I'm such a softie when it comes to movies. I always used to get embarrassed watching television with my Mom. At the smallest piece of televised sentiment, she'd turn to look at us and smile, tears forming in her eyes. But I'm becoming more and more like her with each passing year. I don't know what it is about movies that moves me so easily when in real life I almost never cry. In fact, I can't even remember the last time I cried over something real. It must be at least ten years.

The source of my tears this evening was the movie "Peyton Place", a fifties melodrama set in the early fourties about small town life in New England, and all the undercurrents of class warfare, sexual fears and gossip. But more than anything it was about what most movies are about, love. And it never fails to get to me.

I've had an unusual opportunity to watch movies these last few days, because on Saturday morning I put my back out at the gym once again. It happened in exactly the same way it happened two years ago; I was doing an intensive exercise with heavy weights and I felt the same part of my back just give way. So I knew what was in store for me. Over the next twenty minutes, my lower back would seize up, and I'd be unable to bend, and in great pain. That left me just fifteen minutes to pack up my gym stuff, bend painfully into my car, get home, grab everything I thought I'd need for the next few hours, and gingerly lower myself onto the sofa with an ice pack.

Sure enough, I've spent the last few days mostly on my back, apart from slow journeys by foot to my chiropracter and an accupuncturist (I swore never to try acupuncture again since the incident with the lighted candle in a pool of sand on my navel, but I desperately want to get better quickly so I'll try anything). It's day four now, and I'm finally starting to feel considerably better. I can't sit down for long, but I'm much more mobile than I was. I can even sit on the toilet without pain. I'm sure you needed to know that.

I'm trying not to feel too disappointed at the impact of my back injury on my work-out schedule. Yes, I know it's horribly shallow, but I was well on the way to being in the best shape of my life just in time for the White Party in Palm Springs the weekend after next. But there's little sense in complaining about it; besides it's not something I'm likely to get much sympathy over.

I was going to say that I'm fortunate that an English friend of mine was staying with me for the last two days, but I'm not sure it was good fortune after all. By a seriously strange coincidence, the last time I had this accident was just prior to a trip I was going to take with the same English friend. K is somebody who drifts into and out of my life every few years. He's a wanderer, and we don't stay in touch in between. He's spent the last few years in Australia, and stopped by Sunday night for two days on his way home to England, where he's going to take up a job in a church in North East England (he's just been ordained in the Anglican Church). It's the first time I've had an ordained minister staying with me, and also the first time I've heard a minister freely admit to masturbating on a daily basis. But K was always an odd bird; frightfully English - I'll never forget the first time I met him, when he showed up on my doorstep, a friend of an old friend, wearing his tweed jacket. So frightfully English, but someone who lives by his own obscure set of rules.