Glued to the telly.

Not much blogging this week, but more than my usual amount of goggle-box viewing of an evening after work.

I watched BBC's version of "The Diary of Anne Frank" which was serialised every night at 7pm this week. The children watched it with me. Blue Eyed Boy has been watching it at school as well as they've been studying the Second World War as a topic. The last episode was tonight, finishing with the eight of them being found by the Gestapo and taken away. BBC Four followed it with a two-hour program about Anne and her diary.

It was so interesting, and of course the whole thing is profoundly moving. Of the eight who hid in the house, only Anne's dad survived the war. He went back from his concentration camp to the area and lived for seven years (having lost everything and everyone) with the couple who had helped them all hide. Only after he found out, at long last the fate of his two children did Miep, one of the couple, present him with Anne's diary which she'd been keeping in a drawer. She had never read it herself. Peter, who was in the house too and became Anne's boyfriend for a time, died such a very short time before his camp was liberated by the allied forces that this too was heartbreaking. The BBC Four program showed, also, a meeting between Miep (the helper who brought them food each day when they were hiding) and the grown up son of the one of the eight (the one who was a dentist and was there on his own although he had this son back in Britain). He thanked her for what she had done for his dad, and was understandably overcome with emotion. Two months after that scene was filmed, he died of cancer.

I also watched this week a program about "the world's worst prisons". There were two candidates shown, one in Peru and one in Mexico. I think I'd like to suggest that some of our more moaning-inclined prisoners go there for just half a day to see just how well our prison service in Scotland, despite its imperfection, treats them. That sounds more unsympathetic than I actually am, generally. I have huge sympathy with, and compassion for, prisoners. But they are a moany bunch and some of their moans are, to say the least, a bit unreasonable.

I've just watched more than half of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto - I wandered off and left Him Indoors to see the end of it. It's gory and I don't really do gory films if I can avoid them, but it was refreshing to have a film without any white guys, and what I saw seemed to be well done. I have an interest in missionary projects in various parts of the world, and this for some reason made me think of some of my missionary acquaintances, especially two very heroic single ladies who for many years have lived a large part of their time in the Amazon region, doing Bible translation in both Monkey River and White Lake villages. I receive their newsletter from time to time and it's such a different world from mine that I love to read it.

And then, last but not least, this week, I watched "The Mask of Zorro" with Antonio Banderas. I can offer no explanation of why I like this film so much, as it's not my usual thing at all, but I just love it.

If I could re-model myself, I'd settle for looking like Catherine Zeta Jones, too!

In my defence, for those of you who don't approve of "The Mask of Zorro" as a good use of one's time, I did also knit most of a scarf during it - a present for my mum for a bit of babysitting next week.