A game, a film & a book (The Lighthouse)

I woke with a brutal sinus headache (I'm prone since an over zealous use of mothballs triggered inflammation many years ago) and took a handful Nurofen, the only thing that begins to shift it. I've hardly been out this last week, you begin to feel like a mole, and my muscles are fucked from the exertion of the holidays but I had a ball with my nephews, or 'wee meerkats' as I call them. They got a boardgame called Pandemic which I still don't understand, I don't think any of us did, the list of rules is like an enigmatic short story, but we played anyway. We watched the Attenborough documentary, the male giraffes whipping each other with their necks, I had a nephew snuggled on each side, it was one of those moments when you are simply and gorgeously content, though the giraffes were upsetting and the meat-eating crickets the stuff of science fiction. The excellent film '5 Broken Cameras', in which Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat documents life in his village over seven years, is still available to watch free online. It will pierce your heart. At one point Emad says 'I film to heal'. I've started reading the Man Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse, I don't love it, but I'm only 50 pages in and will keep going, something off-key  in the narrative compels me, even when I feel irritated, I don't, for example, believe that Fuch kept stick insects because his ex-wife wouldn't let him have a dog, it seems contrived. Sometimes it is like that with fiction, you are just not convinced. But it is short, and I prefer short books just now, and some reviews suggest this novel takes a while to get into. And Happy New Year! In Scotland we say it well into January if we meet someone we haven't seen yet.

*Update; my review of The Lighthouse is here.