We begin to sense difficulties, too, not just in her marriage but in the lives of others.
Ageing is associated with recognised physical and mental changes including reductions in aerobic power, muscular strength and endurance, reaction speed, acuity of special senses, difficulties with thermoregulation, sleep disturbances and concerns about increased risk of chronic illness [ 5- 8].
But it has a certain sense of difficulty to it.
"Agon" here recaptures its old sense of difficulty, risk, experimentation.
It communicates a sense of difficulty and frustration, and also the kind of elation that comes from being absorbed in a heroic communal task.
If in The February Speech he can communicate that struggle, that sense of difficulty, which is shared by millions, then he will be a less polished campaigner, but a most persuasive one.
What links his work to the other movies I'm discussing here is that all-important sense of difficulty, of an obdurate and complicated reality submitting only partially to the filmmaker's demystifying will.
In a sense the difficulties experienced in setting up a focus group with cancer patients are similar to the difficulties experienced by cancer patients in forward planning social events.
Gregory recognises, as one of the show's producers, that television will "do something different from the novel", but you sense these difficulties would not have arisen in her meticulously researched fiction.
The company has been keen to battle Didi but, perhaps sensing the difficulty of the moment, it suspended plans to expand beyond Nanjing and Shanghai and into more parts of China.
