never mind the pollocks

I had pollock in Wickham Market. The waitress said it was just like cod but with 'no skin and no bones'. You couldn't help but wonder how it got by in the wild; still, I ordered it. Once it arrived, it was even less easy to see how it worked. Though it did indeed taste like cod, it was long and thin like an eel, yet V-shaped. Was it an off-cut of something bigger? Was the name a reference to Jackson Pollock? 'Abstract expressionist' just about summed it up.

We were in Suffolk to see the Christmas show my cousin writes with her partner. The Haunted Commode is based on the kind of horror film where four strangers meet up in a catacomb/country house/bus shelter and tell each other their horrific experiences before finding out, at the end, that they've been dead all along. In this case, with all the additional elements of pantomime which were sorely lacking in, say, Dr. Terror's House Of Horrors (largely due to Peter Cushing's stubborn refusal to work with glove puppets.)

Here the creepy rendezvous was a railway station waiting room and the pivotal character was 'Florence Humbleby', a writer determined to turn her travelling companions' chilling tales into an 'anthology of the macabre' which will make her a fortune. That a horror anthology could make that kind of money was by far the most implausible element in a show which also featured a dog-mummy demanding 'sausages' and a farting spider. My favourite conceit was the cannibalistic twin public schoolboys (permanently dressed in their cricket gear) who want to turn their ancestral pile into an old people's home and feast upon the inmates. These should become standard pantomime characters.

Not that it was a panto, exactly, as you can perhaps tell, though there was plenty of classy innuendo on hand of the 'I'm now going to deposit the contents of my lunchbox in your front basket' variety. However, entertaining as it was, it was no match for the anecdotes I was a party to throughout the rest of the weekend, staying at my aunt's. An account of killing cockroaches with a flamethrower in a Chorley bakery; stories about mysterious characters like 'Pitt the bowel surgeon', whose aunt is 'a very high-powered landscape gardener'; and the revelation (courtesy of my father) that Hitler's (apparently legendary) fondness for parrots extended to having one strapped to each leg, both of them trained to squawk 'Sieg Heil!' every time the Fuhrer saluted.

Suspect as some of this may be as historical fact, I can already feel the elements of next year's Christmas show coming together.

suspension of disbelief

Mat came round at the weekend in order to get into this blog entry. I waited in vain for him to do something amusing. Eventually we gave up and put on the DVD he bought Dave for Christmas: Chinese movie Mad Detective. This is about a detective. Who is mad. You can tell because he has all the usual symptoms: too-short trousers, imaginary wife. However, he is also a brilliant detective. The kind of detective who zips himself into a suitcase, gets his partner to push him down several flights of stairs, then emerges, crying: 'The ice cream shop owner did it!' While stumbling into walls. And he's always right.

Which is just as well, really.

Amanda was at Lakeside meeting some 'pregnant people' she's found on an internet forum. Mat was typically unconcerned, though it seemed fairly clear to me that, in the way of the internet, these people would turn out not to be pregnant at all. That in fact they would be men. Old men. Old men who needed a fresh baby for their Satanic rituals.

Later, when we went to the cinema to see Defiance, she denied this. They had clearly got to her, with their promises of untold riches and world domination.

The only thing Defiance has in common with Mad Detective is that in both films someone is pissed on. Though in the case of Mad Detective it is at somewhat greater length. Defiance is a true story, and that's just as well because if I hadn't been told it was true, I probably wouldn't have believed it. Daniel Craig plays the (suspiciously Aryan-looking) Jew who leads his fellow Jews out into the middle of the forest, where they set up camp. This is in under the regime of the Nazis, of course, otherwise it might have seemed a bit perverse. And they survive, or some of them do, until the end of the war.

At one point they steal 'ampicillin' to treat typhus. According to 'a doctor' on Time Out's website, however, ampicillin wasn't formulated at the time and, in any case, wouldn't have been used to treat typhus. So, so much for truth. Dave thinks the original story was about one man wandering into the forest. And dying of starvation.

No doubt he was Catholic too.

Amanda, uncomfortable in her seat, tried to use that feeling in order to empathize with the characters' privations, but with limited success. I have seen her scan. Already, the baby really does look like Mat. It is even, if I am not mistaken, holding a tiny laptop. How did it get hold of that? Those Satanists... But I suppose it would be pretty boring in there otherwise.

No wonder she's uncomfortable though.

Mine's a Bloody Mary

Back to the grind. The first meeting of the year to discuss all the latest initiatives for grabbing your blood and organs. Conscription for blood donors is still under review, but until it is introduced on a nationwide level, we'll have to make do with the more ad hoc 'press gang' method. Be careful when you go into the Bay Tree Centre over the next couple of weeks, that's all I'm going to say.

Donor awards for organ donors, that's the other thing. Donate a heart, an eye, and a pair of lungs and you could qualify for a bronze coffin!

I really shouldn't be revealing this, especially as I'm in the midst of assembling my CV to reapply for my own job. The good news is, though, that we aren't going to be called 'distribution assistants'. No, we're going to be 'strategic marketing assistants'! This is something of a victory, though it might have backfired in that I feel a bit intimidated by the new job title. I now doubt my ability to get my own job.

Jeremy Vine was dealing this week with the 'issue' of public sector workers being able to claim back their holiday if they are ill during it, which is apparently something I can do, as long as I have a doctor's certificate. 'Is this a perk too far?', asked JV. Hm. I spent years in retail, working Bank Holidays and Sundays for no extra money, and when I complained, I was told: well, get out of retail then. So I did, and now I'm told I've got too many perks and it isn't fair on private sector workers. Well, tough. It's not as if I don't work enormously hard for these privileges, as I told Jeremy myself when I rang him from the office after my third cocktail of the day, with everyone cheering me drunkenly on through mouthfuls of fillet steak.

Rare, naturally.

ramblings

After last year, Christmas was blessedly conventional. Relatives came down for Boxing Day. As the evening wore on my Mum produced from the back of some cupboard a word game from the late 70's called 'Kan-U-Go', which some people took as a heavy hint. 'And if that doesn't work, we've got one called Piss Off', she said. No, she'd never say that; I had to.

For New Year we went to Suffolk. Dave drove on the way there. The last time we stayed in these cottages we were the first to arrive so this time we resolved to be ridiculously late, and almost succeeded, driving up in the dark. 'Thank you for driving carefully through our village', a sign said, before we'd even entered the village. Dave was so shocked by this presumptuousness that he promptly dropped his cigarette into his lap and proceeded to drive very wildly through their village, demolishing garden walls and running over pets. Serve that village right.

Once there, we watched telly. There didn't seem to be much point in going outside. Whenever we did, something went wrong. Yokels (including a woman who looked like Boris Johnson in a wig) stood at the side of the road, staring grimly at us. The second night Nicki drove us into the next town, careering through the pedestrianized high street in the belief that it was too late for pedestrians. (It was certainly too late for the ones she mowed down.)

We went to a curry house located under a closed branch of Boots with blanked-out windows. We hesitated - it looked like a trap. Amanda asked two passers-by where the Thai place was, but having told us, they proceeded to enter this underground curry house, thus rendering it less suspicious. So we followed them in, and it was incredibly busy and understaffed, but we couldn't leave now because the two guys we'd asked about the Thai were in there and we already looked weird for following them in (like we'd changed all our plans for them - like we'd fallen in love with them or something) and if we left now we'd really blow their minds.

That curry was a long time coming.

We also went to Framlingham castle (closed) and Dunwich, which - apart from having fallen into the sea at some point - was being afflicted by a very cold and constant wind (wind was a problem for everyone on this holiday, but that's another story). In Dunwich we went to the Ship, which catered for ramblers and was itself suitably rambling - rooms everywhere, all higgledy-piggledy; dogs running around like in a medieval castle. The elderly barman looked as though he'd been working there for seventy years without a break. He undercharged Rhys, who said he thought the guy had had a stroke. 'Shouldn't you have called an ambulance then?', asked Mat. But it turned out Rhys had meant at some time in the past.

New Year's Eve involved a murder mystery evening in which I played a mafioso, Mat's younger brother. Amanda said mine was the worst Italian accent she'd ever heard, even worse than Mat's, and he was only doing a Borat impression. My real brother was the murderer, confusingly. Then there was Singstar, only Rhys forgot the microphones. Well done, Rhys! And I write that without irony, for the first time ever in my life and almost certainly the last.

It ended in drunkenness, predictably, though not for Mat, who is of course sympathetically pregnant, and was sitting on the sofa with his laptop when I staggered in, for all the world like a disapproving parent, watching me walk into walls. 'Are you going to vomit?', he asked. I lay on my bed fully-clothed with the lights on for a time, wondering which way it would go, but in the event I was not ill. Though with people sitting around my bed in the mornings (it was a sofabed in the lounge), I often felt like a convalescent.

For the first time we had the presence of very young children (a screeching as of pterodactyls through the wall in the morning) to deal with but, having watched Phil demonstrate to his son how to get the last drops of rose from a box of Blossom Hill, I'm sure they'll be going the way of the adults very soon.