This afternoon we saw The Hours. A beautiful film with staggering performances, but almost unbearable to watch. Half-way through I was seriously thinking of leaving because I didn’t think I could take any more, that I’d be an emotional wreck for the rest of the week if I carried on. But I know from experience that that’s never the way to deal with things that crack you up: if you see it through to the end, you will recover, but if you run away before it’s finished the wound will stay open. True enough, walking out of the cinema, after a few tense minutes we felt fine again. It was nice to see some shots of Richmond in the Virginia Woolf sections of the film, even if she did say that great line, “From a choice between Richmond and death, I would choose death” – which incidentally was the only bit of the whole movie which got a laugh. K and I went and sat by the river with a cup of tea and considered Richmond and that line, and it conflated in my head with some of the ideas I’d had from Adaptation into the latest in a long line of semi-autobiographical stories about a frustrated young writer living in Richmond who chooses life, people. Although of course now he’d be less young than in previous, similar synopses…