To the Odeon! …on Monday lunchtime. You know the score by now. Monday is cheapest chips day at this Sunny Cold Odeon. Book online and you can snaffle up a ticket for a grubby fiver.

I have made the point of looking at the cinema listings to see which is the longest film. Never mind the length, feel the thickness etc. If I’m going to buy a dirt cheap ticket then I want to stretch it out so I can spend as much time in the cinema, getting real value for money.

Which brings us to Odyssey of course. I admit that I hold no great knowledge when it comes to the classics. I was first introduced to the Odyssey back in SE17 whilst working on the school website. The Year 5 kids knew more about The epic tale than I did.

We’ve wanted to see this film for some time now but time and tide haven’t behaved very well for us. If you’re going to watch a three-hour film then you need to set aside three hours in a day to take it all in - which pretty much rules out doing anything else either side of it.

It didn’t get off to a good start in Screen 2 at the Sunny Colch Odeon on Monday lunchtime. Just as the opening scene was starting to build up, someone let rip at the back of the cinema with the most almighty fart. You dirty dog.

I tried to put this to the back of my mind and focus on the film. It proved rather tricky. Even throughout a film three hours in duration, I wanted to turn around and see who the phantom farter was. This is school holiday time. This explains a lot.

But anyway, the Odyssey. I knew I might struggle with some of the intricacies of the plot. I was just about able to keep up with Jackass 5 last time round at the Odeon. The Odyssey was a little bit higher on the intellectual level.

Having said that it is a truly fantastic film. It’s a complete epic which had me gripped for more or less the entire duration. I think I just about managed to keep up with what was going on.

What helped was the rowing WivGigs action taking place. A lot of the film is sea-bound. You have plenty of sweeping shots of the Greek army doing their best WivGigs impression and rowing round and round and round. I was familiar with terms such as holding water.

The plot line is pretty predictable but I guess that’s not down to Christopher Nolan as he’s only following the classic piece of literature that he was presented with.

The villains really are pretty bad boys, whilst you find yourself cheering on the heroes, which are highly likely to have a happy ending.

There was a slight twist towards the final scene, which I wasn’t expecting. I also wasn’t expecting the Phantom Farter to then spark up and fill Screen 2 at the Sunny Colch Odeon with a haze of incredibly strong weed.

Never a dull moment in these Monday Cheapest Chips Sunny Colch Odeon experiences.

You could say it was an Odyssey all in itself.

I wasn’t expecting a big security guard geezer and a bag check ahead of entering the Duncan Grant exhibition at Firstsite. Sadly some of the right-wing nut jobs have taken offence to the idea of homosexuality being celebrated in art form, dickheads. The broad theme for the exhibition is the changing ways some LGBTQ+ people find one another online and offline. Truth be told it’s pretty average art.

There was some X-rated action behind closed doors where you were given plenty of warning about what you might see. The artwork itself was hardly shocking. If anyone is going to take offence then it might be from the potty-mouth profanity coming out of a PA system. I couldn’t see what all the fuss is about to be honest.

What We Did During the Plague at the Minories in Sunny Colch was half decent. It’s a retrospective exhibition of the work produced by Phil Jupitus during those weird lockdown days. It shows his unique approach to collages using Polaroids and creating custom postcards for his pals. There’s a lot to take in with over 100 pieces of work. The detail changes within each postcard but the format and formula remain the same. I just about got all the cultural reference points.

And so at the reconvened Colchester City Council AGM on Wednesday evening, to absolutely no one’s surprise, a Tory/Lib Dem coalition was voted in. Fancy that.

The sums were always going to suggest this would happen, even if some of the political ideology and personal grievances would have wanted otherwise.

My attention was firmly focused on my own three local Lib Dem councillors. Would they be prepared to prop up a Tory administration?

The answer came with a named vote. I’m not sure who called for a named vote, but it usually signifies someone is keen to put the voting intentions on the record for future political gain.

Two Lib Dems locally voted for the Tory coalition, one against. The one that voted against is the one that has the most to lose. He’s the golden boy around here. He also made a point of saying in his speech he could not only not support the Tory administration, but he would also step back from his cabinet position as a matter of principle. Well done you, etc.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out locally. Vote Lib Dem, get Tory?

Elsewhere, some of the speeches were full of the usual bullshit about “let’s keep politics out of this”. This is usually a thinly veiled code for “I don’t agree with you and I’m going to try and shut you down”.

It pretty much means fuck all anyway. Colchester Council is now nothing but a ghost council as it limps towards devolution.

The council has one task, and one task only: and that is to dismantle itself ahead of the larger unitary authority.

Democracy is bloody brilliant, innit.

To The Odeon! …in Sunny Colch on Monday afternoon. This is becoming something of a regular visit for me as part of the cheap as chips start of the week routine. £5 for a film on the big screen? Would you like to add food and drink before you check out? Would I chuff.

The grubby fiver film screenings do have their drawbacks. They attract a certain type of clientele. That clientele isn’t quite me just yet. But I do fear that I’m getting there. Sitting next to me for the screening of Glenrothan was a 60 plus couple. I now know more about than I would care to about Mr and Mrs Chatty.

They talked LOUDLY over the adverts. Fine, I’m cool with that. And then also the trailers. This got on my tits ever so slightly. One hour into the film and they still hadn’t SHUT THE FUCK UP. This was simply unacceptable. I bet they put their feet up on the train seats as well.

Having spoilt the first half of the film for me, I was determined not to let them get the better for what remained. I politely asked them to hold back on their general chit chat until they got home.

“FUCK OFF, YOU CUNT.”

What a charmer. But it did have the desired effect. The conversation ended, and they chose to actually take in what they had also paid a fiver for - which was a half decent film in Glenrothan.

But seriously, SOME people.

There’s a growing genre in cinema that I’m calling Local Hero 2.0. It’s essentially feel good films, usually centred around ideas of national identity. The genre can border around the fringes of Farage flag waving shit. But then it also cuts back with some more progressive ideas, both in terms of the script and appearances on screen.

And so joining the likes of Fisherman’s Friends and The Ballad of Wallis Island, here we have Glenrothan. It’s Brian Cox’s directional debut. He also takes up the role of Sandy, one half of the local Scottish whiskey distillery, alongside his rock ‘n’ roll brother, Donal.

The plot involves Donal losing his Blues club over in Chicago, and then having to confront what he left behind in Scotland over four decades ago. We’re talking family relationships, personal relationships, notions of identity etc.

It sounds pretty heavy stuff, but Local Hero 2.0 always allows for some strong humour. There’s a couple of lol lines - possibly more in the first half, but I couldn’t follow the full dialogue thanks to Mr and Mrs Chatty. The ending wasn’t sign posted, but it was a happy one.

Glenrothan is the type of film you see on a Sunday evening, and not a Monday lunchtime. Given my Sunny Colch Odeon experiences of late, Im not sure that you should see any film on a Monday lunchtime tbh.

We popped into The Minories whilst in Sunny Colch. I would hesitate to call it an art trail, but being right next door to Firstsite, and well, it would be rude not to have an extra serving of art or arse.

The current Anglian Abstract exhibition is very much of the art variety, rather than the anal. It celebrates modernism in East Anglia. This is a landscape that is often captured in watercolours, and not rigid, geometrical patterns. Anglian Abstract adds a little balance.

Many of the works on show are either models, or 3D in presentation. The artwork leaps out at you, not waiting for you to chin stroke and come up with some crap about what it represents.

It all felt very earthly, even for a medium that can be cold in outlook. It all felt very analogue and not of the modern world, despite the modernism tag.

Artwork with straight lines can work wonders for an OCD obsessed amateur art critic.

Sue Webster’s Birth of an Icon at Firstsite has the type of bombastic exhibition title that you would expect from a confident artist. Tell It Like It Is, etc. Thankfully she just about gets away with it.

Birth of an Icon is no doubt a little playful, a tongue in cheek description to herald her first major solo exhibition. It comes right out of the punk playbook that the exhibition celebrates.

Basically it’s an exhibition spread over four gallery spaces, documenting how the first four Banshee albums shaped the artist. There’s some incredible detail with the various artefacts on show.

The main gallery walls resembles the contents of your loft being carefully curated and put on full public show. It’s a timeline of late 70’s, early 80’s post-punk culture, all presented in not quite a lineal style.

What works really well is the orange string that joins up the dots. It can be confusing at first, but it makes all the connections, showing how different artists, scenes and experiences are all related.

I worked my way along the timeline, surprised to see that Bowie was nowhere to be seen. Ah, don’t worry; there he is in some of the few, final spaces, showing how he helps to hang it all together.

The second gallery space has a stunning collection of DIY punk leather jackets, all bastardised showing love for the Banshees. A third room has some self-portraits of the artist whilst pregnant in her 50’s. The final space was a little too happy clappy for me with scented candles.

Oh - and I bloody loved the Crazyhead reference.

“This story was one-sided”

Cycling campaigners criticise BBC coverage of “irresponsible e-bike users”

High water down at the Hythe as I cycled through on Friday morning. Which can only mean one thing: Haven Road is flooded, innit. I don’t quite understand the physical geography of why Haven Road cops it, whilst King Eddie Quay somehow gets away with no extra water. I don’t think the stalled Hythe Taskforce does either. I’m just grateful for having a safe passage and the opportunity for a few cheeky sunshine snaps.

Everyone loves a big old red boat, right? There’s no finer sight than the Colne Light Ship on a crisp autumnal morning. Sure, the Estuary Wilds sun rays may highlight the urgent need for a paint job. But the Hythe has always been a little rough and ready.