The Revenant...

In Barrow this evening, so I parked up near the Vue Multiplex and took in a film. I’d read good things about The Revenant, and it didn’t disappoint. Leonardo DeCaprio plays a trapper trying to make some kind of living hunting and collecting pelts. After he’s horribly mauled by a bear, he’s left for dead by a couple of fellow trappers. Against the odds, he survives, but God knows how, because the landscape is huge, remote, frozen and overwhelmingly harsh and inhospitable.

DeCaprio’s character, Hugh Glass, crawls through snow, falls into ice-cold rivers and rides his horse over a cliff. In those temperatures a badly wounded man would surely not survive a plunge down a waterfall. With no way to dry his sodden clothes when he sleeps in the open, he would surely die of hypothermia. But, in the age of the blockbuster film, the paying public need to suspend their disbelief. Glass eats what he can find - berries, raw fish, raw bison liver - and spends one snowy night, naked, inside a dead horse. Yes, inside a dead horse…

After that cinematic ordeal I won't be complaining about the half inch of snow here in Barrow. No raw fish or bison liver to be had, so I'm making do with McDonald's. Instead of a dead horse I have a sleeping bag and a duvet...

The harbour at Maryport...