Movie magic: ‘The cinema is my solace in times of crisis’

The writer Simon Stephenson looks forward to the days when he can eat popcorn in the dark again

As a writer who works from home, my lockdown life has not been so different from my previous existence. Perhaps the biggest change is that I have not gone three months without visiting a cinema since I was a child. It seems a shameful thing to admit when others have been suffering so profoundly, but I have missed those movies on the big screen. They have been my lifelong companions, and I have lamented them like vanished friends.

The relationship began for me in the long-ago Easter of 1981 with the release of Superman II. My yearning to see it was elemental: my dad was taking my older brother and I wanted everything he got. When it was broken to me that at three years old I was too young to go to the cinema, I screamed for days, thus confirming that I indeed could not yet be trusted anywhere near one.