The antidote to a summer cold is a visit to Game of Thrones...

It's taken me till now to recover. Rewind to Sunday. Another damp dank afternoon. Where did summer go? One of us was suffering from a summer cold. The other was just suffering.
Inspired, I suggested that we watched Game of Thrones. We are surely the only two left on the planet who have not watched this show. I have resisted easily, on the basis that we did not have Now TV, yet another subscription channel. Anything that requires passwords slows me down, generally. Puts me right off. It puts Dearest even off-er, and generally incurs a foul mood. So I took the plunge this week and signed up, alone, in the coolness of an afternoon.

We limbered up with Riviera which had been given full page adverts in the press. It had to be good. We love the south of France; we love a thriller. Let me warn you that it is an extraordinary achievement to shoot the most exquisite coastline so that it looks like a bad travelogue from the seventies, with dialogue and acting to match. Toe-curlingly ghastly. What a waste of money.

Game of Thrones was by contrast a box of delights. A strange thing to say about something which contains extreme violence, lurid sex and more breasts that I have ever seen in my entire life. Just as well it was HD not 3D.  But great story-telling and beautifully directed. And finely acted. The only problem was that Now TV was taking this out of circulation the next day. Ten hours of episodes and ten hours left in the day.
We watched it until the final credit. Nobody fell asleep. We didn't bother with food, just plentiful cups of tea, and we loved it.
Last night we put on The Affair. More rumpy-pumpy. We limped through the first episode. There's only so much you can take...