Sugar Man - must see!

On Sunday night I saw Searching for Sugar Man at the Paramount on Courtenay Place. It's the best film I've seen in years, no exaggeration. What an incredible story. You couldn't make it up. I picked a good time to see such an uplifting movie (boy did I need a lift). Rodriguez's songs were amazing too, so soulful, so genuine. It's not hard to see how his records sold so well in such an oppressive regime as South Africa in the seventies. I'd still like to know what the hell happened to the proceeds of those sales, but that wasn't really an appropriate question for the film to answer.

I saw Julie again last night. It can be hard work sometimes. She rambles, you get all the he-saids and she-saids, and if you're really lucky she might eventually get to the point. She showed me a psychiatrist's report which used the extremely poncy (but accurate) word "circumloquacious" to describe her way of talking. At times I can hardly blame her for wanting to dodge the issue, which is often distinctly dodgeworthy. It's all very sad and I feel powerless to help. She'll need to go into a rest home and is (understandably) having difficulty in coming to terms with that. Sometimes I manage to steer the conversation (if you can call it that) into more positive territory, and on occasions we'll talk about my "issues". Last night she warned me about getting into relationships with people on the autistic spectrum (she was in a 30-year-plus relationship with an autistic man).

On that note I'll be catching up with Tracy tomorrow for lunch. It's funny, a few times I've been about to tune out of her station when I pick up a faint signal. I'm hoping I might eventually hear her loud and clear. The two guys who normally disrupt the autism group were absent for Monday's meeting. This made for a more pleasant experience for everyone. Danielle didn't have an easy Christmas - her father didn't treat her well - and she was almost in tears as she talked about it. I met her tonight at the tramping group. I'd signed up for a trip this weekend but they've postponed it till 2nd February.

On Monday we got our performance grades at work. There had been plenty of talk about them, to the point where even I started to care about what grade I might get. Sort of. They only had three grades which were shared out 20:60:20 or thereabouts. I was happy to get the middle grade; to my surprise it seemed I didn't just scrape it.

They're into round two at the Australian Open. I'm not following it as closely as I used to, but one result stood out a mile from yesterday's first-round matches: 42-year-old Kimiko Date's 6-2 6-0 win over 12th-seeded (and 30-year-old) Nadia Petrova. Date reached the semi-finals of Wimbledon in 1996 after a remarkable run of comeback three-set wins. In her semi she blitzed Steffi Graf in the second set to level the match and another comeback looked likely, but play was suspended for bad light, her momentum was lost, and so was the match the next day.