05/05/2021
Our lovely Palace cinema gets a mention here
https://www.facebook.com/817818425029381/posts/2520722321405641/
Here I am, standing at the place where my new book, The Black Dress, began – a charity shop in Deal. This is where my heroine bought the dress that would change her life. In fact there’s a little black dress in the window today, just as there is in my book, though it’s frumpier than mine. My fictional dress is vampish and clinging, and speaks of the 1950s – cocktail parties, ci******es and s*x. Very retro.
Deal is altogether a retro sort of town. Old fashioned barber shops, snooker halls, penny arcades and ice-cream parlours. No wonder Danny Boyle has been filming Pistol, his drama about the early days of the S*x Pistols here. Last week they cordoned off the car park and vast cranes tower over the beach – the whole town was agog.
I’ve been thinking about the movie business in general as, hopefully, cinemas will re-open soon. Will we flock back? I’ve got a feeling that the big chains will suffer, basically because going to them has been such a horrible experience. What we’re all longing for is the friendly and the local. That’s what I hope, anyway. And from all accounts the little independent cinemas might be more able to survive this ghastly period than the corporate giants.
Round here, in East Kent, there are some magical small, old-fashioned picture houses. I went to Faversham last week, where
The Royal Cinema, Faversham 2021 was getting ready to open its doors. It’s a gem, as are Empire Cinema, Sandwich in Sandwich, The Palace Cinema Broadstairs in Broadstairs, Silver Screen Cinema Dover in Dover...And I know there are many more lovely little cinemas, run on a shoestring, all over the country.
So let’s all support them when they open up again. I bet Danny Boyle would agree. And maybe, just maybe, they might turn The Black Dress into a movie; life would come full circle and I could sit watching it, with tea and biscuits, like the old days.
is out on 21 July
