A good film

 Both of us have aching muscles and back twinges after yesterday's garden efforts, so it's a day of rest for us today....besides, it's raining again.😒  Looks like Tuesday will be the next dry-ish day, so more gardening work then.  I'm so pleased we're able to start working in the garden now, it's been such a long - and very rainy - winter.  If the rain eases up this afternoon, which it should do, albeit briefly, we'll pop to the garden centre and order the bags of compost and slate or gravel for delivery.

Oh, and I forgot to say.....the service provider thing has been settled to our satisfaction and we've been given a refund, so all's well that ends well.

We watched a very heartwarming film last night, called The Great Escaper.  A true story about an ex-serviceman who wanted to attend the 70th anniversary D-Day remembrance service in France, but he'd missed the deadline for the organised trip.  So, instead of giving up and watching it on the TV, he decided, at the age of 90 and living in a care home with his poorly wife, to make the trip to France by himself, with his wife's blessing.  Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson were the old couple, they played the parts really well.  The media got hold of the story and he was welcomed back as a hero by loads of press, much to his surprise (pretty unwelcome surprise at that).  The reason he'd wanted to go was so he could visit the grave of his best friend who had died in the D-Day landings, he was blown up on the beach.....he'd always felt terribly guilty because his friend had died and he'd survived, plus he'd told his friend that it would be ok, adding to his guilt.  He stood in the middle of the Commonwealth cemetery in Bayeux, Normandy, looking out over the sea of around 5,000 graves and cried in despair over the complete waste of young lives, very moving.  Upon his return to England and the care home, his wife told him that he'd had nothing to feel guilty about, his friend getting killed and him surviving was basically a case of bad and good luck, and she'd always been grateful that he'd survived and they'd had a wonderfully happy life together.  I shed a few tears, there were some very poignant moments in it, and it showed the utter futility of war and the massive amount of people killed for no good reason.  He never spoke about his experiences during the war, and nor did my Granddad, who was in the army during WWII, he wouldn't be drawn to talk about any of his war time.  Those men (women too of course, but mostly men on the frontlines) who survived those terrible experiences must have been haunted by those memories to the end of their days, it's a wonder they didn't all go mad.  And still wars go on.