Look, I know it sounds incredibly boring, but I was excited, all right?

So, I got almost all of my essay written this evening, on a considerably less inflammatory topic than I'd discussed the other day, as it happens, with the result that I very nearly forgot to write today's token post! This would hardly be a drama, but I'm stubborn that way.

Having managed to get the essay to the point where I'll definitely be able to fix it up tomorrow, and very possibly hand it in too, or at the very latest Wednesday, is pretty great (if only because it means I get to sleep in several hours longer on Friday, when it's due in the morning), but not as exciting as my possibly embarrassing triumph this evening.

You know sometimes someone tells you about a movie or a book and for whatever reason, you decide to look into it, but then you can't find it anywhere? Is this something that even happens to you guys? I mean, I guess it's possible that it's just me who takes sudden fancies like this and then gets all determined. (I'd make a good fictional detective, I reckon. Probably a crap real detective, but deinitely a good early 20th century fictional detective. Another missed calling!)

Anyway, decades ago, my mother mentioned in passing having long ago seen an old black and white movie where a group of people try to convince a girl she's crazy, by doing things like empty out her coffee cup when she's not looking, then claiming, when she said "where's my coffee?" that they'd all watched her drink it, didn't she remember? For some reaon, I decided to figure out what the movie was. I mean, very probably she said "I don't know what the film was" and I came over all smug teenager and was all "pfft, I'll just look it up on Yahoo [it may even have been so long ago that I said AltaVista], you old people are so bad at this newfangled internet, give me like 2 minutes, bam". Anyway, I couldn't find it, despite hunting intermittently for years. Ages later I came across the movie Gasslight and rather dismissively decided that that must've been what she meant, since the concept of trying to convince someone that they're mad is popularly attributed to that film (hence the term 'gaslighting'), although annoyingly there was no cup-emptying scene.

Frankly, I'm a bit OCD, and this always bugged me, but with that undergraduate contempt for one's elders which we've all been guilty of, and all resented in people younger than us, I just assumed that she had for some reason radically misremembered it.

But then, today, out of nowhere (well, technically in response to me saying that since he was obviously asleep I was going to drink his tea and tell him he'd done it himself), my Dad, half-asleep, referred to a scene where people do that to try to convince Jean Simmons she's mad.

Look, I know this sounds super dull, but it was really like one of those scenes in a whodunnit where the detective is all "what did you say Hastings? Of course!" and rushes out to board a train and solve the crime or whatever.

Anyway, long story very slightly shorter, I finally managed to find it. Turns out it's a movie called "So Long At The Fair". Infuriatingly, it's not available to download (perfectly legally or "perfectly legally") nor is available in JB Hi-Fi, who are essentially the only DVD retailers left in the country. But! Not only is in available on Amazon, but also the Amazon store who have it also sell a bunch of other old movies I haven't been able to find anywhere! Most notably Bachelor Mother, which I've been trying to get on DVD (only to be assured by the internet that it's never been released on anything but VHS) for maybe 7 years. It's a pretty great film, but I'll level with you, it's possible that part of this affection I have is based on the fact that the entire film has been playing hard to get this whole time.

Anyway, I also got a bunch of super cheap Margaret Lockwood, Ginger Rogers and early Hitchcock movies, as well as a CD I've been trying to get for my Grandmother for a year and a half. All in all, it's been a disproportionately satisfying sort of evening!