Weekend

Summer is fading fast, and though, according to my calendar, “the Autumnal Equinox” (is that the newest model of Hyundai?) isn’t until September 22, all the things we love about the season — swimming, county fairs, outdoor drinking, the August congressional recess — are essentially over after this weekend. And while people mark Labor Day in different ways, one of the best is with a barbecue, one of the few culinary traditions America can truly call its own. Smithsonian Magazine tells us barbecue has its origins in the first indigenous tribes Christopher Columbus encountered, who had a “unique method for cooking meat over an indirect flame, created using green wood to keep the food (and wood) from burning.

Worbarrow Bay, Dorset In December 1943, just a few weeks before Christmas, the residents of this remote coastal village were told to pack up their belongings and leave their homes so that they could be requisitioned by the army for training in the run up to D Day. The villagers left a note on the church door, saying that they would return one day, but the army kept hold of the land and they never went back. The result is a village frozen in time – complete with school room and telephone box. Not only is it eerily atmospheric but it’s rare to find more than a handful of tourists wandering through the abandoned cottages.

We live in a strange time. Forbidden to travel beyond our national borders for fear of infection and quarantine, we are nevertheless all too aware that we are connected to the wider world in all manner of ways. You might even call it chaos theory in action; a man eats a bat in a Chinese market, and a few months later we are all locked up in our homes, terrified to resume our daily lives. It is this sense of paranoia and interconnectedness that some extremely able filmmakers have tapped into over the years, as their pictures have combined a globe-hopping sweep along with scenes of palm-sweating tension and mystery.