FLIGHT RISK

First train of the year then. I’m in Oxford today, wrapped in ski trousers and two layers of thermal top beneath my coat. It was dark all the way to Didcot, and even then the sky was just purpling. At Appleford, the platforms sparkled with ice, and as the train rattled across the misty bridge, I could just make out the cold river with its frost-laden banks.

It’s that grey morning it often is at Oxford Station. I’m waiting for the bus, wondering how I’m feeling about it all - today, work, tonight, tomorrow. Complexity is still on my mind.

If you can’t avoid things being complicated, it makes sense to come to terms with it. Sometimes we want to find a magic way of somehow getting everything we want - like the end of a play where all the loose ends are tied up. In reality, when the house lights go up, you have to pick which thing you’re going to sacrifice and which thing you’re going to save. Or, in Spider-Man terms, there simply is no way to save both Mary Jane Watson and the school bus. You have to choose.

A bus goes by - a real one, not a school bus. Mark Wahlberg’s battered face stares out at me from the gigantic movie ad. Flight Risk - in cinemas January 24. Expect Turbulence. Okay Marky Mark.

It’s acceptance we need, isn’t it? It feels like a level of maturity, knowing that you have to cope with the choices and let go of things. I have to say too, that I feel a bit like this is a lesson I’m learning late in my life. Trying to quickly calculate the angles and  timings of the drop while Green Goblin cackles on, is exhausting complexity, especially if, in real life, there’s no actual solution for Spider-Man.

No doubt Wahlberg will have similar choices in Flight Risk. He looks pretty sombre about it, despite the bruises and the nasty-looking head wounds. Let it go, Marko, let it go.