For entirely guessable reasons, on Saturday night every cinema I would regularly, willingly set foot in was booked solid. I nearly got two tickets in my local, but the seats were as far away from each other as it was possible to be, which my 13-year-old was fine with, except one of them was wheelchair-accessible. The cinema, it appeared, was fine with me booking that, but it struck me as the kind of thing Larry David would do in Curb Your Enthusiasm.
So we ended up in a cinema on top of a shopping centre, miles from anywhere, a place where everything smells of the weird doughnut-pretzel-hybrid stall in the ambitiously titled atrium, and everyone has accidentally bought a fitness item they’ll never use in Decathlon. The last time I was here, it was to see Hotel Rwanda with my mum, which throws me back a bit, because that was released nearly 20 years ago, and she hasn’t been out of her house for five of them. When we came out, she said “what an appalling place”, and I thought she was referring to the atrocities we had just seen on screen , but she actually meant the shopping centre.
