It was widely assumed when Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer were released on the same day, July 21 this year, that the two films would attract polar opposite audiences.
Clearly, such assumptions were wrong. And while the “double-feature” may have started off as a joke, as many have now pointed out, there are some interesting connections.
When I was about ten-years-old, I had a secret hideout on the chalk escarpment above my primary school in Folkestone. My gang and I would sneak out the back gate of the school, across the fields and up the steep slope to the World War Two pillbox that was the base of our operations.
I did not really appreciate it at the time, we were too busy playing war games, but from up here you can get a distinct sense of just how connected this corner of Britain is with mainland Europe. On a sunny day, you can see the white cliffs of Cap Blanc-Nez gleaming in the distance, cliffs that are composed of exactly the same Upper Cretaceous rocks that you are standing on. If you follow the contours of the chalk ridge from my hideout to the east, and out across the water, it does not take much imagination to see how intimately the two sides of what is now the English Channel were once linked.
In Season Three of Breaking Bad, Hector Salamanca brutally demonstrates to his young nephews that “family is everything.” The sentiment is reciprocated later by his nephew Lalo in Season Five of Better Call Saul when he vows revenge against Gus Fring.
Better Call Saul is not a traditional family show, but at its core it is a show about family, specifically the disintegration of the toxic McGill/Wexler family that leads to emergence of Saul Goodman. But there is also the corporate family represented by Howard Hamlin, the Cartel, and tying everyone together is ex-cop Mike Ehrmantraut, a man so fiercely protective of his family that he will go to any lengths to keep them safe.
I have found it surprisingly disorientating moving from Hong Kong (22.3°N), where there is little more than two hours’ variation in daylight hours over the course of the year, to southern England (51.2° N), where the longest day exceeds the shortest by nearly nine hours.
Living in a small village with little artificial light makes the change in daylight hours even more palpable, especially on the days when there is a sudden one hour jump to British Summer Time and back again to Greenwich Mean Time.
In the mid-seventh century, Æthelburh, daughter of Æthelberht, the first Christian king of Kent, established one of England’s earliest Christian communities by the source of a pure chalk stream on the North Downs.
Æthelburh, or Ethelburga as she is now known locally, had been married off to King Edwin of Northumbria but after he was killed in battle (a common fate for Anglo-Saxon kings), she returned home for a life of quiet aristocratic contemplation with God. She commissioned a convent and a small stone church on the hillside directly above the spring feeding the stream in the valley below.
The tiny Oxfordshire village of Ewelme* is very much off the beaten track nowadays, hidden down narrow country lanes in the Chiltern Hills, away from any major thoroughfare. But 500 years ago, it was the stage for an epic drama, the rise and fall of one of England’s most prominent families, tragically embroiled in a dynastic struggle we know today as the War of the Roses.
The clue to Ewelme’s former status is the imposing church of St Mary the Virgin on the hillside above the high street, and its adjacent almshouses and school house, a grand stone and brick complex more suited to a small town than a few scattered households.
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The quality of mercy is not strain’d.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
In one of William Shakespeare’s most famous speeches from The Merchant of Venice, Portia attempts to persuade Shylock of the importance of mercy over the blind pursuit of justice, in the hope that he will relinquish his “just” demand for a pound of flesh and accept the offer of double the money he loaned to the beleaguered Antonio.
Somewhere on the hillside of Mosfell, about 20 kilometres to the east of Reykjavik, lies buried treasure. It is here, more than a thousand years ago, that Egil Skallagrimsson, Iceland’s infamous warrior poet, dumped two chests of silver that had been presented to him decades earlier by the king of England. It is reported that some English coins of that era were subsequently found in the area but the bulk of the treasure remains lost – for now.
Hidden down a muddy farm track on the greensand ridge overlooking Romney Marsh is a ruined chapel and the site of a 16th century miracle – allegedly.
It was here in 1526 that Elizabeth Barton, a 20-year-old servant girl from the nearby village of Aldington, prophesised that she would be cured of the seizures and deathlike trances that had recently afflicted her. She had growing a reputation among the local population for the visions and prophesies that emerged during her trances, so a considerable crowd reportedly gathered to watch the event.
On a recent trip to London, I took a shortcut back to the train station through Gray’s Inn. As I hurried through a narrow alleyway, I noticed a plaque on the brick wall to my right bearing the name and unmistakable image of the first president of the Republic of China, Sun Yat-sen. This was the site of Sun’s lodging house, provided by his friend and teacher in Hong Kong, Dr James Cantlie, in the late 1890s.
It was a serendipitous sighting. Earlier that day, I had walked by the Chinese embassy in Portland Place, and was reminded of how Sun had been held captive there for 12 days in October 1896. It was one of the most sensational kidnappings of the decade, an incident that would not have been out of place in a Sherlock Holmes novel.