I wasn't going to post again this year, but today I scanned in some drawings I have done recently. I haven't really done any drawing since I completed my Art GCSE but for some reason had the idea that a good Christmas present for my mother would be a portrait of the cat done by myself. So I did some preparatory doodling just to see if I could still draw a wonky line but in typical fashion got carried away and obsessive about it and they turned out not too bad in and of themselves. So I've now uploaded the five sketches I've done recently, including the final cat picture I gave to my mother last week. For some inexplicable reason they're much better than anything I produced for my Art GCSE and that's without any practice to boot. Modesty. Anyway, here's the gallery.

Friday 30th December 2005, 12.12am

When I was a child I always thought it would be less than undesirable to be ill on Christmas Day, but then, those were the days when Christmas Day meant a morning in church for show-and-tell where all the other kids had giant expensive toys they could hardly carry unaided, followed by a trip to relatives, followed by Christmas dinner, and only after that did we get to opening presents, by which time it was only an hour away from getting dark. Being ill was a way to bypass all the things ungrateful kids such as I didn't want to do. It was also an excuse not to bother getting dressed, and to sit around in a quilt as everyone tends to you.

The reality of being ill on Christmas Day turned out to be somewhat less desirable, even though the church-going and relative-visiting have long since been consigned to the past (or Boxing Day, on the latter count). In fact, I'm still ill as of today, though I'm wondering now if it's several colds running through in sequence. For most of the last week I have been congested and with sore throat, through this now seems to have migrated to my ears. I had "The Bill" on volume 26 today, 10 above usual, and could still barely hear it.

My sense of taste and smell have also been absent for so long I'm simply losing the desire to eat. You never realise how much time you spend eating, and indeed, how much of the appeal is the taste of it, until that sense goes. We polished off the last of the turkey yesterday, but it doesn't actually seem like I've had any because I couldn't taste it. I got a small lorry's worth of chocolate but have barely touched any of it. It would seem like such a waste. Of course, there's a flipside to this, as my ninetysomething uncle has had a catheter fitted and I wasn't able to smell that either. But one does entertain momentary fears this may be permanent, in which case I'd probably waste away through lack of eating.

I'm not complaining really. I'm just being acerbic for the sake of it. I was never under any real threat of starving and nobody was trying to blow me up either. It was a good Christmas for me and I hope it was for you too.

One of the highlights for me was of course the Christmas special of "Doctor Who", which saw David Tennant (aka That Guy I Saw On The Northern Line) debut as the eponymous Timelord. I was impressed. I knew he could handle the quirky light moments that never quite rang true when Christopher Ecclestone did them, but he handled the flashes of darkness just as well as his predecessor too. When he dumps the bad guy over the edge of the spaceship and then lands the prime minister in it at the end I got a sense of the Tom Baker era Doctor, the anarchic troublemaker who is his own side, and woe betide you if you're not on it. The second series looks very promising. And they brought the key change back to the theme music. Perfect.

I've been reading short books of late. I read Paulo Coelho's "The Alchemist", which is nominally about a Spanish goat-herder who has a dream about buried treasure in Egypt then is encouraged by a mystical old man with something or other to do with God, to follow his dream and not waste his life planning to. It was okay, but it never really engaged me emotionally. It was the kind of book that had I read it at university I would have thought was very clever, but now that kind of 'brainspun' literature, where the author's clearly spending more time thinking about how to say something than just saying it, leaves me cold.

I also read "Ten Little Indians" (though it was the old edition, so had the old title) by Agatha Christie because the chapters were short (even Dan Brown would have trouble writing chapters that short, I imagine) and I wanted something I knew would be light reading. This is the one where ten strangers are invited to an island off Devon by the mysterious UN Owen, all believing they know this person, then discover they have been duped, are trapped there, and then start dropping like flies, except they're alone on the island, so one of them must be the murderer. I'd only seen the 1970s film version, which was based on Christie's own stage adaptation, in which she altered the ending significantly, so it still caught me off guard at the end. Christie's prose is resolutely horrendous, but it was precisely the kind of light reading I wanted, and she's sold two billion copies of her books, and who can argue with that?

Happy New Year, y'all.

Saturday 24th December 2005, 12.09pm

This week I have been struck down by a beastly cold, the first one I have had in about two years. They do say that the longer you go without one, the harder it hits you when you do get one. Since I'm not in close proximity with unhealthy students anymore I don't get them every couple of months where they last just twenty-four hours. I'm sure it was compounded by having to go out in the cold and complete my Christmas shopping.

This week I also saw the new remake of "King Kong". Ever since the excellent "Dawn Of The Dead" remake I've been more open to the idea of remaking films, as I said in my review of the "Assault On Precinct 13" remake. "King Kong" is nearer to the "Assault On Precinct 13" remake than it is the "Dawn Of The Dead" remake, in that it sticks a little too closely to the original movie's blueprint, so the lasting impression is: why bother remaking it?

The main change is in the character dynamics. In the original, Carl Denham was a hero. In this version (played by Jack Black) he is a villain, and awkward, cerebral screenwriter Jack Driscoll (played by Adrien Brody) comes to the fore. Moreover, in the original, the ending was tragic because Kong's love for Ann Darrow was completely unrequited. In this version, you get the impression Ann (played by Naomi Watts) feels the same way, so it's more a case of her losing him than the other way round. Indeed, the impression I got was that the girl was far more in love with the big gorilla than she was with the snapped-nosed writer.

If the film falls down on anything, it's that the key human relationship, Ann and Jack, isn't really very well developed. They are only on screen together for about fifteen minutes of the entire film. In their second or third scene they inexplicably start kissing, then Jack spends most of the film trying to rescue Ann from the giant ape, with whom her relationship is far more developed over the course of the movie. There's a love triangle there, but it's not milked for all its dramatic potential. We never get the sense that Driscoll is even aware of the chemistry between Ann and Kong, let alone how he feels about being in second place to a monkey.

Peter Jackson turns the brief monster movie from 1933 into a giant sprawling action adventure, roughly divided into three main sections: first they're on a ship heading to the mysterious Skull Island to shoot a film, then Ann gets kidnapped by natives and sacrificed to Kong which prompts a rescue attempt through a monster-infested jungle, then Kong is captured and taken to New York where he promptly escapes and goes on a rampage. Each of these sections is roughly an hour long, and apart from the middle section, where the movie excels, that is too long.

Whilst it's never less than entertaining, there are some bits where I sat there wondering whether what I was watching was truly necessary to the plot. For example, when they first arrive at Skull Island they spend about five or six minutes navigating around jagged rocks in a storm. I got the hint after thirty seconds. Likewise in that first hour, there are all these bits of character development that seem to be going somewhere, then don't. There are numerous scenes (more than between Jack and Ann, even) between the kid who played Billy Eliot and a guy who works on the ship, that go nowhere. The kid isn't even in the third act, even though he doesn't die.

So yes, it's self-indulgent and over-extravagant, but you can tell that from the trailer. The original had one Tyrannosaurus Rex. This has a small herd of them, and they all attack at the same time. More more more is the name of the game here. Like "Alien vs Predator" it's an entirely bloodless affair, but Peter Jackson's horror roots do come through in the superior middle act with some excellent scenes involving hordes of overgrown insects. Plus there's one death that is completely horrific, and extremely suggestive for a 12A, as a giant snake creature makes light work of one actor who's name is probably more recognisable than his face.

I just cited "Alien vs Predator", but another bit that reminded me of that movie was the main fight between Kong and the herd of T-Rexes. Like the alien and Predator one-on-one fights, it smacks of a wrestling match, with body slams and picking up your opponent by their extremities. Dare I say it, though, but the ones in "Alien vs Predator" looked more realistic.

So I come to the effects, which are actually pretty variable. The best effects sequence I thought was also the most subtle, from perhaps the best scene in the film, where Kong finally puts Ann down, starts playing with her like she's a toy, and she goes with the flow. It's the start of their relationship, completely dialogue-less, so your focus is on what you see, and the effects here are faultless. Kong looks as well as acts like a completely real giant ape. The effects bring wonderful expressions to his face. It was like Gollum all over again, just better.

Unfortunately, that's one scene in three hours, and the rest varies from passable to downright terrible. The worst being a scene where the characters are running through a canyon away from a herd of brontosauruses or somesuch creatures. It looks pretty ropey to start with, like the characters are just running in front of a rear-projection screen. But then all of a sudden the two-dimensional dinosaurs start to overtake them and the characters start running between their legs. It just looked completely fake. The perspective seemed skewed.

Likewise the T-Rex fights. The dinosaurs look less realistic than the ones in "Jurassic Park", and I'm talking about the first one, made over twelve years ago. It's the CGI, I think. There's a bit where Carl Denham tells his movie's star to walk between the camera and the dinoaurs else people won't believe it's real. That seems to be Jackson's attitude as well, and his problem.

In terms of actors, Naomi Watts more than carries this. I remember her in "Tank Girl" ten years ago outshining most of the rest of the cast (well, they were dressed up as mutant kangaroos) even though she was just sidekick, and she continues to shine here. She's perfect for the role, more than just a scream queen, but not some Ripley or Sarah Connor figure either, and she more than carries the film. Adrien Brody suffers from not getting enough to do but be generic action hero rescuer type, but he's certainly a more interesting choice than getting Ben Affleck or someone.

Jack Black is just Jack Black in period costume. Some of the time that's a problem. Whenever he says the word "beast" I was expecting an acoustic guitar to chime in with the opening of "Tribute". I also thought the character was a bit flat. He starts off an opportunist scumbag and there's always a hint that he's heading toward a redemptive moment that never arrives. Maybe that's cliched and trite, but it just left the character dangling.

Apart from the indulgent moments I've already mentioned, the script is never less than solid, with better than average action movie dialogue, some good jokes (the best going to Andy Serkis, who has excellent comic timing), and it's paced well, too. Some of the plot beats were annoying, though. Each of the times the characters get into a hopeless predicament from which there is no obvious escape, instead of forcing them to find a novel, unexpected way out of it, Peter Jackson just throws in yet another dramatic rescue to a rousing fanfare on the soundtrack.

Gee, I've been pretty harsh. It sounds like I hated the movie. I didn't. It was never less than 'good', but it was rarely better than that either. Comparisons with Peter Jackson's recent work are obvious. I certainly enjoyed it more than "Fellowship Of The Ring" the first time I saw it, but it wasn't a patch on the second two "Lord Of The Rings" movies. It may end up the biggest movie of its ilk this year, but I preferred "Revenge Of The Sith" personally. I don't think I'll be getting the DVD.

Merry Christmas, y'all.

Monday 12th December 2005, 11.27pm

How's this for Hollywood at its most cynical? Fox have just released a new 'unrated' version of "Alien vs Predator" on DVD in America, and the only difference from the version we get in Region 2 is that someone has gone through the movie, with a computer, and added a load of CGI blood to make the notoriously tame death scenes of the original cut more gory. The site's in German, but the screen captures are pretty self-explanatory.

We're well into the silly season now, even though as far as I'm concerned it's not Christmas until the Radio Times Christmas edition starts detailing what's on TV that's not worth watching. This hasn't stopped humbugs and killjoys around the country from already trying to ruin it for 'fear of causing offence' to minorities, though. This always pisses me off; I think I wrote about it last year, as well. The other day I read about one company that's not only banned Christmas decorations, but has also banned its employees from giving each other Christmas cards and presents, in case non-Christians feel excluded.

That's the same as that hospital board which recently banned all its employees from smoking even when they were off-duty and off hospital grounds but still in uniform in case it sets a bad example. It's a damn cheek that they think just because they pay someone's wages that it gives them a right to force their hand on matters of personal choice. Though to be honest I can't see any employment tribunal siding with an employer who sacked someone on the grounds of giving a Christmas present. Though, that said, it's probably only a matter of time.

My argument against this nonsense is two-fold. Most pertinently, none of it's actually coming from minorities themselves, is it? It's coming from what I'm sure are well-intentioned people, all of whom are probably white, and from a Christian background (even if not Christian themselves), and who celebrate Christmas. I remember when the Red Cross banned Christmas decorations from their charity shops a few years back overhearing some old women on the bus who'd obviously read about it in the Sun or the Mail, but it wasn't the shop managers actually responsible that they blamed, it was the minorities themselves.

As far as I'm concerned, the only minorities who are going to be offended by Christmas are absolutists, who are going to be offended by any suggestion that any alternative religion to theirs is equally valid. In a word, fundamentalists. So I imagine there are plenty of people who belong to these minorities that the busybodies claim to be acting on behalf of, that probably feel patronised or even offended to be lumped in with people who put bombs on trains and blow up buses in the name of the one true god. I may be wrong. But I doubt it.

My other point, which might seem a bit contentious, but as far as I'm concerned is just common sense really, is that if someone is offended by Christmas, then so what? We don't have laws in this country that say you have a right not to be offended. You couldn't have freedom of speech if we did. There's not been a leap forward made that hasn't offended the status quo. My own sensibilities are offended by what I see and hear almost every day, but that's my problem. We don't live in a comforting, cosy Disney universe and I for one am glad.

It's not even like Christmas is particularly religious anymore, anyway.

I've started work on a new project, though by that I mean started writing it; it's been slowly turning over in my mind for over a year now, and I've been doing the necessary research since the end of the summer. It's called "The Thieves Of Pudding Lane" and it's a historical coming-of-age adventure disaster crime thriller, er, thing. I've uploaded the first draft of the first chapter, and should things go well, that'll also be the last chapter I upload. This may be the one.

Thursday 1st December 2005, 5.46pm

I haven't written any book reviews lately, mainly because I haven't been reading much fiction. I've read quite a bit of non-fiction, though. I read the two foremost modern accounts of the Great Fire of London (one excellent, one a waste of time - more on why I read these books at a later date). I also read the 1990s diary of Tony Benn (a far more damning indictment of Tony Blair than Michael Howard or David Cameron could ever hope to muster - now, what does that tell you?). And this week I read the brief yet epic in scope book "If You Want To Write" by Brenda Ueland.

Almost criminally, this book is out of print in the UK. Don't be fooled by the title; right at the start Ueland asserts that whenever she says writing, you can substitute any form of creativity, and indeed she quotes great painters more often than she does great writers. This book is barely about writing either; it's not a clinical, forensic step-by-step guide to plot construction. Indeed, it's a step back from all that, and is actually about independence and honesty in art.

Except you could read every mention of art as a metaphor and apply everything she says to life in general instead. Such as even if you're filling your life with lots of things and get lots done, if you're not doing what you love, what you really want to do, then you're still just being idle. She laments the millions of people who spend (no, waste) their lives preoccupied with who they think they should be rather than just being who they want to be. She says it's mainly fear (even if suppressed) that stops people being honest, especially with themselves.

Remarkably, this book was written in 1938. It's like a forerunner to the glut of self-help tomes available now, except this doesn't pander to self-pity. If you can find a copy, whatever your 'art', buy it. Even if you can't afford it, buy it. It's worth more than you'll pay for it.

Friday 25th November 2005, 5.25pm

So this week saw 24-drinking legislation come into force, to which I am naturally opposed. I'm not convinced of the logic that if alcohol is more readily available then people will drink less. If someone's clinically obese you don't push the dessert trolley in their direction and expect them to lose weight.

This legislation seems to stem from a crucial misunderstanding on the government's part. People, first and foremost my own generation, aren't binge-drinking because they've got to hurry up and finish their pint before closing time. They are binge-drinking for the sake of binge-drinking. We drink to get drunk. I know, I've done it. European attitudes to drink aren't going to develop here simply because we've now adopted European laws.

There seems to be a rosy image of young people sitting outside upmarket bars discussing the influence of Sartre in Salman Rushdie's new novel, to whom the old closing time laws were simply a damned inconvenience, what what. If only that were so. If only.

We're frequently assured that it's only a tiny, negligible minority that causes trouble when drunk. Well, I do wish that tiny, negligible minority would stop following me around. I've been out and about in the pubs and clubs districts of Southend, Norwich and London on a weekend and twasn't pretty. More like running a gauntlet, in fact.

The other thing I find distasteful about the way this new legislation is being presented is the way in which it's being couched in terms of civil liberties.

You don't want to get into a debate with Americans about gun ownership. In America you could pick any three Americans at random and, statistically speaking, only one of them wouldn't have a gun. If you do get into a debate, however, the Second Amendment will inevitably crop up sooner or later. The Second Amendment is the clause in the American constitution that protects the rights of citizens to own guns. Consequently there are two hundred million of the things in private ownership (and consequently their gun death rate is 570 times ours, but that's another debate).

I've always found it sad that Americans define their freedom on the basis of whether they're allowed to possess lethal weapons or not. But I think it's just as sorry a reflection of the English that some of us are now defining our freedom based on our right to drink ourselves into a stuppor.

It's consumer conditioning, really. You can't buy a television at 11.01pm, but does that make you any less free?

Only a few weeks ago our government tried to introduce laws of internment, which already exist in America. If Americans' main criteria for assessing their liberty is their ability to own a gun, then no wonder the US government was able to get its pincers on the right to trial. I don't know why we should assume that as long as we have the right to fall over in a vomit-strewn gutter after having a punch-up with a guy pissing on the wall that it makes us any more free, I really don't.

Sunday 20th November 2005, 11.02pm

This week Luke and I went to see the new Harry Potter film, "The Goblet Of Fire". Spoilers ahead. To put the following review in context, I saw the first two films before I read any of the books, I saw the third film after reading the third book, and I read the third and fourth book back to back. So it's been quite a while since I read the book. Consequently, apart from some early scenes set at the Quidditch World Cup, I didn't notice where they had made cuts.

In this sense, it was the first true adaptation of one of the novels, because instead of being a plodding walk through all the story beats in the novel (including the ones that work on the page, but don't on the screen), it took the plot and the spirit of the source material and then made a film out of just that. This bodes well for the next few films, seeing as they're just as heavy tomes as "The Goblet Of Fire".

I think I prefer the third book ("The Prisoner Of Azkaban") to the fourth book, but I preferred the fourth film to the third film. I thought the last one was a marked improvement on the first two, and this continues the trend. For those not acquainted with the story, this is the one where JK Rowling dropped the rigid formula of the earlier books, and concentrates largely on the Tri-wizard Tournament, like a mini-Olympics for junior witches and wizards between three schools: Hogwarts, Beauxbatons and Durmstrang. A champion from each is chosen to represent their school by the magical Goblet of Fire, which then also tosses Harry Potter's name into the running as an unprecedented fourth candidate. So as well as competing in various magic trials, Harry and his pristine chums have to reach the bottom of the mystery of who is a powerful enough magician to tamper with the Goblet of Fire.

Except that mystery is kind of sidelined in the film version right until the end, so you never wonder who it was until Harry actually says "You're the one who, etc, etc". The mystery is left by the wayside as the producers decide to concentrate on the adolescent angst aspect of the plot instead. Much has been made of the kids having to contend with hormones in this one, but it's all very innocent and polite, and about as believable and as realistic as the dragons. Consequently, the normal human drama is the film's greatest weakness.

For some imperceptible reason, Ron tells Harry to "Piss off" (thereby guaranteeing that 12A rating, not sure what else is here that's any more likely to offend than the previous films) about half an hour into the film and then they spend most of the film not talking and then make up again at the end in time for the finale. It just doesn't work. Maybe there's more to this in the book, but I can't honestly remember, and the film could have done without it.

Likewise the way it deals with the boy-girl thing doesn't really ring true. For half the film we're meant to believe Harry's this legend amongst his peers, with Ron swapping his autograph for favours, and then all of a sudden we're meant to accept he can't get a date for the Yule Ball. There were girls in the seats behind us cooing and going "aaaahh", but I just found it cloying. In fact, the only bit of halfway genuine sexual tension came in the scene where Moaning Myrtle gets frisky around Harry naked in the bath. I don't remember that bit in the book!

However, that's just a small part of the film, and the rest is pretty good. Director Mike Newell chooses his shots very well, and particularly when he's shooting in and around Hogwarts castle it feels more real and less of a set than it has before. The special effects are the best yet. Having cut so much presumably extraneous stuff from the book, he also manages to pace the film just right, so it never starts to drag, and indeed, after two and a half hours, it didn't feel like that long.

The acting is generally something you shouldn't mention about a Harry Potter film, and yes, there are still some "Star Wars" performances here. From being unbelievably bad in the first film, the boy who plays Ron has improved greatly; he's developed a rather generous range of facial expressions compared to that one he used for every single scene in the first film. Unfortunately, the opposite can be said for the Hermione girl, who was the best of the three in the previous films, but in this film misjudges every line of dialogue she has. There are some obvious punchlines she delivers as if they were serious lines, sometimes almost angrily.

Daniel Radcliffe continues to build on what he's done before. The kid is so Harry Potter now that he's pretty much guaranteed he'll never work again after this. I think they should keep the same ones through to the end, even if they don't look as young as they're meant to be portraying. Even Luke commented on how Ron's biceps were a little too bulgy for a supposed fourteen year old, and I thought Harry looked like he'd been in the Hogwarts gym a lot over the school holidays, too.

Ralph Fiennes is perhaps a little too predictable a choice to play Voldemort, but he's clearly having a lot of fun with his one scene. When I heard he was completely white all over I was imagining him being a sort of albino, though the only quibble I have with the look they chose is that having no nose makes him look like one of the aliens out of "Galaxy Quest". I imagined Mad Eye Moody as being much more crotchety, like the school caretaker, than Brendan Gleeson portrayed the character.

At the end of the day, if you don't like Harry Potter, this isn't going to convert you. It's more of the same safe, cosy, romantic fare that harks back through a rose-tinted window to a golden age that never existed, where everyone was nice to each other unless they were one hundred percent pure evil. But if you can believe in dragons for a couple of hours, then it's surely not too much more of a stretch to believe in a world where even children still have names like Cedric, Neville and Hermione. Bunkum, to be sure, but pretty fine escapist bunkum, too.

Saturday 12th November 2005, 5.48pm

There's been a long gap since I last posted, but I decided Andrew's face has graced my front page in such a prominent position for long enough. Actually, I haven't had much to write about lately. If things go to plan, I'll be revamping the site again soon and these day-to-day posts will be consigned to an archive, kind of like a jeyers.co.uk 'year zero'. I've gone through every post I've made in the last two and a half years and there's only really sixty-odd that I plan on keeping in the archive. Most of what I've written is fluff, and in the last few months, that includes pretty much everything apart from the Bret Easton Ellis talk. So I've resisted just adding more fluff to the mix. The bag needs changing, as it were.

Anyway, I'm posting now for two more reasons. Firstly, that I've uploaded my review of the White Stripes at Alexandra Palace this week, though I've still got gigs dating back as far as May I'm yet to comment on. Secondly, I've started uploading this story I wrote at the end of the summer about a day in the life of a pound coin. I wrote it long-hand in exercise books, and there's five of those to type up, so only the first twenty-odd vignettes are currently online. I'll upload these as and when I copy them up.

Friday 28th October 2005, 12.47pm

Just because it wouldn't be fair to only have subjected/provided Simon with the embarassment/nostalgia (delete as applicable), here's another photo from that Geography fieldwalk the Class of 2000 from Southend High did in summer 1994. It has absolutely nothing to do with Andrew's birthday, but it's the oldest photo I have of him that isn't an official school one, in which he was roughly half the age he is today. The change isn't quite as pronounced as with Simon, I think (but if you want to post one of those spiky blue hair photos, Mr Harsent, I'd generously delete this line).

Saturday 22nd October 2005, 4.47pm

I read today that Education Secretary Ruth Kelly is considering reintroducing ability testing as standard into junior schools, to be used to stream entry into secondary schools. At first I thought this was Labour finally ditching decades of dogmatic social engineering with regards to schools, and adopting a child-centric education policy. As I read on, however, I discovered that actually, the complete opposite is the case. The horror! The horror!

As Ms Kelly envisages in a government White Paper, pupils should take an ability test in year six, and based on the results of that, they will be put into nine different grades of ability. Every secondary school will then be required to take a certain number from each of the nine grades. In other words, rather than giving students an education tailored to their individual abilities, they will be given the same education as everyone else, regardless of their abilities, regardless of their strengths, weaknesses, interests and ambitions, and this proposal is just a more efficient way of ensuring that. Individuality seems to have been dumped from the national curriculum, perhaps because homogeny is easier for Key Stage 2 to spell.

This isn't the first time I've got on my soapbox about this. Indeed, my soapbox rues the days when Labour politicians sink their fangs into our ailing education system. I went to a junior school that was pretty much run along the lines of Ms Kelly's proposal. When I joined the school, there were people in my reception class who had joined the school a year previously. When I left the school, there were people in my year six class who had joined the school a year after me. Was this streaming pupils according to their abilities, with the struggling given extra time, and the high fliers allowed to progress? Was it fuck. If there was streaming of any kind, it was to ensure there was the entire range of ability represented by every single class. So there were two year six classes, but both of them had year fives, both of them had people who were ahead of where they should be in their work, and both of them had people who could barely read or write.

This is my main vexation here. I did all right out of education because I had the ability anyway, even though I went straight to the bottom of virtually every subject in my first year at high school because everyone else had presumably already completed the junior school curriculum, whereas I had not, because a class can only work as fast as the slowest member, and if you have people who can barely read or write in your class, that's going to be very slow indeed. Though I complain, I didn't really suffer because of the way my junior school headmaster (he went on to be a Labour town councillor, unsurprisingly enough) ran his school. The people who suffered were those stuck behind, which was about a third of those in my year six class.

This may sound tewwibly, tewwibly elitist to readers of certain broadsheets, but I truly believe there is nothing to be gained by lumping (no, dumping) kids of all abilities together and assuming because they're all being given the same education, they will all do equally well out of it. The truth is that people have different abilities and different needs, and I feel so ridiculous for typing that, because as far as I'm concerned, it's just common sense, and shame on any politician of any denomination who puts dogma above common sense.

Education is opportunity. Give someone a good education and they can go anywhere with it. It's why I think education should be completely free at every level for every age. If someone at forty decided they wanted a change of direction, wanted to go back to university, wanted to get a degree, then I think the state should pay for it. At the moment you can't even get that if you're eighteen right out of school, and that's not going to change. Tory shoo-in David Cameron has avoided policy all week, yet the only one he's confirmed he's dropping is Michael Howard's pledge to get rid of tuition fees. And this is the bright new light of the Conservatives? There's now a Labour/Tory concensus on denying the poorest in society higher education! We've reached a situation where people can only get what they pay for.

And this is what's going to happen to secondary school education as well. I believe that most of those who left my junior school barely able to read and write would have done much better had they been given an education tailored to them, rather than the generality. Because of what that headteacher did, wrecking their education, he has effectively wrecked their lives, too. They left junior school behind most, so they started secondary school behind, and I doubt, given their increased needs and educational demands, that they would have been able to catch up. Kids doomed to dead-end jobs and zero opportunity by social engineering at the age of five years old. It might not be against the law (and indeed, if this White Paper passes, it might actually become the law), but I still think that's criminal.

So yes, I despair that Labour are going to use my junior school as a model for every school in the country. It will get to the stage where the only good schools will be private ones, who can do what they want. I just think it's sad that the government thinks because it pays for state education, that it should control it. No doubt this White Paper was drawn up by educational pundits, all of them appointed by the government. I'd like a White Paper drawn up by the real educational experts, perhaps a year four or five teacher in a school like my junior school, and then have the government make policy from that instead.

Tuesday 11th October 2005, 10.34pm

Last night I went to Bret Easton Ellis's talk at the South Bank Center. Contrary to my initial inability to place it on a map, I actually knew where both it and I was when I got there, as the Royal Festival Hall (of which the SBC is part) is just along the river bank from the Tate Modern and indeed I walked right past the venue with Jenna a very short eighteen months ago. It was like being back at UEA for a night, as the Queen Elizabeth Hall was built in 1967, when clearly they thought lots of grey concrete was architecturally appealing. UEA never had plush leather seats, however, nor did it have staff who were in as plentiful supply and were as accommodating as the RFH lot.

Bret Easton Ellis came on stage at 7.30pm to rapturous applause. The 1000-seat venue was sold out and I only saw a couple of seats that were not occupied within five minutes of the man taking the stage. I was quick enough booking to get a third row seat on the aisle, which meant I had an unobscured view as he took a seat with the evening's host, critic John Walsh, no more than fifteen feet away. The audience represented every demographic of age and race, though predictably weighted slightly toward twentysomething student-type white middle class males. This probably didn't come as a surprise to Easton Ellis, and I'm sure he appreciated the irony that he was getting the same kind of celebrity response that he savaged throughout "Glamorama".

He looked pretty uncomfortable for the first five to ten minutes as John Walsh gave a precis of Easton Ellis's career to date (conspicuously failing to mention "Rules Of Attraction"). The author lounged in a chair not made for a lounging posture, rocking his knee awkwardly and keeping one of his massive paws clenched around his mouth and chin at all times. He glared into the audience, sizing us up like a caged lion, frequently frowning when Walsh lavished him with the kind of rhetorical praise you'd expect of a literary critic. Walsh was setting a tone for the talk that Easton Ellis didn't look particularly enamoured with, and it was the tone of a pretentious book blurb writer, using too many words like "powerful" and "haunting".

Once Walsh had finally shut up, Bret Easton Ellis accepted his invitation to step up to a spotlit lectern and read from the beginning of his new novel, "Lunar Park". Though he didn't gabble, he didn't sound entirely at ease 'performing' his book like this. He read it out just like it's written, in a fast, continuous, almost monotonous stream. He was acutely aware of what the funniest lines were, and it's when the audience were responding to him, rather than nodding their heads obsequiously to Walsh's prattle, that he came out of his shell, and into his own.

Following the reading, Walsh began an interview. The talk was advertised as a 'conversation with', but it was more of an 'interrogation of'. Walsh was not a natural interviewer, rarely following through from Easton Ellis' answers with what seemed to me obvious next questions, and relying too heavily on his script. At times he even interrupted Easton Ellis before he could answer, until finally he jokingly told Walsh to shut up for a second. It all went down with laughter, but Easton Ellis's expression betrayed sincerity.

As soon as that had happened, and he'd put himself in control of the talk, Bret Easton Ellis started to look altogether more comfortable. He turned out to be a natural wit, often self-deprecatingly so, but never nauseatingly modest. The impression he gave was of someone at peace with his status in the literary world, but perhaps he always was. He implied that part of the intention with "Lunar Park" was to write a response to the response to him. People had assumed that what the characters in his novel did was somehow based on his own experiences that he thought it about time he did something autobiographical. Of course, Bret Easton Ellis being Bret Easton Ellis, it was hardly going to be a straight autobiography.

After the interview part was over there came the question and answers section with the audience. This inevitably led to the "What did you mean here? What did you mean there?" sort of question, which Easton Ellis justifiably batted aside. He was asked his favourite film adaptation, which was "Rules Of Attraction", because Roger Avary captured on screen what Easton Ellis was trying to do on the page more capably than the directors of the other adaptations. Apparently the rights to "Lunar Park" have been sold, and Benicio Del Toro wants to play the protagonist, who is called Bret Easton Ellis. This got a sizeable laugh.

During the evening, Easton Ellis talked most fondly of his first novel, "Less Than Zero". He pointed out how it's the only one of his books that's non-judgemental, that in all the other books, there's someone to blame, even if the blame is wrongly placed, or too simply attributed. He also explained how he wrote the first draft on crystal meth in eight weeks and that it was four thousand pages (yes, a four and three zeros) long. It then took him two years to rewrite it, which probably got one of the biggest laughs of the night.

I did start to wonder when he claimed that just how many of the outlandish anecdotes he was telling were true. I had only bought "Lunar Park" a few hours previously, and only read twenty pages on the train, which basically covers a fictionalised version of his own life from childhood to the "American Psycho" backlash. "Lunar Park" is the story of an alternative Bret Easton Ellis who at a crucial juncture decides to settle down and become a well-adjusted husband and father in American suburbia, until his demons quite literally come back to haunt him. There are hints that he has fictionalised his early years, but you have to know about Bret Easton Ellis the real man to be able to tell. I suppose that's the point, that if you know nothing about the real Easton Ellis, you'll be all too ready to buy the fictional version. It was just that, during this talk, I wasn't sure which Bret Easton Ellis I was seeing.

After the talk was over, I queued up with my new copy of "Lunar Park" to get it signed. And so did about four hundred other people, so I ended up queuing almost as long as I spent sitting in the hall. I got typically tongue-tied when I met the man himself and probably ended up saying something inane. But I got to meet the man who turned me back onto reading after high school English teachers almost succeeded in making me hate it, and I got to look him in the eye, and I got to shake his hand, and I got to take away a momento, and he won't remember a bumbling fanboy anyway, so I headed back to Westminster station with a smile on my face.

Monday 3rd October 2005, 11.47pm

I was flicking through my television channels at 10.30 this evening but my remote control is broken so I have to use the up/down buttons on the TV set itself, which means landing on a channel is largely a matter of guess-work. I was aiming for BBC1, but ended up on BBC2 instead, which was "How Euro Are You?" I'd intended to watch that but had forgotten all about it and ended up watching yet another completely shite ITV drama instead (not even wine could make this stuff good). Anyway, I caught a few moments with Peter Hitchens, and he's always good for a laugh.

I have subsequently taken their online quiz, which you too can take here. I got Mr and Mrs Costa Del Sol, which is probably about as inaccurate as that Ok Cupid test I took last week that found me to be a socialist. It's nice of the BBC to be so typically objective and get a raving loony like Hitchens to represent anyone who dares question the way the European Union has developed, and continues to develop. Apparently you can't wonder whether there's something wrong with a law that says our buses need two and a half doors to meet safety standards without also believing French people are genetically closer to rodents. Tony Benn's as much a Eurosceptic as Hitchens, but you never see anyone with the intellectual argument behind them employed on such programmes. That wouldn't suit the editorial line, after all.

Last week I saw George Romero's latest zombie flick, "Land Of The Dead", which wasn't so forgettable that I forgot to review it, simply that I was musing over my thoughts. I was generally impressed, though I preferred the "Dawn Of The Dead" remake, to which this owes as much as it owes to Romero's original trilogy. It's more of an action film compared to the first three being horror films, though the direction is more focused (even when it succumbs to Romero's blackly comic penchant for self-indulgence regarding gory death). It's basically a film about a truck in the same way "Citizen Kane" is a film about a sledge, but I guess that's just me trying to drop "Citizen Kane" into a review of a successfully unabashed zombie b-movie, anyway.

Friday 30th September 2005, 6.28pm

What wound me up most this week was, naturally, the eightysomething old man being manhandled out of the Labour Party conference for shouting "Nonsense!" during Jack Straw's feeble attempt to justify the war in Iraq yet again. If that had been me I would have torn up my membership card and joined an opposition party, so I suppose it's testament to the man's greater humility that he not only returned the next day, but graciously accepted the New Labour politburo's apology. Rather than let the papers turn him into the conference picture boy, he also made a fine speech drawing an analogy between Blair readily apologising and rectifying for this trivial mistake, yet refusing to apologise for and rectify the much larger one that was the war in Iraq.

I later saw a Party Conference Broadcast in which Tony Blair assured viewers the government was listening to them - and by later, I mean five minutes later, after the footage of this frail old man being grabbed and pulled and shoved for voicing a contrary opinion was screened yet again. And all this after key conference speeches from Tony Blair and Charles Clarke in which they said they wanted to create a society built on respect. I know the Labour Party membership ignores what the leadership says increasingly often but sometimes they do say something sensible, even if they don't mean it.

I have a real problem understanding the stewards' zealous actions, seeing as they were party members and volunteers. I can't understand how you can do things like that and think to yourself, "I am doing a good and right thing." That the old man was a German Jew who fled the Nazis and settled here (joining the Labour Party before Tony Blair was even born) is certainly something pertinent I hope those stewards are thinking about today. In the 1980s the Labour Party threw out much of its militant Left (for which Walter Wolfgang had sympathies). Maybe it's time for another cull.

Besides the footage of what transpired, what wound me up just as much was the fact that the old boy was detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. I remember saying in one of my more hysterical posts two or three years ago that terrorism legislation would inevitably be used to stifle democratic dissent. Not quite as hysterical anymore, is it? It's the main reason I'm opposed to identity cards: I don't trust this government (though I won't be partisan about it, I wouldn't trust any government) to introduce such legislation to do one thing, and not use it to do something else. It's the slippery slope principle. Someone somewhere might use them to identify a terrorist (though Spain has ID cards and that didn't stop the Madrid train bombings, plus the 9/11 hijackers all travelled on their own passports without any trouble, and how exactly would an ID card have stopped the July attacks here?) but what will they end up being used for?

Tuesday 27th September 2005, 9.33pm

Sometimes the less I post here, the less I find myself having anything to say, or almost forget the style in which I write entries for the public domain, or indeed, forget that I write in a particular style at all. That's not to say I adopt a different character when writing these entries, just that these days I'm more selective in what I post about, and about how I present my thoughts. This year's entries in particular have tended to be more innocuous, detached even, because I've resisted the temptation to vent or rant as in previous years (except after a glass or two - see if you can tell which ones). These online blog things are a wonderful catharsis in those regards, but one has to consider the larger picture, and only using it to rant against the world would give an inaccurate, negative impression. (Of course, not posting at all when something in the world's made you angry ultimately does the same).

The last ten days have been particularly busy, much of which I've spent back and forth between Southend and London. There have been a spate of concerts lately (The Offspring, Stereophonics and David Gray), the reviews of which will appear in due course (though, that said, I notice I'm still to post reviews of gigs I went to as far back as May).

Whilst in London, Luke and I also caught "Wolf Creek", which was probably not financed by the Australian tourist board in any capacity whatsoever. Not an original idea or trick in the entire film, borrowing liberally from "The Blair Witch Project" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", but peculiarly effective, particularly in the middle section of the film. Two poms and an Aussie travel to a distant meteor crater in the Outback, their car breaks down, a friendly Crocodile Dundee-type offers them a tow back to town at dusk, and it all just goes pear-shaped from there on. Excellent use of bleak, empty Outback scenery, and the semi-improvised (or so it appeared) dialogue gave it a realistic edge.

I'm currently reading "Trainspotting" by Irvine Welsh, which is a marvellous little book, even if perhaps not "the greatest book ever written by a man or woman" as the iconoclastic Rebel Inc claims on the front cover. Little of the book made it to the excellent Danny Boyle film (though what's there is very literally translated to the screen), and I dare say there's enough material to make a sequel (or perhaps a sidequel) to the film using the same book. It's by turns just plain cheeky, and just plain revolting. Most of it is written in phoenetic Scottish ("The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy" etc), the trick to reading of which is, apparently, to 'hear' it inside your head read with a Scottish accent. Problem being I keep slipping into a Geordie accent, and the characters don't work quite as well when it sounds like Ant and Dec are in the Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle roles. Actually, it genuinely isn't as challenging as it looks, and for all his lit'ry accolades, Welsh is just a downright dirty storyteller of fine calibre.

Thursday 22nd September 2005, 11.39pm

I was being nosey and poking around the blogs of people on Jenna's Livejournal friends list and found this quiz on one of them, and couldn't resist. It's not as good as the Political Compass site. It's more US-centric, and I don't think it's quite as accurate in where it places you, but the questions are quite good.

You are a Social Liberal (75% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (15% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid

NB. I'm not a member of that site. You don't have to be. And I have no need, remember? (This is actually an edit, as I didn't realise where it was hosted until afterwards, or rather, what it was).

Thursday 15th September 2005, 10.11pm

Today I saw a twenty year old BBC drama called "Threads", which was just horrible. Horrible. It made the cause of many a childhood nightmare, Raymond Briggs's similarly themed "When The Wind Blows", look like an episode of "Last Of The Summer Wine". If I don't have nightmares again tonight I'll be surprised. Of course, you don't dream if you don't sleep, and you don't sleep if you're hiding under the stairs. Some thoughts don't seem quite as ridiculous in the dead of night when there's not a sound nor a movement in the house.

Years ago I remember seeing an American TV movie about a nuclear attack starring Steve Guttenburg. It was pretty much a conventional disaster movie, with the first half setting up a handful of disparate characters and their gripes against each other, and then the second half sees all those gripes exposed in their pettiness following a nuclear strike. The attack itself consisted of a few flashing lights, a few smashed windows, and a few dusty extras lying on the ground. The thing I remember most, however, is the disclaimer that rolls at the end, that says in all likelihood a real nuclear attack would be much worse. I'd say. And it wasn't even satire.

I first saw "When The Wind Blows" when I was about six or seven. My sister studied it in high school, and because she missed the class where they showed it, she brought it home. Seeing she was watching a cartoon, I thought that meant it was for kids, so joined her. I later got my parents to borrow it from the video shop. I don't think they knew what it was about. Actually, I'm pretty adamant children should be protected from knowing what fall-out does and what radiation poisoning entails until they're at least ten or eleven. Yeah, slot it somewhere between long division and sex education (or should that be the other way round?).

One of the first stories I remember writing with a concept I came up with all of my own (rather than plundering those I was reading) was the story of Misty and Snowy, who were two talking Siamese cats. Okay, so maybe I plundered a bit from Enid Blyton. However, I don't remember there ever being a nuclear war in the middle of "Bimbo And Topsy", in which all the humans were wiped out and the animals had to make it on their own. Misty and Snowy spent most of the time looking for someone to stroke them, or curling up in abandoned houses to escape acid rain. You see, these cats had the same knowledge I did, which was probably too much for my emotional sanity. I recall making a kid down the street act out the Misty and Snowy stories with me (indeed, he named Snowy himself). I hate to think what kind of damage I might have done him.

"Threads" is easily the worst in this category, by which I probably mean the best. If there's any more horrible than this, I don't think I'd want to see it, by which I probably mean e-mail me straight away if you know of one. From a storytelling perspective it's all over the place, slapped together, episodic, theatrical, relying on the nerve-shreddingly calm public announcer-style narration to tie it all into a whole. But it wasn't until after the final scene froze mid-shot that I started to consider it as a piece of drama anyway.

I don't know what else to say about it.

I've uploaded a new gallery of photos taken this week at the latest Gamegossip meet in London.

Saturday 10th September 2005, 11.16pm

I'm feeling less than one hundred percent at the moment, so I'll keep it brief. Thank you for cards and blog entries regarding my birthday. Tis nice to be remembered in these times of self-obsession. Went to see "Red Eye". Not Wes Craven's best, but final half hour good. Cillian Murphy should stop playing baddies before he gets typecast. Roadblock and police cordon in Southend town centre because guy on top of multi-storey car park was threatening to throw himself off it. Saw him crawling along wall, but nothing on local news or radio so must assume they talked him down in the end. Watched last episode of "24", the best since the last episode of season one. Finished "Cannery Row". Haven't started anything else yet. Listening to new Foo Fighters and Kaiser Chiefs albums. Sold a NoFX one. And finally, added a new section to the website, replacing that quotes section I never got round to typing up. But you can find that yourself, you lazy varmints.

Monday 5th September 2005, 11.44pm

So as I mentioned, I'm currently reading "Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck (and I know the sequel, "Sweet Thursday", arrived from Amazon the other day, by way of a parcel that should constitute the sum of my birthday presents this year). It's perfect summer reading, a book to read when it's hot and you can picture the heat shimmer over a Californian coastline all the more easily than were it pouring with rain outside. It remains to be seen whether it would have that transportative effect in winter.

I might be enjoying it more than "Of Mice And Men", possibly because it's longer, and there's more meat to it, or perhaps because it takes a far more romantic look at life. And that's despite two suicides in nearly as many chapters at the start of the book. Mack and the boys are just as poor as Lennie and George, perhaps poorer, but so is everybody else, and for the most part, that's not an obstacle. There's one bit where they start using frogs as currency, because the Doc wants frogs, but he's out of town, so Mack and the boys pay grocer Lee Chong in frogs, knowing that Lee will get his money's worth out of them in their stead. Of course, then they all get drunk and have a fight and all the frogs escape anyway, but it wouldn't be Steinbeck if everyone lived happily ever after with plenty of amphibians in their wallet.

I have added a link in my Links section to the site of Mike Stone. You might recognise the blinking eye he has there. Mine and Mike's paths first crossed in late 1999 or early 2000, when he edited a fanzine for fantasy and historical author Garry Kilworth, to which I subscribed and contributed a few little bits. I constructed a website for the fanzine, which is now sadly lost to the limbo of a Geocities purging sometime in the last couple of years, even though I stopped updating it shortly after Mike stopped producing the fanzine. In early 2001 he became justifiably distracted from this undertaking by the birth of his first child, which meant he hadn't the time to spend on producing a quality fanzine (it won 'fanzine of the month' from SFX); by his own admission, he hadn't known beforehand just how much time and effort it would demand of him.

Anyway, Mike's also a writer, and has had quite an admirable (or dare I say, enviable) level of success selling short stories to magazines and anthologies. His story, "Clob", is featured in a new collection called "The Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre" (buy at Amazon). I've read the story independently of the anthology and it's very good. Mike is now co-editing a new anthology called "Badass", which includes stories along a gangster or organised crime theme, in the vein of "Sin City", so slightly fantastical elements are welcome. The publisher was keen on a Christmas date, though that looks to be pushed back now amid certain creative differences (not least of which Mike securing a professional cover artist who's worked on Terry Pratchett's Discworld spin-offs but whose work was not met entirely favourably by the publisher).

So it might come as a shock or it probably won't, but I'm currently planning a mob story. The initial spark of inspiration came from this second chapter to that technothriller I never finished earlier this year. In a nutshell, it's the story of two police pathologists who perform a post mortem on a suspected mob hit and find he had swallowed a small fortune in cut diamonds. If it's good enough to go in the anthology, no doubt you will hear no end of it from me, but if it's not, well, you'll be able to read it here in a month or so!

Friday 2nd September 2005, 12.59am

Despite certain things I said to the contrary pretty much exactly a year ago (i.e. "yay, no more education"), I admit I did, out of curiosity, request a prospectus from Royal Holloway in Surrey, which arrived today. To be truthful, I have been feeling increasingly disappointed with my degree from UEA lately. Part of it is undoubtedly a Keeping Up With The Jones's thang, for checking out the league table of universities, I found I don't actually know very many people who went to a worse placed university than UEA. I don't agree with league tables for high schools (or state ones, at least), but I think when you're getting £12,000 (and that was with all the financial perks of being in the lowest income band of students) into debt for a university, there's some benefit to knowing where you're going, beyond what it says in a glossy prospectus.

When I went through UCAS the second time I applied to Warwick and York along with UEA and got rejected from both. I knew I was unlikely to get into York because my personal statement was very much geared toward a focus on creative writing and York didn't do that. Plus I think there was something about having to read a book in another language. Yeah, for an English degree. Warwick was a bit more puzzling, because it was a creative writing minor like UEA, but they rejected me outright without even asking to see a sample of my work. It probably came down to the fact that they wanted AAB and I had AAC (my third A having been in General Studies, which no university worth its reputation seems to acknowledge), and if it's a popular course, then they have no reason to consider anyone who doesn't make the grade.

It quite astounded me when Ed, one of the guys I talk to on MSN, turned out to have gone to not one but two of the top eleven universities, and not just in the UK, but in the entire world (Cambridge at 4, the LSE at 11 in the world). Normally, I would say that's just greedy, but then Ed is anything but normal - in a good way; before he was stricken with a mysterious blood condition this summer, he could have been cycling for NASA. He worked out that he had cycled in the last couple of years a comparable distance to the circumference of the Earth or something. And that was mostly between the family homestead outside Ipswich, and London, where he was living in lovely Brixton. Anyway, Ed was born just a few days after me, is far more grounded, and seems to know precisely where he is and where he's going at any given moment (case in point, he is studying for a PhD), whereas I, his elder, feel lost most of the time, constantly stopping short and second- and third-guessing myself, wondering whether I'm making the right decisions, then missing the boat completely through procrastination.

Anyway, things did get me wondering whether I have shortchanged myself going to UEA. Of course, it may just be a moment of egotistical madness (I was plotting my ascendency to world domination earlier that morning, after all), my having ideas above my station, but at the same time, I remember sleepwalking through my course at UEA, particularly that last year, bored out of my skull, lacking any intellectual stimulation whatsoever, and basically feeling like I was on a conveyor belt, and paying for the privilege of going through the Acme Graduate-maker Press. This led to initial obvious assumptions that this was the experience most people were having, not just at UEA, and that was what it meant to be a student these days. It's only been recently, talking to people on MSN who went (or are going) to more high falutin' institutions, that I've come round to the idea that UEA wasn't right for what I wanted to do. This in turn made me wonder had I pushed myself, had that self-belief to begin with and was a little more savvy, whether I could have got a better experience out of the whole higher education thing.

Obviously, all the confidence in the world wouldn't have made much difference circa 2001, because I just didn't have the grades to get into Warwick, and the courses I wanted to do just weren't available anywhere in between the top of the league and UEA's lower-middling position. However, maybe I was a little premature in ruling out the idea of ever going back and having another go. I don't mean another degree (would rather not be bankrupt at twenty eight), but just because I didn't get on the Masters at UEA last year doesn't mean I can't get on one elsewhere. It's only really been in the last six or seven months that I've properly appreciated why I didn't get on that course, whilst it was something beyond truly comprehending before I was in the right place to. And that place was, to nutshell it, away from education completely, proceeding with my projects by my own devices, without this constant Sword of Damocles hanging over and behind me regarding the idea that everything I do should be subject to academic marking.

Of course, I could be wrong about a Masters being any better. I remember in junior school sitting around being told I'd get to do the stuff I wanted to do at high school. I remember at GCSE being told I'd get to do the stuff I wanted to do at A-Level. I remember in the Sixth Form being told I'd get to do the stuff I wanted to do at degree level. And I never did. My first year on a degree course where the minor was in Creative Writing the only creative writing class I could take was an optional one. That it was the best one I ever took is perhaps indication that removing the expectation of getting graded at the end of it is productive. It's all a matter of whether there really is an inversely proportional link, whether being graded at the end of it truly is counter-productive, or whether I just allowed it to be.

Anyway, I didn't get to do what I wanted in my first year at UEA, and in the second year my only creative writing class was with fifteen people who had no interest in the art of it, were simply taking a perceived doss unit. Not until my third year dissertation, which if I can be honest now, I wrote no more than two hundred words of before the Easter holiday after which it was due in, did I finally get the freedom to write exactly what I wanted. And it paid off, with one of my highest marks at UEA (72%), and the only First grade I got in my entire third year (in which I even managed to get some 2:2s, I was so bored churning out the same crap). So whilst it's tempting to think that, just as at every other level of education, the next step will disappoint, and not turn out to be the chance to do what I really want to do, given that the focus of a Creative Writing MA is essentially an extension on that theme, I'm more tempted to be hopeful, and consider taking the plunge with another speculative application.

The Creative Writing MA at Royal Holloway (which is 16 in the league table, compared to UEA's 33, so is in that upper-middling position I could never find as a prospective undergraduate) is a new course, only a few years old. It came to my attention earlier this year when my mother mentioned something about a similar course at Oxford (mother dearest's spectacles being rose-tinted as regards to her son's abilities there). There isn't a Creative Writing MA at Oxford, though there is an MDip or something like that, and it's a part-time course spread over two years. It wasn't what I was after, even if I was Oxford material. Anyway, when she mentioned it, I did a search for Creative Writing MAs in the UK, and what came up was Royal Holloway.

The course is run by Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, who ran the course at UEA until a few years ago. It's a more intensive course, from the looks of it, with three terms, two of weekly workshops (plus extra unit) and a third of one-on-one tutoring on a 15,000 word dissertation. As well as this creative writing piece, you have to write another 12,000 word dissertation about writing, with a critical eye toward the composition of the creative piece. Also whilst making an application, one has not only to supply 5000 words of creative work, but also up to 5000 words of critical work; an essay, or project, etc. They only take twenty people each year, and presumably that number's split half and half between the poetry and prose strand. So that means ten places, and God knows how many applicants for each. But I thought, why not?

I could of course just reapply to the one at UEA, as my rejection letter requested I do several years further into my writing career. But I'm disinclined to do so. I've nothing against the people who were running the MA at UEA who interviewed me, because they were both experienced, published authoresses. And whilst I most certainly didn't agree with their reason for turning me down last year, sometimes you do come round to the realisation that they were right all along, and generally feel a bit stupid for a little while after that happens. It doesn't do much for your self-belief when you wonder what else you're doing/thinking at the moment you'll look back and cringe about in days still to come. But anyway, I've done the whole UEA thing, I think it was a terrible bureaucratic corporation of a university, and whilst I suspect one MA in Creative Writing entails much the same as any other, I have no desire to go back to Norwich, nice as it was.

There's another Creative Writing MA at one of the Scottish universities (Aberdeen?), but the benefit of Royal Holloway is that whilst the main campus (and the old college building there looks just like a proper English university should) is in Surrey, the Creative Writing MA is taught in Bedford Square, just round the back of the British Museum. Royal Holloway is part of the University of London, even though it's an independent college, so there's some crossover. If I got in there, it would enable me to commute rather than have to uproot.

Right now it's all up in the air. I haven't made a decision, but I am considering it. The worst they can do is what Warwick did, and give you an outright rejection. Except whilst Warwick rejected me because of my A-Level grades (which didn't effect my opinion of them), an outright rejection from Royal Holloway would be because they didn't like my writing. Whilst it's true that I write first and foremostly for myself alone, and that when I am truly satisfied with a piece, it doesn't matter what other people think of it, it's also true that wholesale rejection comes like a cannon ball in the belly. Which would effect my opinion of my writing. And seeing as my recent output is higher in my estimation than it usually is (I'm not talking about that "Doctor Who" fluff here), and I think I'm now heading in the right direction at last, and at a better pace than I was eighteen months ago, then such a rejection would leave me more lost than a bunch of impossibly pretty American actors in a plane crash off the Australian coast.

It would be nice to go to a school that gives you the freedom, but also gives you a push, nurtures your interests. I don't know if Royal Holloway is that place, but I know UEA wasn't. Oh, I don't know. Is anyone still reading? Believe it or not, this was going to be a couple of paragraphs, then I was going to share some thoughts on "Cannery Row", but it turned into an unstoppable stream of consciousness musing. But I don't think I'll delete it.

Sorry, for some reason I use lots of long words when I'm tired. I don't even know where I plucked Sword of Damocles from (damned subconscious), but I think that's the right phrase.

Friday 26th August 2005, 11.26pm

I received my first Christmas mail order catalogue in the post yesterday. Name and shame time: Scott's of Stow. I only ever bought from them once, at Christmas 2001, and they still keep sending me (or rather, a Mr J Evers) stuff. I wouldn't buy from them again simply on principle.

Yesterday I also went to see "The Island", which is not, I'm sure you'll be shocked to know, based on the Aldous Huxley novel, nor the one by horror-porn 'auteur' Richard Laymon. No, this is the latest film from the director of "Pearl Harbor" and "Armageddon", Michael Bay. And the worst thing I can say about it, the biggest disappointment, is that it's been such a big flop in the US, because this was a step in the right direction for Mr Bay, and now he's likely to return to the "Bad Boys" territory, the cheesy slam-bang one-liner fests.

If you've seen the trailer, you know most of the plot. It's a bit like a twenty-first century "Logan's Run", where people who live in a sheltered community, cared for by designated providers, discover the threat of the world outside isn't real. Those who win the lottery aren't shipped off to the Island to start breeding a new immune human race, they're being harvested for organs to keep the people who paid to be cloned alive forever.

In another universe, I could have seen Spielberg do this film. Sure, he would have done a lot different (it probably wouldn't have been quite as brutal in places, plus he definitely would have milked the ending for more sentiment), but it's in the same 'twisty thriller with set-pieces and romantic subplot' drawer as "Minority Report". This is no doubt helped by having stars of some calibre in Ewan MacGregor and Scarlett Johannson.

There's only one bit where Bay loses his grip on the material, which interestingly enough is the action highlight at the midway point, when clones Lincoln and Jordan escape, and are chased into a futuristic LA by helicopters. For the rest of the film, the focus of the direction is very much on these two characters, these two leading actors, but here they are just replaced by anonymous stunt doubles caught in the middle of distracting George Lucas-style action. It's the bit that's most like everything else that Michael Bay has done (even down to the sweeping camera arcs, slow motion walking and smoke drifting through every frame), and is weaker for it.

I would have liked to see what he would have done with the Pearl Harbor story now, coming off of this, rather than coming off of "Armageddon". Instead, it'll probably be "Bad Boys 3". Pity.

Saturday 20th August 2005, 6.40pm

You may have seen my name on AIM with an away message lately, which I very rarely use, because if I'm logged in, I'm usually at the keyboard. However, this week I installed "Aliens vs Predator 2" on this PC so have been making the most of broadband to play other people. It's nearly four years old now, but there's still plenty of people playing. Maybe five hours was a little excessive on Tuesday, though. Had dreams about being chased down dark corridors that night.

This week I started re-reading "Less Than Zero" by Bret Easton Ellis in anticipation of the release of his new tome "Lunar Park", but it was a bit like rewatching your favourite childhood movie and realising the shark looks completely fake and half the cast can't act, so moved onto John Steinbeck's "Of Mice And Men" instead. It's not that "Less Than Zero" is a bad book, it's just I reckon there's a right time to read certain books, and you can read good books at the wrong time and they will just pass you by and not have an effect.

"Less Than Zero" (which Ellis annoyingly got published when he was only twenty) is about Clay, a freshman in college who has just come back to LA for the Christmas vacation and finds the time away has given him enough distance to see his home clearly for the first time. I read it after Christmas in my own first year at UEA, and whilst I didn't come home to the kind of characters that populate Bret Easton Ellis novels, I could certainly appreciate the ethos, the spirit of going away from home, then coming back and noticing how narrow the stairs are in your house.

I read "Glamorama" earlier this summer, having read the Ellis back catalogue in sequence, but putting that one and "The Informers" off after the disappointing "American Psycho". The final few chapters were very nearly enough to put me off buying a plane ticket to the States for next March (see the new counter on the bottom right of the screen). No doubt as I'm making myself comfortable in Sardine Class the phrase Ellis uses more than once in the penultimate chapter describing a terrorist bombing aboard an airliner will come back to me. "And the dying comes in waves". And now I'm thinking of people drowning in burning aviation fuel again. Hmm.

Bret Easton Ellis is coming to the UK for a brief promotional tour around the time "Lunar Park" is published here in October. He's only doing one bookshop, and that's in Oxford, so I've had to buy a ticket to a talk he's doing at the South Bank Center. I don't even know where that is yet, but presumably the South Bank would be a good place to start looking. Advantageously, the SBC website allows you to pick a seat in advance, and despite it being a large venue, I've got a seat in the third row. That's practically in the guy's lap.

I voted for Eugene in last week's "Big Brother" final. I didn't really have anything against Anthony, but after two and a half months, I didn't think I really knew who he was either. What are his opinions? What are his ambitions? I suspect he won because most people are like that: he is very ordinary, just drifting through life, neither contributing to nor doing anything that's much to the detriment of society. He was the safe choice, rewarding simple plain averageness. Of course, maybe he just won because he was a pretty-boy. I don't know what's worse: getting popular support because you're an inoffensive airhead, or winning because you have a symmetrical face.

To be honest, this series lost some of it's appeal when Maxwell was evicted. Not because I liked him, but quite honestly because I completely unabashedly loathe people like that, and there being a risk that such a revolting human being could win a popularity contest generated suspense. I loathed him from the moment they showed his application interview, in which he said he hated people who have opinions about everything, as if somehow thinking about things was irritating to him. It's worse enough when someone despises you for having a different opinion to theirs, thus making them feel insecure about their own worldview's validity (for surely if their opinion was irrefutably great, then everyone would agree, no?), but despising you simply for having an opinion at all, that's beyond insecurity.

I remember in my first full week at university going to see a film with future housemate Luke then going back into halls and having the first and last conversation with three of my then housemates, who were quite drunk, and when I started giving my opinion of the film, they looked at me like I'd done a Nazi salute or something. They clearly found it rather surprising that I had thought enough about it to make cogent criticisms, as if life's a rollercoaster you get on for the sole purpose of enjoying the ride, not a taxi cab that can go anywhere depending on where you want to take it.

That's Maxwell through and through. His sole guiding ethic in life seems to be that if it's a laugh, it's good; if it's not a laugh, it's not good. I wouldn't begrudge anyone their happiness, but when that happiness turns to anger if you upset their worldview, that's where I draw the line. Life can't always be a laugh. It'd be easy to write Maxwell off as an airhead (which he is), but those people at UEA weren't thick. He is just a very, very ordinary, vacuous, obnoxious boor, who was even outclassed by a girl who kept getting her fake tits out.

Eugene, on the other hand, was a genuinely nice person, considerate and sensitive, and I thought that was worth rewarding. Being pleasant to people is underrated and under-celebrated. It's like in the first series in 2000, when Craig won. I saw him get drunk and prance around in the nude in the first week and decided he was a Maxwell-style boor who I would vote out as soon as the opportunity arose, but in the final week, I voted for him, and never considered voting for anyone else. Over the months he had shown himself to be a thoroughly decent, generous person, even if he only had as many braincells to rub together as Maxwell. It just goes to show that intellect has nothing to do with how you are as a person. I went to school with smart people and worked with severely mentally handicapped people during my time at Mencap, and I'd take a friendly retardate over an arsehole who went to Oxbridge any day of the week.

Except Sundays. Sunday is a day of rest.

Sunday 14th August 2005, 6.27pm

This afternoon I finished the story I've been writing since the beginning of April (though I didn't write any of it in May or June, so really it only took two and a half months, which is quite heartening), "Doctor Who: Curse Of The Cybermen". Overall, I'm quite happy with the result, though because of that long break in the middle, I don't really feel as much of a connection with it as I did last summer's big project, "Predator: Voyage Of The Damned", or the epic I wrote in 2003, "The Rabbits Of Roadkill Turnpike". A contributory factor was probably that I was using someone else's protagonists (the Doctor and Rose), which meant I was writing toward someone else's concept of the character rather than creating realistic people myself.

Things that have been annoying me lately: summer (as in the lack of it, where's it gone? I can't sit outside when it's windy and raining); dogs (I'm swiftly coming around to the idea that every dog should come with an ASBO for its owner - you can't open the windows round here anymore, let alone go out in the garden with these anti-social little buggers barking! I'm getting positively hypertensive here and that's not good for anyone); semi-detached houses (related to the above point, I'm just sick of hearing every damn thing that's going on next door, whether it's a dog barking or people banging doors or shouting at each other). All minor quibbles, of course. I'm still alive and so are you, dear readers, so there's much to be glad for, really.

Like "24" season four on DVD. Which is impeccably drool-worthy.

Wednedsay 10th August 2005, 5.41pm

I've removed a link from my Links section. It used to be the official site of prose-poet Bernadine Evaristo, who was a creative writing tutor of mine in my first year at UEA. However, I was bored the other day, so was visiting sites from my own links section... and now the site is the host for hardcore porn. I'm sure this has absolutely nothing to do with Bernadine Evaristo; maybe the tenancy on her initial and surname dot com ran out and she didn't renew it. It doesn't explain why someone else moved in and started using it for real dirty stuff.

I am reliably informed that it was filth of the filthiest degree, even though I didn't hang around much beyond seeing the word "FUCKING" appear in giant letters, as I was boredly surfing on my mother's PC at the time. Reminds me of the time I was editor of the high school paper and unwittingly put a porn site in it (you'd think Mensa.com was run by Mensa, wouldn't you? Well, it is now, but it wasn't then, trust me) and parents ran the school anonymously to report it. Then I had to listen in detail to the deputy head describe what he'd found (bestiality, etc) when he'd gone to check it out.

Anyway, apologies to anyone who might have happened upon this sordid muck by accident (though you really should have told me if you did). And apologies to anyone who's into that kind of thing for now removing it, though to be honest it's not that hard to work out what it was from what I said.

I haven't posted in a while. Last week I went to see both "Charlie And The Chocolate Factory" and "Fantastic Four". Whilst the Tim Burton version of "Charlie And The Chocolate" may be more faithful to the book, I actually preferred the original 1970s version with Gene Wilder. Johnny Depp doesn't really fit in this film. Whether he based his portrayal on Michael Jackson or not, he's creepy instead of charismatic, and there's no chemistry with the kid who plays Charlie (who's from the Haley Joel Osment end of the child acting spectrum). The Oompa Loompas, too, were creepy rather than funny - no wonder Veruca Salt didn't ask Daddy to buy her one in this version. The running joke about cannibalism, which I think they added, actually fitted with Roald Dahl's macabre sense of fun. Other plus points would be the squirrel scene and any point at which the Augustus Gloop kid is on screen - pity he was the first to go, actually.

As for "Fantastic Four", widely panned, and probably deservedly in the wake of "Batman Begins", to which few comic adaptations released immediately after would stand up. I thought it was about on a par with the two "Spiderman" movies in that it's really just about the fights and then all the 'dramatic bits' in between seem incongruous and awkward. Still, at least there's no portentous narration where the characters go on and on about "This is my curse. Who am I? I'm blah blah nobody really cares anyway". Indeed, in this one the characters have the choice to go back to the way they were, and choose not to. Nothing more heroic than that. Plus with the exception of some bits with The Thing (who's largely the comic relief character until the end), at least all of the fights aren't just between blatantly obvious CGI replacements for Tobey Maguire and baddie of the month.

Chapter twenty.

Saturday 30th July 2005, 10.04pm

Just to prove that I haven't been putting the scanner to solely productive use scanning all these aerial shots of Essex and London...

That photo was taken when Simon was half the age he is today. How's that for making you feel old? Serves you right for being almost eleven months younger than me, because that makes ME feel old. I'm not bitter, though. Hope it was a good one, and at least it fell on a weekend, eh?

Friday 29th July 2005, 5.12pm

Last night I had an odd dream where I was being chased by Abu Hamza, the fundamentalist Islamic cleric with the hook hand. He and another fundamentalist type cornered me in a shop doorway, then Abu Hamza took off his hook and threw it at me, laughing. When I woke up I wrote a strongly worded e-mail to Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary (and my former local MP), asking him to bring in new laws to prevent fundamentalists from attacking me in my dreamstate. His response was prompt, and he assured me that the new set of anti-terror legislation does indeed make a criminal offence out of inciting people to have nightmares. I feel so much safer this afternoon.

I've uploaded another photo from my low-level flight over Essex and London in 1996, which I've added to the gallery here. It's a little blurry, but it's my favourite of the series, as you can actually recognise various London landmarks from it. I've been looking for it for weeks, but only found it, serendipitously, after I gave up, and was looking for my mislaid TV remote.

I've also uploaded another couple of chapters of my "Doctor Who" story here.

I was interested and surprised this week to read that one of the teaching unions is calling for a return to the grammar school system. Usually the lexicon of the teaching unions doesn't stretch much further than 'pay rise' or 'one day walkout', often together. Beyond the fact that any time a large group of people gets together they invariably turn into a bullheaded bureaucracy who can't see the wood for the trees with regards to common sense, the teaching unions are actually supremely placed in that their constituent members know more about practical education than any of the politicians who make the laws and dabble in social experimentation.

I'm not sure about a 'return' to the grammar school system, however. Where exactly do they want to return to? The 1920s, where kids are out on their ear at 14 if they're not destined for a few select universities? Or the 1950s, where the kids who passed the 11+ got into grammar schools, and everybody else was dumped in what would become the secondary moderns, which didn't guarantee a qualification at the end of formal education, and were basically just a means of keeping kids off the street until they were old enough to meet legal employment age? One gets the impression that by calling for a return to grammar schools, the union members haven't actually been engaged in a debate about educational philosophy, they've just settled on an idea they think will make their members' lives easier, same as always.

I went to a grammar school as one of the last year groups to take the 11+ exam, which was phased out in 1994. It was replaced by independent entrance exams in English, maths and I think also science, which the prospective grammar school kid has to sit at the school they want to go to. The numbers applying lately have dropped off significantly because parents are afraid that if their child fails to get into the grammar school, they will end up at a bad school. It's not that different from the university application process: some universities don't like being your second choice, so you may end up in clearing if you fail to get into your first choice.

Despite my misgivings about the particular grammar school I went to, I don't think there's anything ethically dubious about streamed education, where kids are taught according to their needs and abilities. What's unfair in that? What the teaching union calling for grammar schools is actually calling for is a return to selective education, which is slightly different. In selective education, you take the high achievers, and lavish them with the best education. Think of this from the teacher's viewpoint, and you can see why the union favours it: by increasing competitiveness in the teaching industry, the good teachers will clamour for places at the best schools, and the less good teachers will end up at the less good schools. This would surely compound the problem and generate inequity in educational standards.

I remember reading in 1997 or 1998 a letter someone wrote to the Daily Mail and writing a reply that I never sent. It was in the first year of Labour's government, when they were introducing the idea of ballots to stop grammar schools being able to have entrance exams. A parent wrote in and said he wholly agreed with the idea, because his son sat the entrance exams at their local grammar school and failed to get in. So he wasn't against the concept of grammar schools, he was merely bitter that his son wasn't suitable, and wished to stop anyone else who was from getting a fitting education. It was spite, pure and simple.

My second time through the UCAS process, I applied to both Warwick and York. I already had my A-Level results, but thought I'd apply to a range of universities, even those that I was very much on the borderline with having the requisite results (Warwick required AAB, I had AAC, though I did have a third A in a subject they didn't recognise). I didn't even get called for interview. I didn't honestly feel much of a failure, and I certainly didn't write a letter to the Daily Mail saying Warwick should be shut down, or stopped from being so selective.

It's like this recent talk of saying 'deferred success' when you mean 'failure'. Talking about 'political correctness gone mad' has become a cliche these days, but I'm not sure what use it is to kids at any age when they aren't corrected, when they aren't told there's a better way of doing things, and indeed, where applicable, a RIGHT way of doing things, in contrast to a wrong way. If you never tell kids they've done something wrong, they never learn what it means to do something right. If kids can't fail, then conversely, they can't succeed either, because what is success but the opposite of failure?

In an ideal world, streamed education wouldn't actually require any grammar schools. My sister passed the 11+ as well, but she went to a local comprehensive because all her friends were going there, and she was in the top set for every subject. That's streamed education, and it's basically what grammar schools do on a wider scale. Even within my grammar school, we were streamed further, with people taking different tiers in maths at GCSE.

As I've detailed here, I went to a junior school where kids of mixed abilities were bundled together, for reasons I didn't understand then, and don't understand now. When I saw a newly qualified teacher on the BBC's "Question Time" programme a few years ago say that all kids start school with the same level of ability, I was shouting at the TV. I started school with the ability to count and write my name. Some kids left the same school at the same time as me barely able to do that.

And this is the crux of my argument for streamed education: I don't understand how it serves the interests of those kids to have tried to teach them at my level. Likewise, I know full well that it didn't serve my interests at all to be taught at their level, which at times I was. A class can only be taught at the rate of the slowest student, and when the needs of completing the curriculum were prioritised, those kids had to suffer so that the teacher could hurry up. No wonder this teaching union wants a return to properly selective education; the best teachers will be able to get away from the kids who test their abilities the most.

It's surely not too much of a utopian vision that one day every kid in the country can get an education tailored to their abilities and needs, that the slower kids get the extra attention they require, and the smarter kids get a chance to fulfil their potential. Like I said, you don't need grammar schools to be able to do that, but I know from experience that good teachers will struggle to achieve that with classes of thirty students. And as for the newly proposed idea of having classes of sixty students, you might as well start giving the kids dumped in such classes their giro books with their first school uniforms. It can only fail those whose needs are greatest (at both ends of the intellectual spectrum).

Tuesday 26th July 2005, 9.56pm

Filming on the second series of "Doctor Who" has just begun in Cardiff, starting with the Christmas special. The BBC have published the first photos of David Tennant (aka That Man I Saw On The Tube) in his garb as the tenth Doctor. He's wearing a pin stripe suit, a brown trenchcoat, trainers and looks like a scruffy tramp. It's perfect. Kind of has that eccentric Tom Baker thing going on. No more Eccles in his not-very-alien high street fashions. Anyway, here he is:

There are more photos on the BBC's official site here. The Christmas special is called "The Christmas Invasion", and sees the newly regenerated Doctor and Rose battle the alien Sycorax. Hmm, sounds like a cold sore medicine. Anyway, there will also be an encounter with a race of catwomen (not Halle Berry, presumably/hopefully), Queen Victoria (destined to be a classic villainess) and the newly revamped Cybermen.

Talking of which, I've uploaded a few more chapters of my own Cyberman story here lately.

Sunday 24th July 2005, 6.57pm

One of the benefits of that massive clear-out I've recently completed is that I found a welter of old photos. Yes, the analogue kind, those things that came on floppy, shiny pieces of thin card. Mother dearest bought a scanner with her new PC, even though it's now over two years old and she's never taught herself how to work the accessory beyond switching it on. Today I sat down and scanned in seventeen photos I took from a low-level flight over Essex from Southend to London and back that my dad won tickets for nine years ago this week. They'll probably be of interest most to Essex folk, and those who think we're an overcrowded concrete jungle of a country without any green spaces left. You might even be surprised. Take a look.

Thursday 21st July 2005, 11.58pm

Tony Blair made quite the disgraceful speech today. It was just a glorified newscast: "Well, today there was another terrorist attack and Warren Street was bombed and a man's been arrested". We know that - what are you going to do about it? Little in the way of linking it to Iraq; in between the lines there was a whole other speech you were never likely to hear. In fact, he spent most of the time talking about Australia, and even had Australian PM John Howard there to hold his hand. Howard promptly managed to upstage Blair by talking for longer than Blair at Blair's own press conference. He couldn't manage to plumb the depths of bad taste, however, which he left up to our Tone, who slipped a joke about cricket... into the middle of a prime ministerial address about a terrorist attack. And you thought George W Bush's speeches were an embarrassment to his people.

Tuesday 19th July 2005, 9.33pm

I see the price of a bus ticket has gone up yet again. It used to be £1.90 for a return to town, but now it costs £2.10, the second 20p price rise this year. No doubt this was done for "improved customer service", which seems to be a euphemism for decreasing the regularity of buses on the number nine route. Still, Arriva were pro-active toward complaints that buses were never on time: they took down the timetables at bus-stops.

I've uploaded my REM review and gallery.

Thursday 14th July 2005, 10.59pm

At the suggestion of Dane Barr (no relation to Roseanne), who shall not be otherwise known as The Lazy Paddy (no, that'd be rude), I have added 'next chapter' links to the bottom of all my longer stories: "The Rabbits Of Roadkill Turnpike", "Tails", "Predator: Voyage Of The Damned", "Alien: The Betty Chronicles", "Aliens: Hudson's Tale", "Hudson's Tale: The Prequel", "Morse And The Dragon" and "Knocking Heads Off Stone Angels". Now you can just go from one chapter to the next, without returning to the contents pages. Anything to please you, dear browsers.

Monday 11th July 2005, 5.48pm

You'd think that with a broadband connection I'd be taking advantage to play some proper first person shooting games, but no, what I've gone and got myself addicted to are online Flash games. The aim of this one is to make words from letters that are touching each other. When you use the letters, they disappear (get eaten by a snake), allowing more to fall in from the top. Make too many short words and burning letters start appearing. Don't use them up, and they eventually fall to the bottom, and the game's over. Hours, I tell you, I actually played it for hours.

This one's a variation on that theme, in which you're given six random letters and have to make as many words out of them as you can. The aim of the game is for your train to reach the station before the consistently moving computer controlled train. You fuel your train... by making words. Yes, it's quite, quite surreal. It gets harder as you go on and the station gets further away, yet the computer train never stops. Longer words also make the train go faster. Have to resist downloading the offline version.

I've also updated the last month of my diary entries from 1995. Apologies to all written about within.

Sunday 10th July 2005, 10.38pm

This weekend we've been clearing out our shed at the bottom of the garden. When our house was rewired five years ago we basically had to move out for a couple of weeks, but instead of putting all our stuff in storage we filled up the two garden sheds and the garage, and took advantage of the generous offers neighbours made to keep boxes in their spare rooms. I can't quite remember why I never got around to unpacking a lot of my stuff, though this was the summer I finished high school, and there was all that hoohah about getting three times the A-Level points I needed and dropping out of the University of North London. Still, that was five years ago.

So this is what it looked like when we opened the door. I actually planned to go through the stuff last year. I actually planned to go through the stuff the year before that, as well. But I always started clearing out the boxes that remained unpacked, but moved into my room, and ended up putting stuff back instead of throwing it out. It just became a rearranging exercise. Except now there just isn't the room for all the stuff, whether packed or otherwise. So some of it had to go.

Truth be told, had foxes not got into our shed after last summer, I would have had a hard time throwing some of this stuff away. But there's just something about the smell of piss and shit that snaps you back into reality. It's a great leveller; no, that's not a crucial part of your materialistic past, it's just a piece of rubbish. Bin it. Another contributory factor were the smorgasbord of animal remains we found, including the large bones you can see here.

About half an hour after we started, a fox bounded out of the shed. It had been in there the whole time, evading my mother. This was no mean feat. It was the size of a small dog, skidded to a halt in front of a girly-yelping version of yours truly (hey, I haven't had a tetanus jab in almost twenty years, and I don't like needles, remember), then leapt away into the overgrown creepers at the end of the garden. I tried to get a photo, but was too busy calming my nerves.

As far as we know, there was actually a family of six foxes living in the shed at one point. My mother saw two adult foxes and four baby ones cavorting around on our lawn and running down the road out front on several occasions. As you can see from the photo above, they knocked out two panes of glass (and later the plastic sheeting my mother put over holes) and also bashed a hole through the bottom of the door.

I was planning on throwing that thing out. My mother had other ideas. It's a race-track I made for my toy cars when I was about nine (yes, complete with papier mache 'jumps' in the middle of the tracks), and the fibreboard I painted it on proved just the ticket to block up the holes in the door. So far, no more foxes have got in, but they've been howling in the evenings for the last two nights (indeed, were doing so just ten minutes ago) and left a little present on the rubber mat outside the back door that I inadvertantly traipsed through the house this morning. Nice.

Friday 8th July 2005, 10.13pm

And to think this week was going so well. We had London spear-heading the worldwide Live 8 extravaganza last weekend, then winning the 2012 Olympics mid-week. I don't even care about sport, but it was one of those occasions to put your cynicism to the side for a quarter of an hour (if only to lap up the polite restraint on the face of Jacques Chirac as he slowly came to the realisation that he himself was responsible for torpedoing the French bid).

And then there was yesterday.

Despite the death toll inevitably going to end up the worse side of fifty, I actually reckon this was a pretty humiliating show for these terrorist chumps. In America they managed to kill three thousand people, raze two important buildings to the group and changed the course of a government. Compare that to what they managed to pull in London. Leaving the "our attack was worse than your attack" to certain right-wing Americans, you have to admit it could have been far, far worse.

Not that I'd want to be the one to say that to any of the bereaved.

"I'm getting sick of Americans tonight" I wrote in my diary on September 12th 2001. After 9/11 there was a quite, quite hysterical response. I got a disgusting e-mail from someone just going through the AOL user directory, cutting and pasting a call to arms, claiming it was my patriotic duty to burn down my local mosque and attack Muslims. People I thought I shared a political allegiance with on Gamegossip showed their true colours (quote NUKE ALL THE FUCKING ARABS end quote), and also the level of ignorance which I had stupidly mistaken for dogmatic fortitude in the past. The right-wingers on Gamegossip are stewing today because they thought they'd come online in all their smugness to find we more liberally minded Limeys champing at the bit for vengeance just like they did, yet we're not.

Indeed, in this country, we're seeing a certain stoicism we're supposed to be famous for, but which you don't expect to see outside Noel Coward films. The attitude very much seems to be to pick up the pieces and carry on regardless. As it should be. The REM gig I was going to in Hyde Park was cancelled this Saturday (postponed to next week), but even if it hadn't been, I would have gone. No terrorist's scaring me out of living the way I want to. I'm gladdened that this seems to be the overwhelming consensus, and that no quarter is given to those who, like certain Americans, see such atrocities as a good excuse for taking out their insecurities and wheeling out a new fascism. If only they didn't have too much pride to ask their GP for Viagra, then they wouldn't seek to destroy everything we've got that's actually worth cherishing. It's times like this when you actually realise how good you've got it.

Thursday 7th July 2005, 9.53pm

Is that the best you can do, fuckers?

Sunday 3rd July 2005, 10.21pm

Hello, I'm writing to you now from my new broadband connection. Yes, we've finally joined the 21st century as far as the Internet is concerned Chez Eyers. I'm not sure how fast it is, but it's the slowest (i.e. cheapest) AOL was offering. Which is fast enough. I'm not after downloading movies or other Warez, but now even the more graphically enhanced pages load instantly, plus I can watch streaming video clips (no, not those kind, pleb!) and play Flash games, like the third person Dalek shooter over at the "Doctor Who" site. Also on the plus side is that I can no longer be mocked when asking for MP3s over MSN and having to wait half an hour for a four minute song to transfer.

Mother dearest has delighted in telling AOL canvassers to stick their broadband whenever they have the affront to call, but when I broached the topic the other week, it turned out that all her silver surfer buddies are on broadband and couldn't understand what she was still doing stuck in 1998. Of course, it's not all Christmas Pud. The laptop's getting on a bit so doesn't have enough RAM to run AOL broadband, plus it's upstairs in my room, more than ten metres from the main phone socket, where the broadband modem has to be plugged in. So this explains my laxity in updating this week. My laptop's disk drive didn't survive a glass of water spilt on it a couple of years ago, so I've had no choice but to use that useless USB drive that lost me all my data to begin with to transfer the website files to the PC downstairs.

In other news, wildlife is slowly but surely annexing our property. My current clear-out was prompted by foxes who had made their home in our shed at the bottom of the garden. They've now knocked out a second window pane and bashed a hole through the door as well. Everything beyond the greenhouse has become hideously overgrown (blame the gardener's preoccupation with the Internet); weeds have broken up what was left of the path. Despite this, I tried to make my way down there, see what I could salvage of the boxes of my stuff we put in there five years ago when the house was completely rewired, and that I was yet to unpack. I didn't even get as far as the door before two of the blighters started leaping around in there. So I left them to it. They've started digging a hole under the washing line now, have already dug several under the fences on either side, and dog toys from nearby gardens keep mysteriously appearing overnight. Still, we're not going to set Environmental Health on them. With any luck they'll bite the chav who lives a few doors down and give him rabies.

And this is the other force of nature encroaching on the human habitat. This toad is seen at least once or twice a day, often in the morning, always at night, increasingly often actually inside the garage, and if you're lucky, you can catch it squeezing through the gap under the door. This photo doesn't really convey the scale of the thing, but it's almost four inches long, and would not sit comfortably in the palm of your hand.

This is the best photo I've managed to take of it, not with a zoom lens, but with the macro option on my camera. Yes, that means the camera was about two inches from its face. As you can see, it was completely unfazed. This will prove the death of it. The other day I opened the garage door and it just sat there in the middle of the floor, looking at me, as if to say, "Yeah? What?" And the day before yesterday I went out after dark, and actually stepped on the critter! It was right outside the back door, and I felt this lump under my foot. The worst thing is that I was looking for it when I stepped on it. Fortunately, it seems to be okay, though it also seems to have learnt its lesson, and flopped away (for unlike frogs, toads don't hop) when I went out yesterday.

I love this face-on shot, even if the flash doesn't work with the macro lens so it's a little dark. The wee beastie has now been seen all over the garden. My mother first encountered it a few weeks ago wallowing inside a watering can, and today she spotted it down near the cats' summer enclosure whilst mowing the lawn. Hopefully she didn't dice it. Of course, this might not be the same toad, and we could be sitting on top of a giant toads nest. NB I haven't licked it.

This week Luke and I went to see Steven Spielberg's latest, "War Of The Worlds". I knew I was going to like the film when the Daily Mail's notoriously pleasant columnist Simon Heffer said any parent who let their child see such a film was guilty of child abuse. I, on the other hand, didn't spend my childhood locked in a cupboard, reading Bible verses and listening to Enoch Powell's latest LP, and know this is precisely the kind of film a lot of kids will love. It owes a lot to the horror tradition, and is closer to Spielberg's ghost-directed "Poltergeist" than it is to "ET" or "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind". In fact, "Poltergeist" is probably closer to "ET" and "Close Encounters" than it is to this. Once upon a time, before his protagonists all became scientists or natural born heroes, Spielberg used to make movies about everymen who had a very unaverage experience. This is, in a way, a return to the old Spielberg.

On the other hand, it's not like most Spielberg movies of late. It's a bit like "The Lost World", which was dark and you could just tell Spielberg hadn't got making "Schindler's List" out of his system yet. "War Of The Worlds" is by far his most unremittingly cold, bleakest film. Even "Schindler's List" was more hopeful and positive in its view of mankind; this doesn't even make any claim to being even-handed. There were bits that reminded me of the George Romero zombie movies: what I like about Romero is that he knows, no matter how bad it gets, there will always, always be human beings who will make it worse. That spirit is typified in this movie in the scene where people start killing each other in a fight over Tom Cruise's character's car, and he just abandons it because he knows they'll kill his kids to get it.

I think that's the point I subconsciously warmed to the character. Cruise plays Ray Ferrier, who is basically a loser, a terrible father, and not even that likeable. Twenty minutes in, I stopped thinking of him as Tom Cruise, coincidentally enough when the excrement hit the ventilation system. For an hour after that, this film is five star stuff: a series of superbly choreographed set-pieces where Ray and his kids flee, and the alien tripods lay the smack down on mankind; each set-piece larger than the next, the crowds of hysterical humans growing, the tension ever mounting. Don't go into this film expecting any treatise on colonialism like the original novel; this is an exercise in pure B-movie visceral filmmaking.

This is apparently the film Spielberg's been wanting to make for decades. He was going to make it in the mid-nineties until "Independence Day", and then dropped his plans again following September 11th. I'd say the film owes more to the latter than the former. There's a lot of 9/11 imagery: bits of burning plane, giant ash clouds, scraps of paper falling from the sky. Just like Roland Emmerich ditched the jingoism for social conscience with his latest, "The Day After Tomorrow", Spielberg imbues his "War Of The Worlds" with the liberal spirit of knowing that not all fights are fights for survival, and some are merely pointless attempts at revenge. When Cruise shouts "You don't have to fight!" at his son in the trailer, that's it, there's no dramatic reversal whereby Ray loads up on big guns in the final act to save the world.

And that's where the film's strength lies. Owing a lot to "Signs" (in more ways than one), this is a movie about just a few random people caught up in global events, and everything we see is what they see, so no exploding White Houses, no climactic battle with the alien fleet. Tom Cruise doesn't save the day. Neither does America. For some the ending will be a cop-out, but I just think it was unsurely handled. If you've read the book or seen the previous adaptation, you already know the ending, but it's not made especially clear what happens; the point isn't sufficiently hammered home that beneath all our claims to superiority over one another, in the face of a superior foe, all humanity is equal.

Yesterday I watched the Live 8 concert, or at least had it on in the background. It'd be far too easy to be cynical about it, but you know what, negativity sucks, people; spread the love. We all know George W Bush is going to torpedo any attempts at sorting Africa out at G8, and you need only look at Pol Pot's campaign in Zimbabwe to see that dropping the debt isn't a cure-all. Sorry, did I say Pol Pot? I meant Robert Mugabe. Driving people into the countryside to fracture any semblance of organised society is not what the Khmer Rouge did, no sir, not at all. If only the million and a half who died in the Killing Fields had had a few barrels of oil between them. If only Zimbabwe had a few jars of powdered weedkiller that could pass for anthrax. If only, if only.

Anyway, having watched it on TV, I'm for the most part glad Luke didn't win tickets. Not because it was bad, but because my legs basically fell out from under me after two and a half hours of Metallica, and this was four times as long. In all other respects, it was essentially all those mainstream acts you're not really a fan of, doing the few songs you actually like of theirs. Except for The Killers. If they weren't going to do "Somebody Told Me", I don't know why they bothered. Velvet Revolver, also, were embarrassingly out of place, and it didn't help when Scott Weiland acted as if he was rocking the joint, but kudos to the organisers for at least getting a variety.

Highlights included the Coldplay/Richard Ashcroft duet on "Bittersweet Symphony" and The Who doing their song used as the theme to "CSI". Other oldies like Elton John and Sting relied on their 'legendary' status to see them through, but The Who tapped right into how this predominantly young mainstream audience will know them. Kudos to the BBC cameramen who zoomed in on Pete Townshend as he literally gouged chords out of his guitar. Continued kudos to them for close-ups of Dave Gilmour during Pink Floyd's set. I only really knew "Money", but it was good to see Gilmour's face screwing up, alternately agonised and orgasmic, as he soloed the night away. Worst performance of the day was undoubtedly Pete Doherty joining Elton John for T-Rex's "Children Of The Revolution" and almost ruining it completely. I'm quite fond of a lot of The Libertines' stuff, but that guy is a drunken amateurish boor.

Another highlight was the unrepentantly uncensored effing and blinding on national television five hours before the watershed! It started with coverage of Green Day's performance of "American Idiot" in Berlin: not only did they fail to censor "the subliminal mindfuck America", but even after Billie Joe ordered the crowd to "put your fucking hands in the air", it passed without comment or apology. Of course, that paled in comparison to Snoop Dogg's set prior to 5pm, in which every other line in his lyrics was "motherfucking" this or "motherfucking" that. No doubt there were plenty of complaints to the BBC about the obscenity, with no sense of irony whatsoever; a child dying of poverty in Africa every three seconds clearly not being obscene enough.

Sunday 26th June 2005, 10.57pm

I am a terrible liar. Sorry, Jenna, but I just couldn't resist it. Though you should have learnt by now: when I tell you I'm going to try and get you something that's not very easily obtainable, my sadistic side imagines what fun it would be to muster some sense of disappointment by claiming I've failed, only to surprise you all the more when I reveal that, in fact, I have succeeded. For your benefit, here's the direct link.

As for anybody else who might be interested, I've uploaded this new gallery of twelve photos I took (or had taken of me - you'll see) at a film convention this weekend. I know, I know, collecting autographs is only a few steps away from buying celebrity gossip magazines. One of my sister's ex-boyfriends started it; he got me Sigourney Weaver's for Christmas a few years back, but it's not the same as getting a personalised memento yourself and getting to feel their soft, oh so soft wavy brown hair pressed up delicately against your cheek. Hubba hubba. I had to branch out from the "Alien" saga this time, y'see; it would have been a waste of time just going for the one guy. You understand, don't you, Jenna? You're still my favourite American, of course.

Thursday 23rd June 2005, 11.17pm

Do you remember that King Arthur movie starring Clive Owen that stripped the legend of all its fantasy trappings? Gone was Camelot, Excalibur, the Holy Grail, Avalon, the Lady in the Lake. Well, now someone's gone and done it to the Batman story. "Ohs nos!" the purists cry. Never fear; you know what, it's damn well paid off: "Batman Begins" is the best Batman film by quite a long stretch.

To put this is some context, I really like the two Tim Burton movies, I'm ambivalent to "Batman Forever", and "Batman And Robin" has been on TV several times yet I've never seen it all the way through. The main problem with the Burton films was that they weren't really about Batman, not really; calling them "The Joker" and "The Penguin Plus Catwoman" would have been just as appropriate. They were about the villains. It's like "Star Trek: The Next Generation": by the end of the series it wasn't about Captain Picard anymore, it was about the guest star of the week coming onto the Starship Enterprise, sharing their woes, then leaving after 45 minutes. Regardless of whether it was Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer or George Clooney (and Keaton was my favourite of those) as Batman, you never really got the impression that the character of Batman (in contrast to simply Bruce Wayne) existed without the catalyst of the villain.

"Batman Begins" is totally about Batman. Throughout the film Christian Bale plays with this duality of personas, as if Bruce Wayne isn't quite Batman, and Batman certainly isn't Bruce Wayne. I said the fantasy trappings are gone, and they're gone pretty much completely. This is not a superhero movie. We're not just left to buy that this rich guy puts on a fetishistic latex bat costume and goes around beating up villains at night. Director Christopher Nolan takes us on this Freudian journey starting off with young Bruce Wayne's nightmarish childhood encounter with bats, the subsequent death of his parents (for which he blames bats - in an indirect kinda way; it makes sense) and his coming to embrace this symbol of what he fears. Fortunately, despite what it appears in the trailer, there's little in the way of Liam Neeson's Qui-Gon-esque psychobabble about conquering your fears; it's simply a matter of Bruce Wayne realising that if he can make the scum and villainy of Gotham City feel the same fear of bats that he does, then they will tremble on their knees before him.

This is an absolutely human take on the Batman mythos. It takes what Bryan Singer did in the "X-Men" movies to a new level: everyone's a rounded, realistic human being here, which grounds them and us in their slightly hyperreal world. The killer (and almost completely British, even down to the extras - fantastic!) cast certainly helps here. When I look at Bale, I think of Patrick Bateman from the "American Psycho" adaptation, but that's no bad thing. He's uniformly flawless, and comes through the costume, whereas even Michael Keaton used to vanish beneath the latex. Katie Holmes too, though she doesn't have much to do, also doesn't end up in the Kirsten Dunst rut, even when she inevitably gets kidnapped. Michael Caine provides the few lighter moments in a very dark film.

There are no Jack Nicholsons here, alas, though there are baddies galore. Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow is suitably creepy, and justifies that "moderate scares" warning on the poster all by himself. Tom Wilkinson as a gangster is perhaps miscast; it just sounds like he's doing a dodgy Godfather impression (likewise Gary Oldman doesn't seem to know what to do with being the most genuinely moral guy in the entire film for once - but these complaints are mere grit in the icing). As for the big baddie, well, I wouldn't want to spoil it, but neither Luke or I saw it coming. You might.

I'm glad this film's been well received because it shows what happens when you let a quality director take control of a maligned franchise. I can think of a few other franchises that could do with someone of his calibre. It won't be to everyone's tastes. People who like their comic book adaptations to be more fantastical would be better off sticking to the "Power Rangers" movie. This is an action adventure thriller with heart, brains, soul - and fists.

Though I do wonder if the clearly set-up sequel is going to shoot itself in the foot regarding a certain character 'introduced' in the closing frames...

Wednesday 22nd June 2005, 11.29pm

I'm having such a starstruck geekboy moment right now. I've just been to Luke's to see Audioslave and "Batman Begins", and for an impromptu barbecue. I left his around half eight tonight, which turned out to be entirely serendipitous. Who should get into the same carriage a few stops down the Northern Line but David Tennant, who made his debut appearance as the tenth Doctor Who just this Saturday gone. Fair dinkum. I wasn't sure it was him at first; he was in the next block of seats along. But halfway between Camden Town and Tottenham Court Road this beggar came through the train and Tennant turned his head. He kinda has that unmistakeable look about him: a sort of exuberantly rubbery dazedness. To give him his dues, he popped a few coins in the beggar's cup, which is more than most of the people on the train did. So, anyway, in case you hadn't guessed, I'm in a "Doctor Who" phase at the moment, and save for Ridley Scott or Sigourney Weaver catching the number nine bus into Southend, this was about as geekgasm worthy as it could get for me right now. Hey, I was in such a sycophantic fanboy revery that I even gave that beggar on the train the 20p I was saving for the toilets on Liverpool Street, so inspired was I. I guess this must be how "Hello!" readers feel every time Linda Barker opens a new DFS store.

I'll review "Batman Begins" properly tomorrow, but I think 10/10 about covers the gist of it.

Sunday 19th June 2005, 10.44pm

Somewhere in Norwich a room lies empty and silent. And I've just remembered I forgot to lock the window. Still, at least I cleaned the sill, which is more than the previous tenant did. So here's my last photo from Norwich, of my room in 8 Grant Street, where I've lived more often than not for the last three years, first with Luke Drever, Steven Whittle and Nicholas Grimes, and latterly with Luke and Nick still, but with Jonathan Tarling instead of Steveo.

Once again, as with my room tour (this will now have to be changed; see below), I climbed inside my old cupboard to take the shot from this angle. For what it's worth, that was the first time I'd actually been able to reach my cupboard in at least eighteen months. And it's not the shot I wanted. For some reason the camera played up, kept switching off instead of taking a snap, even after I changed the batteries. This shot was taken at arm's length (thereby capturing more of the floor than I'd have liked, and none of the window), as I was rapidly squeezing the button. This was the only one that made its way onto the memory card.

So now I'm back in Southend and it's sweltering. It doesn't feel like I've been back a week yet. I've been very busy clearing out my bedroom here. As those who have been here will know, I never (used to) throw anything away. Guaranteed there is still stuff in this room that is still in the same spot as it was last time you were here, even if it is tucked away in some cupboard or drawer, and we're talking at least five years there. God, it's been half a decade already.

This is a proper purge; I'm barely giving myself time to get sentimental over anything. I usually attempt such a task once a year, get a few boxes in and then get caught reading old notes passed back and forth during Year Ten Physics. And then everything goes back into the boxes and stays there for another year, when I imagine I will be able to bare to part with it. This year's different in that I'm actually getting rid of stuff. I've thrown out more than I've kept so far. Maybe it's the heat, and I just can't be bothered with all the rearranging and tidying that's necessary; far easier to bin it (or, as is far easier on the conscience to do, stuff it in the pink recycling bag).

I must say it's turning out to be something of an archaeological dig through my past; the deeper I go, the older the stuff I find (newspapers from 1988, for example; and yes, I did say 1988, that's not a typo for 1998 - though I have those too). But this time it's serious. Here's something you may not have known, but I've never thrown away any Christmas or birthday cards. I tackled my desk in its entirety today, and found four or five of one and/or the other from all the old SHSB lot; I've noted how people's handwriting tends to get smaller as they get older, and how certain people sent me the exact same card in consecutive years. Most of those I've binned now, unless someone's made a particularly witty remark; it got to the stage where I asked myself if I really needed a Christmas card from someone at St Mary's I can't even remember anymore.

My starting point this year was all the old computer magazines I've accumulated. I've never thrown a magazine away either, you see. I had a small mountain of "Amiga Format" in my cupboard, some dating to 1991 (when my A500+ was the must-have machine), the latest from 1996 (when nothing on the coverdisks worked on my A500+ anymore, but I still liked to dream about owning an A1200). I've flicked through them as I've shovelled them into the pink sack; twas amusing to see adverts for 20mb hard-drives costing £90. So I spent an afternoon with such archaic staples of my early teens as the words ARexx and AGA and Team 17 going through my head - for the last time. All gone now.

As I was removing the layers of paper pinned over one another on my pin board, I found at the very bottom a rehearsal schedule for "The Roses Of Eyam". Readers of my ten year old diary will recognise this as the school play I was in back in 1995. Pinned over that was the rehearsal schedule for "A Midsummer Night's Dream", which as readers of my diary will discover, is the school play I was in a year later, in 1996. Pinned over the top of them, incidentally, was my high score for "Sonic The Hedgehog" on the Sega Master System: I got 427900, but Andrew helped me complete that.

This stuff isn't history anymore; it's just junk. Though I'd be lying if I didn't say the main incentive for purging this year isn't to make a clean break, but simply to make room for all the stuff I've brought back from Norwich, which is still sitting unpacked downstairs. So it's not a case of shedding my materialism, it's just a case of replacing the stuff. And indeed, some of the stuff packed in those boxes is similarly innocuous rubbish kept for reasons of sentiment alone.

Anyway, some other items I found that were of interest (or at least humorous value):

The Phoenites Dictionary. Andrew is probably the only one who will remember this. Almost ten years ago I made up my own language called Phoenites (he insisted there was already a Phoenite language, there being a Phoenite people - perhaps he was thinking of the Phoenicians). Grammatically, it was just a simplified version of French. Eb ti tallo ni aiper de aiper de London. That means: I am not going to go to London. I created possessive pronouns, object pronouns, a past and future tense. Completely by chance I discovered what "Do it!" translated to in Phoenites. The object pronoun "it" became "cil" in Phoenites. The verb "to do" was "pen". Pen cil! Though like French commands took the "vous" form, Phoenite commands took the it/he/she form, and verbs ending -en were changed to -er. Per cil! Completely unplanned, I swear.

Bossy's fur. I found a tuft of this in my desk. My parents had Bossy before I was born (she came to them known as Boxer, for her boxing abilities, but they thought this an unsuitable name for a female cat). She was an oriental longhair (though a moggy, not a pedigree like a Persian) and had very long, soft fur. About fifteen years ago it got matted for no apparent reason and my mum cut chunks out of it. And I, apparently, kept one. And, damnit, I'm going to keep keeping it!

A "Star Wars: Episode One - The Phantom Menace", er, chocolate bar. Actually, only the wrapper. It was a special edition Wispa bar (whatever happened to Wispa bars, eh?). They actually mass produced a chocolate bar with Jar Jar Binks's face on it (okay, perhaps that explains what happened to Wispa).

A rusty old GLC badge. It says: "Better active today than radioactive tomorrow". 'Radioactive tomorrow' are in big, jagged letters, surrounded by dots presumably meant to be fallout. At the bottom it says: "GLC. Working for London and Peace". The letters WTF seem appropriate. One can only guess that I somehow acquired this in the mid-1980s, when Mrs T was laying the smackdown on the Greater London Council for its bureaucratic incompetency. Who would have thought that the man who brought the GLC down twenty years ago would ever get to be the democratically elected mayor of London decades later?

A £50 note inside an old Christmas card. You should have seen my face when I found this. Imagine your joy if you found one on the street, then quadruple it with the knowledge that it's rightfully yours to keep.

Anyway, apart from clearing out, this week saw the Weezer gig in Brixton. That makes three shows I'm yet to review, along with Garbage the week before and a certain Miss Minogue yonks ago. Though at this rate it's going to be four; Luke and I are going back to Brixton yet again this Tuesday for Audioslave, which I'm much looking forward to. Apparently they're playing Rage's "Killing In The Name" during their encores.

This week also saw the end of "Doctor Who", though it's been commissioned for two more years already. I didn't really understand what was going on because I missed yet another episode a few weeks back, accidentally recording Monty Titchmarsh's "Bargain Force Roadshow" or whatever on the other side by mistake. However, Dalek vs Screaming Humanity times a thousand always goes down nicely with a pizza and Coke. I thought it was very nice how Eccles gave his life, not to save humanity from the Daleks, but just to save one person, Rose. And as for David Tennant, I'm instantly sold on him.

Not much else to squeeze into this bumper update, except that I was annoyed to discover Freeview don't cover this area, as I was hoping to finally invest now that I'm back home for good. Though what's perhaps even more annoying is that AOL Broadband isn't available in this area either. Why not? I thought I'd just come back from four years in the Sticks. Evidently not.

Friday 10th June 2005, 11.38pm

So, it is my last night in Grant Street, where I have lived for the last three years, and my last night in Norwich, where I have spent the majority of the last four years (summers exempted). Tomorrow I become an Essex Boy again (in name only, mind you). As I was noting a few nights back, the last time I could say that, the World Trade Center had only been down a week, which seems such a long time ago, but only if you're counting in years.

Wednesday 8th June 2005, 11.09pm

I've finished uploading the first batch of photos from Jenna's visit to the UK. There were considerably more than I remembered taking, and over fifty remain to be uploaded for the London Zoo trip; I've decided to put them in a gallery unto themselves. For the time being, there are thirty six photos covering our days in Cambridge, Ely, Lingwood, Great Yarmouth and London.

Sunday 5th June 2005, 11.04pm

You know you've been watching too much of a single TV programme when characters from them start cropping up in your dreams. In this instance, the TV programme is "Alias", of which Luke and I have been watching three hours of the stupendous third series on DVD virtually every day this past week. Last night's dream had me flee a picnic from a rampaging Tyrannosaurus Rex. I took cover in a grove of trees, where the villainous Mr Sark showed up and offered to rescue me by shooting the dinosaur provided I give him the bottle of Merlot I was carrying. I wasn't even sure what Merlot was; I had to check online (it's a Bourdeaux wine in the Cabernet group, though the grapes have less tannins than the true Cabernets, and give a richly coloured wine with body and softness... so now you know too).

I'm currently reading "Glamorama", the last novel by Bret Easton Ellis that I haven't read (until his latest, "Lunar Park" comes out in a few months, at any least). This one centres on the character of Victor Ward, who had a fleeting role in "Rules Of Attraction" as the object of one of three narrators' misplaced affections. It's a few years later and Victor is now the 'It Boy' of New York society; he's a minor celebrity simply because it's fashionable for people to know him, or even better, to be known to know him. We catch up with Victor on the eve of the grand opening of a new club. Victor was vain and over-sexed when he was a student, and now he's taking full advantage of his brief tenure as a celebrity, and that means he's bedding a top model, one of her friends (who's also bedding the new club's owner), and also the club owner's girlfriend to boot.

Naturally, on the night of the grand opening, the truth does out, and Victor's fingers are deprived of all their pies. Fortunately, being the epitome of everything that's cool, suave, fashionable and popular, or rather, being vain enough to believe he is, Victor gets an alternative offer. A girl who obsessed about him has disappeared in Europe, and he's offered several hundred thousand dollars to track her down and 'bait' her out. Naturally it suits his ego (and his economically demanding lifestyle) to accept. Naturally, this being Bret Easton Ellis, all is not as it seems. But that's as far as I've got so far. Thus far, I'm preferring it to "The Informers" and the much overrated, much disappointing "American Psycho", but it's not having the same impact that "Less Than Zero" or "Rules Of Attraction" did when I first read them.

And maybe I was a little harsh in my initial summation of the new Audioslave album. It's definitely grown on me the more I listen to it this week. I've even found the vocal melody from "Doesn't Remind Me" popping into my head.

Also: if anyone's missing me on MSN lately, though I've fixed most of the other computer problems, MSN now refuses to work, and it won't allow me to install a new version of it unless I update to better version of Internet Explorer first.

Friday 3rd June 2005, 11.12pm

Today we went to see "Sin City". Luke's read the graphic novels, so he didn't enter the movie blind. Indeed, it turns out to be such a literal adaptation of three of the books that he noticed the few scenes they cut out (and the Josh Hartnett book-ends, which apparently they added). I, on the other hand, had no prior knowledge of the comic books, and as far as I'm concerned, it didn't make a difference. All I knew was that it was going to be noirish, and it was going to be violent. It wasn't actually as violent as I was expecting in that director Robert Rodriguez's "From Dusk Til Dawn" was gorier, and in this much more was left to the imagination than in, say, "Kill Bill" (volume one). It was relentless, however. God knows what the fiftysomething women in the cinema thought, but they stayed the full two hours.

Like "Pulp Fiction", the film consists of three core stories, which overlap in a similar way, so that characters may die in one story and then crop up in the background of another alive. The first story (which starts at the beginning of the film and ends at the end, with the two other stories between) sees ageing cop Hartigan (Bruce Willis) rescuing a young girl, Nancy (who later grows up to become Jessica Alba) from a predatory paedophile, Roark (Nick Stahl). It's like a much darker and upfront version of a Chandler story. It's also the weakest of the three stories, seeing as years later Roark has turned into some yellow goblin fellow due to restorative surgery after Hartigan blows off his genitals first time round. Whilst the entire film is heavily stylised and hyperreal, it's also gritty, but the whole yellow goblin thing was too far out.

The Roark family are recurring baddies. In the next story, a drink sodden hard-nut, Marv (Mickey Rourke - hard to tell where the broken bones end and the prosthetics begin) is set-up for the murder of a prostitute. He goes on the run, finds out the truth, kills lots of people and ends up, well, I won't spoil it. This was a little too fast paced for me, and the only place where it was apparent the source material was a comic book, and one they were trying to stick to literally, frame for frame. It's probably best they used three books for one movie instead of stretching out one book for an entire film (the stories themselves are quite rudimentary, after all), but they could have filled it out a bit more here.

The third story was probably my favourite as it was the most developed. Once more prostitutes are key characters, as a cop-but-nobody-knows-he-is-a-cop, Rafferty (Benicio Del Toro) beats up his woman for fraternising with another man, Dwight (Clive Owen). Dwight and the whores take revenge, and realise by doing so they've upset the uneasy detente that exists between the whores and the police in Basin City. Now they've got to stop the Mob from moving in and taking over.

The film's got a cracking (hmm, I really did just say 'cracking') cast, and that's one of the big plus points. Benicio Del Toro is repulsive, Mickey Rourke is tragic, Clive Owen is slightly more animated than usual, whilst both Nick Stahl and Elijah Wood (as a mute cannibal) are creepy. The women in the film are all whores, even the ones who aren't prostitutes, so the female stars (including Brittany Murphy and Rosario Dawson) aren't really called upon to do much more than pout. Apart from the actors, the graphics are the other big plus point. It's a step up from "Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow"; there are only a few bits (the leaping cars) where you remember the entire thing's rendered by a computer.

Thursday 2nd June 2005, 11.06pm

The "Big Brother" lot are growing on me. Most of them aren't turning out to be quite as obnoxious as they presented themselves in their application videos. It's a bit like last year, when the blond Scot who came second boasted in his application video about how he'd slept with two to three hundred women, which wasn't so much the Rule of Three as the Rule of One Hundred - the actual figure, at his own latter admission, was in single figures. So maybe they're a bit more savvy and wily this year, and realise the producers learnt their lesson about going for average well-rounded personalities two years ago, in the year when "Star Wars" fan and solar powered pool heater pioneer Jon Tickle was the biggest 'star'. Unfortunately I think Derek fits into that category. He's the serious, mature one, so will become an obvious target when all the irritating ones are voted out, and the remainder want people around who are more up for a laugh.

Wednesday 1st June 2005, 11.02pm

Today I returned to writing my "Doctor Who" story, "Curse Of The Cybermen". It won't be finished in time for the cut-off date of the Gamegossip fan fiction competition at this rate, though.

I'm currently listening to Audioslave's new album, "Out Of Exile", actually the first CD I've acquired this year. I'm glad it was in Sainsbury's VAT-free special offer because I don't know if it'd be worth the £14 some shops are peddling it for. My favourite tracks on this one are the quieter ones, the "Like A Stone"-alikes, like "Be Yourself". First track "Your Time Has Come" is the only one with the distinctive Tom Morello sound (the whole syncopated, characteristic Rage Against The Machine thing). The rest is solid stuff, but not particularly exciting. There's no "Cochise" here, though there is some nifty soloing in later tracks.

Sunday 29th May 2005, 11.02pm

I am such an idiot. Keep reading and you'll see why.

Today my laptop finally gave up the ghost (or should that be goose? I can't remember how the phrase goes...) and died. The other night the sound stopped working and yesterday Microsoft Word wouldn't even allow me to place a cursor, let alone type anything. Today I tried switching it on and I got a nasty VGA-style display and a warning that the computer couldn't find a display driver. When I went to the Display settings, it wasn't even able to account for any means of visual data transfer whatsoever. So I reset the machine (though, in typical 'my computer' fashion, Shut Down has also stopped working recently) and when Windows came back again, it asked me for my name and the product key. That's never a good sign, and sure enough, before long, I had one of those dreaded blue screens telling me there was an irreperable fatal error.

So that was it, I thought. I'm still waiting on the Microsoft Office CD-ROM my mother is sending from home, but reckoned I no longer had anything to lose, so popped the Windows ME recovery CD into the drive. I could have slapped myself. I should have slapped the computer. Instead I just sat back, picking my teeth with a drawing compass and having evil thoughts. The thing I had completely forgotten is that you can do a 'soft' reset. That is, you can completely reinstall Windows and you can keep all your data intact. So I was backing up all my files for no reason. Even more so, I deleted them for no reason. And most infuriatingly, I have lost them all for absolutely no reason at all.

The laptop's working fine now. In fact, it's working more than fine. I had forgotten just how fast it went back when I got it in September 2001. I can go from switched off to Internet ready in well under a minute again. Most of my software's languishing in the Winold folder; as is, I suspect, that pernicious virus thing that caused all the problems to begin with.

ScanDisk is still coming up every time, though, so maybe I will do a full reset after all.

Saturday 28th May 2005, 11.18pm

I've done a big update of the Ten Years Ago section, which was several weeks behind. I've completed it up until the end of next week, in case the planned reboot of my laptop doesn't go to plan, and rather than being left with a completely cleaned hard-drive, I'm actually left with a blank screen and flashing cursor.

I missed last week's "Doctor Who", so I didn't really know what was going on tonight - though it looks like I missed one of the best. Now I have an excuse to buy the lavish TARDIS-shaped series boxset coming out in November. As if I needed one. An excuse, that is, not a TARDIS-shaped boxset.

Did I mention I managed to sell "Excalibur"?

I tuned in to the launch of the new series of "Big Brother", but it left a nasty taste in the mouth. I don't like any of the people in there. They tried to be outrageous last year and it backfired because when they got a transsexual in there, she turned out to be a perfectly normal woman, just one that was born a man. Previously they've always got a mix of different personality types, people who were extroverted, but generally a normal cross-section of twenty-somethings. This year they all seem overly obnoxious and superficial, and not in a showy way. Some of these people seem truly damaged: the guy who says he hates people who have opinions; the guy who says he enjoys making people miserable and ruining their lives. It's quite something when you can say the most grounded, normal person in there seems to be Derek, the camp gay black Tory who wrote speeches for Margaret Thatcher! I have a nasty suspicion that this year they're deliberately aiming for car crash television, as all these hopelessly insecure people get confrontational in an enclosed space.

Friday 27th May 2005, 11.04pm

Well, there goes that plan. Yesterday the Internet Explorer 'virus' struck whilst I still had the USB drive activated. After Explorer crashed, I no longer had the little option on the task bar to eject the drive, so naturally assumed it had happened automatically. So having copied over all the files I knew I wanted to keep - countless stories, photos, MP3s and misc files - leaving behind on my computer only those I wasn't sure about, I tried to access the USB drive today to find that it is now corrupted. And whilst on the Internet last night the laptop warned me I was dangerously low on resources, so prompted me to delete the 230mb of files languishing in my recycling bin - which I did. So I've lost everything. Every unfinished story, every finished one, all these photos that don't exist anywhere else. Everything. That pisses me off. Luckily I have all my stories saved to my website, same with the best of the photos, so I haven't actually lost them for good. But everything else. From 1997 until 2003 I wrote my diary on the computer. 1997 to 2002 is saved on a floppy disk somewhere, but that means I've lost April 2002 until March 2004 in its entirety. Programming viruses should be a capital offence. So should talking in the cinema. Yeah. I am not a happy bunny.

Thursday 26th May 2005, 11.06pm

Good evening, dear readers. It's been quite a while since I last posted. Mainly this is because Jenna has been over to stay for the last few weeks, and I was just too tired to come online and post; early mornings breed early nights - though I'm not complaining. However, I'm still waking up well before 8am, so it'll be a while before I'm chipper past eleven again.

Another factor that will probably delay my return to almost-but-not-quite daily updates is my darling laptop. It's been on a slow spiral into uselessness for some time now. Late last year it started refusing to load up properly without running that system check thing first, regardless of whether I'd shut it down properly. Even though it's easy enough to skip it (though woe betide a screensaver that pops up - that crashes the PC), it somehow manages to slow the entire computer down. Once upon a time it could go from switched off to Internet ready in under a minute. Now it takes closer to ten.

I've decided to rescue all my files, then reset the thing. The final straw seems to be a virus that I don't remember contracting, and kicked in when I was trying to access the website for London Zoo. Now if I'm connected to the Internet it pops up a new Internet Explorer (I do have that FireFox thing, but it's not like you can uninstall IE, especially if you are on AOL - or can you?) at the rate of about one a second that all lead to one address that doesn't even load. After about thirty seconds the computer crashes, unless I Ctrl+Alt+Del Explorer first. And once I've done that, the laptop's running on borrowed time until it crashes completely - and then I have to start anew.

Anyway, Luke introduced me to these flash drives you can put in the USB slot, so I bought a 128mb one off Amazon the other week for a bargain £10.99. When I cleared my first PC I fitted everything I wanted to keep onto four floppy disks. I have spent all afternoon clearing the laptop and the 128mb flash drive is currently 49% full. I couldn't have used floppy disks this time, anyway - I spilt a glass of water on the computer two years ago and the floppy drive hasn't worked since.

Once this is all sorted (and I need to find my "Office" CD first), I'll get round to putting up the mammoth gallery of photos I took whilst Jenna was here. There's at least forty of them. There's enough from London Zoo (including three of a gorilla being sick and then eating it) to comprise a specific gallery. We were both impressed with the zoo, which was just the right size for an afternoon out, but I personally prefer the more large-scale safari-type zoo like Colchester's.

Other highlights from the fortnight include:

Cambridge and Ely. Actually, this wasn't much of a highlight. Jenna had been to Cambridge before and she likes the whole antiquated building thing. I, on the other hand, was turned off by the fact that every nice spot, all the pretty green spaces, every little nook we wanted to explore was invariably behind a gate that said "Private" or "No entry" or more commonly, "For members of St Whatever's College only". It was a smart man who first built a tall fence around a plot of land and said, "That's mine, that is" - even if he does have a lot of blood on his hands. Ely was much nicer.

"Star Wars: Episode Three - Revenge Of The Sith". I really enjoyed it, but then, I also enjoyed the first two prequels (Jenna, on the other hand, did not like "Episode One", and she liked this one too). Where this one bettered both of them was that it had focus and pay-off. It was a movie of two halves, and the first half was more of the same (just better), whilst the second half, from Mace Windu's confrontation with Palpatine on, dare I say it, had moments up there with the original trilogy. The betrayal of the Jedi was particularly well done; I loved the score backing it. In the end the story was small-scale; this wasn't about the rise of the Empire in any single cataclysmic event (the machinery of that, you realise, has been in motion from the beginning of "The Phantom Menace"), but about a single step in the process - the eradication of the Jedi.

The film benefitted from some proper baddies: Count Dooku, General Grievous, Chancellor Palpatine, then Anakin Skywalker himself. There were some irksome problems: Ian McDiarmid's acting was the best throughout, but his transformation scene was wrought with a little too much Cheddar. I also thought it a bit cheap that Padme dies for no reason at all. I can see why Lucas did it: the new Emperor tells the new Darth that he was responsible for her death, and Lucas wants to make sure we recognise this as the last in a series of outrageous lies to turn Anakin evil. The pudding was a little over-egged (that's two food metaphors in as many sentences - can you tell I'm hungry?). And how come the first Death Star takes twenty years to be built when the second one only takes a couple? Violence and gore were good, though.

Simon's visit to Norwich. At least, I think this was a highlight. I can't remember much from when we entered the Wetherspoon's - though I do know the chocolate fudge cake was nice.

Wednesday 11th May 2005, 11.47pm

Jenna Brown is a bare-faced liar. What is the first (okay, second) thing she says to award-winning author Jeanette Winterson when she meets her tonight? "If it wasn't for me, he would never have heard of you." This is an untruth. I first read "Sexing The Cherry" in Autumn 2003. Miss Brown first read "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" in Summer 2004. But like Christopher Colmbus before her, she stakes her claim, in all ignorance to the fact that the Vikings landed there donkey's years before. The discovery was all mine. Jenna is currently repenting in the cupboard (wearing a red tie).

A muffled voice urges me to say that: "It was very good. Jeanette had lots of things to say about life and love and art and she was cheaper than Salman Rushdie! She also insulted my country's leader, so it's all good. She attacked the accusation that she's a snob head on - with references to opera, Wagner's "Ring Cycle", and her distaste for John Carey. Who he? Who he? Hang on, that doesn't even make any sense. That's not English. Anyway, she also recently went to a Franz Ferdinand gig. Jonathan and I were probably the only ones in the lecture hall who know who they were. The rest were nearly old enough to have known the original Archduke. Ooh, catty! Moisturise me! MOISTURISE ME! (Jonathan's made me watch "Doctor Who")."

Actually, I let her watch the second episode. I only made her watch the first. A convert! :) Jenna also says hi to all her American friends. Though it could have just been a groan - she's been in the cupboard quite a while now and there can't be that much air in there. I'm gonna go let her out now. Bye bye.

Monday 9th May 2005, 11.28pm

Today we went to see "Kingdom Of Heaven". Ridley Scott's something of an unreliable director. On the one hand he made "Alien" (one of my favourite films of all time), "Thelma And Louise" and "Gladiator". On the other hand, he made also made "Black Hawk Down", "GI Jane" and "Bladerunner", which comes close to "2001" as being the most over-rated pile of poop I've sat through twice (the director's cut sans sardonic narration really doesn't improve things a whole lot).

"Kingdom Of Heaven" is not his worst film, though it's also not his best. He kickstarted the resurgence of the historical epic with "Gladiator", but the genre's showing signs of lethargy. There's not much actually wrong with the film, it's just that we've seen it all before. The key sequence in the film (the siege of Jerusalem by Saladin) would have been innovative and breathtaking five years ago, but we have been spoiled by "Lord Of The Rings". The siege could for all intents and purposes have been lifted straight out of the Helm's Deep section of "The Two Towers".

The plot of "Kingdom Of Heaven" follows Orlando Bloom's illegitimate son of a noble, Balian, whose wife has committed suicide (a grave sin, for which one's head must be cut off, post mortem) following the death of their child. The first of many nutty priests (see below) urges him to join the Crusade, because only by fighting for God will he earn his wife's spirit's salvation from Hell. One way or another he ends up in the Holy Land, embroiled in a power-struggle to replace the leprous King of Jerusalem, who is close to death. There's a mad bloke with a beard who goes around shouting "War!" a lot, a very camp Brendan Gleeson as the leader of the Knights Templar, and then there's Jeremy Irons as a croaky diplomat. Bloom holds things together surprisingly well.

The main flaw is the film's politics. In this day and age, you have to be very responsible handling the issue of white Christians going to the Middle East to conquer Arab Muslims. Scott could have made a straight historical piece, but instead he tries to address contemporary issues and gets it wrong. He subverts the roles so that the Crusaders are Al Qaeda and the Arabs are westerners, basically. It's as simple (and as simplistic) as that. So you have plenty of Christian priests running around shouting about the will of God and the killing of infidels not being murder (it gets a bit like "Life Of Brian" in places), whilst Saladin's men are peaceful and civilised and get provoked into fighting. I'm sure neither is an entirely accurate depiction, and that's the problem when you try to make complex issues black and white enough to deal with it in time to cram in a few big battle scenes.

As these epics go, it's not in the same league as "Spartacus" or even "Gladiator", but it's a marked improvement on "Troy" (didn't see "Alexander"). Ridley Scott's trying to tell a subtle dramatic tale about one guy's rite of passage, and this isn't filmmaking by numbers, even when Scott's eye for crowd-pleasing money-shots ends up just a distraction. And the claim that it's apologetic pro-Al Qaeda propaganda is on the dafter side of ludicrous. Fundamentalism doesn't come out the end of this film with a good rap, whether you take the Crusaders at face value, or as symbols for modern day terrorists.

Saturday 7th May 2005, 11.06pm

I haven't written that review yet, so I'm just posting tonight to draw attention to the project I've been working on these past six weeks. Someone in Gamegossip's 'Art, Design and Literature' (though that's putting most of the stuff in there politely) forum suggested we have a fan-fiction competition, just for fun. I've never really needed an excuse to do this before, but the new series of "Doctor Who" suitably inspired me to take up the challenge and so I've been writing "Curse Of The Cybermen", featuring the ninth Doctor and Rose. It's far from complete and I don't know whether I'll finish it in time for the cut-off date in late June, but seeing as I won't be writing any more for the next fortnight or so, I thought I'd put the first 26,000 words (nine chapters) up here to be read. (I've actually been uploading them as I go, but only ruthless click-a-lot fans would have found it).

Saturday 7th May 2005, 11.10pm

It's been a few days. Was going to post late Thursday, but I've got a wisdom tooth breaking through the gum and was in proper agony. Well, at least it isn't impacted, I suppose. I have a new-found sympathy for screaming babies who are teething and am glad I have no memories before the age of three or four. Anyway, the pain was driving me to distraction and I could barely concentrate on what I was typing, so logged off early. I didn't get to sleep, however, until 3am, and woke up three hours later, still in agony. I nearly phoned my housemate Luke to tell him I couldn't visit him (see below), but fortunately after dozing on and off until 9am, I was feeling better. Jaw's still a little stiff, though.

I was disappointed by the election result, but it wasn't like it was unexpected, and it wasn't like I was rooting for the Tories to win this time, so it's better overall than 2001. I'm glad that Labour's majority has been slashed, and that most of the Labour MPs who lost their seats were notable Blairites. Whilst Tony Blair still has a sizeable majority, the proportion of left-leaning pre-Blairites (not necessarily true Old Labour types, however) has increased, but mostly because existing ones kept their seats. If nothing else, this will at least force more balance into the debate.

David Amess's position in Southend West was consolidated, his majority increased to 8959 from 7941. His vote is now almost as much as Labour and the LibDems combined. I most certainly do not agree with his positions on abortion, and capital and corporal punishment, but he is well-known for actually turning up at the House of Commons on a regular basis, as well as getting his finger in the pie on many local issues. Shamelessly populist, but what's wrong with that? It's funny that you only get called a populist by people who disagree with you; to others you're a democrat who's in touch with the people.

I was also glad to see that the Liberal Democrats overtook Labour (who came second last time) in Southend West, having a candidate who was actually a local guy instead of a Londoner. Of course, this may be accountable by the fact that the Labour vote went to the Tories, so the LibDems' improved position might be smoke and mirrors; their vote could have remained their same, but they were elevated because of Labour's drop-off - a bit like the Tories nationally.

I was disappointed with the Liberal Democrats' performance nationally, which was truly abysmal. Looking at the results map of the country today, there's hardly any LibDem seats in England, which puts them in the same sort of Celtic Fringe category they were stuck in a century ago, so they haven't actually recovered from their 1920s position in real-terms. I've said they need to ditch Charles Kennedy before, even though I think he was the least worst of the three party leaders on offer this time, but finding a generic everyman might be hard if all you've got are people from the sticks. This isn't me being parochial, by the way, but if England wouldn't vote for a bald Yorkshiremen (for being a bald Yorkshiremen, besides being Tory leader), are they really going to vote for a ginger Scot? I bet he jumps before he's pushed. Who knows: this time next year we might have three new party leaders - which is a good thing. I'm certainly glad the dreadful Michael Howard's going (not that there's anyone good enough to replace him - though at least Boris Johnson would make things entertaining: "Oh golly, Tony, why can't you just agree with me, old chap?").

Despite what I just said, I thought the performance of Andrew Aalders-Dunthorne in Norwich South was commendable. I definitely picked the right horse there. Though the LibDems failed to uproot Labour's ubertwat Home Secretary Charles Clarke, they certainly took a whopping chunk out of his majority, overtaking the Tories to come second. Charles Clarke had a 8816 majority at the last election, but that's now down to 3653. It wasn't until after the election that I learnt Norwich South is Labour's safest seat in the entirety of East Anglia. It was the only non-Tory seat in the region after the 1983 election, apparently. Word is, Labour's worried about losing it next time, but I suspect the backlash was against Charles Clarke specifically rather than Labour, alas.

Anyway, yesterday I went with Luke to a somewhat different 'gig' to our usual fare. I almost wasn't going to put it in the live music reviews, but then I thought that if I was really worried about what people thought of what I posted, I'd just post innocuous stuff about the weather, and go back and delete some of the contentious things I've written that I might not necessarily agree with myself anymore (pro-Iraq war stuff, for example - though I still don't agree with things Menzies Campbell said after Saddam Hussein was captured). So anyway, check back here tomorrow for my review of Kylie Minogue at Earl's Court. And a report on the weather too, perhaps. :D

Tuesday 3rd May 2005, 11.17pm

I've been home to Southend on Sea for a few days. Usually this is just cause for some routine Essex bashing, or some nostalgic wallowing. But last week Luke put on the Colin Hanks comedy "Orange County", which carries a nice message about appreciating your roots; and even when you're in conflict with what those roots represent, at least appreciating them for giving you a reason to be in conflict with them to begin with. Or, indeed, something. Anyway, today I thought I would do different and tell you all about some of the rich and interesting characters that populate southern Essex. Instead, however, I'm just going to be cynical and sneer at the General Election (amongst other things).

I'm registered for postal voting in Southend, but I'm also registered for normal polling purposes in Norwich, and have decided to vote here instead (as explained previously). Having a postal vote means you get the form weeks in advance, and get to see how many of the candidates you've never heard of. Southend West is a reasonably safe Tory seat, being contested by the LibDems, Labour (who once again have tried to foist someone who lives in London on us), UKIP (of the four signs I saw in people's gardens, three championed their candidate - no, the signs weren't all in the same garden), English Democrats (who?), plus two token independents, which usually bring some colour to proceedings.

One of them, a Dan Anslow, is standing on behalf of "Max Power". No, this is not a new political party you've never heard of; this is a car enthusiast magazine. Apparently they're fielding several candidates around the country, and Mr Anslow expects to do well in Southend because it has a large 'cruising' community. It wasn't that long ago when I thought cruising was something sexual. Apparently, however, it's about tarting up your car and driving it around to show it off. So maybe it does have sexual connotations, but only in the Freudian sense. Anyway, Anslow stands for "freedom of expression through driving" (very noble; it should be in the Human Rights Act, I say), and free breast enlargements on the NHS (ditto).

The other independent candidate is supposedly a well-known local-issues campaigner, 'commonly known' (as it says on the postal voting form) as Dr Vel. His full name is Dr Marimuthu Velmurugan, and he's a long-standing local GP. Given a name like that, you might be as surprised as I was to learn he's standing on a hard-line immigration ticket not too dissimilar from the Conservatives. He would also bring back capital punishment for murderers, introduce tougher sentences for violent criminals, purge the judiciary of ultra-liberal judges, whilst providing proper resources for the police. At the same time he would stop the creeping privatisation of the NHS, oppose European Union bureaucracy, and even renationalise public transport and utilities where possible. Wow. Sounds like a disgruntled Tory with a social conscience. If only they were all like that. Had he stood in 2001 I might even have voted for him myself.

So whilst Southend hasn't really changed, I was able perhaps for the first time to look upon what once irritated me about the town with bemusement instead. I was stuck on the bus into town this morning with two Vicky Pollards, plus their noisy toddlers, who went ignored. I was stuck on the train with two more, sans sprogs this time. It was all "yeah, but he said, then she said, yeah, but no, but yeah", but for once I was able to smile instead of snarl. I almost got snow-blindness from someone dressed head to toe in impossibly pristine Kappa gear, however. Damn you, Persil.

Indeed, your typical welcome to Essex was reserved for my return to Norwich this time. I was halfway home when some woman perched on the edge of a raised flowerbed said, "Excuse me, sir, can you spare 30p for a phone call?" I walked past, of course, her inability to enunciate properly and the can of beer in her hand cynically (but silently) inciting me to wonder why, if she was truly desperate to use the phone, she had spent the money on alcohol instead. Maybe she read my mind. "Well, fuck you! Yeah, fuck off, you fucking rich [cunt?] with your fucking rich bag!" (no, I don't know what that last bit's meant to mean, either). I didn't make out what she said after "you fucking rich..." (she might have belched, or vomited - hopefully fatally, if so) but I definitely heard an 'unt' in there somewhere. Maintaining A Social Underclass, Benefit #2: my tatty old high school backpack gets mistaken for something rich. Maintaining A Social Underclass, Benefit #1: so do I.

The weekend's other highlight was the return of the Daleks to "Doctor Who" after seventeen years. Or rather, one Dalek, the last Dalek, the rest having been wiped out in their apocalyptic war with the Time Lords. I really liked how this story drew similarities between the Doctor and the Dalek. Both the last survivor of their respective races, both hell-bent on each other's destruction, but now the tables are turned, and it is the Doctor in a position of annihilative power, with the Dalek defenceless. But not for long. Indeed, the middle fifteen minutes turned into the "Doctor Who" equivalent of a slasher flick. Never again will people make sink plunger jokes!

I'm glad they didn't go all "Star Trek" and have The One Good Dalek. In "Star Trek", it's all about aliens who lack facets of the human personality (e.g. Vulcans and their emotions), 'flaws' that can always be overcome provided the aliens are willing to learn how to be more human. It's quite imperialistic, really. I'm glad that this Dalek's response to becoming 'contaminated' with humanity was to go ballistic and try and kill everything, including itself. Fortunately, that's not the last we'll see of the Daleks, as they (yes, plural) do indeed appear in the two-part season finale. The guy who does the Dalek voices has been listed as 'Daleks' in three episodes of the new series on IMDB (see 'Notable TV Guest Appearances').

This episode also saw Christopher Ecclestone's best performance yet, a bit more fragile, a bit more angry. I definitely want to see where this Time War plotline ends up. Apparently the references to "big bad wolf" in every episode (the Nestene Consciousness said it in episode one, the blue alien said it in episode two, the psychic girl in episode three, a kid graffiti'd it on the TARDIS in the two-parter, and a helicopter was called it this episode) indicates how the war has permeated time. And episode twelve, the one where the Daleks reappear en masse, is called "Bad Wolf". I hope it's not just a bad pun: who's afraid of the big bad wolf? Doctor Who's afraid of the big bad wolf...

Thursday 28th April 2005, 11.04pm

Today I went to see the new "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" movie, which really wasn't much cop. It had its moments, all but one of which (the whale) came during the last ten minutes (from Slartibartfast's first appearance on). Joke after joke not so much falls completely flat as crashes and burns like a plane full of Al Qaeda terrorists on a day-trip to the United States of America.

I haven't read the novels or heard the original radio version, but I saw the 1980s TV adaptation, which was infinitely superior to this movie in all but one respect - the effects. The TV version had sub-"Doctor Who" wobbling sets and Zaphod Beeblebrox's second head was very obviously made of papier mache, but that was part of the charm; the emphasis was on the story, not the production design, anyway. It just goes to show that all the special effects in the world (and the movie's were admittedly rather good, especially the breathtaking rebuilding of Earth sequence) can't save you when you get the tone completely, utterly wrong.

They could have played it for whimsical British eccentricity, but Mos Def (can't act) and Sam Rockwell (can't speak; I missed every other word he said) ham it up and turn it into one big pantomime instead. Martin Freeman is capable enough as Arthur Dent, but Keanu Reeves could have done the whole wide-eyed with wonder thing just as well, I imagine. Stephen Fry as the voice of the Guide is perfectly cast, but then inexplicably vanishes for the final hour and by the time he reappears you've forgotten he was even in it.

The end result is a British movie that's from the same school of British movies as "Notting Hill", when it should have come from the same school of British movies as "Shaun Of The Dead": regardless of whether it's been made by Brits, it's been made by Brits according to what American audiences expect British movies to be like. Luke joked that I'd write in my review that the best bit was the "Star Wars" trailer tacked onto the beginning, but after several hours ruminating, I'm going to have to admit it was. What a wasted opportunity.

Tuesday 26th April 2005, 11.25pm

Saturday's episode "Doctor Who" was watched by around eight million, more than twice as many who tuned in to ITV's uberflop "Celebrity Wrestling". Maybe the world isn't doomed after all. (Just don't expect me to still be saying that come next Thursday night).

Saturday 23rd April 2005, 11.11pm

Tonight's episode of "Doctor Who" was another classy one - if it loses the ratings war to "Celebrity Wrestling" ('celebrity' in an even looser definition than "I'm A Celebrity..."; since when does being the husband of somebody who lost "Big Brother" years ago make you a celebrity? Am quite shamed I recognised him at all, actually) on ITV, then I can only say the human race is doomed, and it won't take an alien invasion to finish us off. I liked how they played the satirical edge up more this episode: the alien-possessed Cabinet trying to wrestle control of Britain's nukes back from the UN, claiming there's an alien invasion force in orbit that has weapons capable of being launched in 45 seconds - don't tell me that number was chosen for no good reason. I'd definitely prefer more two-parters. Next week, however, we have the first Dalek episode. The trailer alluded to the fact that it is the last surviving Dalek; that doesn't bode well for the rumours that the season finale two-parter is a big Dalek story as well.

Friday 22nd April 2005, 12.06am

Here's an interesting link I found on Gamegossip. It's a quiz (a proper one, not "Which 'Family Guy' character are you?" - though that was a good one, unlike "Which 'Red Dwarf' character are you?" - that was a bad one) that asks you questions about your positions on Europe, defence, tax, pensions, health, crime, education, immigration, transport and childcare, and... still with me? Anyway, it weighs up your responses against where Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, UKIP and the Green Party stand, and then tells you who to vote for. You must then obey, naturally.

Who should I vote for?

Labour -32
Conservative -35
	Liberal Democrat 60
	UK Independence Party 10
	Green 50

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Of course, it might all just be a fake quiz and everyone gets exactly the same results, by way of a neat propaganda tool to make you vote for the LibDems. It's not, though; someone on Gamegossip got the Greens. I'm surprised the Greens scored quite highly for me, but then, I don't really know what they stand for apart from wanting to drag us back into the horse and cart era. That'd actually be pretty nice, in theory, but when I come home for the summer, I don't want it to take three weeks to get from Norwich to Southend, so I won't be voting for them.

Similarly for UKIP, if you visit the site and check out their explanations for how they rate the parties, basically UKIP has no policies apart from being against Europe and for free-market economics, so wherever they don't have an explicit policy, they get a neutral rating. Vote neutral on most issues and you'll get plus points for UKIP. (Of course, voting non-neutral against the Euro also gets you UKIP points, I suspect).

Wednesday 20th April 2005, 11.10pm

Watched "The Interpreter" today, which was the kind of slow-burn, character-led thriller you don't see as much of these days. In a nutshell, it's the story of a United Nations interpreter (Nicole Kidman) who overhears a plot to assassinate a Mugabe-esque African dictator when he comes to make a speech defending his policies. However, assassination plot and Kidman are not all they seem, as secret service dude Sean Penn quickly discovers. The political intrigue angle reminded me very much of the original "Manchurian Candidate".

Don't let the trailers fool you into thinking it's another slam-bang action fest. The sole gun-fight, when it comes, is a well-handled scene played for suspense rather than excitement. There are several similarly tense scenes (you can guess that when Kidman's character, an African rebel leader in exile, a couple of secret service agents and a hitman all end up on the same bus that this is not going to end well) that would have been mere action sequences was the time not taken to notch up the suspense beforehand.

To find it suspenseful, of course, the audience has to care for the characters, and this is where Kidman and Penn make the material their own. They have good chemistry, despite the fact that they're both playing hackneyed cliches (loner women with a dark secret in her past, tough grizzled cop whose wife has just died and is taking it out on everyone, etc, etc). This wasn't Penn's most challenging role of the week, that's for sure.

Tuesday 19th April 2005, 11.17pm

I don't know about life imitating art, but how's this for life imitating 'trash'? In 2001 I started writing a story (a comedy) about the Second Coming of Christ in which one of the villains of the piece, the Pope, was discovered to have been a Nazi during World War Two. And now what do we have? A new Pope that was in the Hitler Youth and the German Army during World War Two! Yeah, yeah, so he was opposed to Nazism, yada yada; we believe you, Herr Ratzinger, truly and sincerely. Your preachings against 'relativism' (the idea that instead of an Absolute Truth, there are any number of equally valid interpretations) notwithstanding, eh?

Today mine and Luke's Weezer tickets arrived. Yay. And yesterday, my poll card for the forthcoming election, which confirms that I am indeed registered in this constituency. I haven't voted in Norwich before, mainly because I don't know what the local issues are. I've never blindly voted for one party, so think it's pretty irresponsible to come here and arrogantly support whoever I might have supported back home, assuming they best represent the interests of the city. (Indeed, I've always tended to vote against whoever's in power, particularly locally in Southend; let's call it the "grass is always greener" principle).

Now, you may well argue this is the case for the General Election as well, and normally I'd agree with you. However, the MP for Norwich South is none other than ubertwat Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, and because his decisions effect the entire country, I feel perfectly within my rights to try and get rid of him. And I think we're in with a good chance of doing that. Within his constituency is the UEA campus and the Golden Triangle where most students live, and few will have forgotten that Clarke's previous role in government was Education Secretary, and he was mastermind of the top-up fee. So that's 12,000 potential votes that could go against him. Though, of course, not all of them will, but if roughly half of them do, then that's enough to wipe out his majority over the other candidates in the 2001 election.

I checked the BBC's website a while ago and he's in a pretty strong position, with something like 45% of the votes, compared to about 20% each for both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidates. The LibDems came a close third last time, but that was before 9/11, the Iraq War and Labour's wholesale shift to the Right, so thinking strategically, I imagine Clarke will lose the liberal vote to the LibDems (whilst the Tories will lose the conservative vote to Clarke, another factor that could make it a close-run thing), so I think they're the best bet to beat him.

Of course, it's probably a waste of time, anyway. My housemate Luke lives in Margaret Thatcher's old safe seat, which is now a Labour safe seat; it does seem like if you have a high profile MP, their position is consolidated. In addition, I had a dream the other day in which Labour won the election with 385 seats, the LibDems won 90, and the Tories ended up with 110 (and Michael Howard promptly hung himself from a tree). You'll notice the numbers don't add up, and that would leave 100+ empty seats in Parliament, but hey, maybe my dream was truly proportionally representative of the numbers who'll vote this time. But, rest assured, I'll be one of them. Down with Charles Clarke! Yeah...

Monday 18th April 2005, 11.12pm

Last night had three times the thrill factor, when I checked my e-mail to find I'd sold three items via Amazon. And would you believe it but it was another three I mentioned the other day not expecting to be able to sell them off, namely: the bare-bones single-disc DVDs of "Aliens", "Alien 3" and "Alien: Resurrection". I'd like to think that I'd tempted fate into calling my bluff. Even more I'd like to think that it was my mentioning them on this site that convinced some random passer-by that they really need all three "Alien" sequels in their lives. Actually, I think it's got more to do with the fact that they were each going for a fiver. Am now thinking of undercutting what I would have liked to sell items for; anything's better than nothing when you've got something you neither want nor need any longer, I suppose. (Last minute addendum: I just checked my e-mail and have got yet another sale!)

Today Luke and I went to see "The Assassination Of Richard Nixon". One imagines "The Assassination Of George W Bush" would be just an appropriate title, but presumably the CIA are less bothered about allusions to assassinating Presidents who are already dead. The comparisons to "Taxi Driver" have been drawn in most reviews, but I found Sean Penn's character Sam Bicke altogether more sympathetic than Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle. Travis Bickle was unhinged before the film even started, whilst Sam Bicke's downward spiral has only just begun. He's already lost his wife, but now he's stuck in a job he hates (and hates all the more because he's so good at it) as a salesman just to try and make enough money to prove he can provide the security for her and their kids. We learn quickly that it is Sam's inability to hold down other jobs that has caused the fractures in his marriage, and we learn slowly why that is.

Sam Bicke is pathologically averse to lying. Throughout the film, Nixon is on television, telling America about the need to keep fighting the Vietnam War; the film takes us right up to Watergate. Meanwhile, in training Sam to become a better salesman, his boss idolises Nixon as the greatest salesman of all: he got to office promising to get American out of Vietnam, went back on his promise, then won a second term on the exact same ticket. Yes, this film has a cynical streak a mile across, but it's hard not to empathise with that too. In his job, Sam is expected to do the same thing: promise the customer what they want, then only give them what you want to give. Unlike Nixon, Sam is merely an office furniture salesman. He wants to quit; he dreams of starting his own tyre company, on the principle of honest dealership, not putting a thirty percent mark-up on tyres then knocking off five percent to make the customer think they've got a good deal.

It's when everything (job, dreams, friends, marriage, government) falls apart that Sam realises the American Dream is all just a lie (and Sam Bicke has a pathological aversion to lying, remember), designed to get the Little Man working extra hard for the Boss Man (whoever that may be), in the vain hope that a slice of the pie will be theirs one day - but all the while just increasing the Boss Man's profits. So that's when the eponymous plan comes to him. I don't think it's spoiling the story (unless you don't know any history) to say, like all of his dreams, this one doesn't go very well.

That said, I did think for a moment that maybe it would have been a nice irony if Sam HAD managed to hijack the plane, HAD managed to crash it into the White House, and HAD managed to assassinate President Nixon. That could generate some pathos: whilst on film the Little Man wins in the end, in the real world, the Little Man didn't (and doesn't). Perhaps that would be too ironic, though, too self-referential, presenting the Happy Lie version of events, which was what the film had been savaging like a rabid dog since Sam's first confessional recording narration. At least it would have given you something more to think about, a la "Taxi Driver" (i.e. is he a hero or a nutter?) rather than just feeling sorry, which you do, especially given the final montage as all the other characters... well, I won't spoil it, but suffice to say, it's the utmost testament to Sam Bicke's complete failure in the entire film, and the most touching.

So it's not a cheery film, nosiree. There were moments where I thought Sean Penn overdid it: shots of him lying on the floor or curled up like a baby; I would rather he hadn't been presented as someone turning into a fruitloop. That alienates the part of Sam Bicke that elicited sympathy to begin with; the idea that he's not too dissimilar from everyone else, just that he's been pushed just a little bit too far. (Perhaps no distributor would touch the film unless it made it clear Sam was not One Of Us). There were some genuine moments of humour, though, like when Sam visits the Black Panthers and, explaining how he shares their feelings of oppression, suggests they rename themselves the Zebras so that black AND white people can join. That really bonded me more to the character than I ever was to Travis Bickle.

Saturday 16th April 2005, 11.15pm

I see David Tennant has officially been confirmed as the tenth Doctor Who. No complaints here. Tonight's episode was pretty good, despite some moments begging to be more irreverent and overtly satirical (the idea of the Cabinet being replaced by lookalike aliens hellbent on war war war). Instead, fart jokes - whoever thought you'd see them in "Doctor Who"? The aliens looked more comical than scary, though. The two-part format's allowed them to develop a story more, which bodes well for the Blitz two-parter and the two-part series finale (rumoured to be a big Dalek story). I liked Rose coming home a year after leaving in the first episode, even though for her only twelve hours has passed. Her mother was less of a compensation claimin' chav cliche this time, and her boyfriend wasn't quite so annoying, though I still hope he doesn't become a permanent companion - if only because that would kill off the Unresolved Sexual Tension between the Doctor and Rose. On the other hand, love triangle in the TARDIS... Hmm.

Thursday 14th April 2005, 12.03am

Well, there's a surprise. Despite what I said yesterday, I logged on tonight to find the original bare-bones "Alien" DVD has sold, so it's back to the Post Office tomorrow, I guess. I got an e-mail back from the guy I sold my first DVD to the other day after e-mailing him myself to tell him I'd dispatched it. Apparently it arrived before he even got the e-mail, so he was duly impressed. No sign of a seller recommendation on Amazon as yet, though.

Wednesday 13th April 2005, 12.00am

Wot I Ment: I KNOW feng shui has absolutely nothing to do with commerce; what I was trying to imply, though, was that if I sold all these CDs and DVDs, and then the shelves on which they're sitting, then my room wouldn't be this cluttered mess, and would be sparsely furnished enough for the chi to flow; the essence of feng shui. Not that I believe in that. Tis a truism that few jokes survive a thorough explanation of themselves...

Anyway, today I dispatched the DVD I sold last night and made a tenner, give or take a few pennies by way of Amazon's merciless commission. Said DVD is therefore removed from my DVD list, but I doubt anyone is sufficiently familiar with my collection to work out which one's now missing. I also have a vague recollection of having bought the DVD originally in a sale, so might have sold it for more than I paid originally.

No sign of anything else disappearing anytime soon, even though I've tried to beat any lowest price that's above a fiver for a CD or seven quid for a DVD. I should have sold the original four "Alien" DVDs before the Quadrilogy came out, as I thought about doing. Who wants the bare-bones discs now you can get two-disc special editions for each movie? (If your answer to that question is "Me", pop along to Amazon - they're each going for less than one hour's work on minimum wage!)

I'm now thinking of revising the CD and DVD lists on this site to include a "For Sale" section. Hmm.

Tuesday 12th April 2005, 12.17am

Tonight's "Casanova" and "ER" were top notch. What is it with television lately? It's meant to be crap.

Tonight I also sold my first item over Amazon. I first contemplated the idea a year ago when I had to watch John Boorman's god-awful "Excalibur" for a course I did at UEA on 'Arthurian Tradition', and bought it cheap on DVD rather than go and sit in a classroom late on a Friday evening. It's an utterly worthless film (we're talking "Tailor Of Panama" and "Vanilla Sky" worthlessness here; I fell asleep watching it) that makes Clive Owen's portrayal of King Arthur look like the towering achievement of acting potential ever in the entire history of the universe, by the way. But that's by-the-by, because it wasn't "Excalibur" I managed to offload (more's the pity, but it's on sale if you want it...).

It was my housemate Luke that reinvigorated my concern to rid myself of this foul waste of celluloid (you'll note I never included it in my DVD section), and when I was at his house for a mere twenty-four hours last week, he managed to sell three or four items, to the extent where his long-suffering mother lamented the lack of bubblewrap in the house. So I thought I'd see if I could clear some space from my heaving shelves. The DVD I've sold I only put up on Amazon less than twenty-four hours ago. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a momentary thrill to be had, receiving the "Sold, dispatch now!" e-mail from Amazon.

I now have fourteen more items up for sale on Amazon. I was ruthless. I went through my CDs and DVDs and asked myself whether I wanted to listen to or watch this one now, and if I didn't feel sufficiently moved to, I put it on the list. There's another couple of dozen CDs and DVDs in my CD and DVD sections I have on my list that I didn't even bother putting on Amazon because the going rate for used versions was under a fiver. What does that say about my past tastes, eh?

I must say I can myself getting addicted to this selling lark, however. I could go all feng shui and end up selling the shelves these shiny discs are sitting on at this rate. Still, at least an addiction to selling will bring balance to the first and second year addiction to buying, I suppose...

Sunday 10th April 2005, 11.33pm

Funnily enough, "Doctor Who" was the most watched programme on a Saturday for the third week running, beating the royal wedding by two million viewers. Hehe. It got nine million viewers the first week, eight million this week, but for some reason only got seven million last week, for what was arguably the best episode so far.

Saturday 9th April 2005, 11.01pm

So today I watched the Chaz and Cam 'wedding' (well, I had it on, at least). I'll try not and be too cynical; I know the televised part was technically only a 'blessing', but it seemed like just another church service (complete with seemingly interminable sermons) where two members of the congregation stood up (or knelt down - of which more later tonight, eh, ex-Mrs Parker-Bowles?). It reeked of cheapness, the budget option, as if the only reason the Windsors allowed it to be filmed at all was to say, "Look how little of the taxpayer's money we're spending". I bet millions more were spent on the Pope's send-off yesterday, and Prince Charles is ten times the man that slaphead was. I mean, the Royal Family turned up at the Windsor Guildhall in coaches - no, not horse drawn coaches, but the kind of things you go on a day-trip to France in!

I suppose a low-key affair was probably advisable, though. I thought it frightfully mean when some people outside the registry office were booing. I couldn't imagine loathing anyone enough to be waiting seven or eight hours to try and ruin their wedding day. Of course, if Tony Blair wants to renew his marriage vows at Norwich Cathedral...

The BBC commentary box helped the hours fly by. I particularly liked the close scrutiny and analysis of Camilla's first royal wave, in which she nearly sent her hat flying. Piers Morgan criticising the villification of the new Duchess of Cornwall in the tabloids was also amusing (that's Piers Morgan, disgraced former editor of the "Daily Mirror"). It was also a good catch getting "that awful man" Nicholas Witchell to bite his tongue and be impartial. Sanjeev Bhaskar and Jools Holland also popped in for a few minutes to promote the Prince's Trust, and when Prince Charles's ill-advised hand-shaking with Robert Mugabe came up, Jools pointed out that Mugabe spelt backwards is "E ba gum", which made me laugh.

Apart from that, I found myself distracted by both Internet and a snivelling guitar in want of being played. Sure, this was only a wedding, and whilst the royals would be best advised to cut their spending, they should do that by taking all their cousins off the payroll instead of delivering anti-climactic non-spectacles like this. I remember reading about one of the European monarchs (the Queen of the Netherlands, perhaps?) who is often seen shopping down the supermarket with her subjects. Where's the stature befitting your nation's figurehead in that?

Of course, following that on television was that other non-spectacle, the Grand National, though that was a non-spectacle for different reasons. I tried not to watch, but sometimes you need a reminder of why you have your convinctions; in this case, the banning of horse-racing. There's no sportsmanship to it; it's just a contest to see who can whip their horse the hardest. This obscenity's defenders purport that there's little beating involved, but I'm wondering what on earth they were watching during the final furlong? Their betting slips, I suspect. Would the bastards think it any more cruel if the horses were tied up for their flogging? Does it make a difference because they're running? After all, it's not like they can run away, because the person whipping them is sitting on top of them... Physically ill, it made me feel. That kind of shivery anger that makes you want to knife the next person you see through the neck (especially if they placed a bet).

"Doctor Who" was quite good, though, but I preferred last week's.

Thursday 7th April 2005, 11.48pm

I've been down to see Luke for a couple of days, in which time we saw both "Sahara" (worse than I'd hoped) and "Be Cool" (better than I'd feared). Is it relevant that my expectations of them were inversely proportional to my eventual opinion? I think so. It's like what I said in my review of the first episode of "Doctor Who"; the better you hope something to be, the more likely you are to be disappointed. Expect nothing, and when it's just a little better, you come out pleasantly surprised. Shall we call that the "Alien vs Predator" principle, perhaps?

Anyway, it wasn't that "Sahara" was bad, just that it was competing in a genre that already has some bona fide Hollywood action classics in it, namely the Indiana Jones series. It was clearly given the green-light to cash in on the resurgent popularity in treasure hunting adventures brought on by "The Da Vinci Code", but I preferred "National Treasure". The main thrust of my disappointment came from the fact that I was expecting it to be about the search for this American Civil War ship laden with treasure, yet that only figured prominently in the first and last ten minutes. The rest of the movie was about a corporate conspiracy to dump toxic waste in the desert, poisoning the River Niger and killing off the natives, as investigated by Penelope Cruz's WHO operative. Matthew McConaughey gets to do lots of Bond-esque stunts, Steve Zahn gets all the funny lines, and the audience gets two hours to sit wondering what they've seen Delroy Lindo in before.

"Be Cool" has likewise been ripped apart throughout the Press, but it wasn't quite as self-indulgent as "Ocean's Twelve" in that, egotrips aside, everyone in the movie sticks to the plot, rather than insist they chuck aforementioned plot out of the window in the last hour just to get their face on camera a little longer. Some of the jokes fell flat (mainly the ones that tried to be witty and clever, e.g. John Travolta's character scoffing at sequels, Aerosmith's Steve Tyler's 'character' turning his nose up at rockstars appearing in movies). The funniest involved Vince Vaughn going up in flames. If that sounds appealing, and you think The Rock playing a gay hitman (complete with no less than three opportunities to do the Eyebrow) is ripe for much merriment and mirth, AND you don't know what all the fuss was about "Get Shorty" in the first place, then maybe this one is for you. If all else fails, you can spend two hours spotting all the embarrassing cameos by music 'stars' who play no role, have no lines, but seem to have agreed to be in the film simply to get their mug on the big screen (yes you, Durst).

Monday 4th April 2005, 11.40pm

Well, I watched Russell T Davies's "Casanova" on BBC One tonight, but pretty much forgot I had only intended to watch it for David Tennant's performance. It was really good; somewhat expected. I'd thought RTD would temper his instincts to suit the BBC's love of costume dramas, but this most certainly was NOT the next "Pride And Prejudice". As for David Tennant, much as Eccles convinced me of his worth as Doctor Who on Saturday, I'd be perfectly happy to see DT as the tenth Doctor.

Saturday 2nd April 2005, 11.04pm

This week's episode of "Doctor Who" was a big step up from last week's - and last week's wasn't even that bad! After last week's introduction, this one pitted you into the world of "Doctor Who" proper, but I didn't feel like at any point it would have alienated someone who had never seen the show before last week, or even someone who hadn't seen the previous episode. But then, I'm hardly removed enough from fandom to judge.

I thought concept and execution were spot on. Setting a story at the end of the Earth reminded me a bit of the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe bit of "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy", but as Douglas Adams was a big "Who" writer back in its (last) heydey, I imagine it was something of a homage. The pacing was better this time. I was worried when nothing had really happened after fifteen minutes that it was solely going to be a showing-off exercise of how far the effects team have come since 1989, and that all that was going to happen was that a bunch of strange aliens making saucy double entendres were going to watch the Earth sizzle. But then it really picked up with the whole sabotage and 'whodunnit' subplot becoming the main plot.

The humour felt more natural in this one, and I must admit I did laugh out loud when Zoe Wanamaker's form-less last human suggested a tasteful ballad to watch the world end with - and Britney's "Toxic" came on her 'iPod'. Also great were the quiet scenes, particularly after the finale, those moments where the Doctor and Rose stop running around for a minute and talk straight to each other for once. I like Rose having doubts about going with the Doctor. Even more I like the hints at something that's happened to the Doctor in the time between series, that his home planet has been destroyed in a war, and that he is the last Timelord left. Of course, he's a time traveller, so for all we know, he could have spent several hundred years with Paul McGann's face. Hopefully we'll learn more about that.

This was a story that felt just right for the 45 minute time-slot; neither artificially truncated, nor overstretched. So I'm willing to give the new format a proper go if they're all as well done as this. Another thing I'm willing to give a proper go is... Christopher Ecclestone! He really expelled all the doubts I had on the basis of the first episode. True, as I suspected he did better with darker stuff (did I see a tear at one point?), but he seemed more at home in the role. His interaction with Jabe, the tree-woman, as she probes his identity with more pre-knowledge than Rose has, was good stuff, and I was sorry when she copped it (though I'm also glad Russell T Davies isn't afraid to kill characters off like that).

If I have one complaint (and it's a minor fanboyish niggling one), it's that this Doctor seems to have a lot better control of his TARDIS than previous ones. They tended to hop in, press a button, and not know where they'd end up, but this one seems to get wherever he wants to go several times an episode. Of course, if he's the last Timelord left, I imagine he has to make a special effort to get it right. That might also explain why Eccles's interpretation of the role is frenetic, rushed, even frustrated. If he's the last left, he's got a big responsibility. Excellent stuff.

Friday 1st April 2005, 11.11pm

I'm currently halfway into reading "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco, which is rather different from most of the things I've been reading recently. It's quite a hefty book, yet not much happens: it's like a mystery about history, a thriller of ideas. No, I'm not summing it up too well.

It's about a publishing house, Manutius, that is basically a front for ripping off vain authors who believe they've written works of greatness, yet can't find a publisher. For a fee, Manutius will publish the book for them, yet they only print a few copies, most of which go to the author as complimentary copies. A few months later, Manutius tells the author the non-existent book hasn't sold, it's ahead of its time, it's won awards (in similarly fictitious competitions) - and that they have several thousand copies of the book that are going to be pulped unless the author pays for them all. And providing the author agrees to pay, once more out of vanity, that's the first time the book is printed in substantial quantities.

The head of the publishing house, Garamond, realises that there's money to be made from a welter of occult conspiracy books about secret societies and mystical revisionist history - but only because they're crap and nobody else will publish them, so the authors are willing to pay to get into print. Three long-suffering editors (Belbo, Diotallevi and the narrator, Casaubon, an expert on the Knights Templar) are given the task of acquiring the manuscripts, but of course what matters is whether the writers can pay, not whether their books are any good.

And most of them, they find, are unbelievably bad, and feature increasingly bizarre theories. Like the Bible was little more than a creative writing competition between four guys called Matthew, Mark, Luke and John that people thought was a true story. Like there being a secret brotherhood protecting the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians linking everyone from Homer, King Solomon, Shakespeare, Einstein and Debussy. Like Christopher Columbus being a secret Templar whose signature contains references to the pyramids. Like the human genetic code being based on the Martian alphabet.

Doing this artless work breeds cynicism in Belbo, Diotellevi and Casaubon, so for a bit of a lark, they start entering random bits of information into a computer (affectionately named Abulafia) capable of finding links between anything and everything. Except what it comes out with is actually rather convincing. But that's as far as I've got so far.

The book is, of course, a satire, and exists in a slightly surreal yet recognisable version of our own world. It satirises the human predisposition to believe the world is hermetically sealed: that is, that everything really is interconnected and that things have inherent meaning. So it's a bit of a nihilist text when it ridicules the idea (though at the same time, going along with it for the fun of the ride). It also satirises pretension in art that tries to assert there's some sort of higher meaning. One scene details the work of a painter, Riccardo, who used to paint only in black and greys, then progressed to black and white, but now only paints with white paint, claiming true artistic expression comes from the texture of the paint on the canvas. Of course, there's nothing actually there.

It hasn't been as much of a challenge reading it as I expected it to be. There's a wealth of information there that you need to be interested in or it'll lose you. This book has a hundred times more on the Knights Templar than "The Da Vinci Code" has, for example, but at the same time, I felt it was drowning in esoterica when it went on and on about the Rosicrucians, another supposedly mythical group.

In other book-themed news, I discovered only a couple of days ago that Bret Easton Ellis has a new title coming out. Ellis became one of my favourite authors in my first year at UEA, when I was captivated enough to finish "Less Than Zero" in a few sittings. It was his follow-up, "Rules Of Attraction", that really hooked me, though. I was living with people who I could recognise as characters in that book at the time (so much so that when told to write a poem about life at UEA for a creative writing class, mine started with the line "There's fucking all around me"), people I felt no natural empathy for at all, and the book kinda filled a gap in my understanding. "American Psycho", Ellis's most notorious novel, I was severely disappointed with.

His new book, "Lunar Park", is about a version of himself living an alternate life, involving haunted mansions and strange dolls, and sounds like something Stephen King would write (or try - and fail - to, producing a thousand pages and making himself millions in the process). It comes out in October here, but August in America, so I'll be employing the services of my own personal transatlantic Internet bookstore, Jennazon.com. In other related BEE news, I've added this to the Links section; it's essentially the website of a Bret Easton Ellis e-stalker.

And in a final update for today, I've also changed the counter on the right of the screen. It's now counting down to the release of "Star Wars: Episode Three - Revenge Of The Sith" in May.

Thursday 31st March 2005, 11.00pm

Hullo, campers. I'm back in Nozza again. Not being able to post from home has given me chance to watch the first episode of the new series of "Doctor Who" a couple of times before reviewing it. I think, in the end, I was looking forward to this even more than I was "Alien versus Predator", if only because the reviews for "Doctor Who" were almost unanimously positive (unlike "AvP") so I had perhaps insurmountable expectations. Naturally, then, I could not fail to be slightly disappointed.

There wasn't actually much wrong with it in the grand scheme of things - but it was no "Genesis Of The Daleks". That's my favourite "Doctor Who" story, now some thirty years old, in which Tom Baker's Doctor is sent on a mission by the Timelords into the distant past to kill the creator of the Daleks before he can, well, create them. Of course, there are complications, because when he actually gets there, the Doctor realises that in the time period he comes from, thousands of worlds are allied together because they have a common foe in the Daleks, so that actually, some good came of their creation. That, for me, was the perfect distillation of what "Doctor Who" was about. It was well-written, thrilling, dramatic and epic in scope if not in scale.

The first episode of the new series, on the other hand, was more like "Resurrection Of The Daleks". That story, starring Peter Davison's Doctor, saw him embroiled in an attempt by the last remaining Daleks to rescue Davros, their creator in "Genesis Of The Daleks", from imprisonment so that he can rebuild the Dalek empire. It's actually quite a good story; you sit through it and think "ooh, that was a good bit" and then "ooh, that was even better" and "ooh, I didn't expect that to happen". But then when you get to the end, you sit back and realise it doesn't quite come together as a whole.

That was my initial impression of "Rose", the first episode in Russell T Davies's thirteen-part regeneration of the series, as well. I think my main issues with the story result from the length. There was an hour-long story inside that episode just squealing to get out, but it felt artificially truncated to adhere to a US-friendly 45-minute slot. Fortunately, that seemed like the only concession made to the BBC international sales department; unlike other BBC shows I could mention it didn't feature any Americans, nor did it use any bland, universal settings like office blocks that wouldn't alienate foreigners when London council estates will do. Nice use of the London Eye, too.

It started well. I was really impressed by Billie Piper, mainly because I didn't really think of her as Billie Piper; there was no mugging to the camera, no "hire me hire me hire me". She fitted the role of an Estuary English-speaking no-hoper perhaps too well, and carried most of the story capably and with conviction. I liked how the story followed her escapades; the feeling that she's a normal person accidentally wandering into the middle of this alien invasion, getting rescued by the Doctor, and then being suitably demanding enough to get herself further embroiled. It was a good way of dealing with all the exposition. It didn't feel like a guided tour, a What's What of "Doctor Who" ("here's the TARDIS, this is a sonic screwdriver, that's an auton"), even though that's what it was.

Kudos to Russell T Davies then, for actually covering everything the newcomer needs to know, without smothering them with all the confusing, convoluted lore that has built up around "Doctor Who". Unfortunately, by the time he'd finished filling in the uninitiated, he had an alien invasion to quash, and only ten minutes to wrap it up in. So the grand finale felt rushed, whereas the rest of the episode was marked by its spot-on pacing. If nothing else, however, this does bode well for the rest of the series: now the exposition is out of the way, the storylines can take centre-stage. And Davies shows a lot of promise with regards to future plots: alien shenanigans at the end of the world; the lone Dalek trapped on a spacestation; the alien ghosts who possess the bodies of the dead during the Blitz.

So now we come to Christopher Ecclestone as the ninth incarnation of the Doctor. To be honest, I just couldn't get used to the guy smiling and making jokes. I see Eccles has quit the show today because he doesn't want to get typecast, but you already are, mate. Go back to brooding, moody, dark characters and you'll be begging to come back as the Doctor when nobody will give you anything else in a few years time. I also see that David Tennant has all but got the part of the tenth Doctor already. I'll be watching "Casanova" (Russell T Davies's other TV series - it really is his month!) on BBC One this Monday, but even from the trailers (he plays the young version of the lothario) he looks like he has the natural exuberance that Ecclestone lacks. It's not that Ecclestone was bad, just that he was more incongruous in the show than a police telephone box is in 2005. I gather later episodes aren't quite so light, so perhaps he'll deal better with them.

On a related note (his Manc accent), I was planning to make a groan-worthy joke about expecting to see stolen hub-caps in the TARDIS, but I didn't really notice how Ecclestone spoke until Rose asks "If you're an alien, how come you sound like you come from the North?" To which the Doctor indignantly replies "Most planets have a north!" That was a good bit of wit, and whilst it was hardly "Pride And Prejudice", Davies's script had some great moments of dialogue. My favourite would be the bit where the Doctor talks about the Earth revolving, and how he can feel it. That was the first point at which I thought Ecclestone was the Doctor, so I'm perfectly willing to let him convince me the role belongs to him in future episodes. Who knows, by episode thirteen, I might be lamenting his exit from the show.

Other bugbears (gee, you might be getting the impression I hated the show - I didn't, this is the best thing the BBC have made since, well, that episode of "Eastenders" where Sonia gives birth when she didn't even know she was pregnant) included the remixed theme tune (okay, I admit, I'm getting picky now). They completely cut out the key change, which was the best part! I remember the Sylvester McCoy theme tune made me (shamelessly "kyoot" nostalgic moment coming up) run around the living room, jumping on the sofa and rocking chair when I was eight years old. This remix, with its tinny assembly of the famous bass-line, just made me want to check the video was actually recording this time.

My least favourite thing about the episode wasn't in fact the man-eating wheelie bin I found slightly dodgy in a clip I saw a few days before the episode was aired. In fact, by the time that scene came up, I was glad, because I found Rose's boyfriend absolutely unbearable. I don't know what that guy thought he was doing in the show, but it sure weren't acting, buddy! So I was glad when the wheelie bin ate him, and almost booed when it turned out he survived. I hope he doesn't come back in future episodes; his only purpose in the story was to give Rose good reason to go off with a strange guy she's just met who claims he can travel in time and space in a wooden box.

The whole wheelie bin scene actually worked in context, even if you don't loathe Rose's boyfriend. It was juxtaposed against the scene where a conspiracy theorist tells Rose about the Doctor's appearances throughout history. I really liked that character, and it's a pity the autons got him because he would have made a great recurring character. His line "The Doctor has only one constant companion on his travels... Death" was perfectly contrasted against the man-eating wheelie bin, the latter scene's comedic qualities just making the former even more spine-tinglingly well-written.

So, yeah, I must say I enjoyed it more the second time I watched it, because then I knew what I was getting, and could take it on its own terms rather than subconsciously ticking off (or failing to) my expectations. The episode showed a lot of promise in terms of the chemistry between Eccles and Billie, and the writing, and the production values, and I'm really looking forward to the next twelve episodes. For once there's a show I won't want to miss and it's not American. That's the first time since, well, the last season of "Doctor Who" ended, back when Maggie Thatcher was prime minister and the Berlin Wall had just come down. You took your time, BBC!

Wednesday 23rd March 2005, 11.07pm

The best thing about vandalising a computer mouse is that you get to keep the little rubber ball inside. That's why I'll never be convinced by these optical mice things. Wow. How insightful has this post been so far?

Today I finished "The Subtle Knife", even though I only started it on Sunday. The second half really picked up and ended on another cliffhanger that's tempting me to dive straight into the third part, "The Amber Spyglass". It's getting a mite confusing who are truly the good guys and who are not, I must say. I really can't see why the Harry Potter books are so much more successful, besides the fact that they are tame, unchallenging and safe in comparison. Pullman's books have so many deaths it doesn't get on the nine o'clock news when one major character dies (even when it's a kid who kills them). Having given up on both "The Hobbit" and "The Fellowship Of The Rings" I'd even go so far as saying Pullman pisses all over Tolkein, too. His nearest rival in this whole fantasy genre would probably end up being CS Lewis, but it's hard to read his books today without having concerns that all the heroes are white Christians and the baddies tend to be coloured heathens.

I'm off home for Easter, so will post again when I get back with my review of the first episode of the new series of "Doctor Who" and other innocuous stuff like that.

Monday 21st March 2005, 11.05pm

I am now halfway into the second book of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, "The Subtle Knife". This one's taking longer to get going than the first one, but I get the impression it's setting up for something big; there's a well-developed sense of foreboding, and seeing as the third book in the trilogy is almost twice as long as the first two, I suspect I'm right. No sign of any giant talking killer polar bears yet, though. As with the first one, I think this would make a great movie, but last I heard, the Hollywood adaptation (under the American title the first book was changed to, "The Golden Compass") was in trouble: the director (Paul Weitz) had 'parted company' with the project. I don't think the American studios have the courage to enflame the Christian Right by making the trilogy right, anyway.

Trailers for the new series of "Doctor Who" are getting blanket coverage at the moment. I've seen the main "trip of a lifetime" one twice already today and I haven't even watched that much television. I can honestly say that, six or seven years ago, I never expected I would ever have a picture of Billie Piper up on my wall - with or without Christopher Ecclestone (and with, in this case). I caught a dodgy new clip from the first episode today where a plastic wheelie bin eats someone and then burps. I hope that doesn't set the tone for the series; I don't want Daleks unblocking sinks with their plungers in episode six simply for the sake of arched-eyebrow cleverness. I did worry that Russell T Davies, who's better known for "Daily Mail"-baiting adult dramas like "Queer As Folk", wouldn't know the difference between suitable-for-all and only-for-kids. Have to see in a few days, I suppose.

By way of a small update, I've uploaded a few screen-grabs for this script I wrote last year.

Sunday 20th March 2005, 12.29am

Just posting to highlight my Judas Priest review.

And to wish President Bush a happy second anniversary in the liberation of Iraq from dear old Saddam. Intervention has only killed ten times as many civilians as Saddam Hussein did in the last ten years. But, y'know, WMDs. Nasty things. But all the better if you ignore the tags attached saying "Made in the USA".

Friday 18th March 2005, 11.01pm

I haven't written my Judas Priest review yet, but check back tomorrow if the tight leather, metal studs and squealing guitars (all of the shameless Eighties revivalist sort) I mentioned last week are up your street.

Today Luke and I saw "Constantine", yet another comic book adaptation. All I know of its source material is that it's actually called "Hellblazer" and that the main character is a blond Liverpudlian (supposedly). So, yeah, Keanu Reeves leaps straight to my mind, too. The story's about this guy called Neo, er, John Constantine, who has been cursed with a sixth sense, enabling him to see the realm of Hell parallel to our own universe, and all the demons therein. After attempting suicide to rid himself of these visions, he is offered eternal damnation (suicide being archly sinful), or salvation in return for his putting his extrasensory perception to use for God. So, naturally, he becomes an uber-exorcist.

The credulity-stretching story begins with detective Rachel Weisz's twin sister supposedly committing suicide (this really isn't a cheerful movie; basically the entire cast dies at some point, even if some of them don't stay dead) because she has psychic visions too. Before long Weisz's character (already forgotten the name) encounters Constantine, who offers to visit Hell to check if her twin sister is there (of course she is). The main thrust of the plot is about the Spear of Destiny, the spear that was used to impale Christ during the crucifixion, and thus its iconic evilness in the Christian mythos; indeed, it has the power to bring forth the child of Satan, who will presumably do for Satanism what Christ did for Christianity. All does not bode well for mankind. But never fear, Keanu's got a big gun and gold bullets.

It's all very entertaining in a supernatural version of "The Matrix" kind of way, and it'll probably do Keanu Reeves's career less damage than the two "Matrix" sequels (which on rewatching again caused me to renege on my initial impressions of them). The depiction of Hell being pretty much like the nuclear inferno scenes from "The Terminator" movies was also suitably impressive. However, an extremely camp performance by Peter Stormare at the end and the fact that, having introduced all these interesting themes and ideas, it doesn't really do anything with any of them, prevent it from being anything other than a much darker than usual Hollywood actioner.

And can I resist making a pun about Keanu's acting? No. He's so typically wooden I'm surprised he survived a single trip to Hell without going up like tinder. Rachel Weisz's superior acting chops don't help him one bit.

Thursday 17th March 2005, 12.21am

Just a quick post to draw attention to the fourth chapter of my latest story, which I completed after many an hour at the computer today, having wanted to clear the decks before I go away for a few days.

Tuesday 15th March 2005, 11.06pm

I'm only posting today because the new trailer for "Star Wars: Episode Three - Revenge Of The Sith" really was worth waiting over an hour for it to load up. It looks great, of course, but the teaser trailer released last November was all about the special effects, and that left me cold. Indeed, the most striking image in this trailer wasn't any of the slam-bang explosive battle scenes, but the long distance shot of the Jedi Temple (or is it the Senate?) on Coruscant burning down, clearly evoking the World Trade Center: no great inferno, just lots and lots of billowing black smoke.

The most appealing thing about this trailer was not the visuals, then, but what it implied about the plot. I quite liked the first two prequels, but I can understand why a lot of people didn't. They went to see "The Phantom Menace" to see Anakin Skywalker turn into Darth Vader - instead they saw him winning a race. They went to see "Attack Of The Clones" to see Anakin Skywalker turn into Darth Vader too - instead they saw him falling in love. The feeling I get from this trailer is that it's going to deliver this time. Anakin Skywalker is going to become Darth Vader, but he will already have turned to the Dark Side before this happens apparently, which piqued my interest.

I also like Ian McDiarmid's major presence as the future Emperor in this trailer. It suggests this film's going to have a proper baddie playing a major hands-on role, rather than subsidiary baddies like Darth Maul and the guy played by Christopher Lee (Darth Saruman, perhaps?), who serve only to have a lightsabre fight and lose/die/run away. Knowing he's going to win at the end, there's a proper sense of threat. The scene where Mace Windu (the almighty Samuel L Jackson) turns up to arrest Palpatine is great - you just know that's not going to end well. Likewise the shot of poor Yoda trapped inside the Senate as it's destroyed. The Mystical Muppet actually looks worried for once!

Can you guess what my next countdown's going to be?

Monday 14th March 2005, 11.37pm

Well, the site's two years old tonight, but I haven't got round to changing anything, having been busy on the latest chapter of my story. I wouldn't have bothered even posting tonight, were it not for finally finding this online. It's the new full trailer for "Star Wars: Episode Three". I like it when they offer it in various sizes. The small one doesn't take long to load up. Not that this is a concern for the broadbanders out there. Anyway, I'm still waiting for it to load up, so will offer my thoughts tomorrow (or, if it's as underwhelming as the previous trailer, not at all).

Sunday 13th March 2005, 11.15pm

I've finished "The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time", which turned out to be even more of a slight read than I was imagining, but still comes fully recommended. I am now reading "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" by Jeanette Winterson, who Jenna and I are going to see at UEA's Literary Festival in a couple of months. It's her loosely veiled autobiography, of life as an orphaned girl adopted by evangelist Christians in the working class North, then falling in love with a girl she's meant to be converting. It's not a polemic, as you might expect a story about the clash between homosexuality and the church to be. Indeed, Winterson can't help but be sympathetic towards the church-goers, especially her adoptive mother, who is so strongly written she must surely be based on a real person.

What criticism there comes of the church arises naturally of its own accord; the church satirises itself. Like when little Jeanette is told off by the pastor for trying to re-enact the story of Jonah and the whale with Fuzzy Felt, but lacking a Jonah or a whale, using Daniel and a lion instead. You wonder whether little Jeanette is a little more savvy than the pastor realises, or Winterson states outright. Less subtle is when little Jeanette goes deaf with adenoidal problems, and her mother simply thinks she's ignoring everyone because she's at one with the Holy Spirit or something. So far I like it better than "Sexing The Cherry", which is the Winterson book I had to read previously, for a unit on English Surrealism over a year ago.

Saturday 12th March 2005, 11.12pm

This is what I like to see; giant billboards just around the corner from our house advertising the new series of "Doctor Who".

I had to stand across the road to get it all in, and left in the trees, the block of flats and even the smaller adjacent billboard just to show how big it really is. It doesn't have a transmission date, and whoever's running the official website is being a tease. Last night the countdown was back up, and still counting down to a March 26th start date.

Friday 11th March 2005, 11.17pm

Today we went to see Will Smith's latest, "Hitch". The trailer was somewhat misleading in that it makes it look like a contrived high-concept comedy of the pratfall variety about a guy who sorts out everybody else's love life, but is hopeless in love himself. Except Will Smith's character has no such trouble and most of the wet humour in the film made it into the trailer. This isn't a criticism, by the way, it's just that I wasn't expecting a romantic comedy, just a comedy about romance. I'm not making myself clear, am I? Anyway, the romance plot is at the centre of the movie, and whilst it has its frequent funny moments, it maintains dramatic momentum in between gags. It reminded me of all those British rom-coms with Hugh Grant, except without Hugh Grant (or any toffish Brits, or, indeed, any Limeys whatsoever). And unlike the many works of Richard Curtis, when it got to the dramatic crux at the end, it didn't swap funny for maudlin and serious. Will Smith switches between 'comedic' and 'cool', but the real Will Smith doesn't really overwhelm the character of Alex Hitchens until right at the end: that's when you stop thinking of him as Hitch, and starting thinking of him as Smith.

I just saw one of the "Doctor Who" trailers I tried to access on the official BBC website actually on TV... and it was only three seconds long after all. I don't know what's going on with the official site. The other day it had the March 26th announcement up and had a countdown, like my own, just in hours, minutes and seconds as well as days. But now that's gone. Still, the screensaver I downloaded is still there, and that's the same countdown. I read the other day that the company co-producing it with the BBC, a Canadian TV channel, had managed to leak the first episode onto the Internet. Surprise, surprise, Andrew had it on his hard-drive later the same day. He was the guy who had "Star Wars: Episode One" months before it was released in the UK, too. So now I've seen a screenshot of the interior of the TARDIS (the crowd goes "ooh"). 'Odd' was the first word that came to mind.

Wednesday 9th March 2005, 11.04pm

Next Monday is the second anniversary of this site. I've not got as big a revamp as last year, seeing as that took me until June anyway, but I might get around to changing a few things. If anybody wants to have a go at designing a new logo, I'd be eternally grateful (well, until this time next year, anyway). Of course, for me to use it, it will have to be better than the excellent one Simon Levitas kindly whipped up for me last year, which is the one I'm using currently, and which put all of my own efforts to shame. So this year I haven't bothered trying. What you call "laziness" I call "knowing my limitations". And thus I fall on the mercy of any kind, generous, talented graphical wizards with five-ten minutes to spare, and beseech them to take pity on one whose meagres abilities lie in words, not pictures.

I've added a little TARDIS picture I found to my countdown to the new series of "Doctor Who" starting on BBC One. It also provides a link to the offical "Doctor Who" website, which was revamped yesterday. It has two new trailers for the series, but they are in horrible streaming RealPlayer format (or whatever it is), and on dial-up I only get two seconds before it freezes. They should be on TV soon, anyway. I saw a review of the first episode whilst flicking through "Q" magazine in WHSmiths the other day and they gave it four stars.

Today I finished the third chapter of my latest story (getting to be a bit of a habit this, starting them Sunday, finishing them Wednesday). Don't know if I'll write any more.

Tonight I ordered mine and Luke's tickets for Weezer, who are playing the Brixton Academy in June. I got into them a mere matter of weeks after they last came to the UK, which was about three years ago now, so they've been on my list to see ever since. And then a week later there's Audioslave. Next on my schedule, however, is golden oldies, Judas Priest, who are playing the Hammersmith Apollo next week. I've had their greatest hits on constant rotation for about a week now. I would say "bring on the tight leather, metal studs and squealing guitars", but I think I'll just say "bring on the squealing guitars" instead. Yeah, that's probably safer.

Monday 7th March 2005, 11.11pm

Today my "Alien vs Predator" DVD arrived in the mail from Play.com, who annoyingly weren't as prompt as they had been delivering "Dawn Of The Dead". I got the special edition, and there are several minutes extra material added to the film, but not the quarter-hour or twenty-minutes Paul Anderson had been promising. One would not be too cynical to hypothesise that Fox are planning a proper release a year from now, pretending there was a whole host of long-lost secret material discovered after the boy Anderson's death. (He's not dead yet, btw). Rumours are in this regard rampant, but then, they always are. I still stand by what I said in my October reviews of the film. It's not as good as it could have been, but it's a lot better than it might have been. And it still holds up on my wee little TV set.

I finished "The Player Of Games" by Iain M Banks, which overall I liked much more than "Consider Phlebas". The last chapter ended on a cracking final sentence, and then the epilogue rounded it off with a cracking final twist. I am now reading the much-hyped (no, that sounds derogatory, the much-lauded) "The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time" by Mark Haddon. It's no more about murdered dogs or even Aspergers Syndrome than "Citizen Kane" is about a (spoiler!) sledge; they're just the plot devices, the things that get things moving, and then shape the world. This is a fantastic book, really easy to read - like Dan Brown, I can manage sixty pages in a sitting; except Haddon's nothing like Dan Brown. This isn't a thriller. Sometimes it isn't even a drama, it's just about observation, sometimes without plot.

Nominally, "The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time" is the story of Christopher Boone, who finds a neighbour's dog one evening lying in her garden impaled on a garden fork. He sets out to find out who killed the dog, but instead finds even greater secrets concerning his own family. What makes this different from your usual coming-of-age novel is that Chris has Aspergers, a form of autism typified by emotional dissociation. Haddon takes you right into Chris's head with his first person narration. We view everything through a prism of Aspergers, so that we understand Chris's skewed perception of the world even if the other characters around him don't. Chris also makes some insightful observations that will make you sit back and think, even if you get the impression he doesn't realise he's making them himself. But don't get me wrong, this isn't one of those books that revels in its own worthiness. It's actually very funny, without making a joke of it.

I also learn that the new series of "Doctor Who" starts on BBC One on Saturday 26th March, so I've changed the "AvP" counter to count down to that instead. Only a few weeks now! The last episode was transmitted on Wednesday 6th December 1989, so that's a 5589 day (I didn't work that out myself) gap between that series finishing and this one starting. In the meantime I've finished junior school, gone through high school and graduated from university, too. I still remember the last episode well. The story was called "Survival" and it featured cats that are really malevolent aliens assuming an innocent form so that they can sneak up on people and attack. A friend of mine and myself avoided black cats round where we lived for weeks after that. Forget the Daleks, it was the killer domestic animals that did it for us!

Friday 4th March 2005, 11.05pm

Today I went to see "In Good Company", which was suitably entertaining matinee fare. Basically, it's the story of the guy in charge of getting adverts in his magazine (Dennis Quaid) being replaced by a clueless young corporate riser who's full of buzzwords but not much savvy (Topher Grace, virtually unrecognisable without that wig from "That 70's Show"), who happens to fall in love with the daughter of the man he replaced (Scarlett Johanson). Okay, I made it sound really boring. It's not really about the corporate side of things (indeed, it comes to a par-for-the-course anti-corporate conclusion), nor is it really about the love affair. It's more about the male bonding between Quaid and Grace's characters. It's almost completely devoid of schmaltz, and the ending is more 'affirming', than it is happy. The humour's also wit-based rather than the slapstick and gross-out humour of Paul Weitz's previous offering, "American Pie".

This evening Luke also put his new "Hero" DVD on. We started watching it dubbed, but that lasted half a scene before we switched back to subtitles. Which were a source of much unintentional laughs when they went so far as subtitling the "Yee-argh!" war-cries. Anyway, that film's very good. The plot isn't as complicated as it first appears, but to explain it would be to undermine it. Okay, that sounds like a cop-out. Basically, an assassin in ancient China goes to his tyrannical king with proof that he has killed three other assassins upon whom the king has put a bounty - in exchange he wants power. Of course, the king doesn't believe he has killed the fellow assassins, and that there's actually a plot to kill him and seize his burgeoning Chinese empire. Some of the fights go on too long, but apart from that, top notch.

Wednesday 2nd March 2005, 11.14pm

Today I went to see "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou", the new ensemble comedy from Hollywood's current master of whimsy, Wes Anderson. This one is nominally about a Costeau-esque oceanographer (played by Bill Murray) mounting an expedition to hunt down the jaguar shark he claims ate his partner, Esteban. Of course, this isn't a "Moby Dick" spoof, this film is really about Steve Zissou's relationship with his estranged son Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson); though Steve promptly renames him with the name he would have given a son if he'd had one, Kingsley Zissou.

Like Anderson's previous film, "The Royal Tenenbaums", this is more about a very un-nuclear family and the fractured relationships therein than it is about pirate hijackings, subsequent rescue missions and raids on Jeff Goldblum's Bond-villain-esque undersea lair. Anderson's films exist in a reality all to themselves, and I suppose to some this is an acquired taste they may have no interest in acquiring. Several critics have said this one really is too whimsical for its own good, and rather than being funny, is just very, very strange. I'd say it was both. There were more laugh out loud moments than in "The Royal Tenenbaums", even if a few jokes fell flat (i.e. went over my head). Basically, if a film that has three-legged dogs called Cody, Willem Dafoe pretending to be German and a soundtrack consisting largely of David Bowie songs in Portuguese doesn't sound off-putting, you'll probably be suitably entertained.

I also managed to find time to finish the second (and possibly last) chapter of my latest story.

Monday 28th February 2005, 11.26pm

Luke came running into the kitchen today with this funny link. It purports to be the website of Brian Welch, who until last week was better known as the guitarist Head in the band Korn - but then he left after finding God. I still can't tell whether this really is his official site, or whether it's just a well-executed prank by some aggrieved Korn fan. I mean, he even looks like Jesus on that thing. Haven't listened to the MP3s. Maybe therein lies the proof of its authenticity. Now, far be it from me to mock someone's belief in giant invisible beings who live in the clouds and make universes in under a week, but in the words of many of my fellow AOLites: lololololol.

Wednesday 23rd February 2005, 12.29am

Last night I had a weird dream, in which I dreamt that I was blind. Could it still be said that I was even dreaming when I couldn't actually see anything? Regardless, I was dreaming about the impression of being blind, and knew for sure that I was in a supermarket. Intermittently my sight returned, and then I woke up.

Today I finished the second half of a 5500 word chapter to a new story. I got the idea for a story about a guy who dies after suffering a terrifying hallucination, only for those carrying out a post mortem to discover the subject of said hallucination has burnt onto his retina like a photograph, during an eye test, but only yesterday was sufficiently inspired to attach a full-blown plot full of conspiracies and unexplained phenomena. I don't know whether I'll write any more, but I've hosted what I've done so far anyway.

Monday 21st February 2005, 11.07pm

Did you read this article I posted by Jeanette Winterson a few weeks back? Well, here's another interesting opinion column I read, this time by Salman Rushdie. It treats of art, religion and freedom of speech - and of course has little time for our government, which is an argument that never gets old (and this time it didn't have to come from "The Daily Mail" either).

I finished "Angels And Demons" the other night. It wasn't as good as "The Da Vinci Code", particularly the near ridiculous all-action finale that involved surviving a leap from a helicopter into a river hundreds of feet below. Some suspension of disbelief required. Indeed, I found it easier to swallow the idea that Jesus had kids with Mary Magdalene and that his bloodline survives to this day. Anyway, I've got halfway through Dan Brown's repertoire in six weeks, so now I'm taking a break and have gone back to Iain M Banks. Last night I started on his second Culture novel, "The Player Of Games".

This one's the story of Jernau Gurgeh, who is a universally famous game player. There isn't a board, computer, strategy or, indeed, player he hasn't beaten. But Gurgeh is bored. The Culture is a quasi-socialist utopian society where people and sentient machines live in perfect symbiosis. Everyone is provided for, so there is no need for money, and because the Culture provides everything you could want or need, the acquisition of material possessions is a non-interest. Being a seemingly born winner, Gurgeh realises that winning doesn't actually profit him in any way beyond fame. And then when he manages to lose a game to a child prodigy, he realises losing doesn't mean anything in the Culture either. So when he's offered the chance to play a game where the winner takes it all (literally; becoming an emperor of a planet), and the loser forfeits everything, of course Gurgeh is going to accept.

This one's different in approach to "Consider Phlebas", the first Banks novel I read, which was more of an epic all-action space opera. This has a far smaller scope, and is very focused in on its eponymous protagonist. The identifiable Banks style remains consistent, however. Men swagger around like Humphrey Bogart in "Casablanca"; women are either too smart for their own good, or too smart for Gurgeh's good (that means they're baddies, though I only have suspicions thus far, being a sixth of the way through); and all the sarcastic robots have inferiority complexes. Good stuff.

Friday 18th February 2005, 11.03pm

Today I went to see "Ocean's Twelve". Basically, if you liked the original, you'll like this one, and perhaps, like me, you'll like it more. This one was less about the heist itself and more about the comic interaction of the characters. Yes, the plot came second to the characters in the first film, but here the plot cames third (or maybe even fourth). Indeed, for the last hour there's not so much a plot, as a gaping wide plot-hole. It would spoil it to reveal the particulars, but suffice to say, if - like the producers, clearly - you think Julia Roberts playing a woman pretending to be Julia Roberts is ripe for a funny scenario, then this one will be up your street.

The plot (what there is of it) sees the casino owner Danny (that's George Clooney to you and me) Ocean's gang of eleven thieves ripped off in the first film tracking down each of the culprits and giving them a fortnight to repay the amount in full, plus interest. Realising they're too high profile to work in America, they decamp to Europe, where their exploits attract the attention of a French master thief who for some vague ego-related reason doesn't like the competition. Eventually he sets them a challenge to steal a Faberge egg, and if they can pull it off before he does, he'll pay off the casino owner. One imagines you're not really supposed to buy it, you're just supposed to laugh at its outrageousness.

The first one worked solely on the basis of its charismatic stars, and nothing's changed. Matt Damon's character at one point asks to play a more central role in the actual heist this time round, and you get the impression it's not just his character asking. The humour of the first act of the movie is derived from the clashing egos of these master criminals, and it's clear the actors feel much the same. With a cast like this, there's bound to be a lot of egotism and self-indulgence, and that's the root cause of most of the problems the film has. There are far too many scenes where nothing happens, that don't get anywhere, that are just there to give all of Ocean's Twelve their contracted share of the limelight. Which, yeah, is entertaining, but not always in the ways you suspect Clooney, Pitt, Roberts, Zeta-Jones et al intend it to be.

Thursday 10th February 2005, 11.42pm

So Prince Charles wants to marry Camilla Parker Bowles - who cares? Normal people have affairs, get divorced, remarry, so it hurts the argument that Charlie's just one of us to get on one's high horse regarding his decision. It's obvious Charles was in love with Camilla right from the beginning, but I don't know, maybe the royal PR department ruled her too unpopular, or too unattractive. Princess Diana was mythologised into this proto-saintly figure, just like JFK, but unlike JFK, she was mythologised whilst she was still alive. The truth is, she was a manipulative she-devil who used threats of suicide to save a marriage she herself helped destroy. I actually see Prince Charles as this almost tragic figure (not that you should pity such a priveleged multi-millionaire). He's been groomed from the day he was born to be the most important state figure-head in the world, and it's clear he's neither capable nor, more importantly, interested. He sees it as his duty, but his frequent contentious Prince Philip-like statements in the Press show he's more interested in being plain old Charles Windsor than King Charles III. Let Charlie retire and go marry Cam. Let Wills be king. Nostradamus predicted the last British king would be called Charles, and if Prince Charles gets it, I suspect he will be.

Monday 7th February 2005, 11.21pm

You know what I hate coming online and seeing? That Labour have just scored their highest poll rating since before Margaret Thatcher came to power. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people in this country? Are you all fascist bastards or something? Tony Blair's latest poll boost comes from the fact that today he announced his next government would crack down on immigration. I'll freely admit I am inherently biased against anti-immigration legislation, but how is it that telling "The Sun" and "The Daily Mail" you're gonna Stop The Darkies Getting In guarantees you a three-point leap in the polls (according to "The Times")? Maybe I'm just wholly naive and believe the best in people. So perhaps I'm wrong, and pandering to the foaming-at-the-mouth "I'm not a Nazi, I just don't like foreigners cos they're not like us and don't understand us and they talk funny and have crooked noses and stuff" crowd is Acceptable Politics these days. I hope Tony Blair burns in Hell, along with most of his contemporaries (including - no, especially - Michael Howard, who's just a fucking disgrace). Yeah, vote LibDem. Forget every bad word I ever said against them. We could do worse. And probably will do.

Friday 4th February 2005, 11.50pm

Today I went to see the remake of "Assault On Precinct 13". It'd be a little ripe of me to attack Hollywood's obsession with cashing-in on tried-and-tested products, seeing as my favourite movie's a sequel. And sometimes it really pays off, like with last year's remake of "Dawn Of The Dead", and I liked that despite liking the Romero original too. "Assault On Precinct 13" was originally written and directed by John Carpenter, who's not always a reliable entertainer. On the one hand, he made towering achievements of science fiction and horror ("The Thing"), and on the other hand, well, he made "Vampires". He also wasn't above shamelessly remaking his own movies ("Ghosts Of Mars" was just "Assault On Precinct 13" in space). Plus he's gone on record saying he really liked this one, so I thought I'd give it a go.

This version of "Assault On Precinct 13" is better than "Ghosts Of Mars" and, indeed, pretty much everything Carpenter himself has done since "In The Mouth Of Madness" (under-rated nugget that that was). However, it's not better than the original. Unlike the "Dawn Of The Dead" remake, which took the bare bones concept of the original and then went off in a completely different direction, the "Assault On Precinct 13" remake basically recycles everything it can get its hands on. The essential plot and siege set-up are the same, even if the particulars are different.

The film opens on Ethan Hawke's cop, Roenick, trying to sell a guy drugs. Of course, it's a set-up, which promptly goes belly-up, resulting in the death of everyone except Roenick himself: cops and crooks alike. Eight months later he's washed up, and has been demoted to a desk job manning Precinct 13, a back-water police station in Detroit's deprived industrial estate that is twenty-four hours from being closed for good as part of cut-backs. Unluckily for him, local gangster Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne), has just been captured and is being transported to jail when a blizzard descends on Detroit and the driver of the police van is forced to divert to Precinct 13, hole up for the night, and continue his journey first thing in the morning. Of course, this isn't a film about the weather, this is a film about a siege, and before you can say "Gee, that storm coming out of nowhere was a bit contrived", there's a highly-equipped team of professional shooters trying to get in. Are they after Bishop? Or is he perhaps not the villain of the piece after all?

Most of the time, "Assault On Precinct 13" is simply a pretty entertaining thriller, nothing more, nothing less. There's points where you can imagine how much worse this might have been in the hands of Paul WS Anderson or somebody: a blast of nu metal here, some slow motion, bullet-time nonsense there. Like the "Dawn Of The Dead" remake, however, this one eschews all the technical wizardry modern cinema has available and goes back to basics. There's no obvious CGI or crazy stunts. It's a bunch of cops and crooks trapped in a besieged police station having to band together and share out the weapons to stay alive. And the second half of the film is well-orchestrated set-piece after well-orchestrated set-piece of them doing just that, punctuated regularly by periods of calm in which our heroes can ruminate and show off their acting chops (the ones that have any).

One area in which this film transcends many of its peers is in its almost seemingly casual disregard for its characters. Indeed, the only real surprises the script has in store is who dies when, often the ones you're not expecting, and definitely not when you're expecting them to cop it (ooh, that was a pun).

The other area in which this film definitely has the angle over its genre-mates is in the casting. This is, of course, Ethan Hawke's film. He won't win any Oscars for it. He won't win anything for it. But he makes more than the most of an unoriginally written character and makes him appealing and likeable even when he's popping pills and making lecherous advances on his visiting psychiatrist (who also gets trapped by the blizzard, wouldn't you know?). He's never less than intensely watchable and it'd be half the film without him, I guarantee it.

The other main star is Laurence Fishburne, but basically, there isn't a single moment in the entire film where you don't think of him as Morpheus. He's typecast now, and it doesn't help when he plays the borderline monosyllabic guy who's good with guns, talks with an air of insufferable superiority, and wears a long coat. You're always expecting him to run up the wall and whup bad guy ass, so when he doesn't, the character just fails not to disappoint.

Kudos must also go to the casting of the great John Leguizamo as a junkie also being transported in the same police van as Marion Bishop. Like Cate Blanchett in "The Aviator", he basically just makes you forget it's him (though unlike Blanchett, Leguizamo manages to do it in every film he does - which is probably a good thing, given the fact that he played Luigi in the "Super Mario Bros" movie). Veteran TV-movie star Brian Dennehy wasn't bad either.

Oh, and Gabriel Byrne's also in it. Yeah, you'll forget too.

Wednesday 2nd February 2005, 11.25pm

I'm gradually getting back into the website mood again after being put off by last summer's much-delayed revamp fiasco. Today I updated two galleries: photos of the cats, and photos of Southend. The cat ones are quite amusing, and the Southend ones capture the town at its most picturesque. So obviously, they're all taken from as far away as possible without treading water in the estuary. These were all taken last summer. I wanted to get shots of central Southend, but to be frank, I'm unabashedly prejudiced against chavs and seeing whole gangs of them throwing up on their WKD alcopops in the high street made me think twice about whipping out the old digicam. I preferred it when the place was infested with goths. Where did they all go, anyway? Was there a Goth vs Chav war whilst I was away? Or are they just old enough to stay out at night instead now?

Talking about old haunts, today I returned to my less than beloved alma mater, the University of East Anglia, which has also changed beyond recognition (well, almost). There's a couple of new buildings that weren't there when I graduated, and several more in the building-site stage. Anyway, the purpose of today's fleeting visit was to pick up tickets to UEA's Literary Festival. I saw a poster in a shop window yesterday, and as luck would have it, Jenna's newest favourite authoress, Jeanette Winterson, is scheduled to appear, and as luck would have it even more, on the day after Jenna's due to arrive in the UK, which is the very last day of the festival to boot. Winterson, for those who have never heard of her, writes uniquely surreal little books that don't always seem the most accessible initially - until you realise that they're actually quite straightforward once you appreciate what she's trying to do, and thus find a way in.

Winterson has something of a bad reputation dating from her enfant terrible days in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when in an interview she listed one of her own books as the best novel of the year, and named herself as her favourite living author. And then there was that incident when she turned up on a journalist's doorstep to berate them for a hostile article. There's something refreshing about an author who has an irascible personality and has no interest in playing the media darling. She also has admirably ambivalent politics, being a lesbian who voted for Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, I've kept meaning to find somewhere to put this article she wrote. It was from the "Daily Mail", but don't let that put you off. It's a great indictment of Bush/Blair, with a mighty fine argument I've pinched for my own personal use comparing the acts of faith taken by Bush/Blair (i.e. WMDs in Iraq) to the acts of faith taken by terrorists (i.e. Allah says fly plane into skyscraper). Can't prove either (WMDs/God) exist, but did that stop them? Nooo.

I finished "The Da Vinci Code" over the weekend. Stop reading now if you haven't read it and want to. Plenty of twists, some foreseeable, some expected, others completely out of the blue, but the only thing that really disappointed me was that the main character, Robert Langdon, spends 600 pages looking for the Holy Grail and its treasure, doesn't find it until the epilogue, and then, when he's standing right on top of it, the book ends. We don't get to see it. Not a peep. Still, that didn't irk me enough to dissuade me from starting on Dan Brown's other Langdon novel, "Angels And Demons". This one's more science fiction than the other, being about a nuclear scientist (and former Catholic monk) who seemingly recreates the Creation in his lab, and is promptly killed by a shadowy group claiming to be the Illuminati, who were anti-church and pro-science, but don't want science to prove the church was right. So, similar themes... and similar plot devices, too. This one starts with a guy being murdered and having something written on his chest, just like "The Da Vinci Code".

Friday 28th January 2005, 11.17pm

Today I went to see "Meet The Fockers", which was essentially just more of the same as its prequel, "Meet The Parents". In this one, the unfortunately named Gaylord Focker (Ben Stiller), takes his fiance's parents to meet his own prior to marrying their daughter. Robert De Niro reprises his role as former CIA agent and uptight control freak, Jack Burns, and for the most part it's essentially a culture clash comedy where he meets his match in the Fockers: Dustin Hoffman's ex-hippy and Barbra Streisand's free-loving sex therapist.

The most successful comic moments were unilaterally of the 'wet' variety. As with the "American Pie" films, a lot of the jokes that worked well in the last movie are recycled and revised. The best set-piece of the first film revolved around Gaylord losing Jack's precious cat (which in this film is reduced to numerous attempts to evade the Fockers' amorous pooch), and the mayhem that ensues; in this one it's Jack's grandson, Gaylord's future nephew, that gets lost. It turns into a well-constructed sequence that involves rum, superglue, a video of "Scarface" and some very unfortunate first words.

Other highlights included a disastrous fondu scene with a certain souvenir of Gaylord's infancy (hint: the Fockers are Jewish), the obligatory Owen "The Nose" Wilson cameo, plus all the little in-jokes and references to the first film for those of us who watched it on DVD far too much.

Tuesday 25th January 2005, 11.15pm

Greetings and salutations. I return from London with ringing ears and clothes besmirched with the foulness of spilt (nay, thrown!) fermented malt drinks, and eau de tabac (or should that be "odour tabac"? Yes, I think it should!) For further details, I beseech thee to clicketh here. Can thee hark the sound of yonder hysteria?

Friday 21st January 2005, 11.28pm

Today I went to see "A Very Long Engagement". Or, if I wanted to sound cultured (or pretentious, delete as applicable), "Un Long Dimanche De Fiancailles". For you see, "A Very Long Engagement" is a French film, one of only four I've seen. The other three were: "Delicatessen", "The City Of Lost Children" and "Amelie". Those, as this, were all directed by the same person, Jean Pierre Jeunet. And for anyone still under the impression seeing subtitled foreign films makes you cultured, I probably never would have heard of Jean Pierre Jeunet had he not directed the much maligned fourth "Alien" film (though because of "Alien: Resurrection"'s 18 certificate, "Delicatessen" was the first film of his I actually saw).

I read the novel by Sebastien Japrisot on which the film is based about 18 months ago, so that inevitably has a bearing on my review. Essentially, the story starts where Stanley Kubrick's "Paths Of Glory" ends. A handful of French soldiers are found guilty of self-mutilation as to be invalided out of service on the Somme, and to make an example of them, the French army sentences them to death - by a way that'd get even those nice chaps at Camp Bread Basket quoting the Geneva Convention. One night, a hole is cut in the barbed wire and the five men are forced through it, unarmed, on the orders basically to get themselves killed. And, if the opening sequence is to be believed, that's precisely what happens.

A lot of the story happens in flashback. We skip forward to 1920, when Mathilde, the grieving fiance of the youngest of the soldiers, Manech, receives a letter from a man who was in the trench that day, and his version of events both contradicts what we've just seen, and the sanitised version the army released to civilians like Mathilde. This starts her wondering, and as she explores further, she discovers that in fact two of the five men survived, but was one Manech? The film follows her search, and her investigations, layering on all the alternate versions of the opening until the truth finally emerges.

"Once upon a time, there were five French soldiers who had gone off to war, because that's the way of the world". So starts the novel, and Jeunet perfectly captures Japrisot's flippant tone. He also perfectly captures the entire first chapter, which as I think I've said before remains one of the best openings I've read in a book. We open on a twisting establishing shot of the Somme, descending from the shattered crucifix of a destroyed church (complete with symbolically torn-apart Jesus hanging off it) down through rubble, into the trench, along streams of interconnected barbed wire. Whilst this won't do for the Somme what "Saving Private Ryan" did for the Normandy landings, Jeunet doesn't really pull his punches. Bombs are shown hitting people, and the trenches are rat-infested quagmires that make you feel wet and cold just to keep watching.

Jeunet's sense of humour is perhaps a little more impish than Japrisot's. The Mathilde of the novel spends most of the book in a wheelchair, yet Jeunet just gives her a gummy leg, and implies she just uses the wheelchair to elicit sympathy (in a comical way, a la Lou and Andy in "Little Britain"). Still, this is in-keeping with the novel's character, so I didn't see that as a bad thing. The only part where Jeunet lets his sense of whimsy (oh so inappropriate to "Alien: Resurrection") get the better of him is in the subplot of a vengeful whore tracking down and killing the men who sentenced her pimp (one of the five men) to die, by ever increasingly silly methods (reminding me of the suicidal woman in "Delicatessen"). Though again, Jeunet manages to salvage that character with a tragic final couple of scenes after she's caught.

Where Jeunet really succeeded over the book in my eyes was the middle section, as Mathilde makes her initial investigations into the grieving relatives of the other four men. In the book, this was a leaden, over-long section that threatened to grind to a halt, pace-wise, degenerating into fifty odd pages of letters going back between various characters. Jeunet sums all that up in one of those quick montage-to-music arrangements. I think it might even have been the appropriate "Danse Macabre", which sums up Jeunet's tone completely: he's a scamp of a director, but a slightly creepy scamp, too.

Audrey Tautou is basically just replaying her "Amelie" role as Mathilde. Or, rather, Amelie a few years down the line, a little more jaded, a little more independent. That's no bad thing, though in the novel Mathilde was an obstreporous cow most of the time (though we forgive her because of her devotion to Manech), and this is only hinted at in her first scene in the film. Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon puts in a muted performance as Mathilde's long suffering uncle, his usually exuberant face hidden behind a bushy beard. The only other face I recognised was Jodie Foster in a fluent fleeting cameo (one of her two scenes being a sex scene, of which Jeunet inserts far more than I remember there being in the novel, all of the quaint "Amelie" variety); allegedly cast as to secure necessary extra funding from Warner Bros.

Though you can see where the money went. This is a big epic romantic comic war movie. This isn't some cheap, independent, inaccessible art-house film. It's mainstream and accessible. Jeunet is like the French Spielberg. Reading subtitles shouldn't put you off. It's just a pity that if this had been made in English by a big Hollywood studio, it would reach far more people than it will. And should. Go see.

Wednesday 19th January 2005, 11.24pm

After finally picking up on all the hype about Dan Brown, I started reading "The Da Vinci Code". It was recommended to me on the basis that I liked "National Treasure", and I can see similarities. The book started well, and I was gripped by the end of the first paragraph, when a curator at the Louvre deliberately pulls a painting off the wall as to trap himself in the room for some reason. Unfortunately Dan Brown has no ear for dialogue and as soon as his characters start speaking he started to lose me. "Pain is good, monsieur," one villain snarls on the third page. "Inside the house of the Lord; how they mock us!" the chief baddie, the Teacher, spits in his first appearance a few chapters later. I couldn't imagine anyone other than Mike Myers in Doctor Evil mode in that role.

So it was most unexpected, then, that come page 59, I suddenly found myself unable to put the book down anymore. Usually I'm perfectly capable of doing that after ten pages or so in one sitting, but with this one I had to keep on reading. Either Dan Brown had sorted out his dialogue issues by that stage (in which case why not rewrite the atrocious early lines?) or I was too wrapped up in the plot to care about such idiosyncracies anymore.

In a nutshell, for those who haven't read it, "The Da Vinci Code" is about the Holy Grail. How Leonardo Da Vinci comes into that is the thrust of the plot, which takes in two thousand years of European history and Christian mythology and then liberally rewrites it in a most fascinating way. The book starts like a murder mystery, with the killing of the Louvre curator, and a cryptic message he leaves to his estranged granddaughter and a visiting American 'symbologist'. It then becomes a rapid paced thriller as the pair of them are implicated in the murder and have to go on the run from the French police, whilst at the same time trying to decipher the message left behind.

However, the novel really comes into its own when it transcends the mystery and thriller genres about a third of the way in and starts to tackle religious themes, such as whether there's been a conspiracy within the church to pervert the course of Christianity for the last 1500 years, and that a small group of people have been protectors of the secret truth for just as long, and are awaiting an approaching chance to reveal it. Whether Dan Brown's ideas are 'fiction' or not doesn't matter, because as far as the world of his story is concerned, they're more than plausible enough to draw you into his argument, or that of his characters, anyway. The magic is in the details, such as his allusions to secrets contained within symbols and paintings, like why there's a woman in Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" (y'know, the painting of Jesus and his twelve MALE disciples) that people rarely notice. You may not buy what Dan Brown has to say, but he'll definitely make you go and double check.

I'm about two thirds of the way in now and after reading a hundred pages the other day I'm rationing myself because I don't want this one to end. But at the same time, I'm dying to know what happens next. Sure, it's not perfect. You've got to have a reasonable distaste for the Catholic church, otherwise the villains will just seem like a bunch of nutty vicars. And whilst Dan Brown doesn't hesitate to portray the church as wholeheartedly evil, he litters the book with comments like "Though nobody could deny the great things the church was doing around the world". Show, don't tell, Mr Brown. Along with the church, the French and the English don't get an easy time. The French police are pure stereotypical gruffness and incompetence, and as for the token Englishman, don't get me started on him. His name is Sir Leigh Teabing. That says it all.

As I've been reading I've been thinking that this would make a great movie, and now I see that one's being made. It's being directed by Ron Howard, who certainly has the credentials, though they've cast Tom Hanks in the lead role, and I can't really see him in it. I've been imagining someone a bit less cuddly, a bit more aloof, and definitely a lot more agile.

Tuesday 11th January 2005, 11.12pm

Today I went to see the new Martin Scorsese film, "The Aviator", which was excellent - for the first two and a half hours. It's the story of one of the founding fathers of modern day America, Howard Hughes, the ambitious and obsessive movie mogul and aviation pioneer. You don't need to know anything about the guy to appreciate the film, but I imagine it helps if you know how he ended up outside the scope of the film - alone and for all intents and purposes insane, locked in his hotel room, pissing in milk bottles.

A bloke sitting behind me muttered about how the film version ended abruptly. I saw it as the other way round. It ran past the natural conclusion of the version of Hughes's life Scorsese was trying to depict. The film should have ended with Hughes's triumphant flight of his 'Spruce Goose' sea-plane, but instead continues for another few minutes to show him on the verge of mental breakdown. And then ends. You're left hanging. If you know how Hughes's life ended, then you can fill in the blanks yourself, but if you take the film on its own dramatic terms rather than being a documentary, then it seems to backtrack to a previous episode of mental illness, and then not do anything with it. I understand Scorsese not wanting to make a simplistic flick about a guy who overcomes his extreme neuroses, but at the end of the day, that's what he's done anyway, and tacking on a vague extra few scenes doesn't change that.

But, I must say, that was pretty much the only thing I didn't like about the entire film. It's captivating from the very first scene (well, okay, the second - the scene with the young Hughes getting warned off dirt by his similarly obsessive and apparently sexually abusive mother seemed a bit obvious even at the start). It moves with a swift pace, but doesn't feel rushed; more, it captures Hughes's own impatience to get things done. That said, it covers three years within twenty minutes and twenty years over three hours, but the script never feels episodic. There's no clunkiness or obvious, expected dialogue - no mean feat for the guy who wrote "Star Trek: Nemesis". Perhaps this is due to Scorsese, then, except this doesn't feel like one of his films. His movies tend to feel cold and hard, but this felt warm. It's romantic, even when it's not dealing with Hughes's relationships with Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner.

Of course, the buck doesn't stop with Scorsese, it stops with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role. For the first two and a half hours he manages it just fine, particularly in the opening sequences of the film, where he's the young, ambitious film director who is unknown to most, ridiculed by the rest. Likewise once that changes he can play the contradictory famous moviemaker who both needs and fears the limelight - but that isn't exactly too far removed from the actor's own status. It's in that final half hour that DiCaprio struggles, as he tries to depict Hughes mid-breakdown, which Russell Crowe did so well in "A Beautiful Mind". DiCaprio's portrayal involves little more than looking drunk and growing an unkempt beard.

So no Oscars for Mr DiCaprio, but I wouldn't be surprised if Cate Blanchett got at least a nomination for her part as actress Katharine Hepburn. Even though she does an uncanny impression, it doesn't matter even if you've never heard of Katharine Hepburn. Quite simply you'll forget it's Cate Blanchett, and for a recognisable movie star to make you forget you're watching her instead of the persona she's portraying, that's good acting. The rest of the cast is peopled by lots of stars in minor roles. Jude Law has half a dozen lines as a lecherous Errol Flynn. Ian Holm pops up in a slightly awkward comic relief role. And the credits even list Gwen Stefani.

Go see.

Friday 7th January 2005, 11.09pm

Over Christmas I was bored, so followed a link on Dan's site. The link was to an online game called NationStates, to which he claimed to be addicted. I can see why. NationStates is a god-game, in that you control a country, and that you can't win. It just goes on. You get to choose your country's name, pick a region (or make your own) and even design its flag. My country is called Ossaca, and you can check out the details here. I didn't write that description, by the way. That changes from day to day.

Every day you are presented with a dilemma, and a variety of options. Depending on what option you choose, your political alignment shifts. The other day I was a Scandanavian Liberal Paradise. I don't even know what that is, but it doesn't sound as bad as Corporate Police State or Compulsory Consumerist Society, which are some of the other alignments. The daily dilemmas started out pretty basic (like vetoing a fundamentalist bill to ban Harry Potter), in which the options were clearly delineated in terms of response and consequences, but now they've become more complicated, and you're given a selection of no-win options. Last night income tax in Ossaca was at 41%, and even higher for the wealthy.

Whilst you can't win at NationStates, every day all the countries in the world (there are over 90,000 active players) are ranked according to different criteria. They are also ranked for the region you are in. The other day Ossaca was ranked first in my region, Archipelana, for how foul-mouthed its kids are. Though to put that in context, there's only two countries in my region (the other is Austenville, which is run by Jenna). The idea is to either create your own personal utopia or dystopia. I'm trying for the former, which is inevitably harder.

And that's the extent of the game - unless you choose to join the United Nations. This is when it gets addictive, because this is when you start to have influence over other people's countries as well. Unlike the real UN, the FAQ explains with a smirk, when a resolution is passed by majority vote, all member states have to abide by it. There's only one resolution before the UN at any one time. This week it's some nonsense about a global library. All UN members can vote on proposals, but only UN regional delegates get to propose them (or propose repealing them). To become a UN delegate you need to be endorsed by people in your region. As UN delegate, you get an extra vote for every endorsement. This is where the real power-tripping starts to kick in.

Though only if you're sad like me.

Today I went to see "White Noise" starring Michael Keaton. I was considering "Alexander" or "The Aviator" but "Alexander" seems to have got a unanimous thumbs-down and "The Aviator" was too long for the mood I was in. "White Noise" was suitably spooky and mysterious. It opens with a quote purportedly from Thomas Edison, speculating on whether detuned radio equipment could pick up signals from the dead. That seems to be there to lend a degree of plausibility to a plotline that grows increasingly more weird with each twist. It happens so gradually that it gives you time to buy what it's plugging before pushing on. So it's well-paced, and Michael Keaton carries it with conviction, but it all seems to be leading up to a final twist that never arrives. Most of the scares are of the thing-leaps-at-screen and silence-then-loud-noise variety. So not bad, much better than the similarly themed "The Grudge", but you won't stop thinking of Keaton as Batman because of it.

Last night I decided to check out the new "Celebrity Big Brother" series just to see who they got, and ended up tuning in for the live broadcast in the early hours as well. Guess I'll be watching it all, then. I haven't heard of half the people they've got in there, but was surprised at some of those who agreed to do it. Such as the, uh, old people. One particular highlight I caught early this morning was when uber-feminist Germaine Greer was discussing politics with glamour model Caprice, geegees pundit John McCririck and one of the himbos from Blazin Squad. That's not something you're ever likely to see on "Question Time".

In other news: I got another e-mail from someone who happened upon my site by accident, this time someone who found it doing that Googlewhack thing. As I understand it, Googlewhacking is where you type two seemingly unrelated words into Google and see what site it comes up with - though I may be wrong. This guy typed "horseradish spliff" into Google. And came up with my site. No, I don't know why either. And yes, I know I've just cancelled out the Googlewhackability of this site with "horseradish spliff", but how many millions of Googlewhacking monkeys at a million computer keyboards will it take for one of them to come up with "horseradish spliff" again?

And in a final bit o' news: this site has now overtaken my first site, the "Alien" Encyclopedia, in terms of how many hits it's had. This site has been tracking visits since June 2004. The "Alien" Encyclopedia has been online since August 1998. Whilst I'd like to think this site's had more visits because what I've got to say is more interesting than the "Alien" films I suspect it's more a case of the fact that this site gets uploaded constantly, and in the six and a half years since I uploaded my "Alien" site, I've only updated it once or twice. Back in the days of AOL 3, after all, you actually had to type in all the files you wanted to upload manually, and I couldn't be bothered.

Wednesday 5th January 2005, 11.17pm

Back in Nozza. In the end I couldn't be bothered with the hassle of updating at home. There were several occasions I felt like posting. Like before Christmas, when the government passed the identity card bill, but I already said my piece about that and would just have been venting. Also after Christmas, most particularly about the tsunami. I've scoffed at people before for using their blog-things as mediums for demonstrating their level of self-absorption, oblivious to anything going on outside their own little world, and didn't want it to seem like I didn't care. But what could I say that hasn't already been said? Nobody could have missed the appeals. Or if you have, donate now. Jenna and I have donated £50 each (or $80 in her case), and my income's roughly minus £250 a month, so nobody else has an excuse.

Anyway, here's a late review of 2004, divided into categories a la Andrew's rather than the approach I took last year:

Books

I haven't read any books actually written this year, but the best books I have read this year are "Northern Lights" by Philip Pullman and "Consider Phlebas" by Iain M Banks. "Northern Lights" is the first in a trilogy (though I gather Pullman is currently at work on another series featuring the same characters) set in a world that's ever so slightly different from our own. It's built on the same "Narnia" tradition that "Harry Potter" is a natural descendent of, it just happens to be better than both of those. I gather the third in Pullman's trilogy, the Whitbread award-winning "Amber Spyglass" is a none too subtle polemic against Christianity, but that's only hinted at in the first part, which is pure narrative and imagination.

Which are the same criteria for which I recommend "Consider Phlebas", too. It's like the anti-"Star Wars"; not in the sense that it sets itself up in opposition like Pullman does to CS Lewis, just that at all the plot points George Lucas would have thrown in a bit of slapstick, Iain M Banks throws in a little slap and tickle instead. I got several more of Banks' 'Culture' novels over Christmas, even though I haven't actually finished "Consider Phlebas" yet.

TV/Movies

My favourite film released this year was "Dawn Of The Dead". I went in expecting a full-on sacrilegious raping of the George Romero original, and instead got a reverent thriller that took the key concept of the Romero film and then took it in a different direction, so that it avoided stepping on any toes, and triumphing on its own terms. Keeping on the zombie theme, I also really liked "Shaun Of The Dead", and the more I watch it, the more I find to like. This year also saw "Alien vs Predator" after a decade in development. Not that you could tell. It was better than I'd feared but not as good as it could and should have been.

Films from previous years I've liked this year include "Dog Soldiers", which was a source of many a jolly jape for us in the first year for its tagline, but which we never actually got round to go see. This year they showed it at the GameGossip Meet, but on the second day, after I'd come back to Norwich to finish coursework. However, I nabbed the DVD in a sale and have watched it now almost as many times as "Shaun". Over Christmas I also saw the original version of "The Manchurian Candidate" on TV after the remake caught my interest. And mine alone, it would seem - in and out of the Norwich UCI in the space of a week it was so unpopular. So I didn't see it, so can't compare, but I doubt it would have been as subtle and as clever a thriller as the original.

I suppose an honourary mention can also go to "National Treasure", which I saw a few days ago. I actually really enjoyed that, though it's a good job it moves along at such a swift pace. Stop long enough to think about the tricks it appears to have up its sleeves and they start to unravel. How's that for a mixed metaphor, eh? It's not a patch on the "Indiana Jones" films, but it fills the gap left behind by them much better than "The Mummy" films did.

As far as TV shows go, the third season "24" is far and away the best thing I watched for a second year running, though hot on its tail is "Alias". I watched the second season on DVD over the summer, and any misgivings I had about the abrupt and leftfield final scene of the last episode have been swept away by the excellent first episode of the third season, criminally dumped in the graveyard slot by Channel 5. British TV has continued to be lacklustre and bloodless fare, though the last episode of "Spooks" was very good, and the latest series of "Little Britain" hasn't been bad, even if it's more juvenile and grotesque than the last. Anyway, I saw the first trailer for the new series of "Doctor Who" on New Year's Day, so 2005 might be better.

Music

I seem to have gone off music again this year. I've started noticing irksome background music in TV shows. I've allowed myself to become irritated when people only take out ONE of their headphones to hold a conversation with you (and then have the damn cheek to say "What?" when they can't hear what I've said). I've bought less CDs than in the previous two years, and whilst I've downloaded more tracks, it's usually to see whether something's worth buying - and then deciding not. I'm not the kind of person who just has music on in the background. If it's good enough to be worth a listen, I listen to it and do nothing else. Most of the music I have got (and not just from this year) has been just about good enough for usage in that regard. Two notable exceptions this year were "American Idiot" by Green Day and "Subliminal Verses" by Slipknot, both of which demanded my total attention. Favourite songs would include "Duality" and the "Jesus Of Suburbia" suite.

I didn't go to many concerts this year either. The best overall was undoubtedly the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Hyde Park. Though it's not really fair to compare their show with something in the LCR at the UEA, so honourary mentions also to both Funeral For A Friend and Lostprophets for little nuggets of B-list B-venue A-class giggery.

Toys

I can't decide which was my best consumer moment: the Epiphone, or the new Marshall amp I bought just before Christmas - and then had to abandon for a few weeks. I think I'll stick with the guitar. It sounds great on the Marshall, but it sounded okay on the busted Fender amp too. The old Squier, however, doesn't sound any better on the Marshall than it did with the amp that came with it.

Politics

George W Bush is a spuzclod. Tony Blair is a spuzclod. To even try and be mature and serious about the disillusioning state of things would be to demean myself into spuzcloddery too.

Personal

Getting a degree was an anti-climax, not just because I got a 2:1. I was much more gratified to get 72% for my dissertation, even though that wasn't even my best mark. It signalled that I had finally found the right direction for my writing. Annoyingly, too late to get onto the Creative Writing MA at UEA. Writing and completing not one but two major 50,000 word plus projects over the summer was also something of a personal achievement, and I think the last series of stories I wrote were the best short things I've written in a long time.

As for what I've got planned for the upcoming year, the short answer is: I don't know. The long answer is: I don't knowwwwww. Getting a job would be rather useful now, seeing as Christmas used up a large chunk of what was left of last year's student loan and I'm now on the verge of eating into an investment that came to term a couple of months ago. I'm currently doing the research for my next big project, as described in the e-mail to Gary Lankford I posted a few weeks before Christmas. I've realised I'm now solely responsible for the continuation of my education. If I don't make the effort now then I might never learn anything new again. Scary.

I haven't made any resolutions because I never keep them, but read more, write more, learn more, see more, experience more, be more open-minded, be more generous, things like that.