Snip

I had an ex-girlfriend - my first one, in fact - who refered to me by an inexplicable (to me) nickname. The relationship was short lived, so short lived in fact that I never got a straight answer to why she decided to call me "Cheese Snip*". And of course never will.

Being named after some sort of proto-Mini Cheddar has probably not scarred me for life, but I do seem to have attracted an enormous number of nicknames over the years. Not generally from girlfriends, I hasten to add - if they always had something mysterious and slightly unflattering to call me I'd probably worry. 

So I've been The Professor, Strider, Bob-a-long, Triffid, The Master Plaster, Potto, The Hustler, Marti, Rubbish, Naked Steve and, of course, Speedy. I'm fairly certain there are lots of others, but being of advancing years bits of my past are being erased as my former selves are taken out of time, so several of my identities are lost to me forever. Also, I'm unlikely ever to get called Marti ever again. Thankfully. And as for Naked Steve, my days of appearing on stage in nowt but a breech-clout are hopefully gone forever, like my ponytail.

* whatever it was, I assure you it had nothing to do with the entry on Urban Dictionary. Eww.

Frenzied

I've been awake for 6 hours today. It's 10:15am

This, in short, is a prelude to a less than happy posting, wherein I try to make myself feel better about the shitness of the world by phrasing it in imperishable text and spreading my misery around on the web. And speaking of web...

I awoke (presumably from some sort of dream, but subsequent events rather scattered my recollections) in the darkness of night. I say darkness: the glow of the half a centimetre-across light on my wireless router, so dim in the minutes after the lamps are turned off, by 4am glows like the sickly green ghost-light of Minas Morgul, chucking ghoulish shadows around the room like dirty socks (some of them may be the ghoulish shadows of actual dirty socks). My head was buzzing, but not with any particularly issues, so 45 minutes later I was a little puzzled not to have dropped off back to sleep. I gave up trying to curl into a pre-sleep foetal position and stretched out on my back, easing tension in my back and shoulders.

Perhaps one of the reasons I can never sleep when I'm on my back is the simple fact of being able to see the ceiling. The ceiling is a terrifying canvass for an over-active imagination, even in a garret where the canvass metaphor is stretched out of shape by the angle of the roof, bringing parts of the ceiling within inches of a sleeping head. Tiny imperfections in the wallpaper (ceiling paper?) create a pebble-dash of tiny shadows, any one of which could turn out to be some tiny lurking terror, but - normally - don't.

This morning I found myself gazing at a piece of ceiling a foot above my face and spotting one of these nefarious dark spots. I squinted, expecting it to turn out to be some errant flake of paper or mysterious bit of fluff.

Instead, I was more than a little dispirited - it being 5am and myself in a state of nigh-hallucinatory sleep-deprivation - to discover a large spider sat inches from me, illuminated in the sickly green router glow, in a prime position to flop lazily onto my head.

Yes, dear reader, I am ashamed to say that I shrieked like a child and leapt out of bed. I can deal with my mild arachnophobia at 2pm on a sunny afternoon, when I will happily catch the spider in a cup and usher it outside. At 5am in the morning, thoroughly exhausted, my only post-screaming action was to grab a towel and flick the thing as far away from the bed as possible. I may well have overdone it, as I heard, distinctly, a little cracking sound as it bounced off the far wall. Of course, with a spider that size the sound was just as likely to be the plaster giving way as it was to be a fatal blow to the arthropod.

I feel slightly guilty about this. I'm a vegetarian. I'm kind to wasps. Why should I be so mean to a spider? But I console myself with this rationalisation: It was above my face! If Mahatma Gandhi was sitting there looking down at me from 8 inches away at 5am, I'd flick him off the wall with a towel.

My frenzied attack over, there was no hope of getting back to sleep, even if I'd dared turn the light out. Somewhere, in the garrety gloom, a spider with four legs in plaster is plotting a dastardly revenge.

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.