Lle Llywela

1. Had the police on the phone first thing Friday morning asking about the car smash I saw the night before. They are sending me a questionnaire to fill in as an independent witness. I knew I shouldn't have left my name and number, but nobody else stopped to help at all and I thought someone should.

2. Marchlands came to an end this week. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole mini-series - it held me absolutely gripped from first till last, couldn't take my eyes off the screen. The production values were amazing, the direction and cinematography absolutely beautiful and the cast excellent. I want to watch the whole thing all over again now!

3. The residence hearing for the children down in Cornwall is on Tuesday. Goodness only knows what's going to happen. There have been all kinds of shenanigans down there since they went home at Christmas. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see.

4. It's gone very cold again these last few days, but it feels lovely and springlike - I've got all kinds of plants coming back to life in my garden...although also quite a number that sadly don't seem to have survived their second harsh winter in a row.

5. This fire seems to have been pretty spectacular - you could see the smoke from my house, on the other side of the city!

The first instalment of ITV's new drama, Marchlands, was all kinds of intriguing last night. The show tells the story of three different families living in the same house in three different time periods: in the 1960s a young couple mourn the loss of their beloved daughter, who drowned in mysterious circumstances; in the 1980s another couple worry about their little girl's imaginary friend (which appears to be the ghost of that other child); and in 2010 a young couple have just moved into the (haunted) house and are preparing for the birth of their first child.

The first episode was very well done, extremely atmospheric. I really liked the little visual devices used to mark the wonderfully fluid transitions from one time zone to the next, as the story hopped back and forth between the different families - especially since they didn't go down the usual route of using different colour palettes in the cinematography to mark those changes. Usually when a show involves different time periods, they will use something like sepia tinting or desaturated colours to indicate that we are in the past, but Marchlands didn't do that, instead used the same colour palette for all three time zones. The reason being, of course, that for each of those family groups, the time they are living in is the present. Yet it was always clear exactly when we were at any given time, even in exterior shots of the house, with subtle differences marking the changes to it over the years.

Having had my appetite for spooky ghost stories whetted by six seasons of Supernatural, I found myself enormously intrigued by the mystery behind little Alice's death and how her spirit appears to linger in the house, linking the three different families. I'm looking forward to seeing how the story develops from here!