Twitter - Shitter more like

I just don't get it - I know that it's supposedly a great marketing tool, and that you can use it to send up to 140 characters of information about your life to any number of people who might not otherwise know what you were up to all the time. But I don't get it - I can't follow anyone unless I know their e-mail address, and if I knew their e-mail address then I'd probably just e-mail them to ask what they're up to. I know my brother 'tweets', and I am constantly reading long earnest articles about how important it is to avail yourself of all the social media you can get your hands on lest you miss some important snippet of information, come late to a discussion about your niche or find that someone has tweeted something you disagree with and you're not the first to comment. I am sure I will get into it - it's my first day after all, and because I am doing it for work, I can't really just get fed up and jack it all in, but I really can't believe that it's more efficient just to e-mail the people you know and tell them that you're 'feeling slightly sick' or any of the other gems I have seen on there so far...

Shopping at Christmas

Yesterday I went to Tesco. I should have thought about it and not gone, but we needed to replenish the alcohol stocks for Christmas as the in-laws are coming over, and I thought I could pick up some light bulbs and Christmas crackers as well. Now, I know that supermarkets have several reasons for keeping all the drinks far from the front door - risk of theft, the hope that as people wander round the shop they will get distracted and buy something else too, not to mention the pretence of relevance which they maintain by keeping 'seasonal items' by the front door - but as far as I am concerned, any place where you are expected to put eggs in your trolley before you get 4 cases of Bow is severely misunderstanding good shopping practice. So, savvy shopper that I am, I loaded up with booze which I then delicately accessorised with a light sprinkling of fruit and veg in order to give the impression that I am not a raging alcoholic. Then I searched for the light bulbs - I started in 'Household Goods', checked the aisle-end displays in case they were hidden there, took a brief spin round the pet food aisle, and then cracked and asked a member of staff. 'They're over by the entrance, in the non-food section where the electrical items are'. I had not realised that light bulbs now came under the heading of 'electrical items', but by this point I wanted to jam light bulbs in my eyeballs, so I just said 'I'll kill myself if I have to go over there again - fuck it, we'll have Christmas in the dark.' If I see her again on one of my many fun jaunts to Tesco, I will apologise as she looked as though she was scared I was going to just abandon my trolley and collapse in a quivering, crying heap. But I pressed on, unsuccessfully trying to make small talk with the surly checkout lady, wrestling my over burdened trolley back to the car and realising only when I got home that I hadn't got the buggering crackers either...

Losing my trousers in my lunch hour

Over the last couple of years, I have been making an effort to discount 'fear of looking stupid' as a reason not to do things. It's something that I feel has probably held me back at some points, and although I am not really shy, there are times when I have stood on the sidelines of something I wanted to join in with because I was worried about looking a tit. A look at almost any photo of me will reveal that this fear was entirely unfounded, as I have realised that I spend a large amount of time looking like a tit anyway, because my face does complicated and unwarranted things when I am not paying attention to it. But when I started swimming in my lunch breaks, there was no such fear - I worried that I would run over a small child as I drove into the car park of the school where the pool is, but I think that's relatively rational. I didn't worry about losing my trousers though, which is why I had no action plan when it happened. I went swimming as was usual, got changed, got in the pool, did some lengths and got out again. It wasn't until I was actually standing in a top, a towel and a pair of flip flops that I had a rummage around for my trousers. Assuming that I must be missing them somehow within the confines of the not entirely roomy canvas bag I take swimming, I had another rummage. 'Doh' I though as I abandoned the changing room to find the locker where I had stashed my stuff during swimming, assuming that they must have worked their way loose and escaped while I was trying to pick up all my stuff without getting it all wet. They weren't there, nor were they in the locker below, or any of the adjoining lockers. I went back into the changing cubicle for another fruitless search of my bag. I then began to wonder whether it wasn't that I had somehow managed to lose my trousers, but that someone had stolen them. I decided it was very unlikely that there is a pervert in the changing rooms who only likes trousers - my underwear was in there, so I figured the chances that someone would choose to steal my trousers were pretty minimal. So after I had looked in all the lockers in the changing rooms, all the cubicles and various other areas where I thought trousers might lurk, I decided to ask at the front desk, so I shuffled out into reception in my top and towel, only to find that instead of a friendly receptionist there was a group of school children waiting for their lesson. Evidently, I looked quite amusing but after bearing their sniggers for a short while, I decided to go and have a really good look in the changing rooms again, in case a pair of chocolate brown trousers had somehow been camouflaged against the white tiles or grey locker interiors. I had just decided that the only course of action was to flee to my car in my towel, ring work and tell them I was feeling suddenly sick, and then go home and try to avoid all our neighbours between getting out of the car and making my way into the safety of the house. I was happy to admit that I had lost my trousers, but I wanted to be there when people found out as I could only begin to imagine what would be said in the office if I wasn't there to answer questions. Fortunately, as I completed one final sweep of the changing rooms and gathered up my bags I saw one of the boys who works there wandering around and collared him. My relief was short lived as I tried to ask if they had found my trousers without sounding like a complete tit - I'm not entirely sure if it's possible to ask for missing trousers without sounding like a tit, but I am entirely sure that I can't. But the boy produced the trousers from under the counter and asked if they were the ones I was after (how many pairs of trousers did they have back there?), and I made my way back to the changing rooms with my trousers and the new-found love I had for my trousers and made my way back to the office without having to make any excuses. I did subsequently tell people about the mishap, but at least I was there to explain that it's a lot easier than it looks to lose a pair of trousers over lunch...

The tragedy of disappearing food

I have a slightly compulsive approach to food. Despite the fact that my mother is eminently sensible and would encourage my brother and me to eat a wide variety of foodstuffs, never really allowed snacking and was in control of our sugar intake, the more devil-may-care attitude of my father towards our health included allowing us to eat/drink condensed milk straight from the tin, serving 'experimental' dishes based loosely on recipes he had cut out of the paper and a completely unfathomable love of faggots and lardy cake which he tried (unsuccessfully I might note) to imbue us with. These contrary approaches somehow combined to form a bit of a monster - I have incredibly faddy eating habits, often falling in love with a product for weeks on end, only to abandon the industrial quantities I have purchased when a new treat takes my fancy. As a child I used to go into raptures when allowed to eat frozen peas, raw dried pasta and whole cucumbers. As an adult, with full editorial control over what I eat, recent food affairs have included tapenade (consumed with every meal at the height of its popularity), chav-wiches (a salt-and-vinegar crisp filled savoury muffin which makes me feel wrong, yet right all at once) and the current favourite, Belgian waffles with a dusting of icing sugar (our tolerance of dust is surprisingly high, so this is more generous than it might otherwise be). Despite the fact that the Boy Wonder mocks me mercilessly for the manner in which I acquire favourite foods, he is often the originator of a particular fad, but where he revisits a long-neglected foodstuff with interest and nostalgia, I will sample it already knowing that it wouldn't take much to make it onto my food-of-the-month list. The only problem (as far as I can see - if other people have a problem with the way I conduct my faddery then it's no concern of mine) with the way I fall in love with certain products is that there is a distinct correlation between the ease of procurement of a certain food item and the amount I love it. Unfortunately, the correlation is inverse, and so I often find myself fruitlessly searching for foodstuff which my brain and stomach are telling me must be there, but my eyes are putting up arguments like 'Seriously - if they were going to be anywhere, they'd be here, and they're not, so just try somewhere else. No, you haven't forgotten what they look like, this shop just doesn't sell them.' The most calamitous example of this phenomenon is without doubt rice paper. My love of rice paper began when I was younger, probably about six, and would be given money to go to the shop round the corner from my Dad's to buy sweets. Even at that age, I would regularly clear the shop of their rice paper stocks, buying 50 sheets at a time, occasionally accompanied by some sherbet to make my own version of flying saucers. Then, as adulthood encroached, I kind of forgot about rice paper, writing it off as a treat from my past. So when the Co-op round the corner from our old flat started selling it, I was entranced. I would regularly go and buy 10 packets of perhaps 40 or 50 sheets each, polishing them all off within days, and guarding them jealously, despite the Boy Wonder's palpable lack of desire to steal them. When the Co-op suddenly changed sweet supplier and stopped stocking them, I was sad, but once again I came to terms with the fact. Then, when we moved to The Village, I was delighted to discover that the newsagent a mere 200 meters from our house sold rice paper. I was overcome with excitement, and cleaned them out on the first occasion I spotted them. The nice lady behind the counter looked at me as though I had a problem, so I told her that I did, impressing on her at the time my excitement at having discovered an outlet of this near-forgotten foodstuff so close to our new home. So, imagine my disappointment when the shop closed temporarily for refitting (and apparently installing a tardis as it is about twice the size now, and that can't just be down to the clever positioning of everything next to everything else, regardless of whether there is room for customers to actually move around) and re-opened in a blaze of glory, but with a new generic sweet supplier and no room at the inn for the brightly coloured sweets of which I had almost got used to having a regular supply. That was it - the last time I came across rice paper was in a shop somewhere in the middle of nowhere and when I bought their entire stock, I was told that even they wouldn't be ordering it again, being as I was the only person to even consider purchasing the stuff, let alone demonstrating any enthusiasm. So, whilst I can accept that I am in a minority (my brother will eat rice paper, but I don't think he dreams about it like I do), I cannot accept that someone willing to buy copious amounts of the stuff cannot find anywhere which will sell it - I can't promise that I will eat enough to sustain an entire factory, but I could easily promise that you would only need two or three more like me to achieve that goal...

Ironic Driving

This is a phenomenon which seems to be spreading, and is mostly noticeable on my journey to work, during which time I travel from a 30 zone, into a 20 zone, back to 30, up to 60, slowing to 40, back up to 60, then finally 30 as I get closer and come through a residential zone, and during this time I will occasionally find that I am behind the same person almost all the way. Occasionally this person will shoot through the 40 zones at 50 miles an hour, but then maintain that speed in a 60 mile an hour zone. Now, I appreciate that sometimes people aren't confident driving at speed, and that the speed limit is a limit, not a target, but when a driver displays such flagrant lack of regard for these facts by speeding at inappropriate times, it makes me think that they don't really understand the national speed limit. They see the sign with the black line across a white background, and they aren't really sure how fast they're allowed to go, so they toddle along at about 50 just in case. I don't really understand it as there are only two speed limits really - 60 on a single carriageway and 70 on a dual carriageway in a normal vehicle. Presumably, those who have taken extra tests to be allowed to drive a vehicle which has different limits should really have learnt what those were when they took their tests. So why is it, that on a clear road with no obstacles and no adverse weather conditions, someone who just hooned through a residential area at 45 mph suddenly gets all shy and sticks to 51 on the A-roads. Another practice which I can't fathom is that of over-taking at either terrifying speed, terrifying proximity or both, only to then start driving slower than the person you overtook was driving. Why? What on earth makes you risk your life to overtake if all you wanted to do was drive slower than the person in front of you? It does make me more confident in my own driving abilities - because I passed my test when I was about 22 and everyone I knew had been driving for longer than that I always felt as though I was catching up and that I was the only person on the roads who didn't know what I was doing. This feeling stayed with me until the beginning of last year which is when I started to drive to work, meaning that instead of driving approximately once a week, I was now driving twice a day, which has done wonders for my confidence, but has so dented my confidence in other people's driving that I think my overall road confidence is just about balanced out as I exercise extra caution to avoid being the unfortunate victim of someone else's witless inability to wait, watch or just drive properly generally. All the same, I do like to imagine a world where everyone drives with a bit more care and really thinks about whether their personal desire to get somewhere really outweighs their desire to live, own functioning legs or sleep at night without the soul-gnawing knowledge that their twattishness has had a horrific impact on someone else's life. Until then I will just be content that I wasn't the spanner I saw the other day who indicated left, but instead of making the turn, pulled out to his right instead, still indicating otherwise - he must dice with death on a daily basis, I just hope it's his own.

Living with a hedgehog

The first thing to know about living with a hedgehog is that they smell. It's not the first thing I found out about living with a hedgehog, because I have little to no sense of smell for periods of time and don't really notice that it's gone again until someone says 'What's that smell' and I have to either admit that I can't smell it (which usually results in them asking me questions about not being able to smell that I don't know the answers to), or I have to guess a smell from the look on their face and pretend that I can smell it too, which can go drastically wrong.
 However, the Boy Wonder reliably informs me that our hedgehog smells, which is unsurprising given that he is used to outdoor life in the country where pretty much everything smells, and anyway there's enough air to make smells go away quite quickly unless it's a really big area of poo in a field. I didn't really realise how much the country smells until I moved to some country, and bearing in mind that I can only smell, at a guess, two thirds of the smells available to me, it must really smell to everyone else. On the plus side, we do live near a tannery which is another surprisingly smelly business and having limited olfactory ability is definitely a blessing when it comes to the once or twice a month when they do whatever they do that smells so bad.
Another useful thing to know about living with a hedgehog is that they eat REALLY loudly. Not just quite loudly like you might think when someone says a small creature eats really loudly, but seriously loudly, to the point where you can hear our hedgehog eating in a box downstairs from our bedroom upstairs - not a huge distance, but certainly further than you would expect to hear a hedgehog eating over. (Or, to be more pedantic, a distance over which you would not expect to hear a hedgehog eating.) There are a few other interesting things about living with a hedgehog to do with an apparent fondness for burrowing into towels, a cheeky way of pretending to be on the verge of death one minute by breathing all oddly and then getting up, running about and eating some food the next minute just to keep you on your toes.
 Another hedgehog fact, further to a conversation with our local hedgehog hospital, is that our hedgehog now has pets of his own. I bought him wax worms, which are little caterpillar kind of things which will turn into wax moths if left for too long. Hopefully our hog will eat them all before it comes to that as the Boy Wonder hates moths and being as he is the one who is enduring most of the smells, it seems a bit unfair to inflict a live moth farm on him too.
 To his immense credit, the Boy Wonder is really very understanding and even came with me to take the Hog to the vet yesterday - he makes some pretty weird noises and because he spends most of the time hiding, sleeping and waiting until we go to bed before getting up and stampeding around his box it's hard to tell whether the noises are symptoms of some kind of illness or just normal noises for a hedgehog to make. Our vet is a very nice man - I took Mogbad, our stolen cat to him, and even when he fell out of the scales and weed on the table, nice French vet man was overwhelmed by his attempts to get attention and joined me in wondering how anyone could abandon him (more on Mogbad at some point). So I wasn't entirely surprised when nice French vet man was very nice to Hoggle, describing him as 'very sweet' and giving me props for taking him on.
However, nothing quite prepared me for the sight of nice French vet man trying to listen to Hoggle's chest through a stethoscope pressed to his spines - it looks about as ridiculous as you would imagine such an endeavour would look, and I was very glad to be there to witness it, particularly when the lovely vet turned to me and said 'I cannot really 'ear anything' with an admirably Gallic shrug.   As it turns out, so long as he is eating, defecating (medical terminology for the vast and unholy deposits he seems determined to leave in his water bowl) and curling up when poked, that's about all the signs you can hope for from a healthy hedgehog and I am now reassured about his health, meaning that I won't have to mute the TV every 10 minutes to attempt to engage the Boy Wonder in yet another thrilling game of "cough, sneeze or grunt".
 All in all, whilst it is quite fun to have a hedgehog in the house, don't let the fact that they seem to do all right in the wild fool you - as soon as they know you care, they need a constant temperature of 20 degrees, insects and live worms to eat to keep their teeth healthy, a never-ending supply of places to poo and people who don't mind waking up at 5 in the morning whispering 'was that a burglar or the hedgehog?'. Oh, and you have to keep them until after the last frost of the spring, so he's living with us till April now.

Dreams reflect life...

I am in Amsterdam with friends from school, who are bickering amongst themselves about something I don't really understand or want to get into. Finally they persuade me to come along with them to a concert and when we get there, to my horror, it is a show featuring Mark Owen and Liam Gallagher (I found out I don't know what he looks like as he looked like Vernon Kay in my dream and then somebody had to tell me who he was). I leave the show immediately, but now I am in Amsterdam on my own, and I don't want to be there, I just want to be at home with the Boy Wonder. I resolve not to call him as I know I will cry and make him feel bad that there's not much he can do to help me, and fortunately I come across a Mutley-a-like selling tickets for a boat tour. I board the boat and try to enjoy myself, but all I can think about is 'Why did I agree to this - I knew I wouldn't have a good time and now I'm not.'. In some ways this genuinely reflects the situation I often find myself in - with advance notice I occasionally agree to do something without the Boy Wonder, about which I get a growing sense of dread in the few days before the event and then when I get there, far from what I tell myself, I actually don't have a good time and I want to come home. I don't really get homesick, but I miss the Boy and I can't really imagine anything that I would rather do without him. However, this is generally considered to be pretty pathetic - I have been told so by people when I explained that I didn't really want to attend the Christmas party at work, the fact that he wasn't invited being one of the major reasons. Now why people who I only spend time with because I am paid to do so would think that I would choose to spend time with them over him of an evening, I don't know, but I do resent being told that I should be able to 'manage for one night' when the fact is I choose not to. But apparently, honesty is not what's required of me in this situation - I am supposed to pretend that it costs too much (the option I have gone for in the face of scornful remarks) or that I wouldn't be able to get home, when the truth is, I would rather be snuggled up on the sofa with the man I just married than watching the people I work with getting drunk. Astonishing? Maybe, but I think the astonishing thing is that people really cannot grasp the fact that I am happier with the Boy Wonder than I am anywhere else - I wonder how sad their lives and relationships must be if they long for a night out with their friends which doesn't include their partners, but it wouldn't occur to me to insult them on those grounds. I am aware that people think it is normal to spend a great deal of time apart from their other halves, and as far as I am concerned that's their business. But being without the Boy Wonder trying to have fun against the odds is something which I not only don't enjoy, but which invades my dreams, and anyone who has a problem with it can cock right off...

What do I really need to know about the Corn Laws?

I feel cheated that a large part of the history syllabus when I was at school focused on the Corn Laws, followed by a fascinating insight into the repeal of the Corn Laws. Every time I have thought about this, I have been surprised at how little I remember of these except that I didn't really understand them when I was 14, although in fairness, there was a lot of stuff I didn't understand then and it was mostly because I wasn't paying any attention and me and my friends were too busy taking the mickey out of our history teacher, who was unfortunately named Mr Guy. However, having suddenly thought about it again recently, I decided to look it up and see if I had been missing out on a fascinating and worthwhile slice of historical know how. So I did, and whilst I now appreciate the importance of the law's abolition in terms of free trade (a concept which I have a sketchy understanding of at this age, but had no real idea about at 14) I really cannot fathom what possessed the examining board to choose this particular period in history as one to which all GCSE students must be introduced. When you think that history effectively covers everything since the world began, I find it hard to conceive of the kind of mind that couldn't think of a time period more suited to engaging the minds of adolescents - anything with blood would have done for a start. There's just so much to learn, but subjects like this really did put me off history as a subject - the focus always seemed to be on learning dates rather than understanding how the events of the past have impacted on our present and how they will continue to affect the future. So, I can safely say that not only did the Corn Law syllabus fail to provide the basis for what should have been my understanding of the Corn Laws, it simultaneously put me off history at a point in my life when I could easily have been quite inspired to find out more.

I'll tell you what's really Ironic, Alanis...

This page on IMDB. It's a list of stunt men and women - a pretty long list by all accounts. What makes this list ironic is that they all worked on the show 'The Fall Guy' which is about Colt Seavers, a self-confessed unknown stuntman who works on Hollywood films by day, but moonlights as a bounty hunter to supplement his meagre stuntman income. It won't come as any surprise to learn that Colt's most spectacular stunts are all performed in the course of his duty catching criminals, in which he is ably assisted by Jody, a young blonde woman who shares her taste in shorts with Daisy Duke, and incompetently assisted by Howie, another stunt man who just isn't as good as the main man. One of the best things about the whole show is the uncompromisingly long winded theme tune where the character of Colt Seavers bemoans the fact that he is the one who makes the Hollywood hunks look good, but they always get the leading lady - hence the title of my post as I enjoy watching the long list of credited stunt men rolls past faster than the speed of light as you listen to a song about an unknown stuntman getting no glory. My favourite episode was one where they were trying to track down a girl who was in a roller-derby - Jody goes undercover in the team and befriends the bail jumper and it turns out that the beautiful woman in the snug jumper and short shorts isn't actually the real criminal, she's just a buxom young beauty in a difficult situation. It wouldn't take a genius to work out that most of the scenes featured semi-clad women tussling and wrestling on roller skates before rolling off to the showers together - it's not exactly highbrow, but it is funny. The series fits a category of dramas which I find slightly creepy, but the same things that make them creepy are the things I like, mostly the fact that the protagonist is slightly older than you would expect, and slightly less attractive, but doesn't really let that stop them in their relentless pursuit of 20 something girls with whom they have no intention of forming meaningful relationships if you know what I mean. Another classic of this awesome/creepy/possibly misunderstood genre is the Rockford files featuring ageing lothario Jim Rockford who on one memorable occasion comforts a woman who has just been assaulted by sticking his tongue down her throat. Who wouldn't enjoy that?

5 Books I definitely do not love (part 5)

Well - what horror has been reserved for this slot? I have gone with the only book which not only made me really angry, but made me have strong feelings of dislike for the author, someone who I had previously thought was cool. 5. Silent Bob Speaks - Kevin Smith This book really, really annoyed me. I had been a long-time fan of Kevin Smith's films, and I would still say that Clerks is one of my favourite movies, but the man behind them came across in this book as a complete James Blunt. I could put up with the slightly vile way in which he referred to his wife on the grounds that she puts up with it and him and so has obviously made her peace with being called 'the woman who lets me fuck her'. I could put up with the sycophancy - we all have people we admire, and sometimes it is easy to be rapturously caught up in your personal relationship with them and fail to realise that you come across like someone with an ulterior motive for banging on about how fabulous they are. But what really annoyed me was his claim that Michael Moore stole one of his ideas, and then his passive-aggressive 'Hey, if you don't want to give me credit for coming up with an abstract concept, never acting on it, and then noticing the similarities between a half-formed idea I had and a campaign you worked hard on, that's fine man, whatever.' line on it really wound me up. If you have something to say to someone, say it. Don't write about it in a book, don't overplay your involvement to try and undermine someone else's achievements, and don't expect everyone to bow down and be grateful that you're not 'taking action' when your claim to their achievements is minimal at best. I actually read this book a good couple of years ago and as I had borrowed it from a friend, I haven't been tempted to re-read it to ascertain whether it gets better with time, but I do remember being angered by it, and for a book which I was fully intending to enjoy, that's quite rare. I will often convince myself that I like a book, against all the evidence, because I like the author, the premise or the subject, but this is the only book I remember failing so spectacularly to please me on any of those counts. Which is a shame - I don't like discovering that people I admire aren't people I would like to spend time with. I think that's worse than suddenly being forced to concede that someone who I have always considered to be a total tit might have enough redeeming qualities to be reclassified as a partial tit instead, which I am please to say happens more frequently than the other way round. Which gives me an idea for my next list....

I am America and So Can You

I bought this for the Boy Wonder for his birthday, fully expecting it to be awesome and this far, I have not been disappointed! I had to wait until he had read it, which was blissfully quick as he wanted to get stuck into it too. So far, my favourite lines have been: 'If I want to buy meat from some guy's trunk, that's my business. My Agribusiness.' and 'If I want to fly through my windscreen at 200mph, that's between me and my brain damage.' Who wouldn't love a book with such reasoned arguments for liberty and freedom of choice? Plus, I am only on page 40 or so, so there are plenty more nuggets of goodness where they came from...

5 Books I definitely do not love (part 4)

4. Doctor Zhivago I fully accept responsibility for not liking this book - my own lack of knowledge about the political agenda of the time in which it was set meant I found it almost impossible to follow what was going on for large sections of the book. I did attempt some research into the political situation, but it was so complex, and so difficult to relate to the events portrayed in the novel that I gave up that avenue. I did also read some reviews to see if I could get a potted version of the plot on which I could hang the events I was reading about, but the reviews made it sound like such a simple excercise in comprehension that I found myself even more frustrated that I was failing to 'get' any of it. I did plough on to the end, but mostly because I realised that I was unlikley to re-read this with a better understanding of the social and political intricacies of the time, but I did long for the end, particularly as I was reading it in the dark on buses to and from work mostly which was not a particularly nice way to begin or end the day. I feel as though I should make more of an effort with this one - the problems are all mine - but I can't begin what could end up as my life's work just to satisfy my understanding of this novel. On the plus side, the fact that Pasternak apparently means parsnip has retrspectively made this much more amusing.

5 Books I definitely do not love (part 3)

3. The Little Friend Too long, not enough plot - I read about 600 beautifully written (albeit occasionally long winded) pages to discover that I was to be left hanging. Now, I know that when art imitates life, you are bound to have some loose ends which just can't be tied up, but for a novel to be so starkly set-up as 'about' a girl trying to find her brother's killer only to then fail to resolve the mystery in any way at all seems to be overstating the case a little. If the idea was for the book to be a portrayal of the times, the way of life and the using of Harriet as a character who crosses the lines which the other characters cannot, it succeeded, but I felt as though I had been tricked into reading a novel which didn't deliver what it promised. I don't need everything spelt out for me in black and white and I can live with a bit of uncertainty and having to make up my own mind about what happens, but this wasn't a novel which opened my mind and inspired me, it was one which opened my mind and then slammed it shut again by finishing without even a hint of resolution. The reason people read books is because real life is pretty much boring for large sections - this novel somehow managed to replicate that in written form. Much of the praise I have read of Donna Tartt focuses on how well she described life in the south and her ability to write convincing characters - to my mind, the fact that she was born in the south and grew up in that time frame means that was the least I would expect of her. If we start giving credit to people for knowing the basics about their own upbringing, we might as well not bother with fiction any more. Maybe my irritation at this novel was borne of the same emotions that will not accept good special effects/CGI or great dialogue as sole reasons to watch a film - I want the whole package, not just a part of it. I wouldn't enjoy a programme about an author which didn't refer to any of their work, nor would I want to see a great musician who decided to perform songs by someone else who I don't like - I don't need my hand held, but when the back cover sets up a murder investigation and what you get inside is the case of the missing plot, I feel cheated.

5 Books I definitely do not love (part 2)

2. Robinson Crusoe I have just finished reading this, as a continued effort to read the 'classics', and as I thought I had a vague idea of the storyline I figured it would be an entertaining read. I was wrong. Not only was the story I had in my head vastly different from the plot of the novel but it was better. I enjoyed the opening couple of chapters as they were basically the story of how many people warned the protagonist that going to sea was a terrible idea and that nothing good would come of it if he pursued a life on the briny, however it soon became clear that this was about as good as it was going to get. The shipwreck itself was quite exciting, but the detailed descriptions of the things he salvaged from the ship, the manner in which he constructed his shelter and all kinds of other, more boring things left me cold. But all that seemed positively thrilling compared to the pontificating and philosophising Crusoe did about God. Now, I am not religious, but I appreciate that there are many situations in which recourse to religion is comforting, but there is something infuriating about the way Crusoe embraces religion emphatically when he is on his own, but manages to maintain an air of colonial blood lust as soon as he sees another person on the island. Obviously the context of the novel is important - the morals of 1719 don't necessarily translate to the modern day, but so much of the novel revolves around Crusoe's paranoia at being attacked by cannibals and his increasing devotion to God that I kept wondering whether I was re-reading sections which I had already battled through. Obviously there isn't much action to report over nearly 30 years of solitary living on an island, but I was always under the impression that more happened somehow. Take this very brief summary from Wikipedia: 'The book is a fictional autobiography of the title character, an English castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Venezuela, encountering Native Americans, captives, and mutineers before being rescued.' The problem, as far as I am concerned, is that all that stuff happens in the final quarter of the book - we all know about Man Friday, but what I didn't realise was that he didn't appear until the 25th year of his stay on the island, and the mutineers really only appear in the last couple of chapters. I suppose it is mostly a question of unrealistic expectations - I had expected Robinson Crusoe to contain more action and less detailed husbandry, which was my mistake, but in my defence I suspect that my expectations were artificially raised by the fact that I really enjoyed Gulliver's Travels. As far as I'm concerned that could have been published this year - the insight into the nature of humanity, the wry way of attributing characteristics to entire communities as a kind of thought experiment which seems to reach the conclusion that no matter how you try to run your life, a community, a country or a planet, essentially people cannot and will not agree, and even if they do, something else will arise to create confusion and ultimately unhappiness. A flying island where over emphasis on music and maths renders the inhabitants impotent to achieve anything, a race of super intelligent horses who revile humans, wars fought over which end to start eating a boiled egg. The relevance of Swift's observations is as fitting today as it must have been then, and I think that the gap between the way Gulliver's Travels made me think about the world and the way that Robinson Crusoe just made me want to finish the book so I could start something else is probably just a symptom of my inability to appreciate that the novel in its earliest form. I can only suspend disbelief for so long without needing something to get my teeth into, and Robinson Crusoe didn't give me enough.

5 Books I definitely do not love

Most of the books I have read which I do not love (hate seems a little strong - I wouldn't even bother burning them) are those which I have thought I 'should' read because they are 'classics'. I am a little embarrassed that I managed to get half a degree in English Literature without having read a lot of books that I heard referred to as 'classics'. Part of me just wanted to read them to see what was so classic about them, and part of me wanted to spend less time reading books which I could never discuss with anyone as I was the only one who had read them. It is surprisingly hard to think of a list of all the books you have been told are classics when you try to, so I started with the big ones and those I could find for cheap in the charity bookshop near where I used to work. As this is technically the number one spot, I will start with the book I have enjoyed least and that took longest to read: 1. Moby Dick As I opened the book and saw that first line, I wondered how many people knew that line but had not read the rest of the book. I now envy those people, and if anything good should come out of me having read the bloody thing I hope it is that I do warn people at every opportunity I get not to bother reading Moby Dick. I can sum the whole thing up in two sentences: Ahab gets partly eaten by whale, whom he inexplicably names Moby Dick before pledging to find and take his revenge upon him. To distract readers from the pointlessness of this endeavour, a lot of really boring factual information about whales is interspersed with the details of the fruitless whale hunt, making the hunting part seem marginally more interesting, but ultimately still not as interesting as closing the book and spending the rest of the day collating a list of all the things more interesting that whale anatomy. The single best thing about the book was that when I got to the point of desperation where I began to count how many pages I had left (this usually occurs around the mid-point of a novel, but in this case it was after about 100 pages) I found that almost the entire final quarter of the book was taken up with a series of poems and other crap about whales that were completely incidental to the plot (as was much of the stuff before that in fact), so much so that after only a moment's hesitation I decided I would not make myself read them, and in effect reduced the misery to which I was determined to subject myself by around 20%. I ploughed on with all the other stuff because I was not going to be defeated - having wasted a couple of days reading the bloody thing, I wasn't going to give up until I could say that I had examined the evidence for it being a good book and found it so lacking that I would even argue as to whether it should be called a book, favouring as I did the term 'punishment' at the time. I am aware that the novel is considered a great work, exploring themes of idealism vs pragmatism, the class system and so on and so forth, but however interesting the ideas may be, the novel itself did them no justice in my eyes. I am not unintelligent, I understand most of what I read and when I don't, I work it out or look it up, but rarely have I been less inspired to try and find out the point of something as I was when faced with hundreds of pages of whaling, broken up with the occasional storm. The pace was unbearably slow, presumably because Melville was cramming in all this symbolism and setting the scene for his metaphorical fight between good and evil, but ultimately, the genuine pointlessness of enacting revenge on an animal following their instincts is not something which needs much explanation. Maybe, if you decide you are going to write about how people's ambition can destroy them and make them fail to appreciate any of life's pleasures, the way to demonstrate it once and for all is to force them into the situation which I found myself in when reading the thing - my ambition to finish the book made me unable to enjoy any of the other perfectly nice books I had to read, tainted the ideological plan I had to read the 'classics' and made me feel impotent against whatever authority had decreed that this was a 'good book' (not THE good book, although Tim Minchin has written a very funny song about that, so check it out). So in a sense, Moby Dick was a perfect way to demonstrate the pervasive nature of unfulfilled ambition, but in another, more realistic sense, it was just really boring. On the plus side, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Whaling sums up everything I have just written in a much funnier and less long-winded way than I have, so you can gain insight into what it must be like to suffer through a really long boring book whilst enjoying a quite short and funny book - problem solved.

The Colbert Report

I'm still finding it increasingly difficult to know that the Colbert Report is on in this country, but we can't watch it. It pains me, but I'm beginning to wonder whether £35 a month for access to half an hour's worth of programming a day is actually quite a good deal - nearly £2 an episode wouldn't be so galling if it wasn't for the fact that we did have the FX channel and were blissfully happy, and should we succumb and start paying for it, we will never know whether it might have reappeared at some point anyway. Plus, if we went out for an evening, the cost of each episode would increase, which would mean that alongside the disappointment of not seeing the show, we would have the mounting costs to justify to ourselves as well. A part of me is really angry that there are people out there just enjoying the show, a part of me thinks the message on the Colbert Nation website is almost worth it, and a part of me wants to e-mail Stephen Colbert himself, throw myself on his mercy and beg him to give me personal access to the shows on the grounds that I love them so much. Well, I think that's the part of me that just wants to throw myself on Stephen Colbert generally if I'm honest - it's looking for any excuse...

5 books I love (part 5)

This is a tricky one - having already committed myself to four books (or rather 11 books in total if you don't count 'Three Men on the Bummel'), choosing only one for the last spot feels as though I am rejecting every other book in the world, despite the fact that I purposefully chose a non-exclusionary description for these books. However, I think I am going to have to go with an author rather than a specific book as all her books are good in the same way whilst all being very different. 5. Kate Atkinson I really like her books, not only because they have intricate plots which are somehow constructed in a way which doesn't leave you confused and flipping through the earlier pages to try and remind yourself of what's going on. There is just enough character development that you engage with them, but not so much that you end up reading entire pages where nothing actually happens except the discovery of the underlying reason behind why someone did something that you read about ten pages ago. The first of Kate Atkinson's books is 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' which is set across three generations of the same family, and although there is an element of a mystery, you don't spend the whole book trying to work it out - it's an engrossing read but you don't really realise that there's a discovery to be made, making the moment of discovery even more enjoyable because the plot wasn't entirely propped up by the need to know a certain piece of information in order for the rest of the plot to make sense. I think my favourite of her books is Emotionally Weird, which makes me feel drunk to read it, such is the demeanour of so many of the characters that it feels a bit like the kind of memory you have when you wake up and you can't be sure whether you are recalling events of the previous day or a dream you had whilst sleeping it all off. Kate Atkinson has managed to perfect a writing style which is funny, intriguing, thought-provoking and completely engrossing - I love her and have just found out that she's got a new book out. Something for the Christmas list I think...!

5 books I love (part 4)

4. Three Men in a Boat In a similar way to The Diary of a Nobody, I find the account of the antics of the boating party invariably entertaining - there is such a gentle pace to the humour making the insults and infighting sound more fun than the moments (few though they are) when they all get on. The language is so modern, it's almost impossible to believe that the book was published in 1889, but the thing that really clinches it for me as a great book was something I learnt from the BBC 'adaptation' featuring Dara O'Brien, Grif Rhys Jones and Rory McGrath*. Jerome K Jerome apparently intended to write a serious travel guide to the Thames including historical facts, significant spots to stop etc, but when he came to it, he found that the comedy couldn't be suppressed and it ended up being textual slapstick**. There are so many brilliant quotations, mostly about the ability of inanimate objects to misbehave willfully when there is a chance that they could create havoc by so doing, that it would be impossible to pick out all the parts which have made me smile. The subtlety of the language, the sincerity of it all, the gentle commentary on society and the nature of friendship all combine to make a book which I really didn't want to end. *For some reason Rory McGrath's surname completely escaped me for a moment, and to try and speed up the process of re-remembering it, I turned to Google. It amuses me that the first search I made was 'Rory annoying celebrity' and it amuses me even more that this provided me with the answer I was looking for. **I think I have just coined a phrase of my very own : a quick Google on the phrase 'Textual Slapstick' reveals that my search did not match any documents, meaning that this blog entry should be a Googlewhack - yay! I am aware that I am sad, not only for being pleased that I might be a Googlewhack but largely for even Googling a phrase I had only just written. I was pleased with it, and (as great artists often do of course) I wanted to check that the reason it had popped into my head wasn't because I had stolen it from somewhere. Now that it seems it is original, I will bandy it around until this post can be cited as the origins of the phrase, and in the sprit of that will have to publish three posts today in case anyone gets in there first!

5 books I love (part 3)

3. The Diary of a Nobody This book makes me feel nostalgic for a time way before I was born. The bluff and buffoonery of Charles Pooter is all a part of an intricate social fabric which has to be preserved at all costs, regardless of whether it offends, makes you open to ridicule or ends in disaster. My favourite part is the painting - the peculiar urge to paint almost anything when you have a brush in your hand and a pot of paint is such a universal feeling that I can't imagine anyone who has ever undertaken DIY work failing to sympathise. There is something comforting about having a window onto the daily ins and outs of a life so ordinary that you feel as though you could be reading a genuine account of the time - why would anyone mention their constant battles with a boot scraper, the perils of making sure the grocer's boy delivers to the 'proper' entrance or the minutiae of their butter order. In checking the exact wording of the chapter title, I have stumbled across a Librivox recording of the entire book, which to my dismay is read in such a dead-pan expressionless way that it completely belies the whole point of the book to my mind. Like everyone, the day to day events which make up Charles Pooter's life are not particularly interesting to an onlooker, but the taking of offence, the general inability to accept any responsibility for his mistakes and the constant feeling of teetering on the brink of a social disaster makes this book compelling as far as I am concerned. Maybe I take too much pleasure from the self-imposed misfortunes of others, whether they are real or fictional, but I do feel that a little vocal characterisation wouldn't have gone amiss. Not to criticise Librivox though - I only came across them today and it must be a gargantuan task to collate all these recordings.

5 Books I love (part 2)

2. The Pirates! In an Adventure with... Well, technically this isn't a book either, so much as a series of books, but I couldn't possibly pick out a favourite of them so they all get lumped in together. Apart from anything, they are all very much on a similar theme, plus I have still got some to read to complete the set. However, I am not going to let that put me off writing about them. One of the things I love about these books is that none of the pirates have names - there is the Pirate Captain with his luxurious beard and then albino pirate, the pirate with the scarf etc. For a while I thought that there might be some kind of clever shenanigans and it would turn out that they are all the same three pirates or something, but there doesn't seem to be - it's just fun. That is something I really like - most of the books I have read which I have found to be really hard work are those where the characters have names that won't seem to go into my head, or Russian translations where everyone has several names depending on who is talking to them. I enjoy being able to read a whole book where the person mentioned is self-explanatory - I don't need to know any more than that there's a pirate in green, and not having to even think about who is who makes a refreshing change. Another thing which really appeals to me is that the setting is in a modern version of the 19th century - Darwin is out on the Beagle, but they get their photos developed at Snappy Snaps on the High Street, so you don't have to worry about historical accuracy or understanding the piece in the context of its setting which is nice for someone like me whose historical knowledge is limited to the bloody Corn Laws and their subsequent repeal thanks to a willfully uninspiring school syllabus. Then there are the foot notes - many of my favourite authors like a bit of footnotery: Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin etc all seem to inhabit a genre where a footnote is used to give the reader a little extra laugh without interrupting the plot, which I like. The Pirates! books feature footnotes which contain about as much in the way of facts as you're going to get and conform to my favourite way of learning information - a random comment, barely relevant to the topic at hand, but interesting all the same and worth pointing out if it is something you know. I will often drop into conversation that Shakespeare's father was a prosperous glove maker because I know it to be true and whether it's relevant or not, people always say 'Really? I didn't know that.' which makes me feel as though I am not weird for remembering it for 15 years since I read it at school. And finally, because the books are really quite tiny so I have already spent almost as long writing this as the author did writing the first of the series (which I am lead to believe took him two weeks), is that they are good, swashbuckling fun - the Pirate Captain is a very sympathetic character, whose love for ham, his luxurious beard and making himself appear better at his job than he is are all qualities that are so at odds with the murderous activity he engages in (make no mistake - the books are pure comedy, but plenty of people get run-through in the course of an adventure) that you can't help but love him. The books are fun, plain and simple and I honestly think that they could save a lot of time in speaking to people who turn out to be twats - give them one of these books and if they don't laugh, stop wasting your time talking to them.

5 Books I love (part 1)

I decided to write a post about 5 books I love, but once I had completed number one, I realised that I was going to have to split it up, and then started thinking about 5 books I distinctly don't love but have read because they're 'classics' and I felt I should. So there's more to come...

1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

OK, so this is technically a trilogy in five parts, meaning it would have to be all of my top five books, although it was originally a radio series maybe it shouldn’t be any of them, but I am glad that it is now available in a series of other formats, including (so Wikipedia tells me) two series of towels. I have been a fan since listening to the radio series, courtesy of my step-dad’s possibly illegal home taping of them, as a smallish child to keep me entertained on long car journeys. I consider it to be one of the most influential introductions made in my life, because it instilled in me a life-long (so far) love of Douglas Adams and hours and hours worth of conversation with my brother which few others can understand.

To me, there are few things more satisfying than calling someone a ‘hoopy’ or a ‘frood’ and them understanding it, not least because it’s quite a compliment and if you have gone to the effort of complimenting someone in a language you hope they will understand, it’s gratifying to be met with enthusiasm rather than a slightly askance look and an attempt to disengage from the conversation altogether.

There is something joyful about these books – there are not only no rules, but the ones made up to fit the story don’t apply when the plot makes them inconvenient, yet Douglas Adams avoids falling into the trap so many ‘sci-fi’ (I’m using the term broadly) books do of either making everything so completely ‘other’ that I can’t really get into it, or of creating such fantastic scenarios that it all ends up being contrived and complicated in an attempt to come up with a meaningful ending to the storyline.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide, however, combines the confused curmudgeonliness of Arthur Dent with the worldly optimism of Ford Prefect. Then in case they weren’t polar enough for you, you also get Marvin the Paranoid Android, who out-curmudgeons Arthur Dent without any of the confusion, and Zaphod Beeblebrox who out everythings everyone pretty much.

The thing I love most about the Hitchhiker’s Guide books though is the fact that having done some basic fact-checking whilst writing this, I have been inspired to read the books all again as soon as I have finished Robinson Crusoe…

The thing I wish I’d known

Inspired by my brother and his blog, I started considering this topic and it has certainly given me food for thought:

The thing I wish I had known was that it’s much easier to be happy than to be anything else. I spent years feeling as though I had missed something that everyone else was aware of, or that I was the one who was not in on a universally understood secret. I wanted to be popular but didn’t really have much in common with the people I thought I wanted to be friends with. I wanted to be one of the girls that the boys fancied, but I didn’t actually fancy any of those boys. The things I thought I wanted turned out not to be the things I really wanted. I thought life should come to be and invite me to join in rather than realising that if I wanted something I had to go and get it, and nobody would be feeling sorry for me if I decided to stay in at the weekend because nobody had called me rather than just calling someone and asking what they were doing.

I would also have liked to know that I was good at things which could be made into a career – I was so aimless at school, and then for another three years at university, and then for another couple of years before I found a job that I actually enjoy doing and am keen to learn about. Careers advice seemed uncannily tailored to the jobs which I claimed I wanted to do – journalist, child psychologist etc – regardless of the fact that I wasn’t really cut out for any of them. I wish I’d known about jobs other than nurse, teacher and ‘something in an office’, although I can’t complain that there is anything I would change about my life now (although, obviously, pots of money would make things easier and there would be less frustrating days at work).

On a lighter note, I also wish I’d known that a terrible nostalgia would descend as I approach my 30s – had I known how much I would regret it 15 years later, I would never have given away my Ramona Books.

More thoughts on the world of work

Wouldn’t assigning volumes of work rather than working hours be a better way of working? You do the work and you get paid the money that the task was considered worth, rather than turning up at an arbitrary time and having to take ‘time off’ for boring things like waiting in for a plumber, coming home early to let in the chimney sweep or taking a car to be serviced.

Ironically, the plumber, chimney sweep and garage all work to the system I aspire to – why don’t we insist that a plumber turns up at 9 and stays till 5.30? Because we have agreed to a price for having the job done, and we don’t need to see them there to believe that they are doing what they need to be doing.

All this is leading me to believe that I am not cut out for a job with working hours – my life is more important to me than money or the illusion of security and I would happily work through the night occasionally in order to be able to take time off when I need it without asking someone’s permission. Do I feel like a responsible adult when I am expected to work on Christmas Eve to satisfy a whim of someone who doesn’t really understand my job? The thing is, even if I did work through the night here, I would still have to explain that to someone to justify then reclaiming that time during the ‘normal working day’.

It’s not even as though there is much security – if I am ill for more than 8 days in a year I can expect to go unpaid for those extra days. It’s a system which I find particularly unappealing given that the sick time is calculated on a calendar year, meaning that in the winter, when you’re most likely to pick up an infection (especially given that it seems to be considered the utmost virtue to come into work when you’re ill here) and have unusually high outgoings over Christmas, you are also most likely to find that you aren’t being paid for any time you take off sick. I cannot work out why people do come in when they’re ill – I assume it’s either a misplaced sense of being irreplaceable, a desire to avoid taking unpaid sick leave in the future, or the wildly mistaken belief that anyone is impressed with your hacking performance in the corner of the office.

Basically, the conclusion I seem to be reaching is that I don’t really like having a proper job. I could easily live with the insecurity of unemployment if I was doing something I liked, and perhaps that realisation is one I have needed to spur me into action. Maybe I should stop writing this blog, and start writing something which could potentially be a source of income which would enable me to pursue the writing of this blog without any guilty feelings that I should be wasting my time doing something more profitable.

So, watch this space – if this is the last entry and you suddenly find that a new witty novelist has broken onto the scene, then assume that the witty novelist is me. Otherwise, I have failed as a witty novelist, and not even been inspired to come back here to bemoan my fate which will mean that the sentiments conveyed above have not been realised.

Dream Snippets

I am standing on a balcony looking down on a row of children dressed in pink rabbit outfits with their own heads showing. Some words seem to make the children glow, and they like it too, so I am trying to say words which will do this, but there is someone on the balcony trying to stop me and another person with the rabbit-children trying to stop them listening to me.

I was involved in some kind of contest with some ‘friends’ who I had never seen before – we were having fun, but I wasn’t really sure what was going on.

Matt from work wanted plain crisps, but only had bacon. He was desperate to swop, so I did.

I was wandering down the road where there was some kind of gay pride thing going on. People were drinking weird stuff out of flower shaped costumes.

‘An ants’ shell

So hard to crack

To Hell! To Hell!’

I found this written on a piece of paper in the drawer of an antique chest which I was looking at. There was an armed robbery going on but I really wanted the chest and the note, so I just carried on as if I hadn’t seen them in the hope that I could just get away without them noticing me.

I gave a guy some fairy lights and he was really pleased and started trying to hug me. The Boy Wonder was there and he was impressed at the good choice of present for this guy, and said he could hug me as he would be pleased to have got fairy lights, so he could understand.

Organising a surprise party

It was the Boy Wonder’s 30^th birthday on Saturday and to mark the occasion I organised him a surprise jam/party, which was fun! Admittedly, doing it so shortly after our wedding was a little stressful, but mostly not being able to tell him what I was doing was very difficult – I kept speaking to people who updated me on news etc, and then couldn’t say anything to the Boy Wonder. But, not content with organising two events marking big occasions this year, in my drunken state on Saturday night I also began the process of planning the next extravaganza – a New Orleans fundraiser in the New Year. I have already recruited our richest friends to provide a venue and possible source of wealthy attendees from amongst their friends (although I have a feeling that my subtlety was slightly lacking when it came to sharing the details in my Bow-laden state!).

So whilst on the one hand I was just pleased that everyone came and nobody ruined the surprise element, the completion of our second successful gathering of the year did give me a sense of satisfaction, marred only by the fact that it was more fun planning things with the Boy Wonder – we are both people who like to picture things as we would like them and then recreate that on a larger scale, which makes the planning much more fun than following a formal path of doing what you should do, or compromising, or the dreaded ‘done thing’.

All of this means that I am already thinking of ways to make the fundraiser work, and I am really excited about the idea of supporting a charity which is so in line with our shared interest. The whole thing is still very much in the ideas stage at the moment, but I am sure it won’t be long before the whole thing is imminent and being as I have just looked it up and found out that Mardi Gras 2009 is on Feb 24^th, I’m already thinking some kind of Mardi Gras theme would be a good basis for the event…

I never realised, but I don’t really like films

Talking to our wee Scottish friend last night I realised that I don’t really like films. I have known problems with actors: I can’t tell the difference between Al Pacino, Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman leading me to be really confused when coming across ‘Meet the Fockers’ as I couldn’t understand why the Dad kept changing clothes. I don’t recognise most actors, so if they have slightly different hair, clothes or accent, I can’t make the connection with the person who I have seen before. But, even apart from the fact that I have no recollection skills, there’s something about the format of films that makes me want to know whether it’s going to be good before I watch it. If something’s not going to be great I want to know, and if it’s not going to be great then I don’t want to waste my time watching it for two and a half hours. When the Boy Wonder wanted to watch ‘Lord of the Rings’ I refused to go to the cinema (although he wasn’t that keen either, what with the hating people, crowds, shops/shopping centres and all) so we ended up watching it on the small screen at home. I didn’t expect to enjoy it, but everyone kept going on about how good it was and I felt quite optimistic when we sat down in front of the gogglebox. However, after an hour (the Boy Wonder claims it was only half an hour) I was beginning to lose the will to live. Fortunately the Boy Wonder was feeling the same, and he was the one who actually called a halt to our watching when he said ‘God this is boring isn’t it?’ to my immense relief. Nothing had happened in that whole time, and I was buggered if I was going to waste any more time on a film which had been spun out not only over three hours, but over three more films apparently for the purposes of leaving huge segments where no plot was required. I would have to be very drunk before I sat in front of that again. But it’s not just really long films, any film which is predictable and has an ending which I can predict from within half an hour riles me. As do films which rely on CGI and impressive special effects rather than plot – I will never understand how people can say ‘The plot was pretty crap, but it was worth seeing for the special effects’ because as far as I’m concerned, you shouldn’t even make a film if you can’t portray scenes properly, so no allowances made for that. And films which don’t adequately explain what’s going on piss me off too – I sat through the whole of Transformers only to discover that the big show down was a fight scene in which it was almost impossible to work out who was good and who was bad. I also hate films where the plot is based on an entirely flawed premise, and they spend so much time not mentioning the huge hole in the storyline that you assume it’s because there’s some kind of brilliant twist only to get to the end and find out that it was just a really poorly thought-out set up for the action, which retrospectively makes no sense if you actually spotted the point at which they deviated from sense. However, I watched Lucky Number Slevin over two years ago, in Canada and really loved it, to the point where I not only remember who was in it, but also what happened, and I would still watch it again. That’s about as good an endorsement as any film has ever had from me, and being as Spinal Tap is the only other film I can think of that falls into that category, that gives some idea of how exacting my standards are. Or possibly just that my interest is only piqued by clever voilence and immature humour - whichever makes me sound deeper.

Another dream – maybe Bow is like cheese?

I drove to Derbyshire and back yesterday, which was not in itself exciting, but it did mean that I went from 11am until about 9pm without eating anything, and then stayed up till 2 consuming Bow with the Boy Wonder and our friend The Gift which may or may not be relevant to the fact that I spend the night dreaming that Saddam Hussein was teasing me with a group of his friends.

Now, when I say teasing, I mean approaching me in the street with a rack of 6 football sized rigid plastic balls with numbers written on them and declaring that we were going to play ‘Which is the most boring number’. The game consisted of one of his cronies hitting each ball (marked with an apparently random number) and the ball breaking to reveal, in order: a banger, a balloon flying towards me, something gooey, a yellow thing which flew out and hit me in the groin, something which I didn’t see and finally a long extendable stick (we’re talking over 20m) with a jumping spider on it. I was talking to the Boy Wonder and telling him how annoying it was, but he was distracted by the fact that he was really impressed with the extendable jumping spider, which was really annoying me.

For some reason, Matt Hill kept coming up to me and trying to hug me, but I wanted to know why Saddam Hussein was following me around just to annoy me so I kept trying to talk to him, but he was just being really smug and, well…annoying, which is not really an adjective I ever thought I would use about the man.

So what does it mean? Well, probably bugger all really, but let’s assume that it was more to do with the tapenade and Bow than some kind of peculiar mental illness for now.

Inflicting your music on the public

Further to my post about the annoying tendency of people to be oblivious to the impact their overly loud conversation has on those around them at gigs, I feel I should also condemn a practice which is borne of a similar lack of courtesy but with the opposite effect. I went to an event in London last week, and on the way there I was treated to the sound of some child, around 10 or 11 I’d guess, with his mother, who was definitely old enough to know better, playing some kind of MP3 player out loud on the train! I was gob smacked – I am aware that the yout’ love to whip out an MP3 player loaded with crappy R ‘n’ B, lame guitar bands and the latest ring-tones, but I have never seen one with parents in tow. Do they really think that everyone in the train carriage wanted to listen to their choice of music? Are they the only people who are unaware of fact that all those other people would have brought their own MP3 player had they wanted to listen to music on the train? Is it legal to kill someone for inflicting some warbling half-wit on me while I’m trying to read? I remember when the Sony Walkman was the height of sophistication, and there used to be signs on public transport asking people to ensure that they weren’t listening to their music at such an ear-splitting level that the leak from the headphones would disturb other passengers. It didn’t occur to me that one day, I would be held to mental ransom by a child deciding that what they want is more important that anyone else’s desire for a quiet ride. I am well aware that my main problem is really a public lack of consideration – they could have been playing music I love, and I would still have felt that it was an inappropriate place and time to share it. I also feel very hard done-by that I am considerate to the point of stupidity and if others aren’t going to play fair then the system doesn’t work. I recently spent a frustrating five minutes walking behind a man who was dithering his way to the station because there wasn’t quite enough room for me to pass him without (in my mind) implying that he was slow. I once ended up crying because I had gone round the corner to buy croissants for breakfast, and then I let someone go first at the bread display because I didn’t want to reach across him (even though I had been there before him), only to then watch him take every last croissant in the shop. In the latter case, it was more the rudeness of him that upset me – I am not that pathetic that I get croissant withdrawal – because I was trying to be nice, and he went a ruined it and made me feel like an idiot for doing so. And what’s the point? If I am nice to someone who not only doesn’t appreciate that I have been nice to them, but also breaks the chain of niceness, then it all stops working. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, I was brought up too well to stop saying thank-you to surly sales assistants, holding doors open for people and helping old ladies get their shopping off buses. But one day I really will snap, and if you are the twat with the box of shit music forcing it on me in a public space, then expect pain to rain down upon you, or at least a couple of warning stares, a discontented huff and then a polite request to turn it down.

‘Easy’ cookery shows

Wasting a bit of time last night, the Boy Wonder and I watched a bit of ‘Delia’ in which she claimed to be demonstrating recipes for people who are ‘afraid to cook’ or ‘don’t have time to cook’. Supposedly showing people how to cook ‘on busy days, or if they lack confidence’, her first dish was a salmon and quails’ eggs pie, featuring cornichons, capers and fresh dill. Excuse me? I thought this was supposed to be for busy people who don’t have time to cook, so who are these people who don’t have time to cook anything fancy, but somehow have plenty of time to pop to the shops for quails’ eggs and fresh dill? The element of the show which seems to be designed for a busy chef is that she’s using ready-made mash and ready grated cheese, but I think a recipe involving stuff you can’t buy from your local Spar is probably not a winner for the busy or underconfident, even with two slightly easy ingredients flung on top. Other dishes from last night’s efforts included Peruvian potato wedges with boiled eggs, olives and peppers, which involved using a food processor to make a sauce containing 9 ingredients, one of which was walnuts (who hasn’t got them hanging around in their cupboard?), so already the time saved by using pre-prepared potato wedges has been (pardon the pun) eaten up by making the sauce, boiling the eggs and messing around with peppers and olives. There was also some rather disturbing looking (by which I mean it had the appearance of cooked sick) bread, which seemed a needlessly complicated way of ‘saving time on busy days’. She may as well have called it ‘cooking for the lazy middle classes’, although she did in fact save me and the Boy Wonder plenty of cooking time last night – shortly after her assertion that everyone has a jar of roasted peppers in their cupboard we decided to go out and get fish and chips.

Why do you have to talk there?

Last Friday, the Boy Wonder, some friends and I all went to see Dr John and the Lower 911, supported by John Fohl from the Lower 911. Needless to say, the music was awesome, but the breathtaking rudeness of certain people there astonished me. While we were watching John Fohl we stood just in front of the seating area, with an area of about 50 square meters in front of us with nobody in it (the venue wasn’t full so we didn’t want to stand right at the front as that seemed a bit intense!). After a couple of songs, three people came and stood directly in front of us, to the point where one of them was almost leaning on me. With an entire venue almost empty they couldn’t have at least considered one of the many spots where they wouldn’t have been standing right in someone’s way. However, this poor behaviour is nothing compared to the girl with the squeaky voice who stood behind us (we were right at the front) and shouted constantly through about 3 songs in a row. In the end, I asked her to be quiet, very politely considering how annoying it was to listen to her, and she said ‘Oh, was I shouting?’. Now, I would have thought that the fact someone who was actually leaning on the stage could hear her would have indicated that, but I, again politely, nodded and smiled. Three minutes later, our friends heard her start talking again, only this time she was saying ‘I can’t believe that girl at the front could really hear me’ (as though I would ask her to be quiet for any other reason!), to which they all turned round as one and made it clear that, indeed we could all hear her. But we survived and the next day went to the 02 to the festival of New Orleans. This was a free festival, which it would have to have been because the main stage was in the outer circle of the 02, which, ironically is a little like the 9th circle of hell (where Dante put the Sowers of Discord). We saw some awesome people including Kermit Ruffins, Buckwheat Zydeco and Alan Toussaint who were stupendous. I had to move during Kermit Ruffins’ set because the guy behind me was singing along, badly, and I again had to ask a group of people to stop talking during Alan Toussaint’s set because they were shrieking at one another all through the music, and raising the volume during the solos, as though the band were being quiet to facilitate their conversation. Now, I am sure that people who go to gigs to talk loudly to their friends think that the Boy Wonder and I are terrible bores, don’t know how to have fun, and, worse, want to stop others from having a good time. But, what they fail to understand is that a shrill conversation with your mates can be had anywhere, anywhere in the world, but on Friday night, the only place to see Dr John playing was in St Albans. Why would I pay money (incidentally the tickets were a wedding present to the Boy Wonder) to stand in a room where Dr John’s playing, make my way right to the front and stand next to the stage if I just wanted to hear some squeaky voiced twat failing to appreciate the music that people have come all the way from New Orleans to play to those who want to hear it. Even at a free gig such as Saturday’s, there is no excuse – people have fought their way through crowds of unpleasantly slow-moving people to see a band who ooze funk through their very pores and to have it ruined by people who clearly don’t really appreciate what they’re hearing is an insult to the musicians and a complete pain in the arse to those who just want to get down and enjoy the sound of the music.

On drinking too much and loving it

On Friday the Boy Wonder and I went for a day of sponsored fun in London – we started on a boat up the Thames having some very nice food and an entirely insufficient commentary about the surroundings, but as we were there for the fun, not the learning, it was fine. Then we went on the London Eye, which is something the Boy Wonder had expressed an interest in, and although the ponderously slow pace of the thing put me off originally, I have to say it was certainly an experience. There was a wedding going on in the pod next to us, which was quite fun to watch, and a woman in our pod who was clearly not keen on going too close to the edge, so was shuffling around the bench in the middle apologising to everyone. We then progressed down the South Bank and did some wine tasting – after a brief talk on how to taste wine (where I had some serious issues with listening to everyone else slurping their wine in the traditional style, and also swirled my glass a bit too hard and got wine all over my jeans) we romped around the various rooms tasting Champagne, more wine and some rum – all for free! Having managed to maintain my sobriety for most of the evening, we then met up with one of our most special friends, Ronnie, after whom we have named a fish, and partly because of whom, the Boy Wonder has to keep his phone on silent when we go to bed otherwise he calls up at odd hours of the day and night to discuss things such as whether James Brown really did work very hard in the entertainment industry. So having maintained a sterling grip on sobriety for an entire afternoon, we then started drinking Bow (is there a rule about never mixing grape and apples? It certainly felt like I was getting my five a day) with Ronnie and his ‘very good friend’ before heading off for a rather loud curry where Ronnie made an impact on the waiting staff, the other diners and us with his unique views on all kinds of topics, mostly involving large amounts of swearing. Having survived that, we then headed back to Amy’s and in a fit of inspiration decided to watch R Kelly’s Hip Hopera ‘Trapped in the Closet’. I have to confess that I only saw chapters 1 – 14 before I succumbed to the call of the wine, more wine, rum, Bow, more wine, more Bow and sundry other substances and passed out on the sofa. However, I saw enough to know that this is one of the finest works of cinematography in the known universe, and is fully deserving of an entry all of its own. However, given that I have already admitted that I didn’t make it to the end, I should probably experience the rest (‘watch’ is such an inadequate word) before I pass comment. The Boy Wonder dragged me off the sofa and into bed at about 4.30 and while I was surprisingly resilient in the face of his attempts to get my jeans off, I then felt a little tiny bit like absolute hell on Saturday. Having vetoed the café breakfast in favour of some Lucozade and then a rather fragile journey home on the train, I was then reminded of one of the many reasons I married the Boy Wonder – we came home, he installed me on the sofa, where he allowed me to lie on him feeling peculiar and encouraged me to drink tiny sips of water and snooze. He then (and this is the heroic part) went out and got me a McDonalds, which has always been my staple hangover cure, and which perked me up sufficiently to actually move from my prone position and attempt a little light wandering around and more telly watching. The Boy Wonder would have lived up to his name was it not for the fact that I was physically incapable of experiencing wonder, stuck as I was in a state of slight nausea and a headache. However, he is the perfect hangover nurse, so I might consider hiring him out to those less fortunate than myself, although only on days when I can actually move on my own…

Is it acceptable to have a genre of music in existence named after the only venue in which you can fit enough people to absorb the appalling blandness

This refers of course to the horror that is ‘stadium rock’. Pretty much every band I want to see comes under the heading of ‘the smaller the venue the better’ in my book. I don’t want to watch Tony Joe White on a screen on a stage from half a mile back, and even the Corn Exchange here seems a little cavernous for some bands, so why you would pay £50 a head to stand amongst 65,000 other people being distracted by the fact that the music and the images don’t synch up because it’s all happening SO far away? It’s not that I haven’t been to gigs in these venues – when I was 12 my Mum took the unprecedented decision (probably based on lies that I told) to allow me to go to see Metallica at the Milton Keynes Bowl, supported by Megadeth and Diamond Head. But my friend Annabel and I were right at the front, in an area presumably reserved for blindingly underage pre-teen girls who would otherwise have been crushed in the melee, so there was no need to watch the screens. The Boy Wonder and I did also see BB King at Wembley arena, and whilst we were really glad to be there as it was his last gig in this country, it was all seated and we weren’t that close (which was a blessing when Gary Moore was parading his unfathomably ugly mug around, playing for too long so that BB King had to cut his set short – a desperately poor show for a support act and something for which he will never be forgiven), and we were in no doubt that if we could see him in the US in a smaller venue, the atmosphere would be awesome more on its own merits rather than the pleasure we personally got from seeing him at all. Thinking about it though, I think I can understand the appeal of going to see a band like U2 in a stadium as it reduces the chances that the crushingly identical sound of every song won’t actually embed itself into your very pores like skunk stink. If I was forced to go and see U2, I would be grateful for every extra yard that I could be away from the stage, and I can’t think of a better use for a U2 fan than a human shield. I know that stadium rock originated with bands like Boston, Foreigner and Journey, who have now reached the point of almost cult status amongst people who accept that ‘More than a Feeling’ is a classic of its time but wouldn’t really buy a Boston album. But I am talking about the middle-of-the-road aural fluff that now bears the name as though there needs to be no other information about the music than that thousands of people are stupid enough to like it. Throughout the years genres of music have been named to give some idea of what you can expect – the blues was the blues before it even became synonymous with a musical style, country and western needs no explanation, and if you can’t form a rough idea of what to expect from a death metal band, then you probably shouldn’t listen to any. But ‘Stadium’ or ‘Arena’ rock seems such a low standard to reach for musically – the idea that a genre exists because the music buying public are too lazy to really listen to music and make up their own minds, a music buying public who can tell you their favourite song (a test I always find separates those who really have an interest in music from those who only own albums by top 40 artists), and those who buy the output of an artist they like indiscriminately and will like whatever they get. The very notion of classifying an act based on the kind of venue they play is ridiculous and surely shows that those who enjoy that kind of music are by nature crowd followers. (Please note, this does not apply to circuits – they are genres within genres, and should be considered separately). This is not to say that I think that the kind of music I like is the ‘right’ kind – for a start there is a very wide gap between some of the genres that I would choose as my favourites – just that if you like music, you should like it for more than the fact that everyone you know likes it, for more than the dreaded ‘you should see their stage-show’ lameness, it should be about making you feel something, not involving you in conspicuous displays of success on the part of that band. Whenever I have said that I don’t like U2, I am met with incredulity: ‘How can you not like U2 – everybody likes U2’ but nobody has ever come up with any real reason why they like them. When the Boy Wonder expounds his thoughts on The Grateful Dead, he can give you a million reasons why he likes them, with no minor reference to the fact that a lot of their output was toot as well, and then, if you’re still awake he will give you a million more, and then play you some of their songs, and if you don’t like the first one he plays, he will find another one which might be more your thing and so on until one of you falls asleep usually. But we, and most of our friends have reasons for liking every song, not necessarily logical reasons, but if someone can’t understand what you mean by ‘it’s so funky it hurts’ then the chances are you need to move on. In conclusion, I am mostly annoyed by the identikit blandness of the music available at the moment; I would like to be able to go to one good gig in my local area a month, rather than having to fork out to go to London every so often just to see someone half decent; I would like to have conversations with people about music that don’t end up with me saying ‘You can’t say Guy Clarke’s * crap just because you haven’t heard of him’; I would like to see an episode of Jools Holland where the acts are actually new and talented and interesting and not just a hideous preview of what we can expect from every ‘new’ band we’ll hear in the next 18 months. Is that too much to ask? Possibly… *Insert suitable alternative here

Words only Mums use

Snazzy Natty Cronies Dither Crumbs Bother Nifty Swish Jazzy This is not exhaustive, but if you find yourself using them and you have no known children, you should probably check whether you're up the spout or not...

Who came up with the two day weekend?

As far as I am concerned, the entire notion of a ‘working week’ is misguided – surely there’s work and there’s time to do it. Splitting everyone’s life up into time when they should be working and time when it’s alright to do all the things they actually choose to do, seems perverse and wrongheaded. Especially if, like me, you think that really the only purpose of working is to be able to afford a house to live in and things to do with yourself when you’re not at work. Plus, when I was a kid, we were told that robots and computers would be doing all the work (apparently even the creative input required for certain roles) and that we would have to come up with new ways to amuse ourselves in ‘the future’. As it stands, I think that there is a mismatch between the work week and our ‘leisure time’ allowance – if I am feeling dynamic enough to do something on a Friday night, it feels like I’ve had a bonus weekend night, but then want to stay in bed until Saturday afternoon, meaning that if we then have plans for Saturday night, the chances of actually achieving anything before Monday morning are pretty minimal. The drawing in of the evenings draws attention to the fruitlessness of attempting meaningful achievements on a weeknight (other than trying to eat everything in our freezer which is a challenge by which I have found myself surprisingly inspired), although I am not sure whether that is because the lack of heating in the house means the Boy Wonder and I are confined to the living room if we are to maintain circulation in our extremities. All in all, less work and more play would suit me fine, and I cannot for the life of me imagine who devised the current system.

Stars from the 80s – what’s their secret?

I don’t know whether it is because there has been a bit of an 80s resurgence recently, or whether it’s down to the amount of decade-spanning TV I have watched over the last few weeks, but I have noticed a disturbing effect - a number of artists from the 80s seem to look younger now than they did then. I have no idea how this is possible – even allowing for possible botox and plastic surgery, the youthful appearance of artists like Sinitta is something I find incomprehensible. Samantha Janus is another one - admittedly, her career missed the actual 80s by a couple of years, but the effect is the same. Having watched a couple of episodes of ‘Pie in the Sky’, a snippet of ‘Game On’ and then caught a glimpse of her in Eastenders, Samantha Janus’s apparent inability to age was apparent as never before. There have always been a range of people who just look better now than they used to – David Bowie, Mick Jagger - but I have always put that down to the fact that their stars were in the ascendant at a time when men’s fashion, particularly in the music industry was for a more androgynous, controversial look and having been brought up in the 80s I never fully appreciated that it was at one time considered attractive. But these age defying women are something of a mystery to me – the secret of the anti-ageing process seems to be that the 80s were a shockingly bad time for fashion. Between shoulder pads, fluorescent leggings and orange eye shadow, it seemed to have been an era where the fashion was designed to make everyone look hideous. There is no flattering way to wear leggings: they look like overly tight sausage skins on anyone with any spare flesh, somehow manage to look equally appalling when the wearer is so skinny that they leggings are actually baggy, and even on those with the perfect legs they are still a particularly unflattering way of demonstrating them. Why they became the must-have clothing item for a generation of sweating ecstasy fiends is beyond me, but I think it has helped those who have weathered the storm of the 80s ‘scene’ and emerged in the new millennium looking as though they have been sealed in tupperware for the last 15 years like that family in ‘Eerie Indiana’. The only man I can think of who approaches a similar phenomenon is Andy Peters, who just looks the same, and quite possibly will for the rest of his life, but having begun to ponder on the matter, I am sure that my brain will produce a selection of appropriately ageless males too. I will not be drawn on the Madonna issue – the very fact that the media seem to think that she is the only artist ever to have reached the age of fifty annoys me so intensely that I cannot begin to form a rational thought on whether she looks better now than she did then.