Daily Grind Of Still Water

Yesterday she was recovering well in France as one of the first British patients to get surgery abroad on the NHS. But in December, East Kent health authority told her the list had lengthened to 15 months and asked if she would go abroad for the treatment.”I was told it would probably be Germany, but then they rang back a week later and said it would be France,” said Mrs Sturgess, 63. “I was originally with the Buckland Hospital in Dover, but they had stopped doing the operation So then I moved to the William Harvey in Ashford. I said yes, and in three weeks it was all arranged – we were on our way.”The pain is very debilitating. I had my left knee done about three years ago, and should have had this one done at the same time. But they gave me some pills and said they wanted to see how I would get on.”Yesterday, finally, she was recovering at a plush private hospital in Lille, in northern France.On Friday, with nine other NHS patients, and about four times as many journalists, photographers and camera crews, she had taken the Eurostar train from Ashford Internationalto Lille. On the way, she had been chatting with the other patients, the first of about 200 NHS patients who will be sent to the Clinique de la Louvi? over the next three months in a government pilot project to cut NHS waiting lists.On arrival in France a small media scrum grew, fuelled, perhaps, by Gallic pride that the English needed to send their sick over for some proper treatment.

French TV cameras and microphones followed the party up the station platform.”We are here,” said the husband of one patient, “because in England they are closing hospitals and cutting the number of beds. This a political coup for France.”Mrs Sturgess and four others who needed joint replacements will convalesce at the hospital for about 16 days The hospital’s facilities may help ease their discomfort. Patients rest in their own rooms, which have cable TV, telephone and en suite bathrooms. They will get English TV, English papers, English food, and cups of tea.”It’s all tickety boo,” said Barbara’s son, Phil Sturgess, after his mother had settled in her room “I’m staying in the room with her for a £20 charge There’s a pull-down bed, and I get fed as well. This hospital is fresher, brighter, cleaner and more efficient than anything we would have at home.”Within 12 hours of being admitted to the hospital Mrs Sturgess had had her surgery.”Everything’s fine,” Mr Sturgess said yesterday “She’s in the recovery room for a couple of hours yet But as far as I know, it’s all gone OK.”. Oddly, for a biopic of a Booker Prize-winning novelist and giant intellect, you get to see a lot of Kate Winslet’s breasts in this movie, wobbling softly and palely like two blancmanges being borne up to High Table on a trolley.

But then, Iris’s “greatest talent was for life”, wasn’t it? So Winslet gives us a yomping, skinny-dipping hoyden with a Joan of Arc hairstyle and big brows, and Judi Dench is an old dear with a pebble fetish.This film is not interested in Murdoch’s ideas, her imagination. Of her enchanters and her maidens, the doubting priests, malign lovers and flawed philosophers of her fictions, there is not a trace. The film, based on John Bayley’s memoirs Iris and Iris and the Friends, unfortunately compounds the notion that it wasn’t her books that mattered, but her final transfiguration into sheer goodness and childishness – her transcendence of the word. Film, so often indifferent to writing, here seems positively hostile to it.There isn’t much sense – beyond the heroically filthy Oxford house – that we’re looking at a pair of venerable academics, either. The establishing dialogue is mostly lame, though there’s a marvellous scene in a supermarket when the expert on Plato, having been sidetracked by the desire and pursuit of whole-grained mustard, becomes momentarily transfixed by the notion of a “bag for life”.The film see-saws back and forth, from old to young, senile to brilliant, Dench to Winslet. Hugh Bonneville as the young Bayley and Jim Broadbent as the old one are more successful in giving the impression that they are playing the same person; but then Dench and Winslet actually aren’t. Nearly everything that made Iris Iris was being burgled, and Dench’s depiction of this is undeniably moving.Winslet’s Iris is ravishing in a red dress at a college dance, daring and sexually promiscuous (more breasts).

Her long, cool, speculative stare when her stammering swain wonders jokily whether she sleeps with all those Eton-cropped female admirers is priceless. I was interested to learn that in post-War Oxford it was easy to wander into people’s college rooms and spy on them having sex. (That tired convention where the actors have to leave the door open behind them for the camera crew to get in has never been so irritating.)There comes a point in the seduction when you lattice your fingers over your eyes and hope you won’t be forced to watch Murdoch and Bayley, even in such attractive avatars, having sex We’re spared that, at least. The real stripping comes later, when the doctors fall upon this interesting case-study and condescendingly call her by her first name. “That’s Dame Iris Murdoch to you,” you want to shout.But there’s no denying this is Dench’s triumph, as she rubs and rubs away at the characterisation until there is hardly anything left, just a loving spirit.