People, places and what triggers you to make faces

Sunday, August 9, 2015

True Heart

There are some TV shows which make you sit at the edge of your armchair until every episode ends, and then want to leap from it and go running to get all the feels (a word I have grown to love almost as much as ‘on point’) out of your system. I love it almost as much as I loved Breaking Bad. What do I get high on with True Detective 2? It’s the theme song, the characters, the broken lives, the hard loving, the few words in the still of the night that have the weight of a wrecking ball. Vince Vaughn is the face of the series, (who knew he had this in him?), although Colin Farrell is the overriding talent.

I can feel my heart slowing down just thinking of the finale tomorrow night. Omigod. You know what this means, right? Here we go, embracing the void again.

Billie the Kid blows away the competition

The finale of MasterChef Australia Season 7 was unique. You had a contestant in 23-yr-old Billie McKay who was extraordinary in the way she could read a recipe, compartmentalize it in her head in such a way that she knew she would have to save one hour of the unprecedented five-hour time allowed for a Heston Blumenthal recipe, and showed she had enough of a heart in that machine-like execution of a dish to turn around and try to calm Georgia Barnes at the same time.
This, by the way, is also the difference between MasterChef Australia and MasterChef US. The Australians in the show have always distinguished themselves as friendly, ambitious without being competitive, and supremely talented. No one quite knows how talented the Americans are because it’s buried under an avalanche of malice, temper and self-obsession. It could be marketing but it doesn’t do the country’s national reputation any good whatsoever.
But what was unforgettable in the Australian winner was the way she kept an iron control throughout the months of competition - until the moment when she tried to blow that damn sugar bubble for 45 minutes (of the one hour she had allotted herself). Still, she brought herself back from the brink and nailed that b*&%h. It was such a tour de force, something we had never seen before. And that was what led to another first in MC history – the on-the-spot offer of a job from the great Heston himself, at The Fat Duck no less.
While I have never envied anyone’s happiness, I am almost mired in envy thinking how lucky you have to be to own your passion and have the rest of your life like an open road in front of you. All you have to do is walk down it, stopping to smell the bloody roses on the way. Anyone who says it’s only talent and hard work and not luck is seven kinds of idiot.

I am now off to grapple with that other b*&#h: Karma.