Lily has been saying for years that the Kate Beckensale character in Cold Comfort Farm is actually a fictional version of me. She has been adamant that I rent it, and I finally have. What’s funny about this is that Kate Beckensale is Mr. Mock’s pretend-girlfriend, or one of them. She’s the one who would play his girlfriend in the movie of his life (he would be played, in the indie version of the movie of his life, by a young Alan Rickman; in the mainstream Hollywood version, by, I am sorry to have to say, an older Macaulay Culkin.) I will say in his defence that his affection for her predates her boob job, which is a good thing because this is where she and my double-A-cup self part ways. But I digress.
Chicklets, Lily’s interpretation of this whole thing is:
a) erroneous, and
b) flattering
Let us for a moment explore B, because isn’t that really the more fun option?
Reasons I would like to be like Kate Beckensale’s Character from Cold Comfort Farm:
a) Her clothes are projections of the best version of me, set in a different era, of course. Half schoolmarm, half simmering chanteuse, they are very out of place on the titular farm and yet they are somehow still eminently practical and not fussy. And the hats! I am swooning for those snug little hats atop that clean little bob.
b) She wants everyone to be happy, even the most dreadful sorts of people. She is cheerful and relentless in her machinations and manipulations; they are all for the greater good. She arranges elopements! She cracks the veneer of cranky matriarchs by giving them fashion magazines!
And now, in the interests of symmetry and even-handedness, let us explore Option A.
Reasons I am unlike Kate Beckensale’s Character from Cold Comfort Farm:
a) I do have some cute clothes, I will give myself that, but for every quirky piece I buy for the price of a small sedan at Comrags, I have a dozen ugly, shapeless, mass produced pieces of crap from the Gap that I purchased because they were cheap and did not require ironing. In other words, they appealed to the very worst in me, to my cheapness and laziness. I blame this on my non-private sector, low-public-contact job.
b) I want everyone to be happy, ultimately, but I want the scheming and vile among us to suffer a little bit first. In other words, I want them to have to work for it, if only slightly.
Still, it was a nice thought and I shall remain flattered. More importantly, I now have a concrete persona to which I can aspire.