Show me the money!

In 1996 not long after I had joined the assembled ranks of Chelmsford Theatre Workshop (CTW), I became aware of a very pretty girl and we ended up going out on a date to see Jerry Maguire.

Empire had given it five stars and I can still remember the closing line to their review, which was “Be nice to yourself, go see.” It sounded like the perfect date night movie and I was confident that it would almost certainly result in at least a smooch and maybe a cheeky bum squeeze. Like the rest of the movie-going universe at that time, I promptly fell in love with Renee Zellweger and to a lesser extent and in an entirely different way; Jonathan Lipnicki, who played her son and managed the difficult feat as a child actor of destroying the cuteometer without being massively annoying. “Did you know the human head weighs 8 pounds?”

Sadly, my date film strategy did not pay off. I’m pretty intuitive, so I knew that as I stood there with my lips puckered and bum cheeks in an anticipatory clench, only to hear a polite, yet awkward “I prefer kissing eye brows” and receive the soft caress of warm embarrassed lips ‘pon mine left ‘brow, I had an inkling that the pretty girl just wasn’t that in to me. We remained friends throughout the many years of our CTW tenure (we’re still Facebook chums to this day) and she may well have been the very first to start the trend of going on to be in a very happy relationship and having a beautiful child, having first been through the indignity of going on a date with me. 

That night was on my mind this evening as The Eldest and I sat watching Jerry Maguire (one of us falling in love with Renee all over again) and the emotional beats caught up with me.
 
“Are you crying, Dad?!” 
“Why aren’t you, you monster?! She COMPLETES HIM for God’s sake!”
“Oh, this is where that saying comes from…..”

In news away from yet another of my failed attempts at love/ploy to get someone to squeeze m’arse or have a squeeze of theirs, the ridiculously large and profitable company I work for, has pledged €10m in support of the Ukrainian crisis, with the promise of matching employee donations up to a further €2.5m. Looks like a lot of us have already got behind the scheme as when I checked earlier, the additional €2.5m had already been reached with a promise that “the first €1m will be immediately donated to the German Red Cross to provide humanitarian assistance to those displaced by the conflict and those who are in need in Ukraine.”

Desperately sad that a donation like this is even needed in this day and age, but for once I am proud to work for a large company that has stepped up and at least done something to try and help in some way.

Politics be damned, world leaders. Just f*****g help them.