You'd think that on a fine sunny Spring day like today a man playing alone on a golf course could hardly be more socially distant but even that strategy has been denied me as the Coucil has closed all its golf courses.  Of course it's a cordon sanitaire rather than a barbed wire fence so one could sneak in but... Could I be so bold?

Everything else I do has vanished like snow off a dyke.  Looking on the bright side as I suppose one must, I have a pile of books waiting to be read, a pile of DVDs waiting to be viewed again and the leisure to do so.

Before the sky fell in I saw three wildly contrasting films and got to one concert.  You can always rely on Beethoven for a good tune.  The young Sumwook Kim rang all the changes out of the Emperor concerto from the most delicate pianissimo to thunderingly majestic chords.  Most concert pianists remain poised over the keys when not playing but Kim swivelled round on his stool and enjoyed himself watching the band.  The audience was a bit thinner than usual (virus effect) but gave him lots of applause which unfortunately didn't prove quite enough to get him back on the stool for an encore.

When Uncut Gems started I thought I was in for an uphill struggle.  Fast paced images jumping all over the place straining my eyes, disjointed and heavily accented New York Jewish dialogue taxing my ears as our hero winged his way from one incomprehensible encounter in the diamond district to another.  But it turned out to be a great film in which the little man almost won.

All I knew about Judy Garland before I saw Judy was that she had been a child star and that she was Liza Minelli's mother.  The film focuses on a series of concerts she gave at The Talk of the Town in London in the sixties to try to restore her finances.  It fills in the background to her increasing unreliability due to drink and drugs with flashbacks to her childhood career with MGM, where we are encouraged to believe lies the origin of her tragedy.  I have no difficulty in accepting that.  She was essentially an abused child who was never able to maintain a stable lifestyle as she grew up.  A sad film but very well made.

There's been a set of Japanese films touring the country under the title Happiness is a State of Mind with the tagline Joy and Despair in Japanese Cinema.   Hogwarts is for witchcraft but Hyakkaoh Private Academy where Kakegurui is set is for gambling, which is a milieu more or less certain to foster buckets of joy and despair.

It's the only one that I managed to see and I thoroughly enjoyed it even though on the face of it you wouldn't think it was my cup of tea.  The film depicts a struggle to win the ultimate prize of being assured of being able to lead whatever life one wishes to after graduation.  The means is to come out on top of games of chance such as Paper, Rock, Scissors (who'd have believed it ) and a game that I didn't follow too well that involved slapping cards down on the table, the team with the highest card winning ( slightly more complicated than that).

It's a beautifully stylishly put together and filmed movie and while the plot is fairly silly the characters are intriguing and played with great enthusiasm and energy, even the traagically morose and silent one.  It springs from an anime TV series.  I know nothing about anime but I might be developing a taste for it.

One of the joys of the film for me was the number of snippets of Japanese that I picked out and understood.  No need to despair of linguistic success then even though the class has been cancelled.