*
What is this faint light? An eerie green glow
Rainy afternoon, of insipid June
The sun comes out now, but tis all too late
All soaked to the skin, with our clothes too thin
*
To hide from the rain, to hide from the sun
One needs a big hat, and act the bridge troll
Concrete cannot drain, gutters all overflow
Rooves too hot for cat, trees too short to shade
>
It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.
Regular readers of the blog will know that, like Charles dating his Oxford days from when he met Sebastian, I think of the blog proper as beginning in September 2009; from whence monthly archives can be found all the way up to April 2026. And yet today is a milestone.
It is 18 years since the staking of this claim in the digital terrain. April 22nd 2008. A mere month after the collapse of Bear Stearns and the intervention of the Federal Reserve to calm the waters. A move that would inexplicably not be repeated for Lehman Brothers in September 2008 leading to the credit crunch. But in Ireland we were already experiencing the quiet implosion of the housing market from its bubble peak, as the soft landing we had been promised did not materialise; because there never had been one before in history. George W Bush was the President, and Barack Obama was trying to push the obdurate Hillary Clinton out of the race to replace him. Bertie Ahern had mere days left to serve as Taoiseach before one implausibility too many about sterling exchange rates spurred his resignation.
What has this got to do with the blog? Everything, and nothing. When the blog started I hadn’t mastered how to insert images, so I simply did without for a while. Which is how, when I backfilled all the posts later, the first entry ended up with a gif that didn’t exist at the time; months before the release of The Dark Knight. At all times, it seems, technology to me appears unbidden as a black monolith, and, after panic, fear, and curiosity, I eventually figure it out. It is darkly comic that after such beginnings the blog now showcases AI generated art. People in 2008 insistently read into The Dark Knight the political context of its time. But context fades, and is forgotten. It can be interesting to reinsert lost context, certainly, but valuable culture must have eternal verities.
Back in 2008 I was engaged in a writing project that could have been derided, par Spaced and especially Paul, as being all references. Now in 2026 I am engaged in an even more ambitious writing project that aims to strip out nearly all references. The imitation of Chekhov, if you will. It wasn’t until 2009 that I finally saw Three Sisters in performance, but I knew Alfred’s dictum in The Dark Knight – “Endure!” – had a Chekhovian ring to it. By 2010 I had officially expanded the remit of the blog because I wanted to write not only theatre reviews as well as film reviews, but also colour pieces, concert reviews, and thinkpieces on music, television, theatre, literature, art, philosophy, and wider culture, including, yes, politics. And now in 2026 the humble blog is legally old enough to vote. Whoa.
I hadn’t realised until last year just how many blogs fell by the wayside since the heyday of the form in the late 2000s. I’ve seen people give perfectly reasonable excuses to pull down the shutters. I’ve had perfectly reasonable excuses to do so. And yet didn’t. Talking Movies Endures.
It is time to put the blog on ice for a while, conduct a personal Hitchcock retrospective, and enjoy a duck for Christmas dinner.
Talking Movies will return in 2026 with a Top 10 Films of 2025, and previews of the best and worst films of 2026.
2026 will see Talking Movies continue to explore the back catalogue of cinema, in the spirit of the A to Z of Cinema series that ran thru the lockdown on Dublin City FM’s Sunday Breakfast Show with Patrick Doyle. Also continuing on apace into the new year from multiple sources will be 2024’s innovation of generating whimsical AI art to illustrate the whimsical posts that run here. Meanwhile it’s time to read Brideshead Revisited once again.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
I had never seen a proper diagram explaining Nelson’s tactics at Trafalgar until the recent 120th anniversary brought forth a deluge on Twitter.
The first thing that struck me from looking at all these pictures was that by forming his ships into a narrow line and breaching the opposing fanned out fleet at one single point of (now tremendous) weakness he was effectively doing what Jack Aubrey quoted him in Master and Commander as holding the epitome of tactics: “Nevermind manoeuvres, just go straight at them!” The second thing that struck me was a parallel with how the Thebans broke the Spartans. Refusing to line up in polite lines, but instead concentrating a piledriver at one point to shatter the line and the advantage that came with it. Nelson’s first ship is subject to broadside, but after that sacrificial lamb has smashed thru the line the ships that follow are impervious until they wheel around and attack a fleet now in disarray.
Talking Movies 