marramgrass

Yesterday evening was Get Smart, the Hollywood update of a TV show I loved when I was younger. If you’re not familiar with it (turns out not everyone is!) Get Smart is to The Man From UNCLE and Mission: Impossible what Police Squad and Naked Gun are to the likes of Dragnet. Any wiser? Good.

I hoped this would be a cracker, and it was. Plenty of proper laugh-inducing humour and all the riffs on the series necessary to keep someone like me happy. Steve Carrell does a great job updating Maxwell Smart, and Anne Hathaway makes for a supremely confident Agent 99.

The comedy ticks all the boxes: bad visual puns, some in-jokes and catchphrases, a little bit of politics, slapstick… Not what you’d call particularly intellectual, but fun.

If you remember the series you’ll enjoy the film; if you don’t, you probably still will.

The interwebs are today alive with blogs and tweets observing the first of September. It’s a day that doesn’t mark any particular holiday here in the UK, made special simply by the end of August and the start of September taking children back to school.

Even though it’s a long time since the turning over from August into September carried any special significance for me — school is a long while past, my university life was non-typical with academic holidays meaning nothing, we have no children of our own to keep us watching these seasons — the rhythm learned in 14 years of school sticks with me, and seemingly with many others. There is no marked change in the weather from ‘summer’ to ‘autumn’, especially not this year, but as of today the summer is, I think, over.

This is the first year in a long time when my two months of summer haven’t been marked by some major event, be it at work (the Big Summer Youth Event™), or a life thing (new job, moving house, moving country). This summer has been rather nondescript, populated by happenings that came and went independent of time.

Still, according to the learned rhythm, I can feel my brain shifting up a gear. It’s partly external (now when I make a phone call there is more likely to be someone at the other end to pick up) and partly internal.

Seasons turn in more ways than one.