeo and Juliet, but turned it down as he was on stage in some important (as he saw it)political play in the West End at the time. So Bruce took the role.
Bruce was recently in that great play on the box about the fictional band Strange Fruits.
They're a band of semi-washed up musos who imploded in diversity and in-fighting just after Glastonbury 76 or something who are persuaded to re-form to catch a wave of heavy metal nostalgia.
Played by Stephen Rea, Tim Spall, Jimmy Nail, some other guy, and the ultra-splendid Bill Nighy as the singer.
The road manager is the ultra-splendide Juliet Aubrey (Middlemarch).
After loads of high jinx, catastrophes, soul-searchings and misadventures, the lads are joined on stage back in Glastonbury in the denouement by the missing presumed dead song-writer and lead guitarist Brian (Bruce), and they reprise their beautiful all-time great hit THE FIRE STILL BURNS!
There is this beautiful end scene with Nighy surpassing himself at the mike, replete with cascading hair, Bruce and Nail (the latter for once dropping the prima-donnaness) blending in abandonedly with the endless uplifting lyrics: The Fire Still Burns! and Juliet Aubrey with tear-filled eyes stage left.
And that's how I feel today. Filled with passionate uplifting life. The same old energy, pouring very nicely.
Whether this is because I have just had a nice meditation, or just the ability of life to eternally renew itself and sweep away the old cobwebs from all those dark wardrobes we sometimes find ourselves in, I don't know.
Maybe it is as Katie says (although I only read about half a sentence) that the great Motherwave is always waiting to pick us up again from the places we have been marooned into.
One thing is sure - the energy is for free and not the perquisite of any teacher who may try to claim it for themselves.
It's the natural birth-right, and if we just try to live well towards one another and life in general, we are finally brought back to optimism and some form of contentment, just through nature itself.
