POTATOES FIT FOR A KING

Now that my chil­dren are grown up, the best thing about the Christ­mas hol­i­days is hav­ing time to my­self. With work and to-do lists on hold, I love kick­ing back with­out any guilt and in­dulging in ac­tiv­i­ties I don’t get a chance to do dur­ing the year. That might be deep clean­ing my mo­tor­bike, fin­ish­ing a book that’s lain un­touched for months, or watch­ing films. The var­i­ous pres­sures on my time - usu­ally fam­ily and work - and the rise of al­ter­na­tive en­ter­tain­ment - pri­mar­ily YouTube and pod­casts - means these days I rarely sit down and watch a film all the way through.

One film on my list was The King, which came out in 2019 and stars Tim­othée Cha­la­met as Henry V. The his­tor­i­cal drama is loosely based on Shake­speare’s Hen­riad plays, of which I’m a fan. The film is on Net­flix, which I don’t have, but which my wife’s sis­ter, whose house we were going to for Christ­mas Day lunch, does. My con­tri­bu­tion to the lunch would be roast pota­toes (I got my wife’s fam­ily hooked on roast pota­toes a few years ago, which gives me lever­age over them). Even though the fam­ily would be out vis­it­ing, I arranged to get to the house early to roast the pota­toes. Of course, I also helped my­self to a cold beer and their tele­vi­sion. An hour and 20 min­utes later, the pota­toes were about done and I was into the home stretch of the film when the door­bell rang. Oh no! The fam­ily had re­turned early, the house filled with kids, and the TV was turned off. My care­ful plan was in tat­ters. Would I have to wait till the fol­low­ing Christ­mas to see the rest of the film?

No, be­cause I had a plan B. My sis­ter-in-law and her fam­ily would be spend­ing New Year in our vil­lage, in her par­ents’ hol­i­day home. The house has a dig­i­tal box with Net­flix on it, so all I needed was to get them to sign in and we’d be good to go, and if nec­es­sary I could sweeten the deal with the promise of more roast pota­toes.

On New Year’s Day morn­ing the fam­ily de­cided to go for a walk, so I swooped in and asked my brother-in-law if he would help me set up my film be­fore they left. Yet we no­ticed that the wifi sig­nal was wor­ry­ingly weak and that we had to use an old re­mote con­trol as a mouse and cur­sor.

The whole process was ag­o­nis­ingly slow, with lots of restarts and swear­ing, but even­tu­ally we loaded The King on Net­flix, only to get a mes­sage that this was an out­dated ver­sion of the app and had to be up­graded. It took quite a while to down­load the new ver­sion of the app due to the pa­thetic wifi sig­nal. Even­tu­ally it was done and we slowly nav­i­gated our way back to Net­flix, and got an­other mes­sage telling us to up­grade the sys­tem app, which took even longer. Fi­nally, we had The King back on the screen, and at the spot that I had stopped watch­ing it a few days ear­lier. With a voila, my brother-in-law handed me the re­mote and went in search of his fam­ily.

I pressed play, only to re­alise that the film was con­fig­ured to Span­ish. I man­aged to change it back to the orig­i­nal but only after los­ing my spot and in­ad­ver­tently turn­ing off the app, which re­quired me to restart the whole sys­tem and then wait until it found the wifi sig­nal again. In fits and starts the film re­sumed and I man­aged to make my way through to the last scene, when it stalled again. There were three min­utes left and all I could see was a spin­ning white disk in the cen­tre of the screen. I was just about to restart the sys­tem when I heard the fam­ily re­turn­ing home. Like the French at Ag­in­court I too was de­feated by The King and, un­less I give in and just pay for Net­flix, I will have to wait until next year to watch those final three min­utes.

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