Article

I thought I’d revisit my old random word generator to see what it offered me: I got ‘article’, which doesn’t sound like the spark of life for a surreal rampage through my memories, but does seem fairy appropriate for a return to regular blogging.

I say regular – if this remains the most up-to-date post come July 3^rd feel free to slap me.

Even ‘article’ was a bit of a cheat; the first word offered was “brightness” which for all its light and fluffy connotations seemed even more vague and unhelpful, so I skipped over it, thereby trashing all the rules that I originally set up for Trampling (but since I broke them fairly solidly by not writing every day I probably shouldn’t worry too much).

Of course when I started The Trampling of Small Pigs there wasn’t much opportunity for writing in my life. The most exciting things I got to write were updates to government departments on how their money had been spent, which afforded fewer opportunities for yellow hippos and talking oysters than I would like. Now I get to write articles about human rights abuse in central America – strangely I’m still short on the talking oysters, but nevertheless it’s a marked improvement. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t been back for a while?

But as with everything, as soon as you start doing it for work it becomes hard work. If I was paid to drink Irn Bru I’d resent it by day three and start dreaming of Tizer. Frankly I’m perplexed by the right-wing tabloids: if thousands of “loafers” are indeed being paid by the state to not work, there ought to be an epidemic of volunteering as not working starts to feel like far too much hard work for all these apparently work-shy people.

But that might just be me.

Of course, to go off piste for a moment, the government would then sanction them for volunteering because if you’re helping raise money to stop old people from being made into kites, or whatever, you’re clearly not looking for jobs that don’t exist, and where would we be then?

So here I am, blogging ‘for fun’ and hoping that it actually is.

This article is a gentle reintroduction for me. Hopefully the benefits will become plain if I keep up some sort of momentum (keeping the Jeremy Corbyn of my motivation in charge of the hapless political party of my creativity). I don’t imagine this post itself will attract rave reviews, but since I don’t have an audience, at least it can’t put anyone off. See you “all” soon.

Noisily

[Due to general incompetence, I'm publishing this two years late. That's right. Two years. Actually, two and bit. Sorry about that.]

The world does not fit nicely into our plans. Things that seem a good idea at the time are often revealed as wildly optimistic hopes. In hoping for a lie in on my holiday, I have been made to feel that I was counting on a golden swan to deliver my shopping or firmly believing that one of my legs is actually getting younger while the rest of me ages.

Though I'm pretty sure that one of my legs *is* ageing faster than the other one.

I'm in Edinburgh performing in a play called The War of the Waleses, in which I play Prime Ministers John Major and Tony Blair. It's enormous fun to act in (and hopefully to watch), but it does have the slight draw back of going up at 10:05pm every night. We finish at 11:30ish, and we're at least 30 mins walk from our digs in leafy surburbia, so the earliest I could get to bed would be midnight, and that's ignoring the residual adrenaline rush of performing in front of more than 6 people and the siren voices of whisky bars. In addition to that, go to bed at 12 and my body will assume that 10:50 is the top of the gentle slope to unconsciousness, just when I need to be bouncing on as Blair and dishing out the 1996 conference speech.

So, the simple solution is just to play fast and loose with the old body clock and shift everything onto my own personal time zone.   Jet laggedly zigzagging my hours into a new format should be simple - we all do it at least twice a year. I'll put my own clocks back a couple of hours. What could be more simple?

Me, it seems.  If it wasn't awkward enough sharing a double bed with Alistair Campbell, who seems to have shifted *his* personal time zone enough to have him hanging around in the Caribbean, the good burghers of Edin have decided that the paving slabs on our said leafy crescent need replacing. For some reason, paving slabs need urgent attention at about 8:30 each morning, though you have to be nice to those precious grey squares, and you mustn't tire them out by replacing them after 2pm in the afternoon.

So, thanks to my zone shift, I now have workman digging up the road outside my room from 6:30 till noon. And then they fuck off home.

The most delightful aspect of this is that according to one of my cast mates, at least half the workmen are actually performing community service.  Probably for anti-social behaviour.

Bastards.

Reason & Sanity

Cheating, me? It's just that my random word generator, Watch Out for Snakes, is back! And oddly, the last word before it died was Reason, and the first it's provided now it's back is Sanity. They seem all bedfellowy together, so I thought I'd do both.

I don't have very much reason to doubt my sanity. I might have a blog called The Trampling of Small Pigs, and my girlfriend would point out that I talk to our foster cat by mewing so much that I sometimes meow at other people by 'mistake', but other than that I'm boringly shorn of the signs of madness. Or even the CDs of Madness. Frankly I'm beginning to worry that middle age is making me sane. I haven't had the urge to write a novel about a giant, orange, shape-changing peanut that fights crime for years.

I realise that, rather facetiously, I'm confusing "reason & sanity" with "having an active imagination", though the link between the two has long been a source of conjecture. Or, y'know, something that people go on about. I think it's using phrases like "a source of conjecture" that is probably eating away at my playful imagination like acid. Or worms. Formal phraseology is like some like of parasite that takes over your brain and makes you spout more formal phraseology, like that fungus that rides ants to the top of grass stems and makes them explode all over their ant friends to spread its fungal evil. Just like that.

If I were to make that analogy in a meeting about learning materials or corporate social responsibility, perhaps I'd get that satisfying look of fear from some stiff looking individual with sad eyes and a bluetooth keyboard; instead I'd probably just mutter about 'developing appropriate linguistic cues to establish societal norms' and look stiff and sad-eyed while tapping at my wireless keyboard.

But it's lovely to have the snakes back. Maybe they can eat the worms.

Bauble

With my favourite random word generator looking like it's been eaten by the Worm of the World's End, I'm left waiting for my Dictionary app to spit a random word at me. Today it spat a bauble at me, which could have been dangerous if it had been one of those delicate glass Christmas decorations. In a world become very conscious of health & safety (rightly, for the most part) it does seem out of keeping that we celebrate a great festival to be enjoyed by children by surrounding them with fragile glass and putting electric lights on damp pine trees.

I have a box full of the most delightful, timorously fragile Christmas baubles. Alas they've remained wrapped in cotton wool (or possible bubble wrap) since they were bought, because they're far too fragile to actually do anything with. Instead my Christmas decorations of choice are £4 fairy lights from Chapel Market and a load of tinsel. Interestingly (to me) although I never take the baubles out of the box, I never put the tinsel and fairy lights away, and they've been decorating my north London garret for months now.

I had tinsel wrapped round Easter eggs, tinsel glinting in the midsummer sun, soon I'll have fairy lights shining through the eyes of pumpkins. There is something eternal about tinsel, not least because it's made of plastic and probably takes about 50 billion years to biodegrade. I look forward to being reincarnated as a sentient crustacean in the year 34,005,455,343 and digging up the preserved remains of the Selfridges Santa's Grotto from 2073, the year human civilization was finally destroyed by an invasion of strange pink blobs descended from David Cameron's face.

And all the while, tucked away somewhere in a cave at the centre of the Earth, will be a small, never opened, shoebox full of shell-like baubles, marked 'fragile' in long dead marker pen.  

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