The Hobbit: An Unexpected Pleasure.

 

The film opens with a very old man addressing someone with a silly name that turns out to be his nephew. What the significance of the nephew is we do not learn. Perhaps he's in another film somewhere. Anyway. The old 'hobbit', Bilbo, has decided to use his time constructively in planning for an enormous party to which clearly many hobbits have been invited by... writing a 250 page memoir. Frodo, who doesn't know that the party is also for his birthday, decides to make up for this by going and sitting under a tree. Meanwhile a hoard of party-planners wearing invisible horse stockings borrowed from Rohan scurry about doing all the work.

Bilbo – who in The Lord of the Rings is described as looking the same at 111 as he did at 50 – is now so puffy and ancient that he is being played by Dame Judi Dench*, and he provides an illustration to show that the evil power of the ring has given him a different shaped nose (young Bilbo having refused a prosthesis on the grounds that it would be like 'putty scraped over too much head'). He tells us the story of EreborEreborEreborEreborEreborEreborErebor, a Dwarvish kingdom assailed by disembodied parts of a dragon. We meet the leader of the diaspora of exiled Dwarves, Thorin, who was so traumatised by the dragon's attack that he seeks refuge in Star Trek movies and walks around dressed as a Klingon.

A magic smoke ring carries us back 60 years to when Bilbo's nose was slightly more pixie-like. Gandalf appears and for no obvious reason invites Bilbo on an adventure. Film Bilbo is less worried about offending wizards and totally neglects to invite Gandalf to tea, but at least he has installed special windows that make the eyeballs of nosey people extra large and alarming. We are not treated to the view from the other side of the glass that makes Bilbo look like he has a tiny head and an enormous neck. Gandalf leaves chuckling at the vision.

Dwarves start appearing. Ever on the look out for commercial gain the Dwarves have sold all their hoods to the rangers on the Shire borders and all their tassels to a less than salubrious 'gentleman's' establishment in Bree. So it is that they have nothing to hang in Bilbo's hall other than weapons, and it's probably a good idea they put them down before they hurt anyone. The film Dwarves appear to be largely a parade of bearded, super-powered imbeciles, with those powers focused on an admittedly impressive ability to catch plates without looking at them. Thorin would nonetheless take them over an army 'because they turned up'. This logic is irrefutable, since presumably he is comparing them to an army that doesn't turn up, and despite at least one of the Dwarves being Frank Spencer they are theoretically more useful than an non-existent army, if only slightly.

With the Dwarves being a motley collection of slightly middle-class tradesmen with rubber faces, it's clear that Bilbo has been invited along to provide some much needed gravitas. Gandalf, on the other hand, has clearly chosen him because he is 'also a Took', which we know from other movies means “clownish moron”. Unfortunately, he can't pass the all-important Thorin “showing up” test because they're having the meeting in his front room and he's already there. This leads to Bilbo having to engineer as many showing up opportunities as possible in order to prove to Thorin he belongs, even though in order to keep Showing Up he does occasionally have to run away or over sleep.

Bilbo accidentally joins the quest after he spends the morning trying to fly Middle-Earth's most disappointing kite. Realising after 20 minutes of unimpressive fluttering that it is in fact his contract, he decides to sign it and Show Up. Thorin makes a small mental note, not for the last time.

The story then proceeds for a while along similar lines to the book. Film Gandalf and Film Thorin bicker about general Elf-racism, leading Gandalf to temporarily block Thorin on Facebook and storm off. The talking wallet is thankfully replaced by snot, and Bilbo is caught during a slightly pony rescue mission. The cockney trolls play rough and bag up the Dwarves, but Gandalf shows us his patented Mobile Sun ™ (later seen hovering behind the Rohirrim as they attack the armies of Mordor from the North) which he's been hiding in a rock (the casual viewer might think this is just letting the dawn sun shine through, but from the Trollshaws that would naturally still have been behind the nearby Misty Mountains at that point) and turns the trolls to stone.

Thorin then shows further hostility to Elves as he tries to refuse one of their swords, but this is because he thinks he's a Klingon and the Elves keep dressing as Vulcans to annoy him. Bilbo gets a sword seemingly made from the compressed bones of the trolls' victims.

Earlier on we were introduced to wizard Sylvester the McCoy. They insist on calling him a different name, but he's just being Sylvester McCoy so the character name isn't important. He saves his prickly hedgehog friend, but the presence of big spiders mercifully distract them from doing the congratulatory Disney song and dance number they were obviously planning.

McCoy eventually meets up with the company, where he pulls a few faces and hands over a portentous sword. Gandalf makes a logical leap and decides that the presence of large dogs shows that the company is being hunted. The viewers by now are aware that Thorin is indeed being pursued by the remnants of Guillermo Del Toro's involvement in the project. Del Toro's imagination repeatedly impinges on the film and tries to bugger up the story, but ultimately cannot stop the Dwarves reaching Rivendell, where we meet Smiley Elrond, Smirking Elrond's more cheerful brother. Smiley Elrond helps by taking the Dwarves to his special moon rumpus room, where he goes to enjoy a glass of moonshine and play moon-twister, watches Moon on DVD, moons the passing Elves on the cliffs below, and listens to Shepherd Moons by Enya, as well as reading the occasional moon-rune in June (in the back of a spoon), which he does now to reveal the secrets of the Lonely Mountain's secret door. Laying the map on his special moon air-hockey table, Elrond reveals that the Dwarves are in a desperate race against time. For some reason he is then moderately surprised when they leave the next day.

As the Dwarves prepare to sneak off, we are reintroduced to some old faces. Very much the oldest face on offer is Saruman's who enjoys a brief vertical establishing shot (just to prove he can still do it) before being allowed a nice sit down. Galadriel appears to spend most of the meeting of the White Council standing on a turntable that gently wraps the bottom of her dress around her legs. This makes her so giddy she then entertains herself passing telepathic notes across her desk to Gandalf, possibly inviting him round the back of the bike sheds for a snog.

If the Film White Council appear to be ineffectual, they are at least true to the spirit of the Book White Council, which takes 400 years to establish that the Necromancer is Sauron. Three films suddenly doesn't seem quite so unreasonable in comparison.

After the Dwarves survive a very literal Battle of Wounded Knee, Bilbo becomes aware that without going off anywhere, he cannot Show Up and impress Thorin. His cunning plan is thwarted by Goblins, who reveal a somewhat uncomfortable method of getting into their halls from the Front Porch (how they get back out again, this tale does not tell; possibly they have rocket packs). Fortunately, the whole Company has secretly been turned to rubber by Smiley Elrond's magic salad (justifying the otherwise mysterious focus on food while in Rivendell), allowing them to survive an increasingly unlikely series of falls onto solid rock from an assortment of precipitous heights. Bilbo, being in general about 3 inches shorter than his companions, is so small that the goblins mislay him, allowing him to bounce his way down a cliff face for the psychological fun and games of the famous “Riddles in the Floodlights” sequence.

“Down there in the floodlights lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I don't know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum - as bright as brightness, except for two cute blue eyes in a thin face.”

Despite the editing out of this brief sequence...

“This time Gollum tried something a bit more difficult and unpleasant:

It can only be seen, cannot be felt

Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt

It lies on stars and in the sun

It shines on the pitch of a stadium

It dazzles frogs, moths it catches

Makes shadows, discomfits badgers.

Unfortunately for Gollum Bilbo had heard that sort of thing before; and the answer was all round him any way. “Light!” he said without even scratching his head or putting on his thinking sunglasses.”

...we enjoy the confrontation before Gollum realises he's been had. Bilbo, dazzled by the underground brightness, misses his footing and slips. The tiny pilots inside the ring guide it carefully onto his outstretched finger and he disappears.

Fortunately for Bilbo, Concorde has been decommissioned for Health & Safety reasons, and instead putting on the ring has the sound of a gerbil blowing in your ear and a vague sensation of having drunk too much absinthe. Bilbo takes pity on poor Gollum, and very sensitively kicks him in the face before escaping the mountains for ever.

The Dwarves, meanwhile, have fully exploited their rubbery status in a 10 minute chase sequence in which they fall approximately half a mile down a sheer cliff, culminating in Dame Edna landing on top of them, with few ill effects. The goblins, meanwhile, are left to review their approach to security when their cunning system of rickety bridges, rotten wooden ladders and rope swings are used against them so effectively. A review is set up, headed by a senior Civil Servant, and eventually concluding that in future the goblins should build a number of wide solid platforms made of teak, that goblin security guards should be issued with tiny parachutes and that any future interrogation of prisoners should take place on the ground unless they've already had their arms cut off.

Gandalf, realising that the rubberisation spell will soon wear off, hurries the Dwarves into the daylight. There the Dwarves stand in the beautiful reddish glow of a sun that has already sunk below the mountains, and provide Bilbo with his great chance: he can now Show Up! He is slightly disappointed by Thorin's less than fulsome reaction, but the Great Dwarf makes a mental note that Bilbo Showed Up, not for the last time.

Just when everything appears to be meandering towards the End of Part One, Del Toro's imagination bursts back into the film and the Orc with the Fork ™* chases them up a tree. Gandalf places an order with EagleCabs, but it's December, and frankly there are a lot of parties and to be perfectly honest there might be a bit of a wait.

While they wait, Thorin decides to single-handedly attack the Orc horde that all 15 of them had been flying from in mortal terror moments before. We don't see this, but Gandalf's burning pine cones act like the pills on Pac-Man, and just for a few seconds the Dwarves are invincible and allowed to eat the Orcs. Bilbo decides to Show Up again, but doesn't manage to eat any Orcs before the effect wears off and he and Thorin are in mortal danger.

EagleCabs arrive just in time and drop the company on a convenient eagle heliport. Thorin turns out not to be dead, appreciates Bilbo Showing Up and gives him a hug while crying, which is particularly understandable given moments before he was being bitten in half by a wolf.

The film ends with them staring at a mountain that is still 250 miles away, revealing that Middle Earth is actually flat! This information will no doubt become crucial in the next film when Gandalf summons Great A'tuin to eat Smaug.

The Purist

 

* with thanks to @perfectlyvague

Conclusion

I have come to a simple conclusion: I have Hobbits on the brain. Not the little furry fuzzballs themselves, cute and leaf-eared as they may be, but the film and its future fellows.

The primary reason for this, beyond my status as a general all round Tolkien geek, is the fact that I still can't see the damn thing. This post is not about my slowly receding Chicken Pox (you want 'agony' for that), but its lingering effect is that I'm still in isolation. Sitting, with my germs, in a cinema with lots of potential unPoxed people is to be frowned upon, even if some of my scabs look a little like popcorn.

 Instead, I can read reviews, watch clips, try to ignore my friends on Facebook (my only form of regular human contact) as they discuss details. I can read the damn thing (gasp!) but I can't see it. As a result I think it's taking on greater proportions of importance in my mind. Frankly, up until the reviews started coming in I wasn't all that bothered. I had obsessed over every tiny detail of the production of the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the extent that by the time I watched it the film was so denuded of surprises that it left me cold. So I have intentionally ignored "An Unexpected Journey", so successfully that I was in danger of being rather ennuish about the whole thing - not like me at all, when it comes to M.E.

So when I find myself musing on a facebook status that someone's "three hours' sleep is catching them up", I end up with Tolkienish imagery entering my head, imagining three hours' sleep as a sort of Grey Rider, hooded and cloaked as if it does not want to be known, slowly gaining on the bad sleeper until it comes upon him, in some dark place, far from help. I shared this idea, much to the horror of the friend who felt that I had added a new terror to exhaustion. So I amended the image in my head from a Grey Rider to a Hot Pink Rider, on the basis that just because I'm starting to lose my marbles I don't need to scatter everyone else's.

Agony

Not having been ill that often, I'd always been particularly twitchy about the fact that I'd never had Chicken Pox. I picked up by osmosis that it was much worse to get it as an adult (not with the same specific horrors as mumps, but...) and the thought of all that itching for days on end, well... I just didn't like the sound of it at all.

I even asked my travel doctor if she thought it was worth getting the varicella vaccine. Sister Mary*, however, was having none of it. "You're almost 40 and have lived in London half your life!" she exclaimed. "There's no way you've never had the pox!"

(looking back, the idea that some people have this without realising it makes me wants to hit them with saucepans, but since they're presumably 5 years old I'll probably let them off)

No matter how many times I insisted that I hadn't, there was no convincing her. And since I wanted to be immune to it, in the end I stopped arguing. This is what people do when they are told something they want to hear.

And, like most things that are what you want to hear, it turned out to be total and utter bollocks.

I knew I'd been exposed (cricket club AGM, of all places - 36 year old fellow sufferer from the more isolated plains of New Zealand). I'd checked the immunity status of my fellow actors (all fine, though worrying about it gave me a reputation as a hypochondriac). The most likely time for me to come down the main illness was right in the middle of show-week, but I made it through to the cast party with nothing worse than fatigue and dizziness, and frankly - being a bit of a wuss -  I don't need to be ill for that to happen.

I didn't drink much at the party and got home just as England were knocking off the winning runs to go 2-1 up against India. Naturally, hangover or not, I expected to spend a lot of Sunday asleep. When I barely woke up at all, the tiny part of me that was conscious had a very bad feeling.

For those who don't know, from what I've read Chicken Pox in adults is nasty for three reasons. Firstly, the flu-like bit of it, where you feel like you've been run over by Boris Johnson's pants, is more severe than it is in children; more drawn out and more painful. This then can lead to complications, like pneumonia or the inflammation of practically every organ going, up to and including the testes (orchitis, the latter is called: I'll never look at Shagrat and Gorbag the same way again). Finally, the pox itself follows less predictable pattern than it apparently does with children, with the spots turning up anywhere on the skin and mucus membranes. And I mean anywhere. I'd rather be struck down by tiny vampires; at least they stay out of places where they're uninvited.

For all the massive whinge of this entry, I seem to have avoided complications of any kind, apart from a couple of infected spots that I'd idly scratched before I'd realised what was happening (one is under my eyebrow - this may be fun). But the whole experience was still truly horrible. What noone tells you (and I feel like I've read every webpage going on the illness, to the extent I was correcting NHS Direct at one point) is that it fucking hurts. It's agony. "Unbearable itchiness" doesn't begin to describe it. I felt like I was being devoured by giant ants or stung by wasps. A further rare complication is necrotising fasciitis , and there were times when it did indeed feel like a million organisms were munching on my skin. Fucking itchy? I think the medical profession is desperately trying to avoid scaring the bejeezus out of the 10% of adults who didn't have the Pox as a child. And the strongest painkiller they'll prescribe for this torment? Paracetamol.

Of course, the intensity of the pain does eventually go and is replaced by the legendary itchiness, though again 'itchy' summons up images of comedy itching powder in a cartoon character's underwear or people desperately rubbing at their hay-fevered eyes. This was just a wave of slightly smaller ants. Not scratching is never an problem - your body instinctively understands that to scratch this would just lead to bits of your own body coming off on your hands.

But you want the relief and sensation of scratching nonetheless. There are no creams, lotions or shampoos that can truly relieve this, and the sleep-depriving intensity of it drove me to drinking whisky and popping ibropufen at the same time. Fortunately, that stage lasted only 24 hours, and - several days in - I finally reached the 'annoying and uncomfortable' stage that - I suspect - is everyone else's default supposition of what having Chicken Pox is like.  

Now I look like Pinhead with aluminium alopecia and have learned that my tendency to buy only skin-tight clothing really does have its drawbacks, but I am essentially on the mend. And this is it, no matter how much of a ranty blog mood something like this puts you in, you do get through it in the end. It's only a week, after all. But poxless adults - do not take anyone's word for your immunity. If someone gives you a sniff of a chance to get the varicella vaccine, bite their hands off, before a thousand fiery ants start biting you. 

Spotty.

PS: If you think you've been exposed, apparently the vaccine still works after exposure and before symptoms, so don't sit back and wait for a week of evil. You do not want this.
 
* she isn't called Sister Mary.  But she really ought to be. 

Curtain

I'm on stage next week. There won't be a curtain, sadly - it's not that kind of theatre. It's a small studio above a very nice pub in Kentish Town, so what it lack in front of stage drapery it makes up for it easily accessed food and drink.

The lack of curtain has led the Director to get awfully excited about format flexibility, so we're doing the play "in the round", with at least some audience on every side. I'm looking forward to the occasional moments where I get confused and start talking to an audience member instead of one of the cast: it really, really, really could happen. 'Intimate' does not begin to describe it.

Hopefully people will not be freaked out by the lack of a veil between them and the actors. The play is a black comedy (or perhaps, for the pretentious amongst you, a "dark farce") about a bunch of self-obsessed, 30-something success-fetishists getting together for a NYE party in a country house in the middle of nowhere. Suffice it to say, it all goes a bit avocado-shaped, given there are hooded figures at the window, myriad lies to be uncovered and something very nasty and sharp lurking in the background. Oh, and Buckaroo. Possibly Twister, too, but that might still be vetoed on the grounds of taste.

Tickets are available here.

Produce

I have a love-hate relationship with avocados.

This is not to be confused with my love-hate relationship with armadillos, who keep hanging around the local bus shelters with their leathery armoured shells scaring the locals but helpfully decimating the troublesome London termite population. Or my love-hate relationship with advocaat which, despite being pleasingly sweet and custardy,  once ran off with a beloved girlfriend of mine and now regularly sends abusive postcards from an expensive holiday home in Mauritius.

No, avocados hold a special place in my heart and my spleen. I love them. I love their distinctive taste, their creamy texture and the fact that - loving them as I do - I then get told by health experts to eat even more of them. This is not something that happens with Irn Bru, and is therefore to be cherished, like a small dog who - although a bit embarassing because he tries to shag your Aunt Betty's leg when she comes to tea and keeps weeing on your CD player - also does your tax returns and forges convincing Jackson Pollocks.

Sadly, however, the Irn Bru analogy can prove useful. Would I like IB so much if when I reached for a bottle and upended it into my mouth, nothing happened? I would lower it, peer into the bottle and sigh. "This Irn Bru isn't ripe", I moan, popping it back into the sunlit window sill to speed the process.

The following day I come back and open the Irn Bru again. Still nothing. This despite the fact it has "ripe and ready" on a sticker across it. I put it back on the shelf.

The next day I'm incredibly busy and get home so late for work I go straight to bed and don't check the bottle.

The next day I reach for the Irn Bru and open it. I pour it into a glass, only to discover it's now gone grey and tastes of dishwater. It goes down the sink.

The avocado: produce that - from my experience - manages to be ripe and edible for about the length of a Peter Jackson movie. Miss this golden window of opportunity in either direction, and you're either crunching a bitter, zombie-green pebble, or a disintegrating, putrid bruise in fruit-form. I've thrown out so many avocados I don't know why I don't just throw them in the skip on the way back from the shops, or better still just beat them to a pulp with a hammer straight after using the self-checkout machine. It would save a lot of heartache.

Of course, trying that on the armadillos gets you nowhere and only annoys them. Hug a Shelly. It's the only way.

Modification

I was very relieved to hear that the Government's badger cull has been delayed for a bit, while highly paid officials decide whether or not it really is a fucking stupid idea. I was not alone in fearing that roving bands of psychopaths with a license to kill things with distinctive streaks of grey hair could lead to a bad end for people of my age.

Of course, unlike the poor old badger, hacking their TB'd lungs into a silk handkerchief as they write poems of loss and despair in their under-siege setts, I can very easily turn to a range of products to disguise myself and throw off the marauding gangs, though I should probably be more careful: a recent habit of going for reddish brown means I put myself at danger of being trampled by horses and eaten by beagles from an illegal hunt.

Dyeing one's hair is a delicate business. As modifications go it's relatively minor - compare painting Just for Men into your stubble to having buttock implants, and suddenly it doesn't seem quite so embarrassing - but I do worry about where it will lead. Assuming my hair doesn't all fall out one day (the genetic jury is out on that one) I don't want to run the risk of ending up like Paul McCartney, looking like my own waxwork replica that's been left to close the radiator overnight. Judging exactly when to stop covering your grey is like to be as complicated as working out when to stop wearing jeans or start becoming a fan of charismatic orchestra conductors.

But at the moment, while I'm relatively confident my skin's elasticity is not such that combining it with dark hair would cause me to look like a victim of a slow-working alien disintegration ray, there's no way I'm allowing grey to have its way. If my hair would just fade respectably, that would be one thing. Instead, my hair is performing some sort of crazy art experiment on my head, a follicular abstract project of uncertain ambition. It's latest triumph is a neat circle of grey just above my right ear, a colourless crop circle that bears no relation to any of the other grey hairs around it. I live in fear that I'll wake up and find that the greys have painted 666 on my hair with impressive neatness.

I might get lucky. Maybe the grand plan is for my hair to delicately outline the location of the unrecovered Brink's-MAT gold bullion. I'll be staring in the mirror with horror, aghast at the salt-and-pepper disaster on my head, when I'll suddenly realise that I'm gazing at a set of coordinates and a crudely drawn picture of Hayward's Heath. I'll race south with a shovel as the coordinates lead me to a Sussex wood, and just as I strike the unmistakable feel of metal buried the soil, I'll be shot and killed by the Government's badger hunters, like the end of Nostromo but with omnivorous mammals.

I think, on balance, I'll keep dyeing it for a while. It's just safer.  

Ladder

I've never worn tights. Well, I say that, when I was 5 my mum concocted what was possibly the most bizarre fancy dress outfit ever to create two "Jubilee Trumpeters", consisting of me and my brother wearing souvenir golden jubilee carrier bags and a pair of white tights (the trumpets were adapted cardboard tinfoil rolls). And I have a vague recollection of there being a pair of yellow tights in the dressing up box in my bedroom when I was little, which would almost certainly have been used to create some sort of superhero get-up at one point. But, APART FROM THAT, I have never worn tights.

They have always struck me as a curiously impractical garment. Any clothing item which breaks the very first time you wear it, and provokes more of a "oh well, that was bad luck" rather than a scream of "fucking bastards, I'm taking these back" might as well be replaced with tissue paper and roll of Sellotape. Or perhaps a form of pasta.

Life, however, throws plenty of tights substitutes at the unwary male. Or at least this unwary male (and there must be few more unwary than I). Most durable to date are my cycling leggings. Well, actually, they're not cycling leggings at all, they're cheap-as-chips running leggings from purveyors of bargain shite Sports Direct. But I wear them when cycling, and thus far they have proved impressively durable, despite my tendency to forget to unzip the ankle looseners when I take them off: I end up hopping around with stretchy leggings attached to my foot as I try to pull them off, like a pixie attached to a piece of chewing gum.

(It's amazing how bothered people can be about how others dress - read this thread as a prime example of hot-under-the-collar-fuckwittery)

Most fragile seems to be the ultimate in male tights-substitute, the skinny jean. Despite clearly being a young persons trouser (and therefore out of bounds to angora wearing oldies)  I can't resist building my entire wardrobe around the Skinny.  Perhaps it's a reaction to spending most of my twenties wearing baggy clothes to hide how skinny I (thought that I) was. Perhaps I secretly just want to wander around in tights for some reason*. Perhaps I'm having a mid-life crisis and can't afford a sports car, a jet-ski or a giant, ceramic replica of Jeremy Clarkson.

But Skinnies, it turns out, are a bit on the tissue-paper-and-pasta side. They don't ladder, as such, but I've never worn through any leg wear as quickly as a work through my tiny jeans. It might be that, despite being determinedly on the slim side, I'm just not quite the right shape for them. They are clearly not - for instance - designed for the frequent cyclist. Not only does wearing them while actually cycling lead to worn-through holes in very embarrassing places (stemming from friction of taut denim against saddle) but if you've got thighs and a bum you're going to have to be careful when bending. There's really not a lot of give. Bending at the knees might look after your back when heavy lifting; it doesn't do much for your trousers, and the subsequent journey home on the tube can be awkward.

Maybe I should look into tights after all. And maybe a carrier bag.

S.

*I'm thinking more from the actory side of things than being a transvestite, but you can draw your own conclusions.

Sake

It is indicative of just how drink obsessed I am at the moment that rather than reading this as 'purpose' or 'benefit' I thought instead of a Japanese rice-based alcohol. But then I got over that and remembered that I don't really drink rice based liquor and wouldn't have anything to say about it other than:
I'd like to go to Japan one day.

It's amazing what you can do with rice. I wonder if you can also build a helicopter out of it?

 Japan suffers in my travel plans because of its determinedly northern hemisphere persuasions. I'm sure it regularly cries with anguish about the missed opportunities of being north of the equator and missing out on visits by cricket-loving Brits. If you're going to have a summer at exactly the same time as my summer, frankly you're just not trying hard enough to get my attention. Who works out your scheduling?

 A friend has just said "this time next week it'll be 4:30". So it's going to be dark at the end of the working day instead of just relentlessly gloomy (and right now there's a strange whispy but vast layer of blackish cloud drifting damply underneath the usual smooth grey shell of the autumn sky, as if someone somewhere has set fire to a whale), and this is the point where my motivation to flee the country comes into sharp focus. But Japan? It's single saving grace for a winter holiday would be going to those hot pools that always feature in David Attenborough shows and watching red-faced monkeys kick the shit out of each other in pursuit of a good bath. So, for my own sake, I need some light, some sunshine and - should I not get them - some rice-based liquor and a slice of cake. I'll take what I can get.

Shakiness

Sometimes I don't get hungry. Of course, this happens to everyone, but that's normally because, for instance, they've just eaten a massive cake just before the girl jumps out and have eaten her as well (leading to an expensive public inquiry), or because someone once served them a cocktail with liquid nitrogen and now they don't have a stomach (for fuck's sake).

No, sometimes I don't get hungry even though I haven't eaten for ages. The first I know about the fact that actually I'm a couple of meals short of a picnic is when the end of my nose turns slightly numb and I come over a bit indistinct until I eat a samosa or something. It's the only time I ever consider eating a Mars Bar, a confection almost perfectly designed to be unappetising. Looking as it does like a small bit of fungally infected wood and tasting sweeter than the stench of a dead mouse under the floorboards, Mars' crowning glory is the way they've made the chocolate so sticky that I have to clean my teeth about five times before I stop spitting brown like a chewing-tobacco addicted cowboy. At least Coco-Pops only turn the milk brown.

Anyway, that's all rather beside the point. I have no idea why my stomach sometimes decides it can't be bothered to alert me to the fact that I should, in fact, have eaten a cheese sandwich several hours ago and am now on the verge of catatonia. It's a bit like having a car with a malfunctioning fuel light that works some of the time, so that not only do you not have any idea how much fuel you've got, you forget to keep track of it because on the last three occasions everything was working just fine.

It's potentially awkward, since I tend not to have much food in the house. This is because I have a slightly erratic lifestyle and there's no guarantee I'm going to be home at mealtimes, so if I buy perishables they tend to, well, perish. So I live hand to mouth - or rather, Morrison's to mouth - leaving the very real possibility of forgetting to eat and then having to crawl shakily on my hands and knees to the nearest corner shop so they can sell me an overpriced flapjack.

In fact surely you'd have to be on the verge of starvation to buy one of their flapjacks, and yet they seem to have quite an acceptable turnover* of them. Which makes me wonder if there are not hordes of shakiness-beset Londoners crawling into convenience stores across town forking out £2 for a life-giving square of stickiness. I may not be alone after all.

* or possibly an acceptable flapjack of turnovers

Fascist

Yesterday I may have upset a funny man.

It's entirely possible that he might actually be quite funny, though I confess I have not expended a great deal of effort finding out. I spotted a RT which went thusly:

“Given the physical restrictions of ET's species, in order to build spaceships etc, they must have mastered a slave race”

After a brief moment of appreciation of the iconoclastic audacity of the tweet, I paused and thought: hang on – the film goes to great lengths to show exactly how ET’s race overcomes their physical limitations (telekinesis, multi-purpose glowing digits, that sort of thing), which rather spoils the joke. I retweeted it again, adding “> bullshit” as a coda.

I’d intended to explain myself, but I got distracted. So my hard-line joke-analysis sat unexplained on Twitter, until the joke’s progenitor spotted it and replied:

“Cheers. Nice to know a joke is still appreciated.”

So now I feel really bad, as if I’ve been caught being some sort of geeky humour-fascist. Though now I’m wondering what a geeky humour-fascist would look like – perhaps a uniform, Jarvis Cocker specs and a nose that lights up? Not a red one, a real one, but with a small LED horribly inserted in their nasal canal. They are fascists after all.

A sense of humour is a precious thing. Its absence has imperilled the career of England’s Kevin Pietersen, and of course it’s widely accepted to be a prerequisite for every woman who’s ever pursued love through classified ads or internet dating*. Scientists have also discovered that you can produce electricity equivalent to a medieval waterwheel by plugging seven clowns into a Speak & Spell. Basically, a sense of humour is vital, but a bit like a hamstring: you never think about it until it starts to stiffen up. Except that’s not entirely true. For a start no-one has ever got punched in the face or persecuted by the Daily Mail because someone thought their hamstring was off-colour.  And secondly, I suspect people think about their sense of humour quite a lot, just probably not in a very realistic way.

As Marie says in When Harry Met Sally: ‘Everybody thinks they have good taste and a sense of humour but they couldn't possibly all have good taste.’ And presumably they can’t all have a sense of humour. How many British people would own up to not having a sense of humour? It would be akin to saying “Hi, I like kitten death”, or “I still love Jimmy Saville”. But why should it be so impossible to imagine someone proudly saying, “Hello, I’m Geoffrey. I’m extremely intelligent, work in Great Ormond Street saving the lives of cute children, I climbed Kilimanjaro last year for Marie Curie Cancer Care and I haven’t understood a single joke told to me since 1986”? 

Fair enough, I’d have gone off him for the appalling boasting long before we got to the sense of humour part.

 

So, am I losing my sense of humour? Do I have to worry about it in the same way I worry about losing my hair? Do people get less humorous? According to the University of Glasgow, this happens from about 52 years old. Some clever Americans think that grandparents just can’t spot a joke. I’m just waiting for the research that says all over 65s want to invite Jim Davidson round for tea to listen to his charming views on social equality while offering him some knitted cake. Losing your sense of humour looks like a real threat. Whether that’s worse than losing hair or, say, liver function is probably a moot point, but it certainly lends yet more terror to the ageing process – as if it needed it.

Then again, some of this research compares the reaction of old people to teenagers, suggesting yet again that there’s a correlation between having a sense of humour and laughing uncontrollably at BBC3 shit starring Will Mellor. I’m not particularly convinced of that. Maybe the grumpy old bastards just got discerning on your ass.

* Do men – in general - also seek GSOH? Or are they faintly terrified at the possibility that their date might be funnier than them? 

PS: For a more serious take on recent instances of Comedy Fascism, here's Rufus Hound

Whiskered

 We're approaching the 10th anniversary of a number of things, many of which make me smile, if a little sadly at times. Soon to come up is a decade since I ventured out to try and find Incognito Theatre
amongst the suburban labyrinth of New Southgate. I turned up, walked past it about 7 times (it is awfully well named), before finally spotting it around the back of a dark and silent doctors' surgery. The theatre had a church hall feel, and was populated only by elderly people painting the set, but one of them immediately offered me a part in The Comedy of Errors, and I'd found a theatrical home that would look after me for six years.

 The second, coming up in December, is a decade since my first ever trip to Australia. It was supposed to be a "trip of a lifetime" deal, a seven week loop of the eastern half of the continent. Then it turned out to be the equivalent of those moments where you wish a polite goodbye to someone you don't really like that much, and then find you're both walking off in the same direction and have to do it again several times. By the time I said a proper goodbye to Australia years later I knew her quite well, and miss her still.

I mock you, Amish guy....

The third 10th anniversary is very much linked to the second. That trip trip to Oz was the first time I ever grew a beard. It wasn't really a very good beard, as you can see. It was a product of some sort of sinful coming together of not being arsed to shave and thinking it gave me a rugged traveller look, which I suppose it did in a sort of old beyond my time McKewans-lager-swigging-itinerant sort of way. I was camping half the time so I probably looked like I'd been sleeping in a tramp's pants anyway. I lost my voice about two thirds through the holiday, and in my silence some young English tourists did confess that they thought I was cool and mysterious in a Clint Eastwood sort of way, since I spoke seldom and only in a gravelly whisper. It didn't last long. I got my voice back and immediately started singing Mairzy Doats. The whiskered visage could not save me from falling abysmally in their estimation.

 I may have said goodbye to Incognito and Australia, but I haven't said goodbye to the beard. It leaves me every now and again. Where it goes, I'm not quite sure. I got a postcard from Madagascar (a picture of a hang-gliding lemur) once in handwriting so bad it could only have been scrawled by a disembodied blob of facial hair, and there was the embarrassing time when it was caught trespassing in the back garden of Brian Wilde from Last of the Summer Wine, but apart from that, all I know is that it comes back to me eventually. And I'm very glad about that. Because I feel terribly exposed without it. Beardless pictures of myself make me cringe and want to quickly scrawl a fake one over my chin with a flip-chart marker. Even as the whiskers grow white in places and invite the intervention of Just for Men, (or at a push some more marker pen, though probably not a green one) I have developed the deep and abiding conviction without facial hair I look like Steve Coogan or, worse, like me. And that would be fairly disappointing for everybody.

Listing

I used to love The Radio Times. It seems rather odd now, given I have absolutely no relationship with formalised television schedules whatsoever (good old iPlayer), but back in the dreamy, rose-tinted days of yore the new RT would be optically devoured every week.

It didn’t take long. I’m fairly sure that not only did it only contain the two BBC channels (and no daytime TV, of course) but also lacked about 75% of the endless features that now pad out the magazine. So it was an easy task to familiarise myself with the future. It gave a sense of certainty in an often confusing world. You might not understand your maths homework, but you knew Wogan was going to be on at 7pm on Friday.

It also led to a minor theological debate in the household. In the reality created by my extremely religious mother, the first day of the week was Sunday. The rest of the world seemed to think the first day of the week was Monday. But The Radio Times, perhaps hoping to be known as The Radical Times, went out on a limb and declared that Saturday was the first day of the week. It’s an odd exception to the general rule that TV shapes your thinking: despite the fact that in TV listings land Saturday is still the first day of the week, I don’t think I know anyone who thinks it actually is.

But I think my adoration of the RT began to fade after the deregulation of listings and the expansion to cover other channels. It wasn’t the dirty presence of ITV in my beloved magazine that so bothered me as much as the special notice the BBC were forced to display when advertising that weeks new edition.

“Other listings magazines are available.”

 Of course I knew that already. The TV Times would make an occasional surreptitious appearance in the house at Christmas to round out our festive televisual knowledge. But that familiarity was too cosy, and certainly couldn't excite me. The knowledge - suddenly revealed to me - that yet more listings magazines were out there, waiting for my loving finger tips to turn their cheap coloured paper, that knowledge created a restlessness in me that destroyed my relationship with The Radio Times. I was unsatisfied. I had itchy eyes, desperate for something new. Variety was everything. I imagined the vast array of listings magazines that might come into my life. I would now see them advertised on my occasional foray onto ITV, rubbing their interviews with minor soap-stars IN MY FACE. Oh, it could not be borne! The Radio Times lay in a neglected heap, wrap-around souvenir covers flapping slightly in a reproachful zephyr.

And then came that fateful day when I actually walked into a shop and bought another listing magazine. It was a moment of emotionally charged betrayal. I plucked TV (fill in random suffix word here) from a shelf, as well a top shelf copy of Girls Dressed as Camels to hide it inside and avoid embarrassment. I got it home and for a time the excitement continued as I looked up what was going to be on Channel 4 at 9.15 on a Thursday night. And then I realised it.

There was nothing special here. The information was the same. The paper was slightly thinner. The articles slightly less well written. The whole experience was, frankly, cheap - and not as different as I had anticipated. I took TV Whatever and threw it in the bin, this time wrapping it in Mouse Torturers' Monthly to avoid seeing the condemnation in the eyes of the bin men. I went back to the sofa, scooped up my neglected Radio Times and sat it on my lap. It was the TV listings magazine for me, despite the riches available out there in the world. Other listings magazine were available, but my heart did not want them.

But something had changed. The innocence had gone. I had betrayed The Radio Times, and even if it forgave me, I could not forgive myself. I put it back down, smoothed some digestive biscuit crumbs from the face of Marcus Tandy from Eldorado, and then - with great tenderness - placed a cushion over it and left the room, never to return.

FACTS HAVE BEEN CHANGED TO PROTECT THE BORED. 

Self

Self. Selfishness. Shellfish.

No, not shellfish. At least I don’t think so. Or shelfish, which I suppose would be the act of being like a shelf in some way, perhaps due to a very angular hairstyle a la Vanilla Ice, the shelfish bastard.

I have, to which I may have casually alluded in a subtle plea for sympathy, recently become single. The process was one of those uncomfortably messy ones full of mixed messages and unspoken truths that drag things out over a unconscionably long amount of time (one reading of the situation would suggest that babies gestate quicker than this relationship properly ended), but it is done now. My period of depression and mild psychosis has been duly endured and dealt with, and now my future lies ahead of me. Which of course it always did. I just wasn’t looking where I was going, and regularly hitting my head because of it.

My life as a flow chart goat

It has occurred to me – rather belatedly given context I have no intention of revealing – that I have been in (or affected by) serious relationships for all but a few brief months of the last 9.5 years. By coincidence, it’s about 10 years since I did any seriously sustained writing. Whether, as in Alexei Sayle’s brilliant “The Mau Mau Hat”, these two women both inspired and distracted me in equal measure I may never know. Certainly in the case of my recent relationship, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that I invested a lot of mental energy nurturing and encouraging her creativity, rather than selfishly indulging my own. And suddenly, as if via an epiphany, I realise that this was a profoundly stupid thing to do.

I once had a dear friend – sadly no longer dear nor indeed my friend – who warned me never to rely on someone else for my own happiness. At the time I thought this overly cynical, and to an extent I still do. I think the truth of the phrase comes down to the word ‘rely’: does it mean that you should never trust someone to make you happy, or simply that you must never allow yourself to be the kind of person with nothing left to make you happy if someone lets you down? And that means – at least I think it does – that one should probably not do what I did. I truly, sincerely and desperately wanted my love to live up to her potential (as I'm sure she now will without me). But where was my similar effort to get me to live up to mine?

So, if all I have left is Self, I ought to make the most of it. I might be mediocre, but I owe it to myself to at least try to be magnificent. For a little while. 

Penguins

As soon as this random word came up, I was sure I'd written about penguins before. Then I realised it was back when this blog was on Myspace. So - cheating slightly - I dug it out. I think it was worth a retread. I hope, dear reader, that you agree... 

Dreaming Spires

Who knows what strange things led to this dream? Who knows what dark, subconscious thoughts convulsed in the depths of my brain. Whatever they were, they led here…

I was on a small, wooden boat with C*, crossing (I instinctively knew) not the sea, but a huge lake. The boat, roundish with a flat bottom, and an oar for each of us, was travelling happily, as the lake was fairly smooth and wave free.

As the shore began to recede, with no sign of our destination in sight, I recalled a vague warning about the centre of the lake, "where neither shore can be seen".

The far bank gets smaller. Grey clouds start to swirl above us. The colour leeches out of the world. As the water gets rougher in the sudden wind, spray forms clouds of mist that dance about us. Enormous swells build beneath our vessel, toying with the small boat, buffeting us as we try to hold onto the oars and drive ourselves towards the farther shore.

Then, suddenly visible through the mists, tall shapes appear. At first they appear to be masts of sunken ships, jabbing upward into the gloom from unseen depths. The narrow splintered trunks seem to sway, but as we get closer we realise that it is only us and the sea moving – these lofty pylons are not wood, but rock, and rock solid. Urging ourselves forward, we drift alongside one and lash a rope to it, clinging on with wet fingers.

And then, as dreams do, everything changed. The roil of the waves ceased, the rock of the spikes changed to what it had seemed to be anyway – wooden spires, submerged ships gasping for breath by shoving their masts desperately into the air. The water was no longer water, but a stony, barren desert, with pebbles instead of foam, but otherwise as featureless as the lake had been, stretching into the distance with no discernible landmark. Oddly for a dream, I was conscious of the change, and shared puzzled looks with my companion. We were still rocking – looking more closely I could see that it was the masts that were swaying as if in the breeze, dragging stone and sand with them as they metronomed back and forth, a wooden grinding noise punctuating the sudden quiet.

As I sought to untie the boat, I could see something happening beyond the masts. Shapes, many hundreds of them, were pushing their way through the arid soil, sloughing off the sand and stones and lurching towards us. Gripped by fear, I dropped the rope, and sought to hide us behind the mighty, swaying masts, but we were too exposed. The beings moved towards us, misshapen lumps they seemed, hunched and featureless, and I gripped an oar in self-defence as they drew so close I could hear their shuffling feet in the sand.

I prepared to fight, and the nearest shape rounded the jutting spar, revealing itself clearly to me for the first time. It was…

It was a zombie penguin.

How I knew it was a zombie penguin I'm not sure. It just looked like an ordinary penguin but with a vacant expression. Perhaps they were penguin fans of daytime TV. But I somehow knew they were more than that, and kicked the first one in the head. It toppled over like a bag of marbles.

Beside me C lashed out with an oar, flooring another shuffling bird, but there were too many. Desperately (smacking another penguin over the head with my own oar) I looked again at the apparently featureless desert, and was gratified to see a motorway service station shimmering like a mirage. Grabbing my companion's hand I jumped from the boat, and we weaved amongst the snapping beaks of the flightless fiends as we sprinted towards the mysterious Little Chef. We charged through the doors, just evading capture, slammed them behind us, and then secured the lock with a handy BIC pen.

"Is there something I can help you with?" asked the Butler, standing there with a cloth over one forearm and the bleeping lights of a fruit machine flickering behind his left shoulder. He looked disapprovingly at the BIC pen.

"Zombie penguins," I explained. He nodded understandingly and ushered us through into the canteen.

A little while later I removed the BIC and peered out, but the penguins were still clustered outside the door in silent vigil, and I had to kick another one in the head just to get the door shut again.

We were trapped forever in a Little Chef.

Not one word of this in an embellishment. Honestly. Except for the brand of the motorway service station. It might have been a Moto.

Speedy (clearly sick and in need of treatment).

* Name withheld to avoid attention of the RSPZP.

 

Map

I love maps. I always have. I'm not sure of the reason for this. There were no ancient maps hanging on the walls of my parents' house when I grew up. There were, however, books. Probably two multi-volume books paved the way for my current adoration of cartography: the vast, two-shelf-filling American encyclopaedias and The Lord of the Rings.

Why my parents - not particularly known for their adoration of American culture, particularly (in my Dad's case) when it came to the pronunciation of words, had spent clearly a bundle of money on 10 square feet of educational book that couldn't even spell properly I don't know, but these volumes were the main source of all knowledge for me as I grew up. From the moment I could read, instead of indulging my many questions, I was merely told to "look it up". So I did.

The encyclopaedias were, naturally, full to the fake-leather brim with words and pictures. They were also, naturally, full of maps. Lots of maps. Maps in extraordinary quantities. Glossing over their American obsession with dedicating more book space to US states than to European countries, the books contained double page spreads of surprising detail. The detail was particularly surprising because the books had been printed in the 1960s, and large swathes of the planet were still owned by Britain, causing the occasional problem for researching a geography project in 1981. More fascinating, the entire world appeared to be delicately shaded in pastel colours. A gentle pink here, a soft yellow there. I thought for a while that there was some deep relevance to this - after all, England was coloured a delicate shade of green, and that seemed pretty appropriate. If I'd gone to, er, Northern Rhodesia, I would have fully expected to be greeted by a landscape that was entirely yellow (as opposed to the overwhelming lavender of Southern Rhodesia). It would look pretty amazing from a plane. Beyond the subject country's* borders, surrounding lands would be a dull sepia, as if crossing the border took you back even further in time to a world of handle bar moustaches and cheerful oppression of natives. In some cases it probably did.

Fortunately, lessons at my school seemed to steer clear of the late 20th century post-colonial world, or at least the British post-colonial world. This meant the encyclopaedias never got me into trouble, though it also meant that I was 17 before I realised that Britain used to own Canada. No harm done, you might argue.

Real maps were one thing. Tolkien taught me that made-up maps could be even more fun.

It wasn't just that I enjoyed his, fascinating as they were (I particularly loved the tiny, almost 3-D renditions of mountain ranges, so much more interesting than contour charts on a real map). As soon as I worked out that with careful vibration of the hand one could could draw some very convincing coastlines, I was an unstoppable fictional cartographer. Fjords were the inevitable consequence of my wobbly hand technique - no 100-mile beaches in my worlds - but I enjoyed myself with huge inland seas that defied all the laws of nature, mountains that if to scale would probably have been 100 miles high, forests that looked rather like clouds, capital cities that stood nowhere near water courses... you name a naive creative cartographic oversight, I probably committed it. But it didn't stop me. I created continents, island kingdoms, planets, solar systems.

It was a planetary comfort zone. I couldn't draw people or monsters very well (except, oddly, for their eyes) but I could draw the place they lived. I've got whole worlds kicking about on scrappy bits of paper back home, resolutely unpopulated and with unconvincing pole-equator separation that would probably cause havoc with the ecosystem. I sometimes wonder if I dug them out from under my old bed at home, would life and civilisations have evolved, with tiny ink cities sprouting up in the white spaces where no giant mountains or foggy forests were lodged?

I only wonder this very briefly, because it's silly.


* I mean the country that was the subject of the article, not the one that was subject to the British crown - though they were often the same. 

Approximation

I'm sitting on a bus playing with a new toy. I could never blog from my iPhone - the approximation of a keyboard was so small that it drove me mad to do anything other than tweet (at last I understand the point of the 140 character limit). But this virtual finger tip tap dance stage is another matter entirely - it even facilitates my rather distinctive slap base space bar without complaining, though if I end up with a wee hole worn in the screen I may regret this.

Yes, I bought an iPad. It was an act of utter self-indulgence. Though not as indulgent as the day I went out and realised I had dressed to match my iPad-case combo. When you're accessorising to stop your appliances feeling unloved you know you've gone too far.

Gin

This almost never made it to publication. I am slowly stacking up 'draft' blogs that never quite get finished. I'm a bit distracted at the moment by a combination of awesomely good things and heart-breakingly bad things. Well, thing. Alas, at this stage I do not seem to be someone who draws creative inspiration from pain.

Or gin. Which is a shame, since I've drunk plenty of it.

Normally I reserve gin for flying - for reasons now lost in the gin-soaked mists of ginny time, I have developed a tradition of drinking G&T when the drinks trolley rumbles past on an Emirates flight somewhere points east. It probably makes me feel like some sort of explorer. I'm going to start a campaign for compulsory pith helmets on long haul flights. We can all imagine we're sipping our anti-malarial tonic water while keeping our eyes peeled for cloud formations that only we will ever see (unless Mr Johnson in 46B happens to be looking the same way).

At the moment gin is taking its place in a pantheon of liquid medicines, jostling alongside wine, whisky and quite a lot of beer, like some sort of cocktail of... erm, well just like a cocktail. A self-assembly cocktail. IKEA cocktail. Flat-pack alcohol - I quite like to the idea of putting my drink together with dowel rods.

You know, I don't think I've ever written the word 'dowel' before. Astonishing. Thank God for pointless blogging - I might never have written it! Can you imagine the tragedy?

You're probably getting the general idea of why I'm not finishing things at the moment. I'm trying to look at heartbreak in the following way:

Doctor: I'm afraid I know what's wrong with you. The symptoms generally include angina like attacks that affect breathing and cause the sensation of pressure on the heart. There is also sickness and nausea, which may affect appetite and will certainly be uncomfortable. You should be over the panic attacks stage, but reoccurance does happen so be careful. Worst of all though is that, like a urinary infection, this condition does have a psychological effect, which is perversely both symptom and cause. You will find yourself thinking and behaving irrationally. While it is important to remember that this is unavoidable and not your fault, neither must you give in to it, since this will cause an extension of your other symptoms. The bad news is, there's no cure. The good news is it's seldom fatal, and if you follow prescribed advice you'll be right as rain in a few months. Take liberal amounts of gin every night, and if symptoms persist, fucking drink more.

Somebody

I recently changed my relationship status on Facebook. I would like to stress that the change had actually happened some time ago, but the modern world throws up all sorts of new and interesting social mores, in this case "when is it reasonable to change my status?". I left it private, viewable only to me, as I tend to view the public changes of others as irritating statements of smugness or pleas for sympathy (del as app).

Of course, the one entity you cannot keep this private from is the Facebook monster itself. It knows.  And within seconds of saving my edited profile, all the interesting (comparatively) things being offered in the advertising strip (506 of your friends like Beer! Like Beer too!) on the right hand side evaporated like mirages, to be replaced by an endless, and in some cases a tad disturbing, parade of dating and general "make women want you" ads.

You may have guessed the status by now. We'll move on.

Facebook's desperation to get me fitted up with somebody, anybody, is all very sweet, a bit like an over eager friend who's always trying to interest you in a blind date with their third cousin and doesn't understand that you're in no hurry and perfectly happy. And so there's a stream of perfectly non-threatening dating ads, offering a chance to "Date Attractive Ladies" (surely the equivalent of shouting "play good football!" at the telly during England's euro 2012 campaign), or "Boyfriend wanted" over a picture of a woman whose head is twisted so unnaturally she looks like a reanimated car crash victim with nice make up. All fine, in a take it or leave it sort of way.

Except that it seems that Facebook is also that slightly sleazy friend of a friend down the pub who reckons he's one for the ladies and knows all the tricks you could possibly want to know on 'getting birds', normally involving treating 'em mean or monitoring their menstrual cycle.

My worries were first alerted by:

"3, stealthy, ninja sexual triggers to turn women on. TRY NOW!"

Ninja sexual trigger? What the hell is that? Does it involve using your cock as an impromptu nun-chuck?

Then it gets worse. Grammatically, as well as ethically:

"The covert and dangerous tricks to make any woman wants you, FAST!"

Glossing over the peculiar slippage into the present tense, it seems as though Facebook is allowing an ad for rohypnol. Date rape drugs - covert? Yes! Dangerous? Certainly! Do they make any woman wants you fast? No, not really, but they do make it irrelevant! (insert capital letters or multiple exclamation marks where you will).

Compared to that, the "Secret psychology that makes hot women want to sleep with you fast" looks like children's literature. This could be anything. It could be wholesome, like adopting a positive attitude (not very secret), or ever so slightly less so, like breaking into their house/PC to read their letters/emails in order to find out what their emotional triggers are and then exploiting them by reducing them to a psychological wreck that will cling to anyone or anything to feel secure again in this malevolent world.

That sort of thing.

I don't know for certain, because there's no way in a million years that I'm clicking on that link. I dread to think what I might find there if their ads are this weird. But I do know that the advertisers are clearly aware that they're up to no good, because their final offering is this:

"Covert methods for attracting women that dating experts want BANNED!"

What, exactly, is a dating expert? Can you get a degree in dating? Are there perhaps dating guidance counsellors ready to advise newly-met potential couples who feel that their initial "activity-date" at the Laser Tag centre didn't go quite as well as they'd hoped? Whoever they are, thank God that they're out there, looking after us like Swamp Thing looked out for Lacroix, Louisiana.

God bless you, Dating Experts. Are you , y'know, free this evening?

Offing

A drink is in the offing. It's with someone I would call a "fellow blogger", except that would be hideously presumption of me, since she actually keeps hers up to date. This drink is necessary, since I've wasted the first day of the Jubilee spare-time-fest and I'm feeling pretty miserable about it. I did have plans to start a much needed inventory of stuff before my move in July, but instead I pottered around, watch tv and - the highlight of the day - went for a ride on my shiny birthday bike. But it was all rather lonesome, so I dropped a view hints until a friend said that they'd have a drink with me. They probably think they're stopping me offing myself, or something.

Pity pint. I can live with that.

Hellish

It all seemed like a good idea at the time. A nice trip home to see my old mum, check out the commute to see if I can bear to do it while I try and buy somewhere to live, get out of the house. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, not much in the big scheme of things, but I'm certainly not getting the best of this train route. Firstly, the West Ham fans up for their Wembley play-off today appear to have 'started early'. In their generosity, they must have responded to the parched look of the train floor and altruistically offered it quite a lot of beer. The floor, however, is clearly teetotal, and has refused to soak up any of the offered alcohol, which is now adorning the surface with a sticky and nasally offensive sheen. 

But I regret complaining about the beer, since I can no longer smell it. Not just because as I get out to the greenbelt my hay-fever is getting worse, but because Shenfield has supplied the latest in anti-beer smell air-fresheners by loading a tramp onto my carriage.  He's sitting in the next set of seats, and I can honestly say that I miss the smell of stale West Ham beer.

In commuting terms I suppose he's unlikely to be able to afford the peak fares, and city types - for all their flaws - probably don't crack open the Tennant's lager at 7:30 in the morning. But it's not cheering me up about the possibility of having a 100 minute commute to work not only in the middle of the bloody Olympics, but through the middle of the bloody Olympics - Stratford every morning. If I don't come up with plan B I'm looking at a hellish time in July.

But at least I'm better off than my carriage mate. All things in perspective.

(Hurray! He's getting off!)

Soap

A slightly unorthodox blog today – random word comes not from my beloved “Watch out for Snakes”, but from a simple Facebook comment:

“Now it’s your turn to write about soap”.

Far be it from me to shirk a challenge (unless said challenge involves any kind of physical risk or requirement to hard work) , here I am, writing about soap.

I don’t watch soaps anymore. I’m not sure when this happened. They were as big a part of my life at one point as they were of any fiendish telly addict’s. For several years I didn’t miss a single episode of EastEnders (with the notable exception of, weirdly, the very first one* and two that were broadcast while I was staying in a Paris tower block as part of our school’s French exchange). My addiction even survived University, where I didn’t watch any other telly other than the cricket and Quantum Leap. Years before that, at junior school, I would watch “The Sullivans” at lunchtime , if only to update the lollypop lady as to the latest plot developments (such as they were). What I still don’t understand is how she came to be so interested in a show that, because of her job, she could clearly *never watch*. Odd.

And then it stopped. This, I suspect, is because soap watching requires momentum. Soap isn’t about the grand plots, it’s about the details, the tiny things the characters do or say to each other. They are shows very much about people – poorly written and insufficiently motivated, and even more dreadfully acted as they may be at times – and as such you require an investment, a real desire to know what they will do next (even if it has no impact on a wider storyline). Miss it for a few weeks, and you no longer have any compass to tell you why people are behaving in a certain way, and you quickly stop caring.

The same applies, oddly, to snooker.  Stop watching for a year and the procession of spotty automatons that replace the ‘characters’ you so enjoyed watching will make you imagine you are watching some sort of humourless mash up with I Robot, and you’ll find greater satisfaction in watching your shower drip.

Of course, the very fact that I’ve just wittered on about “soaps” and not “soap” just shows that except for frequenters of “Lush” and other purveyors of high-end smellies, soap is just a word that jostles for attention alongside shampoo, shower gel and hand wash.  I don’t think I own a bar of soap, and if I do I probably stole it from a hotel in Kuala Lumpur.   My cleanliness routine relies entirely on various forms of liquid, which is probably terrible for the environment since said liquids require an ever more advanced concoction of plastic packaging to keep them in place. On the other hand, Nizorel shampoo aside, I don’t have to worry about animal fat in gels and liquids, and shower gel just looks less like it’s up to something than soap. Bars of soap look like they’re planning a takeover of the world. Nothing that slippery is ever up to anything good – just look at George Osborne. I remember being slightly disturbed by the contents of the built-into-the-tiles soap dish in my bath back home (I nearly wrote “in my bath where I grew up”, but people might think I was a bonsai human). As a child it was on my eye level, and never contained bars of soap as much a strange, bubbly blobs of green matter floating in a few millimetres of disgusting looking cloudy water.  I assume my mum thought that the overall mass of the soap was what mattered, not whether each molecule was actually joined to the next. She did grow up under rationing.

I, on the other hand, felt like Zach Galligan’s mum having to clear up the bits of Gremlin after she microwaves one. No-one ever thinks of things of that.  Cif lemon just isn’t going to fix it.

* I boycotted after the intensely irritating previews featuring characters from the square saying their names. Mee-shell? Really? And I still can’t stop myself thinking, if I hear the name “Debs”, of “and Andy” in a Scottish accent. 

Bundle

I've just finished a rather delightful show. It was called "Ghoooooulty Pleasures", and was a cabaret of tenuously Halloween themed musical numbers. So, if a show had magic, or monsters, or magical monsters it qualified, and we had entries from Rocky Horror, Shrek, Wicked, Evil Dead and Buffy.

Our Director is something of a crazed genius, but I worry about her sometimes, as 70% of all the numbers seemed to involve some sort of sex-bundle. Somewhere down the line, however, my sex-bundle got cancelled and instead I got left deserted on stage by two suddenly unwilling female zombies.

UnLife is hard.

So hard, it seems, that I forgot to finish this entry and it lay for months, in a metaphorical muddy riverbed, ready for my Deagolly hands to fumble upon it unexpectedly. I'd probably throw it away, but it does have the most delightful illustration, and at least my best friend hasn't strangled me in order to get his hands on it.

Though it rather looks as though he has. 

Nonpayment

There's a pigeon war going on outside.

Last night it rained. You may have noticed. It rained so much the storm drains were choked and gasping, chimneys were flooding fireplaces and bipeds of all kinds were taking shelter under whatever outcrops they could find.

On the sanctuary of my window sill a power struggle of awesome intensity served to keep me awake more than the gusts of wind rattling the panes or the steady drip drip of the rain water in the chimney. Derek the scruffy whitish pigeon who roosts regularly outside my bedroom, was wrestling for space with three other pigeons, including one conventionally coloured pigeon bully intent on taking away Derek's kingdom.

Pigeon wars seem to consist of several elements, most obviously high-decibel cooing, scrabbling at window frames (it sounded like rats were trying to get in) and, rather lamentably, vast quantities of shitting. My sill looks as though someone has held an avian Glastonbury on it. The pane itself has smears where wings have bashed against it mid fight, a conflict that dragged me out of bed to confront the offenders only to see Derek and the Bully in a mutual beak-lock dragging each other around their scant square inches of disputed territory.  Two female pigeons cowered in the corner, their support hard to fathom as they hid from both rain and violence.  Normally when I pull back the curtains, the pigeons flap away. Instead, these frightened females just cocked a terrified eye at me, while the tussle went on unabated. Though weirdly, as if they knew they were pushing their luck,  the two males continued their fight in feathery silence.

All this may be punishment for skipping my local pizza restaurant without paying for a glass of sparkling water, though I prefer to view our non-payment as a misunderstanding that has its roots in culinary authenticity. This pizzeria is so Italian that the waiters don't actually seem to understand any English, which meant my companion's multiple requests for water were entirely ignored. After we had requested the bill, we tried again to get a glass of tap water, only to receive a lemon-garnished glass of frizzante. Being both parched and irritated there was no way we were sending our acqua back.

At least my attempt to photograph what looked like the world's smallest stick insect climbing up the side of a cocktail stick ended up looking like the opening credits of the original Hartnell Dr Who. Definitely safer to photograph something with this many splinters than put it in your mouth... I imagine Derek the pigeon will return to the fray with a flaming spear looking very much like this to vanquish his foes this evening. It could be another noisy night.