I was on my way to have a facial when my electric bicycle stopped working. The on/off button just dropped off in the street, after days of becoming looser. This was a rare occasion when being early for an appointment had its benefit. Whilst hardly holding back spontaneous tears, I called the bike shop where I’d bought my Raleigh Stowaway; only to find out that the shop was permanently closed.

Then in a blur of googling, I got through to a repair shop somewhere in Kent and the sympathetic stranger directed me to a bicycle shop in North London where a bloke called Aaron offered to try to source the broken speedometer which also turns on the bike.

Two days later, Aaron called to tell me that the part which I needed was no longer manufactured and he also hadn’t been able to find a second hand one. Back home I called the Raleigh headquarters in Berlin, although I had no reason to doubt Aaron whose willingness to be helpful had truly eased my fear of losing my essential wheels.

I couldn’t give up! My bicycle is designed so that it doesn’t easily move even on flat terrain, unless switched on. I phoned around and finally a fellow at West 9 Bikes on Sutherland Avenue messaged that if I brought my bike to his shop he would “find a solution in the store.”

I arrived first thing on a Friday morning. Whilst the West 9 repairman continuously worked on my bike, I sat in the café opposite with a book I bought at a nearby charity shop. It was like waiting for a loved one to come out of surgery.

By mid-afternoon my bike was fixed and, icing on cake or pine nuts on the houmous! I got a super reasonable bill. (Plus the new on/off device has proved to be way superior to the previous one). And so this near-death experience of my beloved bike ended with me still believing that where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Lately I’ve been craving black and white movies from the 40s and 50s which I find soothing in their simplicity. I’ve finally watched Casablanca (cue, shock emoji !) and on BBC iPlayer two war films that had me hooked were The Wooden Horse and Odette.

I love that in Odette when the Nazi actors are speaking, the subtitle reads: German Is Being Spoken. In one scene, after a long moment of shouting orders in German, a Nazi officer hands a document to his comrade with a perfectly English – “Here you go.” Did the filmmakers decide not to fix this incongruity because they’d overrun on the budget? Did they think viewers wouldn’t mind? If so, how right they were! Whereas actors drinking from empty cups drives me nuts, I actually got joy from this blatant imperfection.

When it comes to modern rom-coms I’m hard to please because too often predictability turns me off. In the December released cinema film Eternity, I absolutely couldn’t guess what decision Joan (the female lead played by ace actress Elizabeth Olsen) was going to make when faced with the question of Who should spend eternity with her?

Joan must choose between the very handsome Luke, who was the first love of her life and sadly killed in war after they had only been together for two years, or loyal Larry who became her husband after Luke’s passing. Whilst Larry arrives at the film’s afterlife ‘processing centre’ shortly after Joan’s death, Luke has patiently waited 67 years in this bizarre place for Joan to get old, die and get there.

Eternity is continuously amusing. What fun co-writers David Freyne and Pat Cunnane must have had imagining ‘The Junction,’ which is a ginormous integrated resort where the dead ‘shop around’ to find the final resting habitat or eternity they want to go to. Supporting actors Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early keep it sparking in their roles as afterlife consultants. For me, how reassuring that good entertainment can still be had without violent or very sexy scenes, and that in this imaginative afterlife there are no mobile phones, but still people find each other.

Cover Photo sourced from Typic 2