Good Walkies, Grommit?

Andrea See is talking about the pleasant experience of watching Chicken Run outdoors under the stars.

My favourite line out of that movie is I think "Good Heavens No. I'm a chicken".

I went to Bristol, home of Aardman Animation, a month or so back. It's a really nice city. (Sea ports or former sea ports often have a very nice, cosmopolitan feel about them. The town is also helped by having an extremely good university).

Between Bristol and the Severn Estuary, the River Avon goes through an immense gorge, and over this gorge goes the extremely famous Clifton Suspension Bridge , built Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great Victorian engineer. At the Bristol end of the bridge is the suburb of Clifton, full of nice houses, shops and stuff. The people of Bristol, unlike the English in general, seem to take great pride in the great works of engineering in the town). I sat in a pub named "The Brunel" and had a very pleasant meal and a couple of pints of ale. But I digress.

Clifton does, as I said, contain nice houses, and I got the impression this is one of the posher parts of Bristol to live in. Near the end of the bridge, I walked into a perfectly ordinary English newsagency: the sort of place that is in a small shop, and that sells newspapers, a few magazines, a few groceries, which has an immense array of chocolate bars to choose from, and contains a fridge containing drinks, and a few things to eat, the featured item of which is almost always sweet corn and tuna sandwhiches.

Such newsagents seldom have a great selection of magazines. The local one near where I live in Croydon doesn't even stock the Economist. In any event, this newsagent stocked both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. From this, I deduced that some rich film-making types lived nearby. Who could tell? Perhaps the guy in front of me buying the Guardian was in fact one of the directors of Chicken Run.