moments only

don't trust the sun

2012-01-30T10:54:00.000-08:00

A headline in the Brentwood Recorder says that Amy Childs is 'less interesting than a pot plant'. They've done research apparently. Maybe this is why there is to be no second series of It's All About Amy. In its slot, an hour-long static shot of a geranium is expected to bring the viewers in.

Jeremy Vine was talking about brothers and sisters sharing the same bed. Listeners rang in to say that it never did them any harm; or that it did. A woman had to sleep with her four brothers - 'What position did you take?', asked Jeremy. Cheeky Jeremy seems to have been taking lessons from Chris Morris. After a soundbite of Peter Tatchell tackling Robert Mugabe, Jeremy asked Tatchell if what we were hearing was Mugabe's bodyguards 'pulling him off'. You could actually hear Tatchell do a double-take.

There is a feeling in the admin department that JV is inventing most of his stories just to wind people up. Nevertheless we continue to listen. Other things we refuse to endure, like the sun. In admin we are distinctly ambivalent about the sun, which comes in at a certain point in the afternoons and hits Lorraine in the face. At that point the blinds are firmly drawn, plunging us into premature night (or it would do, if we didn't have electric light). Last Friday, they were drawn twice because Lorraine misjudged the sun's whereabouts and opened them too soon. When they were opened the second time it had ceased to dazzle. 'It's gone behind the trees', Lorraine said, but she still didn't sound entirely reassured. Unable to see it from my seat, I requested that she keep us informed of the sun's activities. 'Let us know if it comes up again.'

Such a cosmic upheaval did not seem to be entirely out of the question, since that very afternoon a massive asteroid was due to narrowly-miss the Earth at about four. Steve Wright had joked about it. Which did not seem to provide a cast-iron guarantee that the world would not, in fact, end.

It didn't though.

Bees Blood Countdown

2012-01-23T10:43:00.000-08:00

Lorraine said they now use bees to sniff out drugs. I was sceptical - 'What next? Trained mushrooms?' - but she saw it on The One Show, and you can't argue with that.

On the office radio Jeremy Vine was talking about a school where they encourage seven-year olds to massage each other. This got a lot of parents rather hot under the collar, and one came on to say that it was 'potentially opening a can of worms', perhaps my favourite use of this delightful phrase ever. However, by the time a caller defended her viewpoint (anti) by stressing that she worked in the sex industry - so definitely knew what she was talking about - you began to wonder if the discussion hadn't gone astray.

An urgent request came in from a hospital for a leaflet nobody had ever heard of called Will I Get The Right Blood? It does sound uncharacteristically pessimistic for one of our leaflets ('Will I get the right blood? I doubt it. You'll probably die.') But perhaps it belongs to an earlier era, when the service was not quite so customer-focussed, and produced such fondly-remembered information leaflets as It's Not Your Blood, It's Ours and How Are You Going To Stop Us Harvesting Your Organs?

The BBC Health News was saying that NHS staff are being encouraged to take every opportunity to promote healthy living. A spokesman said that this would not be annoying - it was just a matter of 'stating the obvious'. What, like 'You're fat'? Luckily I do not actually work for the NHS as such, but for what they call an 'Arm's Length Body', which means you get to keep the public at arm's length. I think.

Talking of insults, the BBC News website also revealed that someone came up with the word 'wanker' on Countdown. I mean, they submitted it as an answer, it wasn't just a bad reaction to the new presenter, Nick Hewer. Questionable words previously used on the show, we were told, include 'fart, bastards, and erection' - which is, coincidentally, the title of the new sitcom I'm working on for BBC3. A plot synopsis is available upon request.

King's Speech 2: The Tourette's Years

2012-01-16T10:30:00.000-08:00

Davoid Cameroon suggested this week that the British film industry should concentrate on making 'commercially successful films' like The King's Speech. What a very clever idea. I'm surprised Hollywood haven't cottoned onto this one. Instead of just making any old shit in the hope that some of it will stick, they could just concentrate on the 'commercially successful' portion of their output.

And how shrewd of him to align himself with commercial success! Because, although I don't know if a survey has been done to prove this, I'm sure that most voters, if asked what films they like to see, would tend to display a preference for 'commercially successful' ones.

He also revealed that his favourite band was Band Of Horses, that notorious hit-making machine, while casting aspersions on Katy Perry and Bruno Mars, those tuneless avant garde wonders whose improvised squalls of jazz-noise are unlikely ever to trouble the charts, thank God.

So at least he's consistent.

End Of The World 2

2012-01-10T10:45:00.000-08:00

Is there any point in worrying about the end of the world? I mean, last year (I seem to remember) began with omens of doom - birds falling out of the sky - and it's not like anything happened. Apart, anyway, from tsunamis, earthquakes, nuclear meltdowns, revolutions and riots. This year I heard something about scientists discovering 'a fish with no face and no brain'. Is a guest spot on TOWIE out of the question?

Gemma from TOWIE was on the show they are pleased to call That Sunday Night Show, surrounded by her hair, a massive construction that made her face look it belonged on a totem pole. Only when she spoke did you realise that she was human - all too human. Indeed, there was very little to distinguish her from a member of the public - a total non-professional who had somehow contrived to interpose herself between Ross Noble and Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens. Dan looked as horrified as if the kitchen maid had laid herself a place at Lord Grantham's table.

So maybe the world is going to end after all. Didn't it say in the Bible that the end of the world would 'come from the East'? Essex is in the East. Maybe TOWIE winning a BAFTA was another sign of the upcoming Apocalypse.

Watch this space.

Southend And The Banana Of Doom

2012-01-03T12:00:00.000-08:00

You can tell it's Christmas, even at work. No Jeremy Vine. Thus we are given the pleasing illusion that the world has stopped turning. Clearly things are continuing to happen, but the fact that nobody has to ring in and give us their wrong-headed opinions about them obviously means that they are of no importance.

People's opinions always seem to be skewed, either by their total ignorance of a subject, or by their inadequate knowledge of it. All they are good for, finally, is the odd choice phrase. A woman talking about a toddler who had attacked another toddler at a playgroup a few weeks ago actually felt it necessary to point out that someone could have lost an eye, but went on to suggest that there was no point in involving the police because 'it won't bring the eyeball back.' The eyeball nobody had even lost in the first place! Nice slogan though, for something.

The other reason we know it's Christmas at work is all the Christmas dinners. We had two in the Centre. First there was the centre buffet, largely an array of brown things, where one member of staff, discussing the spread, nearly caused a major incident by innocently referring to 'those little tarts' just as a couple of women from another department walked in. The fall-out from this is still reverberating through the building.

This was followed by the 'SitDownLunch', as the posters had it, making it all sound rather brutal. Which it was, in a way, but then what do you expect for a fiver? - a phrase used so often in regard to this meal that it ought to have added to the poster as a tagline.

My dinner on Christmas Day was a traditional Danish buffet at my sister-in-law's Danish ex-partner's pub. People just nodded politely when I tried to explain this, as if I was being deliberately perverse. When I think about it, it does seem to tie in suspiciously well with the obscurity of my taste in films, once commemorated on Facebook as 'anything that's four hours long, black and white, and featuring a dead whale'. Although it was in colour, this meal probably was about four hours long, and even if there was no dead whale on offer, there was plenty of pickled herring and smoked eel. Danish kept breaking out around me and I kept looking, in vain, for subtitles.

On New Year's Eve I unexpectedly found myself in Southend, with Dave, and Claire, and Helen. Helen is Dave's old friend and Claire is his new one - and more than just a friend, is what I'm hearing. She doesn't have a TV, but seems to get by. It was not until she came to Brentwood for the first time on Friday that she first became acquainted with the concept of 'vajazzling'. So this has been a baptism of fire.

And Southend-on-Sea too! The home of disappointment, as it doesn't say on the signs - for a start, it isn't even on the sea, it's on a muddy estuary. It does have the world's longest pier though. We found ourselves on it. You can 'adopt a plank' if that takes your fancy. There was a board or boards commemorating these transactions with brief messages such as: 'Grandpa, caring, generous, fun-loving (2 planks)'. Another plank had been assigned to 'the Westcliff Rainbow Unit'. What do they do?, I wonder. Is it like The Sweeney? The phone rings: 'There's been a rainbow!' And off they go, tyres screeching, to hunt it down.

We travelled to the end of the pier on the train. It was slow, grim and unrelenting, with grey clouds lowering on either side - like being in a film by Bela Tarr*. On getting there, however, we were greeted by three seals - well not actually greeted, Southend's tourist industry isn't that sophisticated yet - but there they were, in the water, splashing about. There were also lots of funny little birds apparently called 'ternstones' (or so an old man told Dave). A 'cultural centre' is being built on the pier at some point, but the RSPB have insisted that they build it quietly, so as not to disturb these birds. Maybe they'll have to glue it together.

New Year's Eve I was round Justin and Bobs', with Nicky. It was basically just Allan Carr and a cheeseboard. And wine, obviously. On the aforementioned light entertainer's show, we got to see 'Mary the Mystic Monkey' unhesitatingly select the banana that said that the world would end as promised on 21st December 2012, the day after my birthday. So at least this will be one year when my birthday won't be overshadowed by Christmas.

*Tarr directed Werckmeister Harmonies, the original dead whale epic.

Topical

2011-12-19T11:51:00.000-08:00

Amy Childs went to Dubai and learned how to make scrambled egg. It transpires that Dubai, unlike LA, is 'not like Essex'. It is useful to have this kind of certainty in a fast-changing world. The other day I woke up to the news that I no longer live in Europe. Apparently David Cameron had split up with it, on our behalf, because he needed to go to the toilet.

I'm not kidding. He was using the 'full bladder technique' of decision-making, wherein you put off having a piss in order to keep yourself focussed. I don't think I would make very good decisions under those circumstances. I think I would just make the decision that got me to the nearest toilet in the fastest time. Perhaps that's what he did.

Anyway we needn't worry, because he was right. According to the Mail On Sunday, anyway, whose headline blared: 'YES, CAMERON GOT IT RIGHT.' This was the actual banner headline, not an editorial, and it referred to the result of an opinion poll. But what a relief! Now we don't have to wait and see how it actually turns out. Above this was the story of a Tory MP who had gone on a stag weekend in France at which someone was dressed as an SS officer, and they all toasted the Third Reich. Does that make him a Eurosceptic or a Europhile, I wonder?

I love the way the Mail brands people like Kenneth Clark 'Europhiles', as if they've identified a sickening new sexual perversion.

Within the paper, Peter Hichens was unconvinced by Cameron's stand, which would not, he feared, avail against 'Angela Merkel's giant vampire squid'. By which I think he meant the EU. Although politics would be a whole lot more exciting if Angela Merkel really did have a giant vampire squid.

No doubt all this stuff was covered on Friday's Have I Got News For You anyway - I didn't see it because I was enjoying a Christmas meal at the golf club. Well, maybe not the golf club, but a golf club. And it was good. I had a green plastic frog in my cracker, and - a nice touch this - the joke was about frogs also. It maintained that frogs use 'Morse toad' to communicate. Of course this is nonsense, as toads are a completely different species. You might as well say that they use Morse hedgehog. But it's the thought that counts.

Men, Sex, Blood

2011-12-13T11:12:00.000-08:00

Approaching work the other day, Sufjan Stevens was arriving at a crescendo in my ears with a long track called Djohariah, and suddenly three binmen appeared, pushing bright yellow wheelie-bins in formation and it was just, you know, an amazing moment? Though the binmen must have wondered why I was staring at them like that. (And applauding.)

The Christmas decorations have now gone up in the office. Carol was looking for suggestions for what to do with a bit of tinsel. 'Around the clock! Around the clock!', we chorused like children. The word 'clock' was misheard in the next office, to general hilarity. Tinsel also decorated Lorraine's rubber duck (a sample from a supplier), which then was referred to as her 'Christmas duck'. 'I hope that doesn't get misheard!', I commented and further hysteria ensued. It was like an episode of the Two Ronnies or something.

The duck had been perched on the partition between Lorraine's desk and mine, but facing her, so that I was presented with a tinsel-wrapped duck's arse. It has now been moved - amazing what a quick e-mail to HR will do.

The most exciting thing to happen at work recently - apart from the ongoing debate about whether to increase the monthly tea fund by 50p - has been the fun generated by changes in the law regarding 'practicing' gay men being able to give blood, which they can now do providing the old chap has been off active service for a year. This has meant a rapid reprint of a leaflet now called Men Who Have Sex With Men And Blood Donation, which has a new red cover, intensifying the fantastically lurid air of the whole thing - the words 'sex' and 'blood' leaping out at you as from a poster for an erotic horror film. I knew I was in this job for a reason.

To Live And Die In Brentwood

2011-12-05T10:35:00.000-08:00

I wonder if it's time for me to relaunch this blog as an offshoot of TOWIE. I do live in Brentwood after all. 'Essex is like LA', says Amy Childs in her new programme It's All About Amy. Shots of Nando's in Brentwood High Street don't quite bear this out, but the trick - and it is surely one that Amy is mastering - is not to have any real idea where you are at all.

'I'm the most normalest person probably ever', Amy declares. If this is true - and 'celebrity' is indeed fast becoming the norm - it makes me wonder who wants to watch a series of hour-long programmes about a normal person not even bothering to pretend to be anything else. Perhaps this explains why the series is already showing signs of shifting its focus onto the incontinence problems of Amy's pet pug, 'Prince Childs'.

But the main thing is that you get to see quite a bit of Brentwood, where Amy has just opened a salon. Because it just isn't enough for me to see it in real life every day, I have to see it on TV as well. Although at one point a shop that is clearly in Crown Street is described as being in the High Street, which has me sputtering in rage. TV shows should be followed by errata, I think, like books used to be. Amy should be made to read out the mistakes after every episode - which could conceivably take longer than the programme itself.

People might wonder whether I watch programmes like TOWIE 'ironically'. I tried for a while, but it's impossible. TOWIE exists in a place that is beyond irony. And that place is Brentwood, where boutiques are springing up as fast as you can paint a wall pink and hang up a chandelier, and tourists from all over the UK pack the Premier Inn, each of them no doubt hoping that one day they too can become 'the most normalest person probably ever'.

However I do fear that Amy's new programme is doomed, simply because, unlike TOWIE, it doesn't have a user-friendly acronym. Ask someone if they have seen IAAA and they'll think you're having a stroke.

No More Film Reviews. After This.

2011-11-28T11:11:00.000-08:00

Japanese hand-held horror flick Shirome is being touted as Blair Witch meets The X-Factor, and that's something we've all been waiting for - well I know I have. The director previously made Grotesque, which has the distinction of being banned by the BBFC. Human Centipede 2 wriggled out of this, but it's a simple enough thing to remove one barbed-wire-wrapped penis. Grotesque presumably had a whole banquet of barbed-wire-wrapped penises, like macabre pigs-in-blankets, and more besides. At any rate, it was pronounced inoperable.

Shirome is not likely to go unreleased due to unadulterated gore - the question here is whether it's strong enough to rival Ghost Hunting With The Saturdays. Here's the story behind its making, as related by the man introducing the film at the ICA. Director is asked to work with up-and-coming (now famous) girl band; director protests that they can't act; director is told: don't tell them it's a film.

So the band is told that they are in a Most Haunted type TV show, and have to visit this accursed school. Then the director arranges certain 'unscheduled' mysterious events. A self-described 'relator of ghostly tales' (who comes with his own lectern and sinister theme music) rolls in to give the girls the lowdown on the accursed building. Suddenly he starts vomiting! As though possessed! The girls scream. It doesn't take a lot to make them scream, it transpires. A flickering light. The idea that someone somewhere has died. 'I'll try not to get possessed', one girl promises, bravely, before everyone starts screaming again. They scream so much that they barely need their own fans.

Shirome, who haunts the school, is an entity who grants wishes. If your wish is sincere, it will come true; if, however, there is any 'doubt in your heart', you will be dragged to Hell. The emphasis on sincerity is a nice touch, given the nature of this project. Given, also, the nature of the band, who sing awfully cute songs about their skincare routines, but, when asked if they would sell their souls to the Devil in return for worldly success, respond with an enthusiastic 'yes'.

There are amusing moments here; and there are some eerie moments, but what should be the highpoint of the whole thing - the exploration of the haunted school - is a bit of a damp squib, muddled and confusing. There are strange sounds and some mysterious gloop dripping from the walls. Perhaps, I wondered idly, it was earwax dislodged by the girls' relentless shrieking. Revenge of the Earwax: there have been stranger Japanese hauntings.

There was a party afterwards. We were assured that the 'beatboxing monk' would not start his act until the film had finished. I decided to give this a miss. A beatboxing monk did sound like the kind of thing that's best left to the imagination. And I'd just bought a dictionary. You can't go to a party carrying a dictionary. Even if it's a present for your Mum. Perhaps especially if it's a present for your Mum.

I did fill in the feedback form a Japanese woman gave me. I awarded this film three stars.

Oh. More films. Perhaps this is my life now.

2011-11-21T10:32:00.000-08:00

Human Centipede 2 was available on DVD before it hit London cinemas (or rather, one London cinema). Nevertheless I felt the need to see it on the big screen, and hurried to the Apollo Piccadilly Circus from the Soho Curzon, where I'd just seen The Future. This is a film by Miranda July, which the critic in Time Out said made him want to gouge his own eyes out with a melon baller. He still gave it three stars. I fear for his safety should he ever see Human Centipede 2.

The designated problem with The Future was that it was too 'kooky', but - although I could never bring myself to watch an episode of Ally McBeal - I didn't have that problem here. You don't have to look far beneath the whimsy in Miranda July's work to find real sadness and vulnerability. OK, so it's narrated by a cat. But it's a dead cat.

I probably should have written SPOILER ALERT there.

Human Centipede 2 has a great idea for a sequel: demented fan of the original movie (named Martin) decides to create his own human centipede using staple gun and gaffer tape (and hysterical victims, obviously). If only Jaws 2 had gone down that route. However, whereas the original successfully balances nastiness with campy humour, this goes astray somewhere. After all, there are only so many things you do with a human centipede. You can make it bigger, you can inject it with laxative, and you can have the sole survivor run away naked while giving birth. All these boxes are ticked, in glorious black and white, but the fun has gone out of it somehow. I wish I liked it more, since nobody else does, but sheer perversity just won't stretch that far. And in terms of apocalyptic horror, the new Muller yoghurt ad easily outdoes it. Still, I'll never do the conga again. Not naked, anyway.

BFI LFF Round Up Part Two

2011-11-11T12:18:00.000-08:00

Hors Satan

Difficult to ask for a ticket for this one, because the temptation is to say the first word with a French(ish) pronunciation and the second with an English one, which is awkward. A literal translation ('Outside Satan') doesn't help much. I found myself wishing they'd called it Satan's Whore and left it at that. It might give people the wrong idea, but on the other hand it wouldn't be all that wrong an idea.

Like most films by Bruno Dumont, this largely consists of people wandering the French countryside enigmatically, singly or in pairs. On this occasion, however, Dumont finds the time to include a couple of murders, a possible demonic possession, and (EXTREME SPOILER ALERT) a bona fide resurrection.

I have to say I found it wholly entrancing. Maybe my high point of the festival. Was anyone else convinced? It was hard to tell. There was a Q and A but it was a bit muted, perhaps because Dumont had said in advance that he wouldn't 'explain anything', though he was looking forward to hearing our 'responses' - which made it seem like it was the audience who were being judged rather than the movie. He did reveal that he prefers to work with non-professionals, because they have certain boundaries beyond which they will not go, whereas actors 'will do anything'. (He has obviously seen Human Centipede 2). This is also the philosophy behind The Only Way Is Essex, I believe, but I thought better of bringing that up.

Breathing

In this Austrian offering a young offender gets a job in an undertaker's, and exposure to dead bodies helps him comes to terms with the murder - or manslaughter - that got him banged up in the first place. Contains a very moving sequence of a corpse being washed and dressed. Am I selling it to you? Funny, because I could almost imagine someone other than myself enjoying this one. How can I put it? It's like Harry Potter, but without the magic, but with lots of dead people, who stay dead. And there's a visit to Ikea in it. You'll be anxious to know the release date by now I imagine, but I'm afraid I just can't help you.

The Monk

The only real disappointment of the festival. You would think that a version of one of the most lurid of all the Gothics, starring Vincent Cassell and directed by Dominik (Harry, Here's Here To Help) Moll would be fantastic, wouldn't you? Of course you would.

In fact, it's rather a plodding adaptation, neither hilariously over-the-top nor a genuine full-blooded Gothic. You get the odd spectral nun and a (non-human) centipede amidst the roses, but it all feels a bit half-hearted, and Cassell never really gets a chance to be properly evil. Shame, because I have fond memories of reading the novel at university, and being amused by the depiction of the fallen monk Ambrosio leering at the heroine's resplendent 'Orbs'.

We Need To Talk About Kevin

This was at the festival, but I saw it afterwards in a common cinema with only members of the public in attendance. It goes like this - Tilda Swinton gives birth to an evil child - or has she made him evil with her failure to love him? This is the debate which is meant to 'make us think', I think. But although the film is really effective as a mother's nightmare, it is just a nightmare, and tends to disintegrate in the cold light of reality.

I mean, what is Kevin? Is he a complete psychopath who, from birth, has never felt a genuine emotional attachment to anyone in his life? Surely not, because as everyone knows, complete psychopaths don't (SPOILER ALERT) go on killing sprees in high school - they become the CEO's of major multinational companies.

So is he, then, just a normal boy who has been irreparably traumatised by his mother's failure to bond with him? But Kevin appears to have a perfectly good relationship with his father. I suppose he might be faking it (see above) but if he isn't, shouldn't it ease his Weltschmerz somewhat? Enough, might I suggest, that he wouldn't feel the pressing need to murder all his classmates and the one parent he does get on with, just to spite Mom?

Then again, perhaps there are other possible explanations. Perhaps Kevin is possessed by Satan. Or he's an alien. But the film doesn't really embrace these possibilities. It remains an exquisitely made horror film that doesn't know it's a horror film. It worries that it might be. It wakes up in the night thinking about it. Finally, the horrible moment arrives when it can pretend no longer and then - it gets awarded best film of the festival by the BFI!

Phew! It was all a dream...

Horror fans will have to be content with the inevitable sequels - We Still Need To Talk About Kevin, We Really Really Need To Talk About Kevin, and the straight-to-DVD Let's Stop Talking About Kevin And Just Kill Him (starring Jason Statham).

Interval: Fireworks

2011-11-09T10:24:00.000-08:00

We went to the fireworks in Herongate. They were banging out the Prodigy and people were waving glowing things and it was like walking into a rave. The fireworks themselves were accompanied by murky ambient music, although it could have been Westlife played through a bad sound system, I suppose. Or, to put it another way, a good sound system.

The fireworks fizzed and corkscrewed through the night; they reached up to the sky with wavering ectoplasmic fingers. A tree caught fire - always the sign of a good cutting-edge display. Then suddenly it was all over. People were rushing to the exits - so fast it was like someone had shouted 'Fire!' - leaving the hardcore few to dance naked around the flames.

We went back to Justin and Bobs' for hot dogs. Mat, chewing on one with a thoughtful expression, looked, I thought, like Sherlock Holmes eating his pipe. Later, Christopher went into meltdown over a missing cardboard 'crown' (these had been handed out to kids at the display). It was quite a performance, and we stared as though Larry Olivier had suddenly materialised in front of us to show us his Lear - an absurdist King Lear, whose tawdry crown featured the face of Shane Richie promoting his upcoming appearance in Aladdin. The letters of 'Aladdin' were made up of what I imagine were meant to be fragments of gold, but which looked more like oven chips.

For a moment it did seem that nobody would be allowed to leave until Mat had pontificated over The Case Of The Vanishing Promotional Piece of Tat With A Picture Of Shane Richie On It, all the while sucking reflectively on his hot dog. Then the natural order of things reasserted itself and Christopher was dragged off screaming into the night.

BFI LFF Round Up Part One

2011-11-04T13:58:00.000-07:00

Because I saw so many films the other weekend, mainly at the London Film Festival, people kept asking (or at any rate my Mum did) - 'Why don't you become a film reviewer?'

Well here's why not.

Snowtown

Mum's new boyfriend brings some kind of structure into the life of directionless teenager Jamie in this true crime story from Australia, and he is soon joining his new Dad, name of John Bunting, on happy outings to the other side of the road to deface the house of Mum's previous boyfriend, a paedophile (for this reason, it didn't work out). John doesn't like paedophiles, or drug addicts, or gays and is soon making them disappear, one way or another. One way in particular.

This was quite hard to watch, not so much because of the violence and sexual abuse, but because I was sat at an awkward angle to the screen, so the characters looked too narrow, as in some of the later Tom And Jerries. I had the same trouble with The White Ribbon two years ago, but there I adapted. Here it was a continual distraction, perhaps making me more than usually critical.

And yet I enjoyed the film, which is the kind of thing I like. You know: bleak, ominous and, as the posters say, 'unflinching'.

It's so distracting when films flinch.

The director Justin Kurzel, and Lucas Pittaway who plays Jamie were on hand to answer questions. The director seemed to see killer John Bunting as a sort of community leader gone AWOL. I saw him as demonic throughout, but Australians may have different expectations. He talked about Bunting 'giving the community a voice'. This seems rather a grand term for the discussion groups he presides over, in which he encourages neighbours to say what they would like to do to paedophiles ('Well... first I think I'd skin his penis', muses one woman, as though discussing the preparation of a meal.) Having elicited these juicy fantasies, he then proceeds, more or less, to act upon them. 'It's an Australian tradition', he posits, half-humorously.

The film's main fault is that it puts far too much emphasis on the vulnerability of the teenager who comes to be complicit in Bunting's crimes. He's clearly the audience's way in to this seedy little world - his tears are our catharsis. But he's too busy reacting to do any real acting, and reacting with the horror of an outsider. But if he wasn't really inhabiting that world, you can understand. It's a bleak film. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be a little bleaker.

Last Screening

A movie projectionist lives through the last days of a provincial French cinema that's about to be turned into a supermarket. He is most upset, not only because he likes his job, but because he has a shrine to his Mum in the basement, adorned with the left ears of women he has killed locally.

It may be an unlikely scenario, but an undercurrent of genuine emotion pervades this offering from Lauren Achart. Our projectionist only wants to flesh out an illusion (that the mother he worships loved him) and in many ways he is not so different from your average movie fan. The need to maintain the illusion is paramount. The hero/villain never blinks.

The murders are all the more effective for taking place offscreen, or being shown from a distance; even though the corpses pile up at a rate that makes the absence of police activity seem a little strange. That's because they couldn't afford police on their budget, the director said.

And this is exactly the kind of insight I go to the London Film Festival for.

Sleeping Sickness

This plunges us vividly into the life of an upstanding German doctor in Cameroon, then, 'three years later', drags us out of it to follow another character entirely, who has been sent out to Cameroon to monitor this doctor's sleeping sickness programme - which is fraudulent, for the doctor has been undergoing a moral decline. Or that's one way of looking at it.

This is a sort of postmodern riff on Heart Of Darkness with the darkness replaced by a deceptive twilight. In which, at the end, it is just possible to make out (SPOILER ALERT) that the doctor has been transformed into a hippopotamus. Or that's one way of looking at it.

This is a slyly oblique, curious film, and in its refusal to provide clear answers a lot like Africa itself. I suppose that's the idea anyway. I think it worked. The director, in keeping with his elusive main character, wasn't there.

Take Shelter

They were handing out free umbrellas for this one, and I didn't mind if I did. 'Ladies Umbrella', said the tag on it. I couldn't really see how it catered for the especial needs of ladies, but perhaps I'm missing something.

You get the idea though. Take Shelter. It's about a storm. Not necessarily a real storm. It might be in the head of Michael Shannon (present at the screening) who plays a perfectly ordinary family man afflicted by terrifying dreams about a ferocious tempest, dreams which soon leak into his 'real life'. Is he going mad or - well, yes I think he is going mad, or that does seem fairly likely considering his Mum's a paranoid schizophrenic.

But that doesn't mean that the storm isn't real.

Well-performed and initially scary, this becomes less like a horror film as it goes on. But I didn't mind.

The Troll Hunter

This wasn't at the festival, I saw it at the Prince Charles in between other things. I found myself resisting this because trolls are a bit, well, silly, aren't they? It took a 200 foot one to convince me otherwise.

Tongue in cheek, but the only decent 'found footage' horror film since The Blair Witch Project. If it is a horror film. Which it isn't. It is Norwegian. Is that clear?

So there you are. At least they got shorter as they went along. Maybe Part Two will be an improvement. Don't bet on it though.

Charity Begins Elsewhere

2011-10-25T10:39:00.000-07:00

Children In Need is looming again. I do hate these mainstream charities, they're so obvious. Oh look there's some children! And they're in need! Let's give them all our money, shall we? Surely there should be some imaginative effort involved in giving to charity. We should seek out unpopular causes: Paedophiles In Peril or Adopt A Gypsy.

(You know what people always say to anyone who tries to defend gypsies - 'How would you like it if they came and lived next to you?' Well now's your chance to find out! For only a small fee, Adopt A Gypsy will rehouse a Dale Farm family in your garden! Any takers?)

No. Not even Vanessa Redgrave, who was defending the Dale Farm 'travellers' on Jeremy Vine, only for practically every caller to ask her that question. The problem is, it's a rhetorical question, because even if you said you'd be perfectly happy for a fleet load of caravans to descend upon you, no-one would believe you anyway. Vanessa merely mumbled that it wouldn't be practical, she had a small garden, instead of, as she should have done, declaring: 'What would I do if they lived next to me? I'd shoot them, Jeremy! Shoot them, and their babies too. Hypocritical? Yes, but what you fail to understand, Jeremy, is that I AM VANESSA REDGRAVE.'

I really don't know what to think about the Dale Farm Massacre, as it will no doubt be known to future generations, but I wasn't reassured by the police spokesman on Jeremy Vine, who said that taser-happy police were only 'reacting to prior intelligence' - as opposed to what was in front of them, I suppose - 'intelligence' which stated that 'missiles' were to be found on the site. Hang on, weren't we in Basildon a moment ago? Now we seem to be in Iraq. But the police spokesman goes on to explain that he isn't talking about Exocet missiles; no, a missile in his terms 'could be anything'. Right, so the police were reacting to 'intelligence' which stated that there 'could be anything' on the site. It's good to know we're in safe hands.

My own favoured charity is, of course: Stop The Pigeon.

Hard Labour

2011-10-18T11:23:00.000-07:00

In London an Oriental man suddenly stepped out in front of me in Berwick Street and demanded to know where Chinatown was. Is it terribly racist of me to have felt like saying 'You should know'? I was on my way to the London Film Festival. Once more I got to tread the red carpet that was there for something I wasn't seeing. None of the assembled photographers acknowledged me. Shallow bastards.

'Are there going to be any famous people here?', asked a naive woman in Vue Screen 6. Not unless they don't want to be seen, I thought to myself. The film was Hard Labour, a Brazilian drama in which a woman's attempt to run a grocery store is undermined not only by the economic situation (her husband has just been made redundant) but by - SPOILER ALERT - the corpse of a werewolf that's walled up on the premises. Most critics felt that the horror elements did not mix well with the rest of it, and I could indeed see why a dead werewolf might be considered an irrelevance in a social drama; but it worked for me. It was interesting to see the way the couple reacted to the beastly corpse. Not like people in a horror film, running around screaming, but quietly disposing of the body as if it represented their secret shame.

Which it does: it's as though the husband's feeling of redundancy has been made manifest in these grotesque, absurd remains, which are helping to poison the wife's business venture (because traditional masculinity dictates that if she succeeds, then he is doubly shamed). A dead werewolf also functions perfectly well as a symbol for dehumanisation, emasculation, something rotten in the heart of the system, and - well, you name it, a dead werewolf symbolises it as far as this viewer is concerned.

I am painfully aware that not everyone else thinks like me. The film even taps into the 'shame' of watching a B-horror movie instead of a respectable social drama, which is one reason why I fear people won't get it. By the end, I was starting to convince myself that I was the only person in the room who really understood it, and that included the writer-director (one of the writer-directors, at any rate). I mean, he did seem awfully young. No doubt I am wrong - someone selected it for this festival, didn't they? - but it didn't help that the last audience comment in the Q&A (which I was far too timid to join in) came from a woman who praised the film highly - but mainly, it seemed, because it had been shot in and around where she used to live, and her old teacher was in it. She even asked the director to 'say hello from me!' when he went back to Brazil.

So anyway, I'm taking to the internet to say it: Hard Labour - great film. But you probably won't like it.

Not For Turning

2011-10-11T10:50:00.000-07:00

In a moment of desperation Dave and I found ourselves watching the Conservative Party Conference. The Minister for Science and Universities was hailing 'the broccoli of the future'. Was this a metaphor? For young people? Perhaps not, because he went on to say it was available in Marks and Spencers.

Considering that they were preaching to the converted, the various ministers seemed rather unconvinced themselves. The exception was Michael Gove (a veteran of The Late Review or whatever the hell it's called now) who said that he 'would not rest' until all schools in the UK were 'as good as the best', and said it in a voice so authoritative (and so strangely similiar to that of Victoria Coren) that you could almost believe that he really believed what he was saying, even though such a situation, were it ever to come about, would only result in remarkably well-informed rioters.

Where are we to turn as the economic system collapses? Jeremy Vine didn't have any answers, and soon turned from the topic to the human interest story of an elderly woman from Romford who was arrested for dangerous driving. Apparently she went round a roundabout the wrong way, wandered from one lane to another, and drove really slowly on a motorway. So slowly that the resulting 'police chase' consisted of a policeman running alongside the car and tapping on the window.

JV interviewed her, and she turned out to be very posh and also very furious - all the time, by the sound of it. She was particularly outraged that she had been put in a police cell 'against my will' - as though people would normally be consulted about this. Adamant that she had done nothing wrong, she seemed to embody the spirit of the British Empire in her remarkable attempt to 'colonise' the motorway. They should make her Prime Minister. She's bound to know just what to do about the economy. And she can probably fuck it up a whole lot quicker than this lot will.

SNODS, CLODS and severed heads

2011-10-03T10:29:00.000-07:00

We used to deal with DTC's (Donor Transplant Co-Ordinators) but now we deal with Senior Nurses in Organ Donation and Clinical Leads in Organ Donation, or SNODs and CLODS in other words. Not sure if they were consulted about the name change - I suspect not. One CLOD was having trouble erecting a banner stand, so I asked her to send it over to see if I could get it up in our office. I not only got it up, it stayed up all night. I told the CLOD and she said she'd talk to one of her SNODs about it. I think she was impressed. And this is my working life, difficult as it is to believe.

While the banner stand was upright, it radiated a powerful message about organ donation into the surrounding area. Ben the temp did a double take when he encountered it on leaving - almost, he was moved to hand one of his kidneys to a colleague right there and then. I explained that this was a new marketing strategy. Instead of targeting the widest possible number of people, the new focus, 'going forward', would be on much smaller audiences: for example, him. 'If any street theatre breaks out in your vicinity, you'll know what it's about.'

All this exposure to the message has had its effect on me too. I have been conducting my own research into organ donation in the way I know best - by exposing myself to films on the subject. It may be that The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant starring Bruce Dern is not the most scientifically-credible guide to the field (half-close your eyes, and you're watching a Will Ferrell comedy) but we learn some valuable things. Don't sew a violent madman's head onto the body of an educationally-challenged hulk, for example.

Which brings me to The Man With The Severed Head, just out on DVD from Arrowdrome. Whoever they are. When I bought this in HMV the man said, as they are forced to do, 'Have you found everything you're looking for?' No, as it turned out.

I suspect that this isn't the best introduction to Paul Naschy, Europe's greatest horror icon (if you forget that England is in Europe). However, it must serve as mine. Naschy plays a thief who gets a bullet in the brain. Luckily he knows a doctor who knows a doctor who is an expert in 'the field of brain transplants', this being apparently the only cure for his affliction, though the doctor, through the terrible dubbing, does warn that there might be 'personality problems'. What, a brain transplant causing a personality change? I've learned something already.

But first an unwilling donor must be found. Exercising rigorous quality control, Naschy's cohorts immediately settle upon Naschy's arch-enemy, a man known only as 'the Sadist' - hmm, nope, can't see a problem here. As it turns out, this is 'only' a partial brain transplant, and therefore wrapped up in minutes by the doctor's wife (because the doctor's hands don't work for some reason I failed to grasp). It is an operation whose finer points are clearly hard to take in, since they have eluded even the author of the blurb on the back of the DVD, which claims that Naschy's brain is transplanted into the Sadist's body. This makes much more sense, but it isn't what happens in the film. Just as well, I suppose, since as a vehicle for Naschy the film would have been a bit of a damp squib if, having spent the first half of it in a state of unconsciousness, his character was, on awakening, played by somebody else.

As it is, we get a decent helping of Naschy running amok with a bandage round his head, glowering balefully. It seems that having part of a sadistic criminal's brain inserted into yours can transform you, through some kind of weird supernatural process, into a sadistic criminal. Although, since we saw very little of Naschy before the bullet hit him, we have to take it as read that he wasn't like this anyway.

Also present on the DVD are 'additional erotic scenes'. These are much more fun, I find, if you think of them, not as deleted scenes, but as behind-the-scenes footage - as if the whole film was just an excuse for everyone to get together and have sex. Which, as I understand it, is indeed the reason most films get made.

Curiously, one of these 'erotic scenes' merely shows a nude female corpse toppling out of a wardrobe. One for specialised tastes, I suppose.

As for the film's effectiveness as a marketing tool for organ donation, I am going to have to rate this one: low. Next week: Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed.

Upset the Rhythm

2011-09-30T15:39:00.000-07:00

Previously on this blog, regular readers might have spotted an entry in which I lamented the fact that the band Ut have never reformed; in fact, I may have claimed that Ut and Abba are the only two bands left who haven't reformed. That was a lie, and all the more so because Ut are now touring again, and I know this because, reader, I saw them. At the Lexington, in London.

Before them was a duo called Peepholes. A woman who looked a bit like Dave Grohl drummed and 'sang' through a mike so echo-laden that anything she said outside of the performance was entirely incomprehensible (as was, naturally, everything within the performance). Meanwhile, a tall skinny guy layered big slabs of synth over the top. The echo made it all sound as though it was coming from a long way off - about 1980, I'd say.

Trash Kit were a more engaging prospect. They have met both Pedro Almodovar and John Waters, the lead singer announced excitedly. That was almost enough to win me over in itself (she even looked a bit like Almodovar) but I also liked the wonky guitar playing underpinning the short, scrappy, upbeat songs. One was about going to the hairdresser's and they try and straighten your hair - oh yeah tell me about it sister - but the song was basically just: 'No, stop it, aaaaagh!' Which anyone can identify with.

Not a patch on Ut though. Ut really do come from the past, they aren't pretending. Originally they were part of the New York's 'No Wave' scene, which was a bit like the New Wave, but more, er, negative. In fact, its general disinterest in things like 'songs' and 'melody' made tonight's many 'tuning problems' onstage seem a bit ironic. Not that I cared. I mean, here they were: Nina (the nervy one), Jacqui (the sceptical one) and Sally (the customer-facing one). Nina and Sally wore garishly-patterned and quite possibly wipe-clean clothing, which was either an ironic post-feminist statement or the height of fashion. Or both. As previously mentioned, there were many pauses between songs, but it was worth the wait. One of the best things about Ut is that they have three distinct and striking voices - Nina's howl of despair, Jacqui's angst-ridden yelp, and Sally's mellow-but-tough transcendent croon. Mirroring, I like to think, the three stages of catharsis, even though 'the three stages of catharsis' are something I just invented. I expect.

Three women with great voices, then - they'd go down a storm on X-Factor, and they even have the song for it:

'Going down down to the marketplace,
Gonna learn to lie like an evangelist.'

The campaign for Christmas number one starts - and ends - here.

MORE WORK

2011-09-18T13:27:00.000-07:00

We had a meeting up in London - it makes a change. We were told that NHS Blood and Transplant are going to be 'managing fridges' in hospitals. I might apply - my managerial skills aren't up to much, but surely even I could manage a fridge. They tend to just get on with things anyway, don't they?

No meeting would be complete without an innuendo nobody else notices, so when a colleague said (of some report or other) that he had 'pulled it off after last Thursday's meeting' I was satisfied, except to note that it would have been even more effective if he had said 'I pulled one off after last Thursday's meeting.' As he could so easily have done.

It has been noted, in fact, that my 'notes' at these meetings tend to consist entirely of doodles, mainly of faces, fanged and slavering. At this meeting, it was even suggested that I was drawing my assembled colleagues, though nothing could have been further from my mind. I'm not that engaged with my immediate surroundings.

Although at least I am physically present. We keep having to field calls for a guy whose PA works in our office, but who is on holiday at the moment. We have absolutely no idea where this man is at any particular time, and it is a little embarrassing to have to keep telling people this. We are getting to the point of just making things up out of sheer frustration - 'Oh, he's auditioning for X-Factor.' 'Oh, he's in the fridge right now.' 'Oh, he's juggling turnips.' My Customer Service assessor would not approve.

Talking of customer service, I got a haircut. They are almost ridiculously obliging at my barber's. They usually offer me a tea or coffee (I always decline) but on this occasion one of them was going to Marks and Spencers and asked if anyone wanted anything. It took me a while to realise that this was not just aimed at his colleagues, but included me as well. It was as though I might have produced a shopping list - 'Oh, and two dozen eggs, six parsnips, and one of those Dine In For £10 offers - you choose.' This is what my Customer Service workbook calls 'extending the service offer.'

WORK

2011-09-12T11:15:00.000-07:00

My Customer Service course has been bamboozling me with such questions as: 'Describe the organisation's guidelines for recognising customer expectations.' I seem to have answered that question without ever working out what it means. And yet other questions, on the very same page, are insultingly obvious: we are asked how to recognise if a customer is 'angry or confused.' Hmm, well, let me think... Anger, isn't that the one where they ask to 'speak to someone who knows what they are doing', and use such words as 'dickhead'? Confusion, is that the one where they go: 'Durrrrrr...' and drool spills out of their vacantly gaping mouth onto the floor?

We are also asked to describe how we have dealt with 'difficult customers'. At Waterstone's this would be a cinch - I could say: 'I went out the back', or: 'I pretended to be unable to speak English'. In this job there haven't really been any. I am going to have to send out some e-mails just to wind people up, and thus gather some 'evidence'.

I am also asked to confirm that my work station is tidy, a tricky question for me, because - conventionally speaking - it isn't. So I am forced to explain that my approach to work is in fact analagous to an ongoing process of tidying - ergo, what may appear 'mess' to some people is in fact merely work to be done. Were my work station ever perfectly tidy, I would no longer be able to grasp the concept of work at all. I know what my assessor will say to this: 'That's not what's written on my answer sheet.' Of course it isn't, that's because it's a blazingly original thought!

FrightFest, and after

2011-09-05T11:42:00.000-07:00

Judging by the queue for the cubicles in the men's toilets, FrightFest is secretly a convention for shy bladders. After all, I am also afflicted by this syndrome, which makes it hard to piss in the urinals with people spurting away on either side of you. But the warm feeling of being surrounded by fellow sufferers - or my impatience with the queue - was enough to unfreeze my loins, and soon I was happily pissing everywhere I could.

But that's by the by. For the first time I did not go alone to FrightFest, I went with Dave. No, not that Dave - and not that one either - the other one. This Dave attracts trouble. After the first film a young guy came up to ponce a fag off him. He obliged, but then this guy wouldn't leave us alone, and followed us up the road, talking constantly. Among other things, he said (a.) that the Prince Charles cinema shows new films cheaper than other cinemas after they've been out a couple of weeks, which I knew - and (b.) that his uncle lives on the Caledonian Road, which I didn't. He eventually left us alone, but not until we had both shaken his hand. No wonder they say smoking's bad for you.

Rabies (Israelis lose their tempers) was followed by The Glass Man (Andy Nyman shoots a traffic warden - in a scenario conjured by Jason from Footballer's Wives!), and these were both excellent in their different ways, though I wasn't quite so sure about Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil. Here our eponymous heroes are innocent hillbillies mistaken for psychopathic inbreds by excitable college students who have seen too many horror films, and who set about impaling themselves on tree branches and throwing themselves into wood chippers in their inept attempts to deal with the perceived situation. Amusing, yes, but too slight to detract from 'Dale''s disturbing resemblance to a bearded Heather-from-Eastenders...

I returned on Sunday despite the absence of trains, due to 'essential engineering works' - thank God they weren't frivolous engineering works, that would have been really annoying. On the bus back from Newbury Park - I was on the top deck - I heard a voice from downstairs shouting: 'Anyone getting off at Brentwood?' Thinking that this was the driver, I nearly responded. Luckily I didn't, because it was only a drunken man - another Dave, in fact, as became apparent when he sat next to the girl who was sitting behind me, an acquaintance of his. I learned quite a bit about them on this journey. He had been 'getting right on it' apparently, and was looking forward to 'getting right on it' again in the near future. Both of them were thirty, but she was going out with - gasp! - a 45-year old. 'Is he a typical 45-year old?', asked the Dave. No, he wasn't, she insisted: 'He's Italian'. As so few 45-year olds, notoriously, are.

Meanwhile, I was wondering if I was 'a typical 45-year old' - or, indeed, if I was even 45. It's hard to keep track, these days.

When I got in it was just in time to see Primal, on Film4. This is just the kind of film that you could end up seeing at FrightFest, if you aren't careful. In this Australian shocker, a picturesque group of young things travel to the outback in order to, would you believe, look at some aboriginal paintings. Before long, a couple of them have 'gone primal', which means their teeth fall out and they grow new ones. Sharp ones. And they run about like people pretending to be animals, roaring, and tearing people's throats out. Pretty much what you'd expect, in fact.

As is the film. Although I'll admit that I wasn't expecting the heroine to get raped by a giant leech. If that's what it was. Throughout the film, much has been made of the heroine's reluctance to use the c-word. At the end, having despatched a former friend 'gone primal' with a rock dropped onto her head she finally lets loose with the word: 'Cunt!' It's the last line of the film. This, then, was her character arc. She has learned to unselfconsciously use the word 'cunt'. Well, I guess we've all learned something. If you are looking for a cultural wasteland, go to Australia.

the passable man

2011-09-01T13:37:00.000-07:00

1.

So it was my brother's stag do. I was best man. This was not a position I was really comfortable with. I would never normally aspire to the heights of 'best'. 'Quite good', maybe. 'Passable', sure.

Almost, I would prefer to be the worst man, and perhaps I was. When Justin said he didn't want any fuss made - no strippers or silly costumes or anything like that, just a quiet night out - I actually listened. When what I should have done, as best man, is agree with him - then, on the night, force him into a mankini and have everyone beat him with rubber hoses.

I did have one 'brilliant' idea, which was that everyone should wear eye patches, which Justin does all the time, one of his eyes having been paralysed after a motor cycle accident. This struck me as admirably fair, appropriately jolly, and visually pleasing to onlookers. However, Justin felt that it would make him uncomfortable - and I suppose it's true that were he - say - a hunchback, and everyone turned up with a cushion stuffed under their shirt backs, that might come across as offensive, not to mention sinister.

That one idea completely exhausted my imagination, so on the day itself I was shocked to realise that I had nothing arranged. No outfits, no planned humiliations. In a sudden panic, I took with me a blow-up doll which had represented Justin, in his absence, on the hen night. Perhaps I would not have bothered had not the doll (with no modification other than an eye patch) so closely resembled him.

So doll in bag I went to the Green Man and we sat outside in spite of the unsettled weather, eight or ten of us, drinking. I had made no plans about getting to Brentwood, three miles away. I had imagined that we might walk through Thorndon Park - I had visions of making a ritual sacrifice to the Great Stag Lord, as dictated by family tradition. The Great Stag Lord would then summon a fleet of helicopters in gratitude.

We got cabs. In O'Neill's Phil got me to go to the bar to order a round of the 'Bramley's apple' shots he had seen advertised on a board there. When I got there, it turned out that he had been misreading the dessert menu. So we nearly had ten blokes downing ten bowlfuls of apple crumble and custard in one. Which really would have been messy.

By this stage the inevitable parrot had emerged, along with the pirate costume. It was so obvious that I hadn't thought of it, but luckily Alex had. So Justin was decorated with inflatable parrot and hat, plus a wig that carried more of a suggestion of Whoopi Goldberg than Johnny Depp, or so I thought. And there he sat, as the alcohol really started to kick in, looking like a waxwork on the verge of melting.

But he did not melt: he went to The Swan along with the rest of us. There, by a happy coincidence, his 'teenage fanclub' awaited. Or so they were once known - a group of girls who he used to encounter, over and over, during nights out in Brentwood. They are no longer teenagers of course. But the blow-up doll was at last inflated, and tossed over to them, and in all their excitement they ripped its arm off, possibly with their teeth. The necessary sacrifice had been made.

A curry followed. Alex was sick on the way to the curry house, and he was sick on his return home later, but while in the curry house he cunningly managed to reverse this process, even to the extent of acting as a receptacle (albeit an unknowing receptacle) for other people's unwanted chillies. The word 'hero' is often misused, but here it does seem apt.

2.

In the speech I would describe the stag do as 'a riot'. Then I would go on to say: 'And if anyone wants to buy a plasma TV, see me afterwards.' This was a joke referencing some riots of the time, which many readers will no doubt remember. I myself remember watching it on TV, mainly a burning furniture store which News 24 chose to focus on as iconic. Not that there were many rioters around, or people of any kind. Even firemen seemed to be keeping well out of it. A (false) rumour came through that Primark in Romford had been targeted. 'Tens of pounds will be lost!', I wailed. I was becoming hysterical.

Even more alarming to me was the consequent appearance of armies of people in the streets, wielding brooms - 'Oh my God, it's the Big Society!', I screamed from my hiding-place behind the sofa. It was almost as though those riots were the 'culture change' deemed necessary for Cameron's brave new world to be ushered in. Not that I'm a conspiracy theorist but - hmmmm... Lorraine, on the other hand, thought that the police started the riots so as to demonstrate that they should not be subject to government cutbacks. This seems equally plausible. I wish these conspiracy theories were not incompatible so that I could believe them both. As it is, I shall have to believe them on alternate weeks.

On the radio, Jeremy Vine was busy fielding calls from people wishing to bring back National Service. One female caller suggested that the rioters should be 'systematically sprayed with dog poo'. I liked her use of the word 'systematically', and wondered if she had a system in mind.

3.

And so to the wedding. This took place in Brighton, in the week after Gay Pride. Brighton, then, wasn't especially gay - shame had set in. Ross hypothesised an event called 'Gay Prude', involving lots of repressed gay men and women in drab and securely-buttoned clothing. Who nevertheless feel a need to parade.

He then went on to suggest that Aswad's Don't Turn Around is about golden showers, and that the chorus goes: 'Don't turn around/It's only warm water.'

I don't think I should listen to him. He seems untrustworthy.

I was down there from Monday. On Tuesday I was wandering through a museum exhibit of idols, masks and totems from various cultures. One was intended to embody a spirit that would help with the smooth running of 'the ceremony of the yams'; I wished that I had a spirit whose aid I could call on for the best man speech. Perhaps I accidentally invoked an evil spirit, because although the speech went fine, my Mum fell over in Brighton town centre and had to attend the ceremony in a wheelchair provided by the Holiday Inn. At least we got to see 'the real Brighton', in A&E, where a man in one of the cubicles was steadfastly refusing to get on a trolley, so that a nurse walked in and accused him of 'not using the cubicle effectively'. That was telling him.

The wedding ceremony was effective - light-hearted, with a reading of a poem about old people having sex. The ceremony of the yams also passed off without a hitch.

Then the speeches.

People had been full of sound advice about this. 'Whatever you do', they said. 'don't fuck it up. That would be a disaster.' In my anxiousness to shrug off all my responsibilities, I had recruited three other people to help deliver the best man speech, and ended up writing four speeches instead of just the one. Dave Sullivan and Kevin then threw my speeches away and did their own, which only added to my anxiety, given Dave's notorious fondness for four-letter words and Kevin's penchant for ranting about women, or 'whores' as he calls them. In fact, Dave's swear count only came to two shits, a prick and a plonker, and in any case he more than redeemed himself by putting it all in rhyme.

(Some maintain that 'plonker' is not a swear word, but I would suggest that it may be one when used to refer to an actual penis, in this particular instance my brother's. However, the sting is surely removed when, as here, it is rhymed with 'Tonka'. And it is also fair to say that Dave's 'prick' was not a real one, but a splinter.)

Kevin also acquitted himself well, steering clear of my proscribed topics (paedophilia, rape, and genital mutilation), as did Phil (obligingly reading what I had written for him), and then I stood up and said: 'That's all we've got time for.'

Joke.

Afterwards, my part of the speech was mainly remembered for one particular joke, which I didn't think would go down as well as it did. I had talked about my qualms about joining, via Justin, such a big and complicated family as the Backhouses, and then I said: 'But I'm sure Bobs felt the same when I first showed her my extensive collection of mummified badgers.'

I had thought this rather obscure, but no, it seemed to be the jest of the season. There may well be people at that wedding whose only knowledge of me will rest upon that association with 'mummified badgers'. Just as well I didn't put 'child pornography' after all.

When all the tension was over, there was one delightful sunny day, before it was time to return. We sat by the beach, next to a plate of spare wedding cake sweltering under clingfilm. Children threw stones into the sea, as though in a futile attempt to destroy it.

On the very last night I sat in a curry house opposite Christopher, three and a half, who talked about his recent experience of doing a poo. So young, and already a perfect mastery of curry house etiquette!

frogs

2011-08-02T12:50:00.000-07:00

The film about goats was Le Quattro Volte by the way. If anyone's interested.

Back to work. As I walked there a young woman was walking ahead of me, and a cat appeared in front of her, facing us. She immediately turned to look at me, as if to check that no-one was there to see what she was about to do to it. Eat it, maybe?

I looked away.

At work, Lorraine had an e-mail accusing her of having a 'weak' password. It sounded like a bit of an insult to me - then again, her password was 'flower'. They've been very hot on 'information governance' recently at work, so we amused ourselves by imagining the inadequate password setting off a siren at head office, and Nazi stormtroopers bursting in to tie Lorraine to her swivel chair and drag her off: 'Your password is veak! YOU are veak!'

Meanwhile, we plough through the Customer Service qualification, learning our special Customer Service phrases, phrases like 'We're very busy', 'Not in my remit', and - an Americanism, but one I'm still fond of - 'Get bent!' 'Not in my remit' can be shortened for convenience to 'remit', which explains why a group of NHS employees heard from a distance can on occasion be mistaken for a pondful of frogs.

Goats - Cute, Yet Satanic!

2011-07-26T12:37:00.000-07:00

I had some time off. Time to see a film about goats. Time to buy toothpaste, and a pie. Time to walk the length of Bethnal Green Road in search of a shop that sold 'vintage and collectible paperbacks'. Or it did, a few months ago. Now, curiously, it contained no books. It was never exactly cluttered, even with the books, so it was now very hard to see what it was selling. Although you could have a cup of coffee while you searched for it.

In this it was strangely at odds with the rest of Bethnal Green Road, which was tumbling over itself trying to sell you things. News And Booze, a shop said, telling it like it was; and there was a stall offering 'cooked bones'. Mmm, cooked bones! I expected to see big shaven-headed hardmen walking along, gnawing them.

I saw Jo Brand grimacing in front of the ticket counter at the BFI, clearly thinking twice about something - going to see a film about goats, maybe.

I also saw the film Win Win, which was not about goats. It was very likeable, but it made much of a faulty boiler at the start, with a character played by Jeffrey Tambor fretting over whether it would 'blow'. Now as everyone knows, if you introduce a faulty boiler at the beginning of a film, you need to have it explode at some point. Either that, or it needs to be repaired in a heartwarming montage sequence set to some mellow alt. country tune - I'm sure there is one about boilers. However in this case the boiler gradually disappeared from the film, along with - curiously enough - Jeffrey Tambor. Disappointing. But maybe they will appear in a spin-off together. A buddy movie. They could solve crimes. Crimes committed by goats. I have already seen the script. In my mind. There is a lot of interest in it. In my mind.

The Terrors of Tooting

2011-07-18T11:04:00.000-07:00

On Thursday I went to work from Ingrave across the fields. Last week, after the rain, the cracks in the earth had softened into gummy mouths and the clayey soil had clung to my shoes, undermining my progress. This week it was bone dry again. The crops had turned golden, from last week's green. I have to suppose that this is normal. Even if they turned blue I'd have to accept it, I suppose.

Walking out across this space makes me feel like I'm exploring the African savannah. Were an ostrich to appear, trotting across the field towards me, I would hardly be surprised. This is, in fact, a distinct possibility, since there is an ostrich farm not far away. I have no idea what I would do in this eventuality. Probably fall back on my Customer Service training. Greet it 'politely and positively' and endeavour to manage its expectations.

Friday, I walked out into the morning and it was warm already, not the slightest chill in the air. 'I pronounce it the loveliest day of the year!', I bellowed at the office. 'We should all have it off!' It immediately clouded over. Luckily, the office was empty anyway. Only four people turned up at all. So we couldn't really spare anyone to go to the 'Absence and Sickness' teleconference on the third floor.

Someone was in the Accounts spreadsheet, which was 'locked by the Administrator'. None of us were in it, so it was a bit of a mystery. 'It's like a thriller', I said, perhaps a little hysterically. 'Who is the Administrator?' The conclusion was that it must be one of our superiors in the Centre at Tooting. We amused ourselves by picturing him being chased around by unearthly white globes, as in The Prisoner. For all we know, it really is like that in Tooting.

Marley And Me

2011-07-11T11:54:00.000-07:00

Not quite sure how I ended up watching this film, about a Labrador who moves in with a young couple and gradually destroys their lives. Or enriches their lives. Or something. The most powerful association I have with Marley And Me is an anecdote from Bobs about her young nephew who, on being asked if he found the film too upsetting, crowed: 'I'm playing with my penis!'

They should put that on the cover of the DVD.

Maybe I'm watching in order to find out what the upsetting thing in the film is. It turns out, not too surprisingly, that it's the death of the dog. Oh, wow. A dog gets old and dies. It took the running time (more or less) of Bela Tarr's Damnation to tell us this?

You would have thought that, since Marley's alleged 'charm' seems to rest mainly on his capacity for acts of extreme domestic vandalism, they'd be glad to see the back of him. But it seems that his ability to eat an answering machine whole makes him the canine equivalent of Einstein. If this couple bring up their kids with the same attention to detail they give to the dog, they'll be selling their bodies on the streets for crack by age ten, and who will be laughing at their giddy antics? Apart from me, that is.

Live Long And Prosper

2011-07-05T11:19:00.000-07:00

In Eastenders Steve John Shepherd was accusing David Essex his Dad of murdering his mother 'with your neglect and your wandering eye'. How do you murder someone with a wandering eye? Maybe she tripped over it on the stairs. Maybe it had wandered that far.

I met Paul and Richard in The Swan. Our drink-exacerbated conversation brought all sorts of strange facts to light, for example that Kirk Douglas could climb up his own chin and that the next President of the USA will be Batman. Perhaps we should write a documentary instead of the situation comedy we are meant to be working on.

They still don't have jobs. They have things in the pipeline. I still have a job, for the moment. There, Transplant Week is upon us again, demanding that leaflets and banner stands and other things have to be in place at various destinations RIGHT NOW. It really doesn't help the situation that the theme of Transplant Week this year is 'What are you waiting for?'

Luckily it is quite easy on the system to get proof of delivery, although even this may be confusing. A delivery 'signed for by Vulcan using Saturn' had us wondering briefly if one consignment of leaflets had been shot off into space. Not at all, but there was some question over what this Vulcan had done with them. Whatever it was, I'm sure it was logical.

PS: So it turned out to be, in a sense: he'd put them in the bin.

Sexland

2011-06-27T11:59:00.000-07:00

At work, Jeremy Vine was in Iceland; not the shop, the country. Contrary to expectations, Iceland sounds rather rude. Even when they (inevitably) started talking about volcanoes, it sounded unpleasantly biological, what with all the references to 'viscous ooze', 'wind problems' and 'big ones erupting so close together.' Or maybe it's just me: in a meeting on Wednesday I nearly collapsed into giggles when one colleague claimed to have 'front-loaded' another.

Iceland have banned lap dancing. The general view in the office was that they probably don't need sex clubs, as they no doubt get their rocks off by frolicking in the hot springs. There was some discussion about how the sex industry demeans those who work in it. I pointed out that we in admin are not that much better off, although admittedly we are not called upon to fire ping pong balls from our nether regions. Not yet anyway.

Carol said that she had seen this act in Thailand, and Lorraine picked up on it as a classic example of women being treated as objects. I wasn't so sure - surely the object in this case is the ping pong ball. I didn't mention my own experience on Grant's stag do in Amsterdam, during which I seem to recall actually catching something which had been propelled through the air in this fashion. I can't quite remember what it was, but it wasn't a ping pong ball. A cricket ball? Surely not a basketball? I'll have to consult my notes. If they aren't too smudged.

would you like a new kidney with that?

2011-06-20T10:47:00.000-07:00

So I continue with my customer service qualification. This is the sort of course that sometimes feels like it's making you stupider rather than teaching you things. You are asked to cite instances in which you have communicated with people. 'Did you use words? What words did you use?' I'm making that last bit up, but you get the idea. It's like being asked to describe how you got out of bed that morning.

Although, when we attempted this in the office, we quickly ran into difficulties.

The one big problem that hangs over us still is the 'observation', meaning that our assessors have to 'sit in' and watch us using our customer service skills. This is fine in more 'hands-on' parts of the organisation, where you are no doubt continually hoping that people 'enjoy their liver' and telling them to 'have a nice bleed'. However, our job isn't a full-on customer service job - more a question of answering the occasional phone-call or e-mail - and this presents problems. The assessor may sit, and sit, and nothing will happen. She might have to watch us doing the written part of our customer service qualification.

In order to avoid this, there seems to be a need for some element of performance. So people are being recruited to ring in from an office down the corridor, to make enquiries about things. One member of staff has volunteered to wander in and out of the office in a variety of disguises. Getting carried away, I have agreed to write a script. There will be people falling out of cupboards. There will be goats and chickens running around.

It will be a bit like a farce; which some would say is fitting.

Sex Crimes In The Old Post Office, and other stories

2011-06-13T10:51:00.000-07:00

Listening to Radio 2 at work, I was amused to hear that a school were asking their pupils to wear 'baggy clothes' in order to discourage paedophiles. Blimey, why not just disfigure kids if they are so dangerously sexy? Burn their faces off!

Surprisingly, nobody rang in to Vanessa Feltz to make this suggestion. The school were worried, it transpired, about a 'known paedophile', who was said to be 'operating from his home' in the area. Operating from his home? They make paedophilia sound like a full-time job, instead of - as I'd always imagined - a hobby. Perhaps he should have rented an office. Been 'transparent'.

Anyway, the upshot was, as one caller made plain, that baggy clothes are no deterrent to paedophiles. Apparently, they have x-ray eyes.

In this context, I note that Brentwood is slightly at odds with the Zeitgeist. While the rest of the nation considers forcing kids into burkhas, Brentwood now has a beauty salon for children, called Trendy Monkeys. The owner is accused of furthering the 'sexualisation of children', but she maintains that she is only allowing them to be 'princesses'. Fair enough - I'm not convinced that 'beauty' has anything to do with sex anyway, and people who complain that kids nowadays 'don't have a childhood' should probably realise that they still do, it's just different. Once upon a time, losing the stabilisers on your bicycle was a landmark childhood experience - now, it's your first botox injection. It's called progress, folks.

I do hope that the owner of Trendy Monkeys will persist, and realise that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Soon, I hope to see them offering boob jobs to the under-fives and discounts on 'full sexualisation'. And then at last the time will be right for Ross to open his much-anticipated new club, Sexcrimes, in the old Post Office. He's a Tory, so they're bound to let it through.

it's a lot like life

2011-06-06T10:44:00.000-07:00

At work some materials being returned to our distribution hub had turned up with some unanticipated T-shirts and fleeces among them. When I informed my colleagues of this, Lorraine thought that I said, not 'fleeces', but 'faeces'. Not that she batted an eyelid: nothing surprises us. It was only a question of whether to assign the unauthorised excrement a stock code.

People think we have a cushy life in the public sector, but it isn't so. Only the other day, the soap dispenser in the Gents went AWOL. We were left with a bag of 'Unperfumed Antibacterial Liquid Soap' sagging by the side of the sink like a mollusc prised from its shell. You had to squeeze its little snout to get the gel out. By the time you'd done that, the water from the tap was usually too hot to put your hand in. It gets hot fast, that water.

And so I make my dissatisfied way back up the corridor, squeaking. That's my shoes, by the way - I got some new ones recently, and they shocked me by the noise they make against the floor of that corridor in particular. It's not just squeaky, it's sort of squelchy too. It sounds like Donald Duck coming up the corridor, ranting. There is a rumour going round that HR have forced me to wear these to stop me sneaking up on people - a slightly less humiliating alternative to bells.

It was I who started the rumour, which won't stop me reporting it to HR as part of an entrenched 'culture of bullying' in the workplace. Soon, everyone else will be dismissed and I, laughing and quacking madly, will be King of the Office!

I return to my desk, where I am once again aware of Norris eyeing me sceptically at the corner of my eye, from my Coronation Street mug. I'm sure that's having a negative effect on my performance...

little awful annie

2011-05-31T11:22:00.000-07:00

I was watching the film Orphan, in which a couple adopt a 12-year old Russian girl. Because they don't know they're in a horror film, it doesn't occur to them that she might be irredeemably evil. But she is. No sooner has she killed a full-grown nun with a hammer, than she is taking a knife to her new little brother. 'I will cut off your hairless little prick before you even know what to do with it', she snarls. There's a girl who'd really benefit from a spell in finishing school.

Is she, perhaps, the reincarnation of Stalin? Or some kind of genetically-modified Soviet super-weapon? I was fully prepared for either eventuality. The (SPOILER ALERT) truth is simpler - she's thirty-two! A thirty-two year old maniac Russian - well, actually Estonian - dwarf. The adoption agency have certainly taken their eye off the ball here.

Not that the couple went through an agency, which was perhaps the film's message. Even so, I felt that here was a suitable challenge for inclusion in my Customer Service qualification - you're allowed to invent examples. I mean, imagine having to make that call: 'Apologies, but unfortunately, due to an administrative error, you have been sent a homicidal dwarf instead of the little girl you were expecting. Sorry about this. Possible our medical checks should have been more thorough. Our strong advice to you is to GET OUT OF THE HOUSE NOW! SHE'S GOT A KNIFE! DON'T GO IN THE CONSERVATORY! RUN! Once again: sincere apologies.'

My assessor is going to be very impressed, I think.

Mystery of the Handbag

2011-05-20T14:49:00.000-07:00

After years and years of trying to avoid the subject, I am now doing a Customer Service NVQ. Obviously I wouldn't dream of doing such a thing if I actually had to deal with customers face to face, but now that I only have to communicate with them on the phone or via e-mail it has taken on the character of a purely theoretical qualification, like a PhD in Ancient Greek Philosophy.

The qualification will enable us to speak in 'customer service language', which I like to imagine is an actual language, possibly consisting not of words but of soothing noises (perhaps resembling whale song) which can be used to lull the customer into a blissful state in which they will be happy to tolerate any outrage.

Before we could embark on this, however, we had to prove our worth by doing a literacy and a numeracy test. The workbooks confronted you every now and again with a page that asked you if you were 'happy to carry on' and advised you to tell the assessor if you weren't. Of course this was meant to be reassuring, but in fact the effect was alarming, like in a horror film - dare you continue into the haunted room? - and it made you feel like breaking the studious silence by wailing: 'I can't go on!'

In fact, the silence was maintained, and we all did very well. Although at one point a child's voice was heard issuing from a woman's handbag. 'It's my daughter', explained the woman, and reached into her handbag. Presently, the sound stopped.

Run Run Run

2011-05-16T12:01:00.001-07:00

Last Saturday I went to the May Fete at my old primary school for the first time in years. All the old English traditions are still in evidence. Like the nail bar staffed by eight year old girls. The Egyptian dancing.

The Egyptian dancing was women of a certain age, colourfully-attired, wielding veils and rods, though not simultaneously. I saw no maypole, but there were those who claimed to have seen it, lurking on the sidelines like a sex criminal. Justin recalled a May Fete of his youth in which boys dressed as farmers pursued girls dressed as rabbits (bunny girls, you might almost say) with shotguns to the strains of Run Rabbit Run. Well, it was the 70's. I recall dressing up as an oil rig worker, possibly in some kind of variation on the Village People - to be frank, I've blotted most of it out.

This Saturday was given over to another tradition: Eurovision. The 'outsider music' element to this seems to be giving way increasingly to X Factor-style homogeneity - the only obvious eccentrics here were Moldavia, performing what could almost have been a Faith No More b-side, in very tall hats, while a unicyclist hovered nearby. And they did rather well. Azerbaijan won, with a perfectly serviceable ditty called Running Scared, in which they claimed to be 'scared of breathing'. Blimey, that is scared.

Perhaps it was a response to Russia's entry. They fielded some movie star heart-throb doing a song called Get You, but it didn't do well, possibly because the concept of Russia's spokesman vowing to 'come and get you' set off alarm bells in neighbouring countries. As did, perhaps, the song's somewhat ambiguous compliment: 'You look good on the floor'.

Current Events

2011-05-06T13:36:00.000-07:00

So Obama was shot and killed. Sorry, I mean Osama, I always get them confused. I'm sure I'm not the only one - only the other week they had to produce Obama's birth certificate, because apparently most Americans don't know who he is even though he is the president of America. Well at least this should help resolve some of that confusion, which was perhaps the whole point of the exercise.

We then had to vote for AV, or against it, depending on what we felt like. The No campaign was very effective in its way. Having seen and/or heard Peter Stringfellow, David Cameron and the Daily Mail all assuring me that the entire fabric of civilization would collapse if I voted in AV, I couldn't wait to get down Bardswell Social Club and put my 'x' against 'YES'. (Or, alternatively, put my 1 against 'YES' and my 2 against 'NO'.)

Anyway it didn't work, perhaps because, as everyone kept saying, AV was 'too confusing'. Even though all the voter has to do is grasp the concept of ranking different choices according to how much they like them. As if you'd need a degree in Higher Mathematics to understand Top Of the Pops. Although maybe that's why they took it off air, because nobody does.

I went to London on May 29th, not to see the Royal Wedding - just to be in the margins. Obviously I waited until it was over. I saw a bit of it on TV, but missed the exchange of vows because I turned over to a film about sheep herding in Kazakhstan.

Very good it was too.

Really I was going to London to see Let's Scare Jessica To Death (1971) but I didn't make a point of mentioning it to people. It didn't seem to be especially in keeping with the national mood, even if a vampire did emerge from the lake in a wedding dress.

But what was the national mood? It was hard to tell. Apathy? Certainly it didn't seem especially hostile, although a rapper called Tyler (Wat Tyler?) was on the front of the NME saying that he 'didn't give a shit' about the Royal Wedding. OMG! Pass the smelling salts! You'd have thought that as a member of an LA 'alternative hip-hop collective' called Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, he'd be down the front waving his little flag, wouldn't you?

bonerus

2011-05-03T12:23:00.000-07:00

I was on my way to Sainsbury's and an elderly woman looked at me and said: 'Are you the librarian?' It was as though my secret identity had at last been revealed. 'Yes, Madam', I felt like saying, 'you have guessed correctly: I am The Librarian!' Then I could have thrown a couple of books at her and run away. Instead, I said no - 'But I did used to work in the bookshop on the High Street'.

She seemed satisfied with this.

Of course, I am now The Strategic Marketing Assistant, which confers few secret powers upon me... or does it? Having taken on some, ahem, extra duties recently, I am now in receipt of what is termed a 5% 'responsibility allowance'. Woo hoo! Of course they forgot to pay it to me. Then they forgot again. Then they remembered - and how.

I couldn't help but be struck by the fact that the deductions in my most recent pay packet were almost exactly equal to my usual take-home pay, while my pay itself had more than doubled. It transpires that, having calculated 5% of my yearly pay, they seem intent on paying that to me every month. Perhaps the responsibilities I am to take on are graver than I thought. Perhaps they are going to drop me into Libya.

The question was - should I mention it? Unfortunately I gave it away immediately by staring down at my wage slip in slack-jawed amazement. I may even have been drooling. When I told this to Ross later he maintained that I should have told curious colleagues that I had an erection. It's what he would have done. And it would have had the desired effect that their attention would then have passed hastily on to something else. Oh well, I'll save that line for the court case.

Ikeaster

2011-04-26T10:47:00.000-07:00

On the way to work I see that the Nuffield are advertising a 'Free Cosmetic Surgery Open Event.' Imagine the carnage! Still, if you've always fancied trying your hand at rhinoplasty, but have been put off by the thought of all those years of study, here's your chance.

Lorraine thought she had a fifty pence piece, but it turned out to be a Mauritian coin. She was going to try and put it in one of the vending machines in the canteen, but I warned her that an alarm would go off, and she would immediately be extradited to Mauritius. She didn't try it - whether because of my warning or for reasons of her own, I couldn't say.

I spent Easter in Ikea with Dave and his friend Helen. Well perhaps not the whole of Easter, but time does tend to warp in that place. After hours of staring at objects with bizarre names like 'Fartyg', you start to think you've gone insane.

I bought a small blue dog and a black Benno.

There was a barbecue at Matandamandas. Mat held Samuel in front of the barbecue. 'Piggies!', he shrieked, wanting his son to understand just where those sizzling sausages came from. 'Piggies!', echoed Sam. Hmm, wasn't that one of Charles Manson's catchphrases? Maybe that was how Manson got started - his Dad imprinting upon him the association between attractive things and things that must be killed and eaten. Mat didn't seem concerned by the idea that Sam might turn into a serial killer. He might not be so happy if he turns into a vegetarian, though.

Film round-up

2011-04-19T10:50:00.000-07:00

Zombies just won't die. They've gone viral, it seems, appearing in rewritten Jane Austen novels and cluttering up HMV's horror section with titles like Zombeak. This belongs to the category of films which I can't even bother to pick up off the rack, to find out what it's about - never mind actually watching the thing. I imagine that it's about undead budgerigars.

By rights everyone should be bored with zombies by now, but obviously they have a way of transcending boredom, perhaps by becoming a kind of metaphor for it. Zombies And Their Metaphors... someone should write that book. Perhaps the key to the rise of the zombies is that you can pretty much do anything with them. Take Bruce Labruce's LA Zombie, in which gay porn star Francois Sagat plays an 'alien zombie' who walks out of the ocean and shuffles round LA reanimating corpses with his enormous undead penis that gushes black stuff. Yes, zombie porn is here. Although, in it's shorter version at least, there is a certain innocence about LA Zombie which reminds me of Charlie Chaplin films... or perhaps it's just me.

I saw this at a festival, where the producer, introducing the film, said he had three spare copies on DVD which he'd flog for a tenner afterwards if anybody was interested. It all sounded wonderfully seedy, but unfortunately I had to run for my train.

Mark Pirro's Rectuma (seen recently on DVD) is in a way the opposite of LA Zombie, with its redemptive cock. Interesting to imagine this film being pitched to Hollywood execs: 'Well, it's about this guy who gets raped by a Mexican frog and then a Japanese scientist puts a radioactive rod up his arse, and the arse then detaches itself from his body, grows to gigantic proportions, and lays waste to LA...' Get Tom Cruise on the line right now!

For arse read butt, because obviously this is an American film, and I'm not entirely certain that the humour really translates. However, it's interesting to wonder what Freud would have made of this. He might have felt that a giant penis would have worked better as a wild destructive force, so it is at least pleasingly counter-intuitive to find instead a death-dealing bottom. Counter-intuitive is the word: you spend most of this film in a state of vague surprise at the fact that it actually got funding. Actually - not that much funding.

A couple of Japanese singers provide a kind of - erm - Greek chorus. They are unceremoniously crushed at the end of the credits by the star of the proposed sequel, Scroton. It doesn't seem likely that this sequel will ever be made - on the other hand, it may be that radioactive ballbags are the new zombie. Watch this cultural space.

Squirrels

2011-04-11T11:53:00.000-07:00

Another leaving do at work, but on this occasion it's voluntary, so no need to feel guilty while tucking into the sandwiches. The carrot cake is another matter. Have I been in the organisation long enough to be the first to cut into a pristine carrot cake, decorated with white chocolate curls and pretend carrots? Surely I would need to be Grade 7 or above to get away with that?

Luckily, someone else moves in, and I follow. It proves to be worth the wait.

Squirrels invaded the canteen at work once. There was a bit of a hoo-hah, I am told.

Neither squirrels nor overeating are featured, I notice, on the new comprehensive drop-down menu on the sickness absence form. Nevertheless, it's a veritable Smorgasbord of reasons not to come to work. 'Burns, poisoning, frostbite and hypothermia' - wonder how often that one gets used? And if you aren't suffering from anything official, there's also the very useful 'unknown causes'. 'I can't come in today - my unknown causes have flared up again.' Oh yes, I'm a martyr to my unknown causes.

We also now have 'substance abuse'. Does this mean that I can inject myself with heroin on a Monday morning and then ring and tell them I don't feel like going to work now? As long as it's on the drop-down menu, no problem.

Boner Services

2011-04-06T11:41:00.000-07:00

Not only are we faced with 'relocation' at work, we have been caught in a pincer movement by the Department of Health, who are carrying out a cost-cutting exercise on the organisation as a whole. I have every confidence that the DoH will make a wise decision. I'm a bit concerned by that acronym though.

Well, if the worst comes to the worst, I can always form a group with my colleagues. It worked for The Soldiers and The Nurses. I'm not quite sure whether the Out-Of-Work Admin Assistants can command the same kind of popular following, but no doubt it's a question of choosing the right material. Money For Nothing, anyone?

Someone even suggested at a meeting the other day that NHS Blood and Transplant might incorporate sperm donation. I shudder to think what the new logo would look like. Two hearts and a cock? However, I think it is generally accepted that blood and sperm don't go together.

Except in certain films.

the presenters

2011-04-06T11:22:00.000-07:00

On Quest, Al Murray was presenting a series of programmes about World War II. He seems a little bit lost without his Pub Landlord persona, as if wondering whether the joke is now on him; wearing a tin hat several sizes too big for him, he looks like he's hoping to be Ross Kemp when he grows up.

Later, along comes Brian Cox. Wonders Of The Universe. Oh dear. I remember the days when science programmes were fronted by men with beards and pipes, standing in front of blackboards, people you could trust. Now it's some goon who clearly took too much E when he was the keyboard player with D:Ream. I used to think he was soppy but now, watching him grinning inanely while discussing the death of the universe - and talking about how the whole of humanity might be crushed into a space the size of this rock he's holding - and saying that there is 'nothing' inside him... I understand that he is in fact psychotic.

They put him in a centrifuge so that he can experience the gravity of some remote planet - in fact, this is clearly the only way they could find to stop him smiling. It works for a while, but it isn't pleasant - it's sort of like seeing his face ripped off. When the grin bounces back again, it's almost a relief.

FIRE!

2011-03-21T11:52:00.000-07:00

There was yet another fire alarm at work. There seems to be a sinister intention to show us just how few people are actually left in the centre. Every time there's noticeably less, so it's a bit like being in a horror film where characters are being picked off one by one - only less fun.

We are currently being encouraged to 'Go BIG Early', which means reporting potential 'critical incidents' as soon as we notice anything 'out of the ordinary'. Which sounds to me like a licence to run around screaming and waving your arms around every time an insect flies in the window - I can hardly wait for it to be put into practice.

Meanwhile, in the office, Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 was discussing the story of some girls who were arrested for picking daffodils in the park. This story is certainly good tabloid fodder with its lively opposition of contrasting cliches: the innocent young girls skipping through the park with their Easter baskets full of flowers being surrounded by armed police and carted off to prison to be brutalised. It reminded Lorraine of the dog poo bins in Doddinghurst, which had been set alight by youths. 'They should do a programme about that', she said. I agreed that it would certainly put those leaking Japanese nuclear reactors into perspective.

Doddinghurst sounds like fun. I recall Lorraine's account of a 'donkey derby' there at which someone's big dog attacked someone else's smaller dog, and, in order to get it to unlock its jaws, someone set fire to it with a cigarette lighter. This proved so popular, that they now do it every year.

jetsam

2011-03-14T13:21:00.000-07:00

Plumbers have been to look at the bathroom, sucking their teeth and offering quotes. Soon, the toilet may become stable, and sitting upon it less like an experience at Alton Towers. In the back garden, the previous toilet still reclines. Dave has suggested making it a centrepiece of the front lawn, which is a good idea, except that passers-by would probably use it for its original intended purpose.

Honestly, what is the world coming to when you can't even put a toilet in your front garden for fear of people pissing and shitting in it? I've a good mind to write a letter to the Daily Mail. WORK LONGER FOR A SMALLER PENSION, was their headline on Thursday. As their special offers go, it seems unlikely to prove as popular as Lark Rise on DVD.

Of course this was before events in Japan made every other news story shamefacedly wonder if it really belonged on the news at all. Watching all those homes and cars being swept away, as though by the whim of a child at the end of a game, it strikes me that the worst thing is - Nature makes it look so easy. I've already lost count of the number of nuclear reactors that have exploded or are due to explode. Why does Japan build so many nuclear power stations by the sea?, grumbled the Daily Mail peevishly. As if the Japanese were just being typically perverse. Eventually, however, they had to answer their own question - they use sea water as a coolant. Oh, right.

the workplace that dripped blood

2011-03-07T11:20:00.000-08:00

Torture Garden was a British anthology-type horror movie from the late 60's. It was considered scary stuff back then; now, you buy it on DVD (as I did the other day) and find that it's rated 12 and is said to contain 'some moderate horror'. What does this say about society?

The separate stories are linked by Burgess Meredith's carnival showman Dr. Diabolo (aka: the Devil) hypnotising his victims using a pair of scissors (wielded by 'Atropos, Goddess of Destiny' but you don't need to know that). 'Stare into the shears of Fate!', Dr. D intones...it's a situation that has a peculiar resonance for those of us whose jobs are at the mercy of government cuts.

The Blood Centre at Brentwood may be relocating, we have been told. Not to the Bahamas, sadly. 'In the Brentwood area', probably. For 'the majority of staff'. Which is alright, unless you are in the minority of staff - those who, during the relocation, may be accidentally mislaid.

Every day I turn up at the Centre wondering will my pass work, or will I be left forlornly staring up at the windows of empty rooms - 'Oh, didn't they tell you?'

The latest rumour is that it's going to be turned into 'a mental health unit'. So we won't have to leave after all, is the joke doing the rounds. Old people's home, ditto.

Ironically, we are quite busy, but there is still time to get the measure of a fast-changing world through the medium of Jeremy Vine on Radio 2. David Cameron wants to establish a 'no fly' zone over Libya. Seems a bit unrealistic. How are they going to keep out all those flies?, I wonder...

Then controversy rages as John Galliano crosses the line between camp excess and enthusiastic support for genocide with some ill-advised anti-Semitic remarks, but it all seems to have got wildly out of proportion, and I'm tempted to ring in: 'Jeremy, not a day goes by in this office without somebody declaring their undying love for Hitler, and no-one bats an eyelid.' A little bit of common sense, that's what's needed... but of course I am far too busy to do this.

What does the future hold for the Brentwood Blood Centre? Will we be turned into robots? Will a cat eat our heads? Or will the plot of Torture Garden have no bearing at all upon our experience?

The Devil only knows.

I Predict A Riot

2011-02-28T12:26:00.000-08:00

It was interesting on the Brit Awards the other night to see Tinie Tempah saying he wanted to 'big up God'. You wouldn't think God would need it, would you? I'm sure it must have down wonders for His self-esteem though, being 'bigged up' by 'Tinie'.

Later in the same show, Plan B staged a riot, complete with burning policeman. This was quite exciting because, such is our experience of the Brits, there was every possibility that it might be happening for real.

But on the whole, TV has not been that exciting. So bad has it become that, a few evenings ago, Dave and I found ourselves watching BBC Parliament, where Nick (Son of Douglas) Hurd squirmed under the onslaught of complex incisive questions about 'the Big Society'. Questions such as: 'What is the Big Society?'

Everyone seemed to accept that, whatever it is, it won't happen unless there is a 'culture change'. What is that then? Is it something like the Renaissance? Oh well, that's OK then. I'm sure there'll be another one of those along in a minute.

Another phrase that kept cropping up was 'social entrepreneur'. These are the people who will supposedly build the Big Society, and already their name sounds like a euphemism for 'criminal'. It doesn't bode well. But I shouldn't be negative. David Cameron has apparently attacked the BBC for reporting cuts in a negative way. But I wonder how you report them in a positive way? The closure of a library as a great leap forward for illiteracy? The scrapping of a bus service as a health initiative?

Presumably none of this will be necessary when this 'culture change' happens and everyone immediately becomes completely selfless. At which point, never mind the Tories, might we not give Communism a go?

Last Exit To Candlerise

2011-02-21T10:53:00.000-08:00

So Lark Rise To Candleford has finally come to an end. This series (which I have occasionally glanced at out of the corner of my eye) has seen the ladies of the village briefly putting aside their copies of the June 1890 edition of Take a Break to goggle at hunky newcomer Gabriel, as he bangs away at his ironmongery. 'Hold this still while I show it who's master!', he commands a nearby urchin, who eagerly obliges.

Later in the series, the village is invaded by a python of possibly supernatural origin. What next, I think to myself - a killer robot? Perhaps that is the mysterious 'machine' Gabriel is slaving over in his forge...

But no, it turns out, in the very last episode, that he has invented the combine harvester. Or something. Everyone is quick to understand that this machine represents the end of their pastoral Eden. One old crone has dreamed of a burning chimney rising up from a field like...like a cack-handed symbol of industrialization. Or a massive penis.

But fans of LRTC are not after subtlety. They only want to escape back into a simpler time - a time of poverty, disease, and early death. A time when they wouldn't even have been able to get away from it all by watching Lark Rise To Candleford. Or even reading it, since it hadn't been written yet.

But what is there in this modern world to escape from? Everyone seems to be having a great time. Just look at The Joy Of Teen Sex on C4. 'Everyone I know is having sex on drugs', one teen blithely assures us. Another reaches into a carrier bag and says: 'I went shopping and I bought some drugs.' For a dizzy moment, I think that they are about to play that shopping list memory game ('I went shopping and I bought some drugs, and a vibrator.') Disappointingly, this is not the case.

A teenage girl attends the programme's 'clinic' with her Mum in tow. She has been dumped by her boyfriend because she refused to do it doggy-style. 'I found it difficult to cope with on her behalf', says her Mum, suggesting - or is that just me? - that she has been dutifully standing in.

Meanwhile, outside the window, a massive flaming penis rises up from the earth...

the man with one brain

2011-02-14T11:21:00.000-08:00

Mat came up with a thorny problem the other evening. He would dearly love to be a connoisseur of whiskey; only problem is, he doesn't like it. Most people would probably give up on the idea at this point, but Matthew is made of sterner stuff. Blaming his dislike on a 'fault' in his brain (due to a childhood trauma which occurred when he downed an entire bottle of the stuff on a whim), he is forcing himself to drink it in the hope of making his brain change its mind. However, thus far, brain says no.

This scenario struck me as slightly odd. I mean, where is he in all this? Which is the real Mat? The brain that hates whiskey? Or the guy frowning at the brain as though it were a malfunctioning TV? However, when I tried to explain this, it didn't go down very well. Suffice it to say that, when Mat eventually rids the world of all its 'idiots', I am unlikely to be one of the few survivors.

Still, I have thought on his problem, and I don't see why he shouldn't become a connoisseur of whiskey anyway. When he shows his collection of hundred-year-old malts off to visitors, and they ask which he prefers, he can shudder theatrically and say: 'Oh Christ no, I don't drink the stuff! It's pure poison!' I imagine that this would give him a certain cachet in whiskey-loving circles.

It also occurred to me that he could form a double act, Mat And His Brain. He could wear Edwardian costume (I'm not quite sure why) and the brain would be in a bubbling vat, of course:

MAT: Now see here brain, I have it in mind to become the greatest connoisseur of whiskey the world has ever known. What do you have to say to that?

BRAIN (in a reverberating undertone): Gay-y-y-y.

Weary of lifting a spoon? Why not download food straight into your mouth?

2011-02-07T10:57:00.000-08:00

I've nothing against Simon Pegg and Nick Frost but it's a bit irritating to go to the cinema and find them fronting an ad nagging you to go and see films at the cinema. 'But, but - ', I splutter, 'I am in the cinema, waiting for the film to start. Isn't it a bit perverse to encourage me to do something I am already doing, and then actively get in my way?'

They don't listen. They just go on to plug their new film, Paul, which judging from the trailer looks a bit like what might happen if two English comedians sold their souls to the Devil in exchange for Hollywood success and found that the price of this was being forced into a menage a trois with Jar Jar Binks.

I'm sure it's better than it looks though - it would have to be - and they are right, of course, when they tell you to make the effort to see films in the cinema. Culture is far too accessible these days. I mean, I'm told that you can download books now, into something called a 'Kindle'. Because books, it turns out, are just text. True, I suppose. Then again, Haribo and fillet steak are both just food, but I wouldn't necessarily want to eat them off the same plate. And at least when I pick up a book, I know that somebody somewhere (rightly or wrongly) thought this particular text was worthy of being transformed into a discrete object. In the digital age, how are you going to separate real writing from, say, an unusually elaborate e-mail? Or this shit?

On the other hand, I don't see why books and Kindles can't co-exist in peace - at least until books are seen as so ecologically unsound that people carrying them are targeted for the kind of abuse now handed out to women who wear real fur. Tree-murderer! I was reading someone's anti-Kindle rant the other day on the internet and this person sounded so smug and precious that I immediately began to warm to the pro-Kindle comments down the page - until, that is, I read one in which someone said how great it was that they were now saved from having to turn pages. What? You can't even turn a page? What are you, a baby? Is there anything else you'd like help with? Breathing, for example? They have machines that can do that for you, you know.

televisiono

2011-01-31T11:22:00.000-08:00

'People have a lot of misconceptions about California, but none of them are really true', says a current ad for that place. Oh, none of those misconceptions are really true, are they? Funny that, because one of my 'misconceptions' about Californians is that they don't properly grasp the concept of 'misconceptions'. Only it seems that this was not a misconception after all...

Advertisements can be irritating. If Dave is alone in the lounge and I hear him mutter: 'Fuck off' it's a dead cert that the ad for match.com has come on. You know, the one that goes:

'I like old movies,
Like Godfather 3.
It isn't considered the best one,
But that's just me.'

It's almost as if 'love' is considered to be more important than a basic grounding in film appreciation. And when did Godfather 3 become an 'old movie'? Or is 'that just me'?

Not that the programmes are much better. I saw Julia Bradbury on Countryfile quite overcome by the sight of some starlings flocking. 'It's so kaleidoscope!', she burbled. 'It's like I'm watching it in 3D!' But - you are, aren't you?

Cultural Highlights 2010: Film

2011-01-25T12:32:00.000-08:00

1.) Tam Lin at the Roxy Bar and Screen, Borough High Street. This presented problems in that I am quite happy to go to the cinema on my own but not into a bar. Nevertheless, a rare showing of the only film Roddy MacDowall ever directed was enough to conquer my reluctance. In the end I wasn't convinced that pubs and cinemas go together. Other people are an unavoidable drawback of going to the cinema, but let's not encourage them. Let's not try and pretend that it's a social occasion. This is still the only film I've seen where the screening was interrupted because some pisshead tried to charge up their i-pod in the 'projector'.

As for the film, it's quite entrancing. Roddy isn't in it, but everyone in it talks like him. At the end, as I remember, Ian MacShane is pursued by a bear, and then his arm turns into a snake and attacks him. As I remember.

2.) L'Eclisse at the BFI. This had an introduction by some kind of professor, which was dreary in the extreme, and almost had the audience rioting when he sounded like he was about to give the ending away. He didn't, except to reveal that the ending was 'a montage', but that was almost enough to ruin my night, as I was spending too much of the film waiting for this 'montage', and wondering just what it consisted of. It seemed unlikely, given the nature of Antonioni's portrait of aimless characters drifting through a soulless landscape seething with existential angst, that it would be a sports training montage. Then again, how could I be sure?

However, it's a great film, one of my most enjoyable experiences at the cinema this year. In a way, it's a bit like a horror movie, suffused with the menacing feeling that nothing is about to happen. And, believe me, it does.

3.) Dahmer Vs. Gacy at the Prince Charles. Some films you don't need to actually see. Reading the title is enough. I'm saving my money for Dahmer Vs. Gacy 2: In Space.

ambient metal

2011-01-17T11:00:00.000-08:00

Walking to work with Ensemble Economique's Psychical on your i-pod is like walking through the credit sequence of an early 80's horror video. Every third passer-by is one of the damned and even Marks and Spencer's gleams with malice. Work cannot live up to it, even if there's a fire drill. Well not a drill - someone was caramelizing sugar in the canteen, apparently. Not that anything featuring caramelized sugar ever appears on their menu. And obviously there is a very good reason for this.

Outside, confusion! The trees were unsigned! We used to meet at Tree D, but Tree D was gone! Well, it was still there, of course, but nameless now - no longer employed by NHS Blood And Transplant, and flourishing nonetheless. Instead, we all gathered at the entrance, so as to be indiscriminately mowed down by the fire engine, should it arrive.

It did, and not before time. It was cold out there - we could have done with a fire.

Back inside, what was this strange noise in the corridor? An almost musical drone, somehow enchanting. Was it a radiator? Some concealed machine? I stared around, eyes wide with wonder, as if, following it to its source, I might cross over into a magical new land. I haven't yet - however, the sound appears to be ongoing.

Resisting its pull, I returned to work. They are reprinting the Iron In Your Diet leaflet, which I prefer to mishear as the Ironing Your Diet leaflet. I like to think that this was something they encouraged housewives to do during the war, to make the rations seem bigger and 'seal the goodness in', as they might have put it.

In this way, time passes.

is it over yet?

2011-01-10T11:25:00.000-08:00

I was pleased to learn that they have discovered the cause of male pattern baldness - faulty stem cells, apparently. The same article went on to say that men don't really lose their hair - it is just that their hair is too small to be visible to the naked eye. What a relief. I thought I was going bald, but it turns out I have loads of invisible hair, a whole cloud of the stuff floating on top of my head like candyfloss. It must be pretty long by now, since I only instruct my barber to cut the visible stuff.

A cure for male pattern baldness! Surely this is one of the Signs of the Apocalypse? I notice that flocks of birds have begun their year by falling stone dead out of the sky. This has been blamed variously on 'fireworks', and 'poisoned water sources'. Terry Nutkins appeared on Jeremy Vine to make a case for this last explanation and reassure us that it isn't the end of the world. It's always a bit deflating to hear that. Although if it actually happened the end of the world probably wouldn't be remotely amusing. One would probably even find oneself longing for the golden days of yesteryear when one wasn't being drowned in lava or crushed to death by rocks. But something in me does prepare to heave a huge sigh of relief at the thought of it. I was right not to get a private pension!

Or maybe it's only New Year fatigue - I am ashamed to say that overindulgence in the holiday season has left my guts in quite a state. They have straightened themselves out now - not literally, of course.

oh is it that time again?

2011-01-04T11:28:00.000-08:00

We spent New Year in Cambridgeshire, travelling up a potholed track in mist and darkness, so that anything could have been on either side of it. Although in truth, and as daylight subsequently revealed, it was a lot more like nothing. Moist black earth. Misty pylons. An uninspiring shack offering 'Hot Tubs'. Dave's satnav was set to Finnish, adding an extra dimension of bleak alienation. We might have been in Belgium.

Our cottages boasted a hot tub, possibly procured from that very uninspiring shack. Dave and I lifted the lid of it and were instantly gassed. The stench of chlorine lingered in our nostrils as we staggered out into the light, clutching our throats like it was the Great War all over again. People thought we were exaggerating. They learned.

Undaunted, we explored our surroundings further. This 'working farm' was a real playground. Trough full of icy water; rusting hayfork; abandoned septic tank. The kids - if they survived being gassed by the hot tub killing machine - would be in Heaven. Literally.

As for New Year itself, well we are all far too mature now to disgrace ourselves - even Rhys has lost the knack of drinking too much, and Mat had diarrhoea (not a cocktail). We were reduced to watching, with fond nostalgia, fifteen-year old Saskia get drunk for perhaps the first time. Not that we were encouraging her of course - unless you call dancing round her cheering while she downed a yard of Special Brew 'encouragement'.

This didn't really happen, I should point out. Instead we played a game in which you had to place an After Eight on your forehead and work it down to your mouth without using your hands. I wasn't very good at this but that wasn't the point. The point was to take photographs of your facial contortions and put them on the internet to make it look like you are mentally disabled. Happy New Year!

pony moroni

2011-01-03T09:59:00.000-08:00

For Christmas I got 'Jack Duckworth's Wind-Up Racing Pigeons'. One lacked a foot, so racing was out of the question. I was inconsolable.

My Mum received the least likely present for a woman in her seventies - a Twilight-themed gift box of shower gels and body lotions. The guy who gave it to her presumably thought Twilight was just another designer brand like Hugo Boss, and mistook the three protagonists pictured on the box for the kind of vacant hollow-eyed models you see in perfume ads. The confusion is understandable - Dave drew my attention to an ad on the TV in which Ralph Lauren was trying to sell something called 'the Big Pony Collection' to men. Is that how men like to see themselves nowadays? As big ponies? Yeah, me and me mates, we're just a bunch of ponies really. Big ponies though. You should see us prancing down the High Street...

Or is it that designers think they can get away with anything as long as it has their name on it? I mean, why not go the whole hog and call it the My Little Pony Collection (including bubble bath)? Are the Care Bears due for a revival?

Heidi got a teddy bear from my Mum which she instantly named 'Teddison'. It was almost as if she was earmarking him for a butler.

why I love Christmas

2010-12-29T07:55:00.000-08:00

On the way back from the work Christmas meal (one of them) we got stuck behind a slow-moving learner driver whose school was (ironically) named 'XLR8'. No doubt they were right to keep the speed down; certainly it doesn't seem the most suitable name for a driving school, as if you would get in the car for the first time and the instructor would say: 'The first rule of driving is - accelerate!' And off you'd go.

Christmas is really here again it seems. I went to London in search of the odd gift. I had a specific type of hat in mind, but it must have suddenly gone out of fashion, or alternatively had become so incredibly fashionable that everyone had bought it, because it was very hard to find. Plenty were visible, but always on the heads of fellow shoppers, and I couldn't just rip them off their heads. Could I?

In my increasingly wearisome travels I found it necessary to adopt a rule of thumb: if the dummies don't have heads, the shop probably doesn't sell hats. It didn't help much. One thing I did discover was that it is a lot easier to find the way into shops than it is to find the way out. It's almost as if they planned it like that. While I was trying to escape one place, a man with a European accent asked me if I was looking for something for 'a special lady'. Such was his unctuous tone, it was almost as if he was asking if I wanted 'a special lady', which he, for a fee, would procure. I reacted in 'how very dare you' horror, telling him I was looking for a present for my Mum - as if there were a clear distinction between my Mum and 'a special lady'. He persisted, and asked to look at my fingernails. What mad universe was this? I fled, screaming - to Dorothy Perkins.

consternation street

2010-12-13T10:27:00.000-08:00

Coronation Street has celebrated it's 50th anniversary by traumatising and killing off its characters in a tram disaster. Now that's what I call a celebration! This event has also caused ex-characters to come crawling out of their graves into satellite programmes like (the inevitable) Come Dine With Me special, featuring Reg Holdsworth (I mean, actor Ken Morley) who is practically indistinguishable from his character (I mean, phenomenally irritating). He is still compulsively watchable, though predictably he came fourth out of four; 'I just hope I'm the fourth to die', he quipped.

Amazingly, some people weren't watching the live special: they were too busy rioting in the streets. Bloody students. Their activities were soon conveniently summarised by the 'iconic' (as it has no doubt already been called) image of Charles and Camilla cowering in their car from the protestors, she with (according to a Daily Mail headline) 'terror in her eyes' (it looked more like irritation to me). This would have been shocking in the 70's, but the reaction seems more ambivalent now, and the recent revelation that Camilla might have been 'poked with a stick' may well tip the balance into outright hilarity.

Had he been a more enterprising Royal, Charles might have leapt out onto the roof of the car to make a stirring speech to the rioters, perhaps leading them in a march on Parliament ('My ears are large enough to accommodate all your demands! Follow me, I shall be your King!') But nobody does that kind of thing anymore. The riots are just an opportunity for money-grubbing photographers to coerce protestors (or anyone really) into taking a shit on a statue of Winston Churchill, so that they can sell a picture of this 'outrage' to the Mail. It may not have happened yet, but I'm sure it will. Especially now I've mentioned it to Chad, who seemed quite keen.

chilling

2010-12-06T11:31:00.000-08:00

A team telecon at work began with an invitation to share any adverse incidents or near misses, Health and Safety-wise. As if we were going to volunteer to give a hilarious account of our pratfalls (and near-pratfalls) for the amusement of the team! Mind you, I did fall over on the way to work the other day, and although nobody saw, I seem to feel the need to tell everybody. Perhaps I think it will humanise me.

It happened on Thursday, during my epic journey to work across the frozen fields from Ingrave, just me and my i-pod. This is when your so-called 'avant-garde' sensibilities can come back to haunt you. It might well be appropriate for my slow death in a snowdrift to be accompanied by a punishing industrial drone, or someone squawking about death - when it comes to it, I'll probably be wishing for Relight My Fire.

Meanwhile, strange events have been happening in the new house - Dave's razor practically throwing itself out of the bathroom cabinet when I open the door - mysterious spots of blood appearing on the living room floor - and a strange milky ectoplasmic substance obscuring one shelf in the fridge. Dave insists that the razor only fell, that the blood came from some or other human being, and that the milky substance was, in fact, milk, which had leaked out of a milk carton. I'm not so sure. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes: once you have eliminated the impossible, everything else is too boring to bother thinking about.

a bad name

2010-11-29T11:59:00.000-08:00

At work a woman e-mailed me to say that she had just sent through a fax to 'your good self'. Amused as I was by her archaic usage I had to e-mail her back to say that although the fax had duly arrived for my good self, my bad self had unfortunately intercepted it and ripped it up in front of me, laughing evilly. Could she send it through again?

The office's imagination has recently been gripped by 'Bungate'. This is the outrage caused by one member of staff's bringing in a pack of iced buns and not sharing them out equally. The incident has already been 'cascaded upwards', as they say - ie; mentioned to a manager - and we shall see what develops. A meeting, perhaps. Possibly including a presentation. A tribunal, even...

Personally, I think the scandal should be termed 'Icedbungate' to distinguish it from any incidents that may arise in the future involving other kinds of bun - hot cross buns, say. I shall certainly raise this at the meeting and/or tribunal.

There is a competition on the intranet asking us to name the sleek, high-tech new blood donation chair. They were after something that sounds inviting to the potential donor, so my suggestion - Dracula's Throne Of Agony - is probably not going to win. But here's hoping!

evil maniac landlord horror

2010-11-25T12:05:00.000-08:00

We have moved without too many disasters, although moving day didn't begin well. Dave, in a sudden panic, started filling a Sainsbury's bag with spice jars, on the hob. 'Fuck, the bag's split!', he cried, and then, moments later, 'What's that smell of burning?' For he had inadvertently turned one of the hob rings on full, and orange plastic was busy melting all over it. Then he nearly had all the spices on the floor in his haste to get it all out of the way... In fact, he had conjured up a whole Norman Wisdom-style slapstick routine out of nothing in the space of three minutes.

The rest of the move went swimmingly. Not so the inspection. We had no problems at all with the landlord during the tenancy. 'We should help each other in this life', was his oft-expressed philosophy, and he was indeed helpful, while also careful to maintain a much-appreciated distance. The inspection, however, was carried out with ruthless precision, and ominous formality. I wouldn't have been surprised had he donned a special uniform for the event. Possibly including a monocle. As he shrieked: 'Look at that stain!' while indicating with a rigid finger an invisible mark on the carpet, it became increasingly apparent that this 'helpfulness' was a purely contractual phenomenon.

The new tenants have dogs, which makes his concern at the state of the carpet a bit, well, insane. I'm sure they will be fine, as long as they never leave.

As for the new place, it's fine. Well, the bathroom is a bit of a no-go area. Which is a bit awkward, as of course one does have to go.

curate's egg

2010-11-15T10:40:00.000-08:00

They were doing 'breast screenings' in the car park at work. I expected to see the drivers sat there with tubs of popcorn, having got the wrong idea.

Within the office, tensions have mounted over the most serious subject yet - the Christmas meal! At one point two rival meals seemed to be emerging, and - as twist after twist transpired in a saga worthy of Downton Abbey - it began to feel like we would all be eating our turkey in separate restaurants. However, tradition does now seem to be reasserting itself, although Secret Santa is still judged too risky. Nobody wants to unwrap a turd.

I'm beginning to wonder how long the department will survive, since who needs to promote organ donation when you can grow organs in a laboratory, as scientists are beginning to do now? Luckily (because you should never think that NHS departments work together) we have an operative in the field who goes round sabotaging such experiments. Or at least we have a member of staff we never see, and nobody knows what he does, but that is how I like to imagine him - sneaking into laboratories, smashing up equipment, possibly being ambushed by livers...

My brother rang me to say that he proposed to his partner, Bobs, on Halloween. She accepted (he probably wouldn't have bothered to call otherwise) and now I am going to be a 'best man', one of those opportunities in life which I had hoped - I mean thought - had passed me by. The best idea for a stag do thus far has involved donning spray tan to imitate the cast of The Only Way Is Essex down the Sugar Hut. We can describe ourselves as 'model slash footballers'.

TOWIE, by the way, is surely the new Twin Peaks. It really gets under your skin. I can't wake up in the morning now without telling my alarm clock to 'Shut up' in a camp voice.

Ross and Christine have got engaged too, so Dave and I were round there the other night. Sadly I was out of the room when the night's most hilarious anecdote was told. I returned to find everybody helpless with laughter and babbling about jet planes being attacked by frozen chickens. 'Terrorism?', I asked, but this only seemed to fuel the hysteria. I still haven't got to the bottom of it.

My room in the new house is now as duck egg as it can possibly be without actually being a duck's egg.

adventure of the duck egg walls

2010-11-08T11:17:00.000-08:00

Because I have to paint my room in the new house I have been obsessively examining the interior decor on TV programmes in search of clues. Lilac, my first choice, seems to be popular. In Eastenders it was in Ian Beale's living room, and then, when Kat fell over and had to have her baby checked out in hospital, it was in there too. It has also featured on Holby City. Yes, lilac has really jumped the shark, as they say. I'm glad I chose duck egg blue, or - as Mat calls it - 'egg duck'. It's more classy, like, you know, Downton Abbey or whatever.

Mat and Amanda and Sam were round at Justin and Bobs' for post-firework soup and hot dogs. Sam, with swept-back hair like a mad professor's, did his Darth Vader impression, which takes its place along with all the normal farmyard noises in his repertoire. Some are born into geekdom, some achieve geekdom, and others have geekdom thrust upon them. In Sam's case I think it's all three.

Mat's latest obsession is Sherlock Holmes, though when he was talking about it the other night in the Swan he seemed mainly interested in the amount of ejaculation going on in the stories. Of course he meant verbal ejaculations. He was particularly struck by a scene in which Watson was woken by Holmes ejaculating from the corner of the room.

In emulation of his hero, Mat's powers of logical thought have now been honed to such a point that, becoming aware of a strange smell in the Swan toilets, he was finally able to deduce - or, if you prefer, 'remember' - that he had eaten asparagus earlier that evening, and that the curious smell therefore came from his own piss!

Whether he then ejaculated I am unable to say.

social fools

2010-11-01T11:35:00.000-07:00

I went to London a bit. I smilingly refused a Big Issue seller, and he said something that sounded amicable, although the only word I could make out was the last: 'Bye!' Later, I uneasily concluded that he might well have been saying: 'Die slowly in terror - bye!' I passed a man talking very loudly to his friend about the girl he was seeing: 'Do you know what her father does? HE INSURES COUNTRIES!'

On the train back from a gig by the 'reinvigorated' Swans - Time Is Money (Bastard) and You Fucking People Make Me Sick are representative titles - a young guy jabbering away to some girls inspired another male passenger to refer to him as a 'mouthy prick'. This resulted in a marked increase in the young guy's jabbering, to the effect that he was a 'gangsta' and cage fighter who could 'knock anyone out in his weight category' ('runt' being the category, as far as I could tell) and eventually he was pushed out onto the platform at Gidea Park by a group of men, who were bored with him standing in the doorway trying to phone for 'backup' and thus preventing the doors from closing. For all I know, he is on the platform still, shaking his fist.

Afterwards one of the men who had helped to eject him then made a kind of speech about it, rather as though he had faced down the Russian mafia instead of pushing an over-excited twerp off a train. We should 'stand up to these people', he maintained and not just sit there pretending it wasn't happening (which, needless to say, was what I was doing).

'Well', said one of the other men involved, clearly wanting the subject closed, 'we did stand up to him.'

'Well', the first man replied, feebly, 'we should do it more often.' As if talking about a possible series of jolly nights out.

Someone else even suggested that this was David Cameron's Big Society in action, but I'm pretty sure that that was a joke. The comment, not the policy. Although also the policy.

Blank Generation

2010-10-22T11:44:00.000-07:00

Dave got the keys to the new place. Now he's worrying about how he's going to pay for it. 'Direct debit', I suggested, helpfully.

I went in there with Dave, Mat and Rhys. Mat is Dave's 'interior design consultant'. Unpaid, of course, which is useful since it means Dave doesn't actually have to use any of his ideas. The principal one of which is that the whole place should be painted entirely white in a tribute to the early George Lucas film THX1138, set in an oppressive world of the future. That's exactly the kind of atmosphere I look forward to living in: oppressive.

But perhaps we already live in this oppressive world of the future, since, as a number of visits to Wickes has made clear, there are plenty of shades of white available, with names like Blandness, Who Cares? and Unlikely To Offend Future Buyers. I was more struck by a colour called Sugarplum, but Dave refused to have any truck with that, instead firmly directing my attention to a battleship-grey shade called Steel.

I have an urge to paint my room lilac, but aren't sure if I can endure the homophobic abuse this is bound to entail. Perhaps I shall ask the Shilson's dachshund, Lulu, for advice. She has already expressed a critique of the lounge carpet in the form of a lengthy turd. Or perhaps I shall paint my room in Indifference - a popular shade of white, I believe.

unreality TV

2010-10-18T11:59:00.000-07:00

At work Lorraine was googling quangos. Luckily it seemed that we weren't one. Nevertheless when George Osborne was dishing out the spending cuts on Tuesday, I half-expected that we would be mentioned by name (I used to work with GO at Foyles, and the less said about that, the better). Nothing happened anyway, except the office nextdoor split up, due not to the economic situation but to what was described as 'a poorly-worded e-mail'. It's true - half of them suddenly relocated to work in the office down the end of the corridor, where the sink is. This was the day before I went on five day's annual leave, so I can't help but wonder what I'll find on my return. An armed siege?

I have been attempting to watch The Only Way Is Essex. This has attracted a lot of adverse comment locally for not representing 'the real Essex'. Having seen a couple of episodes, I'd have to agree. It doesn't seem to be on nodding terms with reality at all. It is a 'docu-soap', but that only describes what it isn't. It is not a documentary and it is not a soap. The people in it are not acting but neither are they being themselves. They are nominally in Essex but they could just as easily be floating in space. And it doesn't help, of course, that they are orange.

I find it oddly hard to focus on, possibly because by the time it comes on on a Friday night, I have normally consumed half a bottle of wine. The only thing that grabs my attention in the midst of this glistening void is the sudden appearance of a sight I see almost every day in real life - the back entrance to the Sugar Hut. This doesn't make the programme seem any more real but it has got me questioning the authenticity of my walk to work.

the new people

2010-10-11T11:07:00.000-07:00

So Dave has exchanged contracts - or at least, he got a letter informing him that he had. I had expected some kind of ceremony, perhaps something along the lines of an old-fashioned duel, with the participants pacing towards each other, contracts in their outstretched hands. Perhaps solicitors performed this ritual in their stead; it's hard to know.

Potential tenants have already been round to look over our place. I consider it my duty to put them off, so that Colin, unable to let it, is forced to let me stay for a nominal fee. In order to create the right unsettling atmosphere I answer the door in the nude, and offer them plum tomatoes from Sainsbury's. 'They're Taste The Difference', I say. You'd be surprised how sinister that phrase can be made to sound.

I have Resonance on loud, and - with luck - they're playing a symphony of industrial noise and synchronised vomiting. I tell the visitors that I recorded these sounds last night, from nextdoor.

Then - getting desperate - I try to rope in the fact that we ran out of milk that morning - 'It's not a good property for milk.' A brief word about our landlord ('He makes us do things!') and then they're out the door, never to return. Job, hopefully, done.

Don't it make my brown eyes blue?

2010-10-04T12:02:00.000-07:00

I finally had my Equality and Diversity course. Now the office will no longer be subjected to my boorish racist rants. It used to be a one-day course, but now it lasts half a day and is described as 'fast-paced'.

We were read a story about a builder admiring a nurse's legs and were invited to answer questions on it. Since the story failed to specify the sexes of any of the characters the correct answer turned out to be 'Don't Know' in each case. I got top marks. This wasn't because I'm careful not to make traditional sexist assumptions - I just wasn't listening.

Then we were shown a DVD about a teacher in Iowa in the 60's who separated her class into brown-eyed and blue-eyed children, and taught them that the blue-eyed ones were superior to the brown-eyed. This was a two-day social experiment, by the way, not just her belief. I've no idea what happened to the green-eyed kids, if any. Perhaps they were taken outside and shot before filming started.

Anyway the film certainly impressed upon us the ease with which prejudices may be fostered. On the feedback form where we had to write what we'd learned I put: 'Brown-eyed people are stupid.' And I'm brown-eyed! I certainly had gained some insights.

timelord, landlord

2010-09-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

It seems that I am set to move in with Dave - or possibly into a lock-up garage round the back, one of the two. I was briefly distracted, however, by the appearance of what was described as 'a large Victorian room' on Rightmove. It would almost be worth it, I thought, just to be able to utter the phrase: 'I live in a Large Victorian Room'.

I would feel obliged to acquire a matching lifestyle - a pipe and a manservant, at the very least. It's a houseshare though, and it's difficult to sustain that sort of thing when you have to share a toilet with (shudder) other people. So I suppose it's the lock-up garage for me. Unless the room really is large, like the Tardis. (Is there a toilet in the Tardis? I can only suppose that there must be.) Perhaps the room really is Victorian, and you travel back a century when you step over the threshold - that certainly beats a tatty Hill Street Blues poster. Maybe I could travel through space and time in my Large Victorian Room, solving mysteries. At the very least, this would look good on my intranet profile at work.

I don't seem to be able to edit my intranet profile at the moment, mind you. My hobby, it seems, is forever going to be 'teaching chickens to type.' It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it isn't how I would really like to be remembered.

no alarms and no surprises please

2010-09-20T10:36:00.000-07:00

There was a spider in the corridor at work. I reported it. Eventually our 'spider marshal', the other Martin, removed it using a glass and a 'Feeling Faint' leaflet.

On the whole, though, the week was not overly stressful. Lorraine, who was off last week, leaving me alone in admin, returned. Now she could resume her usual task of moderating the photos people send in to express their support for organ donation on the internet. Performing that task last week, I had a bit of a shock: one lady's enthusiasm for organ donation was so great that she submitted a picture of certain parts of herself - well they may or may not have been hers, but they certainly weren't her (or anybody's) face, unless they were bearded and very deformed. It was not the kind of thing one expects to see at work on a Monday morning (depending on your job of course).

I didn't know quite how to handle it. It seemed that perhaps I should mention it to someone, but it was hard to find the right tone. Jokey? Outraged? Should I run into the next office screaming: 'Vagina!' Or should I discreetly go over to my supervisor and say: 'I've got something to show you...'?

Neither seemed quite right.

Not liking the idea of people standing around my monitor gawping at genitals, I eventually decided to delete it using the standard response for an 'inappropriate image' and not speak of it - well, except here on the world wide web of course, but who looks at that?

Nothing of comparable outrageousness happened during the rest of that week, although the day after that there was a fire alarm. Once outside we wondered if this was a ruse on the part of the powers that be to get everybody out in the daylight and ascertain how many people still worked in the Centre; if it was few enough, they would close the place then and there ('Sorry, you can't go back inside, it's a Premier Inn now.')

Either this wasn't the case or there were still too many of us, because they let us back in. The cause of the alarm is still unknown, but it may have been because they were testing the generator earlier, which always produces a lot of smoke. Possibly the fire brigade operates under the time-honoured principle that there's 'no smoke without fire'.

Although in this case, there was.

Swine Eleven

2010-09-11T09:59:00.000-07:00

'Obama condemns Koran burning plan', said a BBC news headline. I agree - that doesn't sound like a very good plan at all, does it? It's some ghastly pastor in America called Terry, wanting to offend radical Muslims and - what the Hell? - all the other Muslims too, why not? He is fed up with Muslims getting all riled up about everything while Christians just sit there peacefully and take it. Isn't that what they're supposed to do though? Whatever happened to loving your enemy?

A listener to Jeremy Vine said the pastor should go ahead and burn the thing 'rather than being dictated to by world leaders'. Well yes, it's coming to something when you're letting world leaders dictate to you, isn't it?

Meanwhile, in Brentwood, a notice on the window of a new shop said that Peppa Pig would be in attendance at the shop's opening - on September 11th! I'm surprised that Obama didn't get wind of this - Peppa Pig has already offended against radical Muslim sensibilities (so it says on the internet) by - well, simply by being a pig, I suppose. Or at least, a popular one. This seems like another real slap in the face for Islam - OK, so it didn't actually say that she would be burning copies of the Koran, but you never can tell with Peppa. It's all down to how she's feeling on the day.

the signs were all there

2010-09-06T10:57:00.000-07:00

Back to work. I suppose it's a sign of the times that a room down the corridor has been renamed the Redeployment Room. It's a snazzy looking sign which, when you look closer, is only laminated card. Nothing for George Osborne to worry about there then.

This is the room where we used to wash our mugs up, but I'm afraid to go in there now in case I re-emerge as a cleaner.

Upstairs there's a sign above the photocopier telling you to ring Facilities before the toner runs out. Were I a more officious person, I would be on the phone to them daily - 'It hasn't run out yet...' - but even though this is the kind of behaviour the NHS seems to encourage, I haven't.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Phil in Eastenders is on crack. Naturally he was a braindead stumbling addict minutes after trying it for the first time. The announcer said that he had 'hit rock bottom', then a week or so later he said that he'd 'reached a new low'. How is this possible unless Phil is tunnelling through the earth? Perhaps, Dave suggested, he will reach the Chilean miners soon.

society

2010-08-31T10:33:00.000-07:00

I had a week off. I saw The Human Centipede. Or Human Centipede: First Sequence, as it is optimistically subtitled. Dr. Heiter is a surgeon famous for separating Siamese twins. Bored with separating people, he now turns to linking them, mouth to anus, forming a small chain of three, only one of whom is likely to enjoy a decent meal ever again. And why not?, as Barry Norman claims he never used to say.

This is surprisingly enjoyable, largely due to Dieter Laser's performance as the good doctor ('I don't like human beings!'). He resembles a barely-human cross between William Burroughs, John Carradine and a Pepperami, with maybe a bit of Charlie Brooker thrown in for good measure. I'm sure I'd end up like that if I lived alone (still a looming possibility!)

At Frightfest I took in a couple of films and picked up a DVD of the 1968 Peter Cushing movie Corruption. Cushing plays a surgeon keeping his disfigured girlfriend's face up to scratch using Essence of Decapitated Prostitute. THIS IS NOT A WOMAN'S PICTURE, blares the poster reproduced on the DVD sleeve, THEREFORE NO WOMAN WILL BE ADMITTED ALONE TO SEE THIS SUPER-SHOCK FILM! I wonder if this was ever enforced? Did placard-waving feminists stage protests outside cinemas: WE DEMAND THE RIGHT TO SEE THIS SUPER-SHOCK FILM UNACCOMPANIED?

I'm not sure they'd have enjoyed it particularly anyway, to be honest.

I attended a barbecue on Saturday, to celebrate Phil and Vicki's baby Nicholas' christening - although this isn't actually until October. It was another socially awkward situation for me. I began by knocking (unlit) candles over, then I found the cider going to my head a little too quickly because I hadn't eaten enough. I stumbled into the room where all the food was laid out and started to load up a paper plate, before suddenly realising that, at this point, only children were permitted to eat. It was Vicki roaring 'Children!' at me that gave it away. At least she didn't follow it up with: 'For God's sake, think of the children!'

But what was I to do? Should I put the food on my plate back? That didn't seem right. But what else could I do? Eat it? Oh right yes: I did that, stuffing it into my mouth as discreetly as I could, but then I still held the crumb-strewn plate, symbol of my evil capacity to steal the food from children's mouths. Well, not their actual mouths, that would be disgusting, but you know what I mean.

In the end, after much hesitation, I brazenly strolled outside with the plate in my hand, hoping to turn the situation into some kind of joke. Then a cruel breeze grabbed the plate from where I placed it on a table and deposited on the lawn, far enough away from me that picking it up would have made me terribly conspicuous. I couldn't face the humiliation of everyone pointing at me and whispering 'He's eaten the children's food!', but from this point on was hyper-aware of that white disc out of the corner of my eye, the glowing moon of my shame.

After that it seemed that I had nothing to lose. I might as well get roaring drunk and become an honest-to-God monster, knocking over gazebos and throwing kids onto the barbecue. Luckily, things levelled off a bit then, and I left without causing any further havoc.

I think.

Dislocated

2010-08-23T11:50:00.000-07:00

Just when I was daring to think that I might live through a whole year without having to move house, Dave has gone stark raving mad and bought a maisonette one block down from where we are. As to whether I will go with him, this is still undecided, but I will obviously have to go somewhere, unless I convert his room into a cannabis farm. This is just one of what my telephone handset at work calls my 'current options'.

I was warned before I saw the place that it 'needs work', that the decor is hideous; I also knew that it was a 'mirror image' of our current abode. The phrase carried eerie associations, as though I would be moving, not just into a new home, but into some nightmarish parallel universe.

On seeing the place, I realised that I would, in fact, be travelling back in time. On one wall of the room that would be mine, the cast of Hill Street Blues grins from a poster ripped out of the TV Times, overseeing other relics of an 80's boyhood. Since then the room has been colonised by the boy's Dad's extensive video collection - all detective shows taped off the telly with neatly printed labels - and a flock of ancient post-it notes bearing mysterious messages.

The carpets are worn and faded (which is probably just as well, since you would shudder to see some of those patterns blazing forth in all their glory). The bathroom suite is pink, the net curtains brown. Nevertheless, it's a perfectly decent house. It has walls, floors, windows, even ceilings. All more or less where you would expect them to be.

Perhaps, once deciphered, the post-it notes (which would be yellowing if they weren't already yellow) hold a key for unlocking extra space. Because in this place, as 'the lodger', I would be (quite rightly) occupying a smaller room - the spare room, essentially. This would incur a lower rent so, yes, it's all swings and roundabouts, swings and roundabouts until I'm quite dizzy with possibilities. All of them just slightly depressing.

I have had mad fantasies of getting the landlord to reduce the rent of this place, though even in the maddest of these he has not gone below £600 per calendar month. Which I have accepted. In real life, when I made an attempt to broach the topic, he had a good chuckle.

Must be the way I tell 'em.

Decentred

2010-08-17T11:05:00.000-07:00

Another week, another leaving do at work. This time someone who has been there for 20 years - it is said that 'a lot of knowledge' is leaving the building. If things carry on like this the Centre will soon qualify as retarded.

A bigwig visited recently to talk to people in a department that is being closed down. He was supposed to tour the Centre afterwards but unsurprisingly the talk dragged on, right through the midday fire alarm test. We can only hope that this didn't coincide with an unfortunate moment in the guy's speech ('...and I'm definitely NOT lying when I say how sympathetic I am with your plight - ' WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP). That would be just awful.

There is no plan, they say, to close the Centre and I've worked for the NHS long enough that I can quite believe that there is no plan. But that doesn't mean they won't be sending in the bulldozers tomorrow, of course...

deflation

2010-08-09T12:37:00.000-07:00

The nights are drawing in. This was impressed upon me as I walked from Ingrave back to Brentwood the other Sunday evening and found myself making my way through an increasingly shadowy and sinister forest with voices chanting 'Blood! Blood! Blood!' in my ear. It was one of those occasions where I question the wisdom of leaving my i-pod on 'shuffle'.

This weekend we had the annual Hunt family Hog Roast. Although it was as delightful as ever, Dave and I left uncharacteristically early, even before the bouncy castle was deflated, sealing another group of unlucky (?) kids inside it until next year. Ross and Christine had tempted us away into the sunset with the offer of a lift. Somehow we ended up in the Swan, which has been refurbished again. On this occasion, they have decided to make it look shit.

Ross is now Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party! Oh alright then, the Warley branch. Although they were a little alarmed when his first action was to change his name from 'Brown' to 'Braun': they are trying to live down their Nazi past. (The Warley branch, that is - it's a long story.) Ross also revealed that he no longer goes to yoga classes since they doubled the fee and I asked him whether he still turned up to protest, heckling during the relaxation sessions. He said no, but that on his last visit he managed a 'dirty protest' when he relaxed a little too much.

I'm sure he doesn't mind me telling you all this. Especially as almost none of it is true.

Ain't Gonna See No Formulaic Film Cashing In On Nostalgia For Old TV Series, Fool

2010-07-31T10:13:00.000-07:00

So now there is a film of The A-Team. This is on my list of films to see, just beneath Cats and Dogs 2: The Revenge of Kitty Galore and Big Tits Zombie (yes, it is real). The cast were on T4, bigging it up, even Liam Neeson who you might have expected would have better things to do. But no, there he was, telling the world how enthusiastic he is about this film: 'When I read the script I said to myself - My God, I thought Ibsen was dead! And it was good to be able to play a real hero for a change, as opposed to, say, Oskar Schindler.' It is this show of enthusiasm that may constitute the real 'acting challenge' represented by The A-Team.

Not that I'm suggesting that the film will be bad. It is much more likely to be mediocre. But perhaps, in opening it out, they have managed to give it a bit of an edge. What always bothered me, watching the TV series The A-Team when I was younger, was that 'crime they didn't commit'. They were always very insistent upon that in the opening preamble to each episode; so insistent that I began to wonder what this crime was. Genocide, gang rape? I know they didn't commit it, but it still seems to matter. In essence, there is nothing wrong with the whole family sitting at home watching the antics of a group of men who haven't raped and slaughtered their way through a Cambodian village, but it does seem that it might influence the tone of the thing somehow. However, Dave assures me that it was all explained in the pilot, and it was something so dull that a.) I have already forgotten it, and b.) it probably wouldn't matter if they had committed it.

As for the film, I'm sure they'll come up with some interesting crimes for them not to have committed, maybe even a different one for each character. I can hardly wait to not see it.

life stings

2010-07-26T12:51:00.000-07:00

An insect mugged me as I turned into Park Road. I never even saw it, only its sting, which I had to pull out of my face. This kind of thing happens, I am told, purely by accident, but it felt personal: I was shocked and hurt. Only the news that this was part of a general uprising of the insects against humankind would have brought me any comfort. But this did not appear to be the case.

The next day my face was swollen up and I had to wear a mask and go live in the sewers. Though when I think about it, why did I do both? Life and horror films are not always logical. I watched Brazilian horror movie Inferno Carnal (aka: Hellish Flesh) from my Coffin Joe box set. Some people on the internet have slated these DVD's because of the picture quality and the burned-in subtitles whose English translations are, shall we say, not the most elegant in the world, but the latter only add to the fun in my opinion. In this one our writer-director-star Jose Marica Marins (aka: Coffin Joe) plays a scientist who is neglecting his wife because he is too involved in his 'experiences' (I think they mean experiments). These involve, in one instance, pouring acid onto a caterpillar, which seems of doubtful value to humanity, although we are assured that he has created acids strong enough to 'destroy a big arm in seconds'.

It isn't long before his faithless wife throws one of his own acids in his face, while her lover burns his lab down with him in it. He survives - hideously disfigured, we are told - but, curiously, does not press charges. Instead he broods and smokes his pipe through his mask - or is that meant to be his face now? - and continues to feed his wife money, all the while waiting until such a time as she will voluntarily return to him and - also voluntarily - throw acid into her own face so that they can be monsters together. At which point - ha! - he rips off his mask and reveals that he isn't disfigured at all! Hmm, so why was he wearing the mask even when no-one was looking at him except the audience? Perhaps the acid got to the script.

On some level though, I believed it all.

watch this space

2010-07-18T13:05:00.000-07:00

I was on my way to work when a woman stopped me and asked me the time. I showed her my watch; it seemed the simplest way to proceed. But she just stared at it as though she had never seen such a thing in her life before, though it is a very ordinary kind of watch. As the seconds visibly ticked by and still she continued to peer at it without speaking, I began to wonder if I had misheard. Perhaps she had asked me - for example - where the library was. In which case my thrusting my watch in her face might indeed seem a puzzling response. Maybe she was waiting for it to unfold into a 3D model of the town. Or the world. Finally, I said, 'It's a quarter to nine', and she seemed to come back to life again, thanking me and moving away. Now I wonder if I hadn't inadvertently hypnotised her.

At work, appraisals are looming. You have to fill in a form, explaining how you have managed, say, to pick up a phone before it stops ringing. Then your objective next year will be to speak into the phone, and so it goes on. It is simply a matter of knowing how to phrase things in a way that they will understand. Such as, for Equality and Diversity - 'I have managed to repress my deep-seated racism and homophobia, and strive to regard all of my colleagues as equal, no matter how inferior they are.' Or, for Health and Safety - 'I have conquered my pyromaniac tendencies, and no longer feel compelled to arrange little 'accidents' for my colleagues with the office guillotine.' The secret is to give the impression that you have triumphed over something. Otherwise it's like you don't mean it.

The Blood Badger Terror

2010-07-12T11:09:00.000-07:00

'Strawberries saw the cream of the town celebrate soldiers', says a headline on the front of the Brentwood Weekly News. If headlines are all about the concise delivery of information, then that one would make a great cryptic crossword clue. Further in, we see a picture of Stephen Mulhern with his arm around a twelve-year old boy, positioned just above the headline: 'Perv's sickening child porn haul'.

Unfortunate.

Not that I'd go along with this no doubt inadvertent suggestion, but there is something slightly unnerving about Stephen Mulhern, I find: as if he might be the result of some crazed scientist's attempt to grow a version of Philip Schofield in a test tube. The experiment hasn't gone badly wrong... but it hasn't gone quite right either.

The other night I hit my head on the corner of an open window at the back of the maisonette. It didn't hurt but it bled, as they say, profusely. I took it quite well and started working my weary way through the kitchen towel, but now I wish I'd milked it: stumbled into the lounge where Dave was, clutching my head with blood-spattered hands, and taken half an hour to tell a garbled, surreal story about how it had happened.

I could have said I'd been assaulted by a badger, and joined in the media frenzy surrounding the 'fox attack twins'. It seems a solid bandwagon to jump on - glancing at the schedules, I see that they already have their own TV series. Well, maybe it was a one-off, but a media career is surely on the cards with a name like that. The Fox Attack Twins! We can't wait to see what they'll do next! Once they've recovered and grown up, of course.

figments of the real

2010-07-05T11:18:00.000-07:00

I was checking the bus timetable at one of the stops in the High Street and this woman sitting there said: 'I get that bus', almost as though she was the only one allowed on it (she wasn't slim). When I explained that I was looking to get a later one she looked miffed, as though I'd rebuffed her.

People are strange.

After a funeral a woman was gathering up the green salad leaves which had served as a bed for the sandwiches. She turned round and said in explanation: 'My son's got iguanas.' I felt like replying: 'Terribly sorry to hear that.'

At work Lorraine was talking about the enlarged testicle of her sister's rabbit. It is having to be castrated. At the time, and it may have been this that inspired the comment, Jeremy Vine was going on about testicular cancer on his radio show. It felt odd to be sitting there in the office with Vine and co. encouraging you to feel your balls. Not that I did.

There is a new cafe in the High Street that does blue ice cream. A label stuck in it identified it as 'Blue Cloud'. It was one of the few ice creams there that bore a label, which seemed odd because that particular name didn't really tell us anything we didn't already know. Still, I asked if I could have it in a milkshake. 'Blue Cloud milkshake', said the woman serving, as though this exotic-sounding confection was perfectly permissible in the scheme of things - ordinary even. Nevertheless, I walked the High Street afterwards chuckling maniacally to myself, thinking: 'I'm drinking a Blue Cloud' and feeling like the inhabitant of some bizarre future world, you know like Avatar, if it wasn't crap.

What's My Name? (I Forgot, Again)

2010-06-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

I saw that Snoopity Dog-Dog from the 90's on Glastonbury, doing Gin and Juice, which brought back memories. Back in the day, my favourite tipple used to be gin and orange juice. This was by no means in imitation of 'Scoob', as we used to call him; oh no, I was way ahead of the curve on this one. But did I get 'respect'? No I did not. I was merely sneered at for drinking 'girl's drinks'. Hold up, I protested, here's a gangsta rapper eulogising my choice of drink! Does he look like a girl? With his pigtails...?

Hmm.

An elderly alcoholic told me that the drink had 'connotations of pre-war spinsters'. Gangsta rappers and pre-war spinsters make strange bedfellows... except maybe in a movie starring Ice Cube and Imelda Staunton, which - let's face it - could easily happen.

Perhaps my mistake, back in the 90's, was trying to milk the resemblance beyond the drink. There is something slightly pathetic about a male bookseller wearing pigtails, even if there are few hairstyles better suited to the onset of male pattern baldness.

Come On, Dine With Me

2010-06-20T14:20:00.000-07:00

The World Cup is here again. Obviously I was very excited. However, after the Come Dine With Me football specials were over (shortly before the tournament began) it all fell a bit flat. The competition seemed unlikely to provide anything as startling as Frank Worthington's avocado vinaigrette (an avocado cut in half with vinegar poured onto it).

Perhaps the best way to retain my excitement, I decided, was not to watch any of it. However, I did end up in a crowded pub on Saturday to see England play Algeria. The pub had recently been renamed the 'Three Lions Bar', though it seems unlikely to be a long-term thing. As I watched the game I found that the most interesting activity on the screen was going on in the top left corner, where a clock was counting away the seconds. Mind you, a lot of other people seemed to feel the same. I don't know why it bored me actually. I'm quite happy watching a film in which nothing happens for two hours and then it all ends ambiguously. As for the vuvuzelas, most of my music collection sounds like that.

A few chants were struck up. 'We're shit, and we know we are', was my suggestion but it wasn't taken up. I notice that James Corden and Dizzee Rascal have got together to do a World Cup anthem, a version of Tears for Fears' Shout. 'These are the things I can do without' - yes, see how the project helpfully critiques itself. Odd that it seems to be encouraging howls of therapeutic rage rather than cheers - or perhaps this is entirely appropriate under the circumstances.

Am I the only person to be bothered by the absence of a comma in the phrase 'Come on England'?

I used to roll my own but now I have a fag

2010-06-14T11:15:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, only a few weeks ago it seems, politicians were people who fed you feelgood lies while, behind the scenes, they were busy shafting you. Now they are people who promise you pain. Yes paying back the Great Debt is going to be 'painful for everyone', says David Cameron. Christ almighty, why not just kill us all and get it over with?

Mind you, here at least is a promise politicians might actually be able to make good on, although it doesn't give you much of a comeback when their policies destroy your life. 'Well we did promise you pain', they'll say. 'We can offer you more pain. Would you like more?'

Surely they are taking this too seriously. I'm no economist, but you don't actually have to pay back the national debt, do you? No you just wait until it reaches Third World proportions and then Bono or someone will campaign to have it written off. David Cameron and colleagues are behaving as if money really existed. Amateurs.

At least we are apparently going to be consulted at how we want our pain applied. They borrowed this idea from the Canadians but it does seems to tap into a particularly English vein of sadomasochism, possibly inspired by DC's experiences at Eton.

We are all his fags now.

bestiary

2010-06-08T13:47:00.000-07:00

I stayed at my aunt's in Newquay, a family holiday. 'Hello Martin', she said - to Justin. It hardly mattered. Holidays are about forgetting who you are. Calm days of gazing out to sea, into the misty distance, but nights of terror as the cat tried to break into my room, leaping up at the door handle. Unsuccessful in the first instance it seemed to retreat, but moments later I heard alarming crashing noises. Perhaps it was constructing a small battering ram - so I wondered, trembling in the dark. It's name was Gromit, after all.

I exaggerate. I don't even dislike cats. Dogs are another matter. My cousin nextdoor had a new dog, a Hungarian breed with a serious and old-fashioned look, as though by rights it should have been staring dolefully out of an ancestral portrait in some faraway hunting lodge. It could even have got away with a moustache, I thought. But its air of dignity was somewhat undermined by its failure to achieve stillness and by its constant attempts to chew through its lead. What if it succeeded? Would the house survive? Would we? Only a puppy, it was still big enough and clearly its ambition was to be everywhere at once. Thank God it lived nextdoor.

As though this wasn't enough in the bestial line, we went to the zoo. A woman persuaded me to 'gift aid my entry fee'. I didn't understand but I said yes. I had to give them my postcode, at which point my fears began, as if I would return home to find the place full of, say, marmosets.

Heidi wanted to see the lions. She didn't really want to see anything else. It seemed for a moment as if it would be necessary to pretend that all the animals were lions: monkey lions, ostrich lions, penguin lions... Luckily, there was enough in the way of distraction to keep her amused until we got to see the actual lions being fed. The meat was hidden under some logs, which did not present much of a challenge to these beasts. A voice explained that, in order to keep their interest, the lions were often fed in 'exciting' ways. Meat attached to bungee cords, hidden inside papier-mache zebras, and so on. You imagined the lions, presented with their keepers' latest wheeze, wearily rolling their eyes. How undignified.

An animal renowned for its 'speed and energy' was lying on its back as if dead. The tapir seemed to be mating, a process which involved the half-drowning of one of them. For all of these reasons I very much enjoyed my day at the zoo.

ding a dong every hour

2010-06-07T11:56:00.000-07:00

I caught the last half the National Movie Awards, the awards voted for by the public. The public? Who let them in cinemas? They even had an award for most anticipated blockbuster (the next Twilight, of course) but none, I noticed, for most bitterly disappointing one. The audience screamed at everything. Tom Cruise won the Tom Cruise Award for Being Tom Cruise. He tried to look surprised, and gave a speech in which he revealed that he knew exactly where he was (London, in England) and thanked everyone ('In particular, all of you.')

Don't mention it.

Excitement was also provided by the Eurovision Song Contest. I was not surprised that the UK's feeble entry came last, although the fact that it lagged so far behind a song in which a woman claimed repeatedly to have an apricot stone in her head is one of the many lovable mysteries of Eurovision.

My all-time favourite Eurovision winner is Ding A Dong, the 1975 Netherlands entry by Teach In (yes, them). It is so thrillingly urgent in its demand for the listener to 'sing a song that goes ding ding a dong' at all times, whether you are 'feeling alright' or whether, alternatively, you are wallowing in despair after 'your lover is gone, gone, gone'. That the compulsion to continually sing nonsense lyrics over and over again may in fact have helped to bring about the departure of the lover does not even seem to occur to them, so manically focused are they on their message.

If you actually followed their advice, of course, you would wind up as a dribbling lunatic, mindlessly chanting 'ding ding dong' in your soiled underwear as your life falls apart. But how refreshing it is to find Eurovision nonsense pursued to its logical goal: complete insanity.

you had to be there

2010-05-24T10:46:00.000-07:00

So we all trooped down to Sunshine House to celebrate Sam's first birthday. He looked faintly perturbed by the whole thing. Luckily Sunshine House was playing host to actual sunshine, and there was a barbecue too, although on arrival we were told: 'Don't mention the burgers' , there having been some sort of burger-related crisis earlier on. Something to do with supply-and-demand issues; sanctions had had to be imposed... essentially, we were entering a war zone. Children, of whom there were quite a few, screamed. But then, that's mostly what they do. In response to these tensions I immediately dropped a beer bottle, just to watch it smash.

No, it was an accident of course, and ensured that I spent the first moments of the party in search of a dustpan and brush. This being Sunshine House, it was no ordinary dustpan and brush but some sort of fabulous contraption, and I had grave doubts about my ability to use it.

I needn't have worried.

Later, it seemed that an actual war had been declared because all the 'men' disappeared. However, this was something to do with a climbing frame further down the garden which had to be moved or assembled or something. I had witnessed men taking off their watches and solemnly handing them to their wives in preparation for this task. Which had alarmed me. Luckily, I had just speared a chorizo sausage when the call came, and I couldn't just abandon it, despite Mat's assurance that I would provide a vital hindrance to the task.

I haven't been down the end of that very large garden in years. Rumour has it that illegal immigrants toil in plantations down there, boosting the Sadler millions and occasionally being picked off by alligators from the swamp.

Our revels were not disturbed by alligators, only by a random spaniel which materialised on the lawn and ran madly about until Rhys persuaded it to leave. He was rather cagey about how he had managed to do this, but it was probably through one of the following methods:

1.) A 15-minute PowerPoint presentation explaining the finer points of social etiquette and the desirability of the spaniel's remaining in its own 'space'.

2.) The feeding of one randomly selected child to the spaniel. (As I said, there were quite a few there).

Kevin said, to everyone's surprise, that worms lived in lightbulbs.

80's revival

2010-05-17T10:55:00.000-07:00

So the Tories are back in, their first act being to postpone EastEnders, since BBC coverage of the switchover overshot massively. First we were assured that EastEnders would follow immediately after the coverage had finished; then, when the coverage had finished, we were told that it wasn't going to be shown at all that day. Already we were being lied to.

Cameron's opening speech made mention of the elderly, the frail and the poor. Start running now, was the clear implication. If you can. There's something inhumanly bland about Cameron: stare at his face for too long and it threatens to shrivel into some hideous alien visage - specifically Michael Winner's.

No doubt Nick Clegg has already had his brain sucked dry by the Conservatoids. Poor Nick! He never really had a choice, though when he pretended to have one and did a bit of shopping around he was accused of being a 'harlot', of all things. As if jumping into bed with the first person you meet was somehow the reverse of that.

Meanwhile, the candidates for the Labour leadership are some people called Miliband (possibly it's the Steve Miller Band) and Balls. What kind of a choice is that?

I never liked The Joker.

Darts Match

2010-05-11T11:13:00.000-07:00

We went down to Wales for the wedding of Rhys and Hadeel, Dave driving. As an experiment, and because Dave's ipod had run out of battery, my ipod (or 'deep throat' as I have named it) was used to provide the in-car 'entertainment'. However, it seems that prolonged exposure to 'my' music sends Dave into a trance, and from there swiftly into clinical depression and psychosis - the experiment was abandoned at Reading services.

Rhys was putting up decorations at the wedding venue. He was so very pleased to see us that he immediately fell off the table he'd been standing on. Luckily, he bounced back, and we spent the night before his wedding in the traditional manner, watching Mega-Shark Vs. Giant Octopus starring Debbie Gibson on the Horror Channel. No doubt we would all have got riotously drunk, except Rhys spilled beer on the sofa and had to rush out to buy Febreze.

The wedding venue was a pub called Ty Mawr. This means 'Big House' apparently. You can see why they didn't bother to translate it. When, pointing at the name on the menu, I asked Rhys what it meant, he thought I was indicating the special offer just beneath it and was surprised at my puzzlement at the notion of 'two main meals for £8.95'. Despite which, he was all geared up to launch into an explanation, and I really wish now that I'd let him.

The ceremony went smoothly enough. Mat did the best man's speech, seeing as he was the designated best man. Both Rami, Hadeel's brother, and Rhys did speeches before him, and I feared that they might steal his thunder. There was no need to worry, as Mat doesn't have any thunder. He doesn't 'do' thunder any more than he can grow facial hair (Amanda, he explained at one point during the day, can do that for him). He was simply, hilariously, himself. It's an act he's been perfecting for many years, while still managing to give the impression that he's just starting out.

The night ended really quite bizarrely with Mat and I caught up in a seemingly endless discussion (I would hesitate to call it an argument) about Science (Mat) versus not so much Religion or even Spirituality as my fuzzy idea of 'something more'. Since Mat chose to define Science as 'everything that has ever existed or ever will exist' I feel I did well in keeping it going for as long as it did. We ended up in the hotel, standing talking in front of the bar for what might have been hours before I finally suggested getting a drink. At which point he said no he didn't really want another drink, and we repaired to our rooms.

Everyone else had drifted off long ago, alienated by the discussion. It was not quite Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus, after all.

Speak up Brown, you're through

2010-05-04T12:36:00.000-07:00

So Gordon Brown, not being content with probably being about to lose the election, seems determined to make a real effort to lose it, by ensuring that his off the cuff remarks about voters are recorded by Sky. He could still have tried harder - I would have hoped for something more along the lines of Catherine Tate's 'Nan' character - 'What a fucking liberty! Stupid cow!' Instead, he just called the woman a 'bigot', which at least meant that the formerly, supposedly, 'taboo' subject of immigration was now fair game. I watched BBC News patrolling Rochdale to discover whether people had views on immigration. One man was 'too angry to speak' (they didn't say if this was generally the case). Others were only too happy to do so (I summarise): 'They're coming over here, taking our jobs. They live on benefits and never do a stroke of work. In fact, we don't know what's the most aggravating thing about them: their tireless work ethic or their unbelievable laziness.' You quickly realised that the reason for the taboo was not to prevent 'rivers of blood' so much as a dreary grey drizzle of ill-thought through complaint.

Enter the BNP. We had a leaflet through the door in which Nick Griffin was pictured so close to Winston Churchill that they looked like a mythological beast with two fat heads. Churchill? Why not Hitler? Well apparently, after much discussion, they decided at BNP HQ that it wouldn't play as well.

Poor old Nick! Nobody ever asks him about his economic policies, they're too hung up on this slight indiscretion of him being a Nazi. For the record, I think their economic policy is as follows: get rid of all the immigrants and everything will be OK. However, I missed the party political broadcast. Lorraine said it was hilarious. A man in a turban was brought on, possibly at gunpoint, to express his enthusiastic support. Churchill appeared again (it says something about your campaign when the only celebrity endorsements you can get are from long-dead people) and there were lots of Spitfires zooming around. Perhaps their policy is to return the country to the 40's. This seems achievable: uninvent the internet, reintroduce rationing, close all the supermarkets. It would be like one big dull, endless, reality show - that never gets televised. No doubt the immigration problem, if there is one, will solve itself.

RIP, RJP*

2010-04-25T12:59:00.000-07:00

In Spike Milligan's Q series, from the 1970's, they had a way of ending a sketch, when they had run out of ideas, by having the cast stare at the camera and shuffle off to the left, all the while chanting, in a hopeless way: 'What are we going to do now?' I thought that I might steal this idea to commemorate my father's death. He loved Spike Milligan and I'm sure that he would have enjoyed the idea of a churchful of people acting in this peculiar fashion. And besides, it's a pertinent question: what are we going to do now, without him?

Just over ten days before he died he was still walking and talking coherently, though there could be no doubt that the cancer had taken its toll on him. Then he went into hospital for a blood transfusion, and, troubled by agonising back pain, agreed to stay in. From that point on, every day marked a further deterioration. This time, it wasn't the hospital's fault. Brentwood Community Hospital is a hospital for people who don't like hospitals (everyone). The staff seem to genuinely care. They keep asking if everything's OK, like in a restaurant. Of course - it isn't. But it is nice to be asked.

The book of deathbed humour does not have a high page count. Nevertheless, even at the very end, after we'd been called out at five in the morning to share his last minutes, there was one moment of unexpected laughter, when we were talking about how my Dad had hoped to hold out for Summer. 'Never mind', Justin said, 'it'll be scorchingly hot where he's going.' I looked at him in some surprise. Dad was a lapsed Catholic, it's true, but this seemed a bit harsh. It turned out that he meant the spot in the garden where he wants his ashes scattered. It's a bit of a suntrap.

My Dad was the kind of person who would talk to anyone, as his sons, who spent most of their childhoods waiting for him to finish interminable conversations in Brentwood High Street, knew to their cost. He sometimes felt that he had wasted his potential because he never made significant amounts of money, but his great gift was for life itself: it lay in his day-to-day dealings with other people, in his warmth and lively humour, the twinkle in his eye. He loved life. He really engaged with the world, and was always telling us what it would be like if he ran it - a scenario which varied alarmingly according to his mood.

Most of all, he loved to laugh. I really wanted the music at the end of the service to be Tommy Cooper's Don't Jump Off The Roof Dad, which I think he would have appreciated. This was vetoed, but I was able to include in the eulogy a couple of lines from a nonsense song I recall him singing around the house in my childhood, and which unaccountably stuck in my mind:

'When I see a sausage on a stick,
I can't help it, I have to get in quick.'

Of course, he would have forgotten the words as soon as they emerged from his mouth, but I hope that he would have been tickled to know that they actually got read out in church, by a vicar. (Thanks, Andrew).

Not very long after his departure, we were already living in a changed world. Volcanic ash filled the skies; planes were grounded. This does not seem like coincidence - life never will be the same again. This is just the beginning.

*Reginald John Plumbridge (1936 - 2010)

no entry

2010-04-25T12:58:00.001-07:00

tits and terror, or: Nigel Kneale's Breasts

2010-04-05T15:00:00.000-07:00

Beasts was a series Nigel (Quatermass) Kneale wrote for ATV in the late 70's, a series of supernatural stories themed around animals. I just bought it on DVD and it was worth the £20 just to see the ATV ident again. The other night I watched Buddyboy, in which Martin Shaw plans to convert a former dolphinarium into a porn cinema. The current owner is suspiciously eager to sell, however. What's bothering him? Is he being squeezed by the heavies? Is it the decor in his flat (ghastly)? Or is he being haunted by a vengeful ghostly dolphin?

Well, we never actually see a dolphin clanking its chains and walking through walls, but, yeah, it does seem to be the latter, sort of. That's a bit of a problem, since it is very hard to make a dolphin, or even the idea of a dolphin, sinister. Buddyboy (this is the name of the vengeful dolphin) doesn't manage it. But as it's Nigel Kneale, there is an idea behind the whole thing, with the exploitation of dolphins being used as a metaphor for the exploitation of women. A feminist subtext then, although I can't see Germaine Greer being overjoyed. Watching it at the age of eleven (?) I didn't notice. In true post-feminist style, what I noticed back then was tits, as if Beasts was really Breasts.

Of course I am so desensitized to such sights by now that they are a matter of supreme indifference to me; they were not so common then and, and to add to the trauma, I was watching this with my Grandma, who was babysitting. The biggest surprise I got watching it again came from the fact that I'd misattributed the breasts. I remembered them small and pale on the body of the girl (spoiler alert) who drowns in the bath at the end. But she is fully-clothed: the half-remembered breasts turn out to be enormous and tanned and sprouting from the body of a wannabe porn star who pops them round the door of Martin Shaw's office for assessment. It's one of the few instances in which something recalled from childhood actually turns out to be bigger than previously thought.

Also oddly familiar in that they belong to actress Marianne Morris who, in the 1974 film Vampyres (which I saw for the first time only last week) plays one of two lesbian vampires who reside (squat, really) in an English country house. Here they lure unsuspecting and lust-addled male motorists in order to drain them dry. It happens.

But what really must have addled my childish mind was that Stuart McGugan, a former presenter of Play School, is Martin Shaw's sidekick in this. So he's gone from having Little Ted and Humpty whispering in his ear to boasting of having weighed Marianne Morris' tits on the kitchen scales. I am now recovering long-suppressed, and possibly false, memories of Play School episodes in which he attempted to ravish Floella Benjamin.

the camel's back

2010-03-30T02:41:00.000-07:00

While walking over to the South Bank, I was asked by GMTV (represented by a short blonde and a tall cameraman) if I watched Dancing On Ice. 'No', I said. Then I added: 'Only on Harry Hill', but they'd lost interest by then. They should have known, shouldn't they? Who are you going to get on that bridge except foreign tourists and people who are interested in only the very finest examples of the culture? Now if they'd asked about Deal Or No Deal...

One thing I have noticed watching TV recently, is people having difficulty with the idea of straws. First I saw the villain in a Jean-Claude Van Damme film telling JCVD that if he wasn't careful he'd be 'eating out of a straw'. Out of a straw? Through a straw I can understand, but out of a straw, that sounds tricky, and would it even be worth it, the amount of nourishment you could squeeze into the average straw? Unless it was some sort of super-condensed space food, or just a giant straw... But there was no suggestion of this in the script.

Then, a couple of days later, and I can't remember what programme it was on, someone was commiserating with someone else for picking 'the short end of the straw'. Now come on, that whole straw is short, isn't it? It's not just one end. It's both ends. And the middle.

So what is it about straws? Are they a concept that's hard to grasp? Hence the phrase 'clutching at straws'? Or does 'clutching at straws' mean that they're easy to grasp, because straws are what you clutch at when you can't get the whole thing? Then again, clutching at straws doesn't sound easy, does it? Christ, now I'm confused. Straws really are tricky customers. Hence the phrase 'the last straw'.

Mysteries of the NHS

2010-03-22T12:24:00.000-07:00

I discovered that Liz is having a baby on Facebook. Well no, she's not actually having it on the social networking site, that would be ridiculous. In fact, she's thinking of having a water birth. I warned her that, in Romford, that means a public swimming baths, with about 40 other mums giving birth simultaneously. She was thinking of 'Romford' names for it like Aurora but I think I talked her round to Courgette (Parsnip if it's a boy). Vegetables are so in right now.

At work they are offering 'clinical masterclasses for CLODs', I noticed. That's 'Clinical Lead on Organ Donation', of course, what kind of clod wouldn't just know that? Meanwhile, our Assistant Director is being 'moved sideways'. A few days after he told us this he rang his PA claiming to be in Legoland. 'In Legoland' is possibly another term that means something to those in the know. Or perhaps he was really in Legoland, maybe when you're moved sideways, that's where you end up. At that level, it is hard to say. His PA is being 'moved sideways under him' while simultaneously remaining exactly where she is. The public sector is a place of many mysteries.

So is the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Why were they showing Lucio Fulci's 1970 film A Lizard in A Woman's Skin? Is it Art? Not exactly. Fulci went on to make Zombie Flesh Eaters. This is better, but not that much better. In front of me sat that guy who curates obscure exploitation movies for the BFI's 'Flipside' strand. It's a small world, the world of obscure exploitation movies. Then again, you'd expect it to be, wouldn't you?

This was an Italian movie set in London and dubbed into English, except for one brief scene they obviously missed in which the (English) characters start frantically jabbering in (subtitled) Italian. Of course, such things just add to the delirious pleasure of the film, which features Stanley Baker as a detective who whistles with a tunelessness that's almost avant-garde, and who at one point blithely orders the interrogation of every red-headed man in London.

The film also features one of the most gratuitous scenes in any film ever, in which the tormented (but is she?) heroine blunders into a room in a clinic and is horrified to discover a number of dogs hanging up with their bodies slit open and their beating hearts and squirming entrails on display. So much attention to detail has gone into the creation of this special effect that, at the time of the film's release, Fulci was almost arrested for extreme cruelty to animals, but its irrelevance is as breathtaking as its grotesquerie. Up until this point the clinic has seemed like just the kind of genteel place where upper-middle class people with over-strained nerves sit out on the lawn with tartan blankets over their knees. The director of the clinic apologises, but - amusingly - only for not locking the door.

The Last of Danny Dire

2010-03-15T12:01:00.000-07:00

What the hell am I going to do now? Danny Dyer's Deadliest Men 2 has finished. The last episode was a compilation of all the 'best bits' of the series, themed around DD's slang, used exclusively by him, I think ('Didgy', anyone?) 'My arse is flapping', he said, quite a lot. No Danny - that's your mouth.

The other week he was talking to Bernard O'Mahoney, author of Essex Boys. O'Mahoney knew the Essex Boys gangsters. Not very nice people, apparently. 'Naked violence', he says of one. 'It's the only thing he knew.'

Yes, here is a man who actually speaks tabloid.

Of course anything he can do, DD can do better. When O'Mahoney talks about the effect of Ecstasy on Essex club culture, he puts it like this: 'the monsters turned into mice overnight'. Cue Danny, in portentous voiceover: 'And the mice needed feeding.'

I thought they were talking about e's, not cheese. Similiarly, DD describes these gangsters as 'having their fingers in various unsavoury pies'. Hmm, aren't unsavoury pies just sweet ones? Such as lemon meringue pies? Then again, you wouldn't want to find a finger in one, would you? A meat pie, that wouldn't be quite so bad.

Mat is calling Sam's cuddly pink pig 'Mr. Pork' in an attempt to convey to his child the fact that cute animals may be slaughtered for food. He has even come up with the idea of manufacturing cuddly pigs, cows etc. which, when unzipped, can be disassembled into cuddly cuts of meat and possibly organs (all labelled of course). He thinks that this would be educational. Though, after some discussion, we decided that it might give young children the wrong idea about household pets, as they try to unzip Fluffikins and extract her tripe.

Give Rhys a Chance

2010-03-08T13:49:00.000-08:00

It was Rhys' stag do in Cardiff. This involved a five-a-side tournament in which I was unwilling to play. However, my ignorance of, and complete lack of interest in, football were not held to be any kind of drawback to my being the referee. I wore my old Waterstones polo shirt (because I wasn't expecting to enjoy myself) and was handed a whistle and two sets of red and yellow cards. I immediately proceeded to just stand there.

Because I had to be near the electronic scoreboard in order for the remote to work, I was stationed on the far side of the pitch from where everybody else was standing, in this freezing cold industrial unit. What should I do? The games were only fifteen minutes long so sleeping was not an option. Luckily, I had a notebook with me. Here are some excerpts from the journal I kept of my time in the wilderness:

12:31 Lonely. Confused. No change there then. Feel like a scientist stationed in some Arctic outpost, monitoring the obscure social rituals of a new breed of penguin. My prime directive: do not interfere. All I can do here is keep score and blow the whistle. It should be easy.

12:48 I blew the whistle. It seemed to work. They actually stopped playing!

Must not let this power go to my head.

1:10 Keeping score not so simple. On the telly you know when they've scored because everyone is cheering and hugging and having furious sex on the pitch. This lot aren't so demonstrative. Well, except maybe for Rhys' team. I'm going to have to rely on more subtle clues, such as attempting to observe with my actual eyes whether or not the ball has gone in the net. Shit.

Is anyone really bothered about who wins? I mean, it's only a game.

1:40 Have witnessed several acts of brutal violence, mostly committed by Rhys. Wonder if I should do anything. Oh, is that a pigeon up there?

No.

2:32 Bored. Yet tense. It's like watching paint dry. Except it doesn't dry. It keeps moving. All the colours swirling around in front of me. Feel strangely weak... Head... melting!

Shortly after this, the Great God Cthulhu appeared. But that's another story.

From the moments immediately following this game comes the only photograph I managed to take during the entire day. It shows a man in pink hotpants and an England shirt, seemingly alone in a car park, in broad daylight, downing a half yard of Special Brew. Rhys looks not so much like a man on his stag do as someone with severe mental health problems.

(The pink hotpants and England shirt were imposed upon him, by the way. All of the shame, I understand, lay in the England shirt.)

So we went into Cardiff in the late afternoon. It was touch and go whether we would all get there, since a bus journey was involved and, in Cardiff, the bus driver's well-known resentment of people who aren't carrying the exact change is enshrined in law, meaning that such people may be shot. Or at any rate not permitted to travel.

Despite this, we managed it, and proceeded to crawl through numerous pubs. Rhys was provided by Mat his best man with various challenges, one of which was to eat a raw chilli. This he did with considerable nonchalance for about thirty seconds. Then, metaphorically speaking, his head exploded.

It was his worst nightmare. The rest of it was a cinch. After several gallons of Coke, he was made to don Mat's grubby, ill-used Gordon the Gopher glove puppet and go round getting women to kiss it. Which is not too far from a normal Saturday night for Rhys, as I understand it.

As we moved further into town the pubs got louder and Gordon lost most of his clothing. (Much later, Mat had a dream in which Gordon - mute for years - got his squeak back. 'It just needed warming up', Mat said disturbingly.)

I was enjoying myself, at least until someone called Lleu turned to me and said: 'Are you Rhys' Dad?' Immediately, I was back in those snowy wastes, watching the penguins playing five-a-side. Thinking back, I wish I'd said yes and seen how far I could take it. 'Yes you could say I'm Rhys' Dad, although technically of course his father is a Staffordshire bull terrier. It was a strange time, the Seventies, let me tell you...'

Rhys said, when I told him about this and he'd finished laughing, that he didn't know who should be more insulted, me or him.

I thought me.

However, true to my elderly stereotype, I was among the first to go back to the hotel (a Toby carvery). Rhys, although very anxious that nobody should go home at all, followed about ten minutes later along with Mat, who had spent the previous hour burbling on about how what he really wanted was a nice cup of tea. We had been busy extracting Mini-Cheddars and chocolate bars from the vending machine. Some would have preferred a kebab but, as Dave put it the next day, 'You don't get dysentery from a Yorkie.' Which is the tagline to their new ad campaign, I believe.

Those who didn't return went to what they described the next morning as 'the place with the test tubes', suggesting that they wound up in a secret underground laboratory where strange experiments were carried out on them. Which is pretty much what I expected would happen.

Apres Garage

2010-03-01T11:15:00.000-08:00

I went to see Pere Ubu again. I've seen them twice over the past two years and been slightly disappointed. Nevertheless, following a band is a bit like supporting a football team. Or so I imagine. You stick with them through all their concept albums about ducks.

First I had to get a ticket. Since I very seldom part with money online this meant physically going somewhere, in this case the Jazz Cafe in Camden. It was dark, and unoccupied save for a little booth by the door, inside which a woman was struggling to operate a primitive form of Windows. She gave the impression of being new to the job, and even to civilization itself: when the phone rang, her first impulse was not to lift the receiver but to turn the whole thing upside down and frown at it. Nevertheless I got my ticket. Written on it were the mysterious words: 'Relentless Garage Sale'. The gig was at the venue formerly known as the Garage, in Islington, which is now sponsored by a fizzy drink called Relentless. The Relentless Garage sounds like a very peculiar children's picture book. Couldn't they have got a more suitable sponsor? Esso, for example?

Then again, that might have created confusion.

Two things pleased me about the gig. Firstly, I got a seat. Secondly, they played the old stuff. God, that sounds bad. Truth is, though, that whole concept album based on the 19th century Absurdist play was a dead horse which no amount of flogging - or teasing with cattle prods - could lend a semblance of life to. 'I screwed up', admitted lead vocalist David Thomas, having abandoned the scheduled playthrough of that album two songs before the end. After the interval, it was straight into one of their first singles, Final Solution ('Don't need a cure, need a final solution.')

Rarely have those words been greeted with such enthusiasm. 57-year old Thomas berated his audience for preferring the old songs, but he didn't mean it any more than, back in the day, he meant Final Solution to carry certain unfortunate associations. He was young and naive, back then. Not now. 'One day', he serenaded us towards the end of the set, 'I will be your man. One day, I'll be the best that you can do.'

'I'll kill myself first', said one (male) audience member. Rather unkindly I thought.

soldier talk

2010-02-20T15:32:00.000-08:00

Jeremy Vine was talking to a military expert about Afghanistan. He said that the Taliban were 'like fish' and also offered this piece of wisdom: 'If you kill the local people, they'll never support us.'

A great alternative to killing other people is to kill yourself. Or at least punish yourself in the name of fitness. A leaflet came through the door offering various sports and exercise-related activities I was very unlikely to be interested in. A new class called 'Body Attack' was offered. This sounds like a worryingly proactive self-defence class, but is, I think, just another form of aerobics. It seems a curious message to use in promoting health though: you must attack your own body. Like a starved Alsatian. 'Rip it apart!', yells the instructor, fresh from a starring role in Danny Dyer's Deadliest Men.

Regular readers may be disappointed that there was no mention of DD in last week's episode. I mean, this is pretty much a Danny Dyer fan site now. Or the nearest thing he has to one. (Only joking, Danny, if you're reading this!) The other week he met Mo Teague, an ex-soldier who left the forces with only 'a capacity for extreme brutality' on his CV. Well, that and a level one qualification in PowerPoint. Despite being a monkey-wrench wielding bouncer and, er, royal photographer, Mo is also a 'doting grandfather'. 'But we're not doing a documentary about doting grandfathers', says Danny. No, but you will, Danny. You will.

Ironically for a man with an avowed propensity for shitting himself, Danny's worst nightmare in this one comes from not being able to shit himself. Out on manoeuvres in the countryside with Mo, he is called upon to defecate into some clingfilm (which is how real soldiers while away the small hours apparently) can't follow through, and is driven away in a big black car. He won't win hearts and minds like this.

uninspired

2010-02-14T13:54:00.000-08:00

Carol at work reported a conversation she overheard between two employees of Tesco while shopping there:

1ST. WOMAN: Did your kids see that video about the earthquake in Fahiti?

2ND. WOMAN: Don't you mean Haiti?

1ST WOMAN: Whatever.

But never fear, lest the disaster slip from the public's mind a group of celebrities have come to the rescue with their new version of REM's Everybody Hurts. Earthquake survivors, should they be in a position to listen to this, will be pleased to be told that they're not so special - because everybody hurts. Even Leona Lewis. So just, you know, get over it, why don't you?

On Thursday I went to the Swan with Richard and Paul, with the idea of exchanging ideas in some sort of creative forum. It suffered slightly from the fact that none of us had any ideas - or no viable ones at any rate. My 'Prawn Ring' idea sounds a bit lame when you say it out loud - almost as though it actually is quite lame. As for Richard, all he could come up with was something about Michael Bolton being kidnapped and having his hair cut off, which for mysterious reasons imperils the entire world.

Only Paul provided anything that seemed even faintly plausible, a TV series in which an angel and a demon compete to influence the life of a different character each week. Only not quite as obvious as that might sound: Paul didn't even like the idea of a 'will they won't they' romance between angel and demon, which struck me as a clear selling point. Although he did quite like it if both the angel and the demon were female. Then it wouldn't be 'will they won't they' so much as 'they will'. Every week. Possibly to the exclusion of all else.

This is the life

2010-02-07T14:05:00.000-08:00

In Sainsbury's on Saturday night Dave and I purchased three bottles of wine and a block of Lurpak (slightly salted). There were very good reasons for this, but I did wonder what the checkout girl thought we had planned for the evening. The answer: we were going to Matandamanda's for lasagne - Mat had requested the butter because they had run out.

Afterwards we saw a DVD, Todd Solonz's 1998 film Happiness, which Mat's brother Mark had given him along with the recommendation: 'This is the worst film I have ever seen.'

Of course he is wrong. It's the best film he's ever seen - he just doesn't realise it.

It's hard to imagine what anyone could find to object to in this comedy about masturbation, serial-killing, and child-rape. Surely it is perfect Sunday afternoon entertainment, with plenty for the whole family to talk about afterwards, as in: 'Daddy, what's a serial pervert rapist?'

Meanwhile, this is how it is at work: the bubbly temp comes out with odd little questions, like 'Would I look better if I was taller?' or: 'Do you like cotton wool?' (She doesn't). Lorraine frowns at squirrels capering outside: shouldn't they be hibernating? We look it up on the internet and no, they shouldn't. They would need to be fatter. The names of two members of staff appear on the 'absences' board with 'Bang!' written next to them. It turns out that they are in a meeting with a design company of that name. I thought for a moment that they'd been taken outside and shot. 'Restructuring' can work that way.

My Genius

2010-01-30T13:38:00.000-08:00

I bought a notably thick smoothie in Somerfield. Smoothies are adult baby food really, but in spite or because of this I can't get enough of them. Dave asked what it tasted like and I told him that the flavour was dominated by banana. 'Dominated by bananas', he mused. That's now in the running for the title of my autobiography.

I have been astonishingly creative this week. I came up with another title - 'Vacuuming Elaine' - after mishearing something Dave said. I have no idea what it's about. But it's a start. I also had an idea for a film about a man trapped in a woman's body. Literally. You see he's been sewed in there, really tight, by a serial killer. I reckon Danny Dyer would be up for it. It could be another one of his worst nightmares.

This week, at exactly the same time as he was meeting up with yet another deadly man on Virgin, he was on BBC3 doing a documentary about UFO's. Naturally, this was in the finest tradition of investigative journalism, with Danny, having met a number of transparently insane individuals, concluding that he really didn't know whether UFO's existed or not and that, frankly, the subject did his head in. Next week will hopefully bring even more Danny Dyer programmes like Danny Dyer: Pope For A Day or Danny Dyer In The Night Garden.

I have also been working on a sequel to Titanic, which Rhys made me watch as part of our shared blog. So horrified was I by it that I had to develop another personality to review it with. But that's another story. In the sequel Harvey Keitel plays a survivor of the original disaster who is determined to hunt down the iceberg that caused the accident. The iceberg contains an alien spaceship and has now become a living entity, played by the Rock or Meryl Streep, whoever offers me the most money. Then -

Then I had to lie down for a while.