Week One
I don’t really have any resolutions for the new year. What I do have is a determination to lose weight. This week I have been eating much less than I would do normally and trying to insert some activity into my otherwise sedentary lifestyle. As a result I’ve lost close to three pounds. This is roundabout where I want to be. The purpose (rather than engaging in ‘fad’ diets) is to change the way I live, to take better care of myself. The aim is improved health, as much as it weight-loss.
On Friday we went to see The King’s Speech. It was our first trip to the cinema in 2011 and a good reason to start. Original but strangely comforting, funny, moving, dramatic. It had all the components of a good story and at the same time was extremely cinematic, which gives it the edge over other royalty-based films such as The Queen. Colin Firth was convincing, as you’d expect. There’s talk of him being Oscar-nominated. On the way home we talked about whether or not he deserves an award for that kind of performance. He was brilliant, as I’ve said, but was the role challenging enough? We thought of The Reader, in which Kate Winslett played an utterly disgusting character yet made us feel sorry for her, root for her, and feel upset when she took her own life at the close. No comparison between the two.
All I’ve been able to read is Harry Potter. I’ve started with The Philosopher’s Stone, reading a chapter to the bump every night. It’s nice to read aloud, although the crushing repetition of adverbs is hard to swallow, and makes me a bit angry.
I finished Stewart Lee’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate (incorrectly titled as How I Escaped a Fate Worse than Death in previous blog posts) between Christmas and New Year. It was hilarious, and also quite touching. He segued nicely between his stand-up routine and an account of a debilitating and quite embarrassing illness. At times it was a bit wanky. The endless footnotes got annoying. Overall a funny and clever man.
Christmas
Christmas Day was a mess of various meats, pickles, pies, chocolate and an overly long and nearly-violent game of Pictionary. At the end we fell into an icy car and returned to Boughton and that was that. A fitful night’s sleep (populated by meat-based dreams) later and we arrive at Boxing Day. England are wiping the floor with the Australians at cricket, later there be football, we all have presents to play with and ‘Christmas Telly’ to watch. Recorded the Queen’s speech and a number of episodes of Born at Christmas, a couple of films, Doctor Who, that thing that David Walliams and Matt Lucas have done about an airport. Drivel, basically.
Revolutionary Road has now been superceded by two Christmas receipts: Stewart Lee’s How I Escaped a Fate Worse Than Death and Tom McCarthy’s C. That’s a fiction and a non-fiction, which is a good pair to be going on with. I’ve read Revolutionary Road before and the final fifty pages are the most depressing, so I’m happy to leave them to memories, until its next read.
The Stewart Lee book is an autobiography of sorts, about his return to stand-up comedy following a several-year hiatus. Included are transcripts from some of his live shows, with comprehensive footnotes explaining the genesis of his ideas. The footnotes are a bit heavy-handed in places, and I sometimes fail to understand why they’re not just included in the text, but overall the book is funny and interesting and well-written. I read some to our baby last night until Abi got fed up with my glasses poking her in the stomach.
C is a strange book, about what I know not. Currently, a baby has been born in the eighteen hundreds (I think?) to the sounds of the world’s first wireless transmission. What I do know is that Tom McCarthy has always written interesting books, even if they occasionally misfire. Remainder is about a man who receives a great deal of money as compensation for something falling on him, who then uses the money to reenact in minute detail very specific events from his life. It gets a bit much near the end, with the never-compromising level of detail, but it’s about ten times more fascinating than most novels. Tom McCarthy also wrote Tintin and the Secret of Literature, which is an analysis of the famous Herge creation and is a pretty-much perfect work of non-fiction.
I’ve also just had a bath. It was slightly too hot, and now I’m finding it hard to feel my feet. No matter.
A festive message
Have now finished work for the year. Feels good. I love my job but it can be a bit draining and it’s nice to have a break.
Currently listening to the Christmas Wittertainment on BBC 5Live. I can’t explain how much I love Wittertainment and, in fact, how much I love 5Live. I almost feel emotional thinking about that radio station.
This morning I bought The Innocent by David Szalay. It’s a Cold War thriller set in an isolated psychiatric clinic, so pretty much ticks all of my boxes at the moment. When Revolutionary Road is wrapped up it will be waiting for me with its chilling, bony arms.
It would be nice to write some kind of 2010 summary, but I can’t be bothered with that sort of thing to be honest. Those ‘Top 100’ programmes on TV make the bile rise right to the back of my throat, and I’d hate to emulate them. Also making me sick at the moment on TV are Frankie Boyle’s Tramadol Nights on Channel 4 and The Impressions Show on the BBC. I don’t have any issue with Frankie Boyle himself (he is the only person who has ever made Mock The Week funny) or his near-the-knuckle sense of humour (there’s a place for that). My issue is just with the fact that it isn’t funny. At all. In fact, it’s anti-funny, and lazy.
I am more angry about The Impressions Show. This is a boring, derivative, drivel-strewn catastrophe of a programme featuring impressions which are a long way from original and most of the time not even accurate. How the BBC can commission this while passing on Lizzie and Sarah (which can be seen here) earlier in the year is beyond me. I know, I know, comedy is a subjective art (as is all…), but let’s be honest, does anybody actually laugh at The Impressions Show? It’s shite.
I also realise that moaning about TV is boring in itself, and that it would be a far better idea to either come up with something interesting of my own or praise what’s on that’s good. However, I can’t help but feel pissed off that we pay a hundred odd pounds a year for the BBC to churn out shitty comedies and low-budget dramas. Also on over the past week or so was The Nativity, an absolutely dreadful retelling of the story of Christmas. It was cheap, badly acted, badly scripted, completely historically inaccurate, like watching a children’s nativity play acted by adults. It was so bad I nearly cried.
Sorry. This was supposed to be a festive message but it’s turned into a bit of a rant. I’m being an idiot.
There is better news. This past week or so our daughter has been making herself known. She rolls and kicks and elbows and wriggles. On Wednesday we visited the midwife and heard her little heart beating and swooshing.
So that’s that. Christmas Day tomorrow. Turkey and potatoes and stuffing and all sorts of other nice things to eat. It would be great to hit an extra stone by the New Year. Wish me luck.
Big Freeze
You might be interested to know that I now have a comprehensive(ish) list of thematic tags. I also have a list of books read/bought/mentioned. This may seem like a pointless waste of time to you, but it’s the sort of thing that makes me happy so give me a break.
Yesterday in the space of 90 minutes the roads around Boughton became blighted by snow. After picking Abi up from work we had to enlist the help of a local to push the car up the hill. ‘He’s making you push while he drives?’ said the local to Abi. ‘And I’m six months pregnant,’ she said. That’s just the kind of guy I am.
The news channels are going slightly nuts over this week’s Big Freeze. They’re loving the pure-white graphics, viewers’ photos and excessively apolocalyptic outbursts. ‘Stock up on bread!’ Why, in these circumstances, is it essential to have bread?
Still, we managed to get out in the evening to my friend Mike’s 30th birthday party in Canterbury. Slightly concerned we wouldn’t be able to get back into Boughton, we left early, but it was still a good evening. Then, at home, I most definitely felt our daughter kick me through the medium of Abi’s stomach. After a previously dubious encounter, this one was a definite kick. Quite startling, all in all.
Reading Revolutionary Road, I’m finding more and more that I want April Wheeler’s story to end well, and remembering over and over that it doesn’t. It’s sad. She’s a strong, beautiful character, full of flaws and humanity and heart. She doesn’t deserve her ending.
This week’s highlights
This week I bought a cool and slightly deadly birthday present for my friend Mike. He turns thirty on Christmas Eve. Another friend, Marcus, turns thirty in March next year. I don’t know if I have any other friends approaching thirty. There must be some, as they’re mostly around the same age. So, for all friends of mine either thirty-plus or approaching thirty, well done. Life begins at fourty, so you’re nearly there.
Abi and I went to the cinema to see Harry Potter on Wednesday but it was sold out. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ we thought. We sat in the chairs at the cinema into which you are supposed to insert fifty p and they vibrate. We did not insert fifty p. We just sat and wondered what to do, and then we returned home. We watched The Apprentice instead of Harry Potter and to be honest I was pleased with that result.
Because I thought it might be a good idea to read about a youngish couple with lofty ambitions which are stymied by the unstoppable force of a suburban life, this week I started to read Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. I know how it ends, I’ve read it before and I’ve seen the excellent film. It doesn’t end well. Still, it is a quite brilliant book, coloured with the minutiae of everyday life. The opening, which tells of the Laurel Players’ disastrous performance of The Petrified Forest, followed by April and Frank Wheeler’s near-violent argument at the side of a road, is one of the most exquisite things in modern literature, I think.
Last night, Abi made me watch a Twilight film. I say she made me but I wanted to watch it, truth be told. I like the Twilight films. There, I said it. I like them. I know they’re terrible in every way but still. I like them. I also read half a Twilight book while on holiday this summer, and God damn it I liked that too.
Our daughter has started to make herself known. Every so often Abi twinges, twitches and looks at me and says, ‘She’s moving.’ I press my hand to Abi’s stomach but feel nothing. Last night, I thought I felt her move but, on reflection, I didn’t. She isn’t strong enough to be felt outside the body yet. I can hear her thoughts though. She’s thinking, ‘Release me from this prison. Release me.’ Or words to that effect. ‘No,’ I think back to her. ‘You are not ready. Your skin is still translucent and you are too small. Wait until April.’
Let Me In
On Wednesday we ended our cinema drought by going to see Let Me In, an English-language remake of the excellent Let the Right One In, of Swedish descent. There are a number of things wrong with it.
The first wrong thing is that there really wasn’t any need to remake the original film at all. It isn’t particularly old, it’s well-made, well-acted, well-lit etc. etc. It is a good film. The only possible reason for remaking it is that people don’t like to watch films with subtitles. Whilst I can understand this, it seems an awful lot of money to spend and is difficult to justify. The new film-makers seem also to have virtually copied the original film shot-for-shot. It is set in America, although the landscape is no different to that of Sweden. The dialogue is the same. The actors all look like the actors in the original film. In fact, it isn’t really a remake, it’s a translation.
The second wrong thing is that all of the subtlety, ambiguity and subtext of the original has been lost. Mark Kermode said today that Let the Right One In is a movie about teenagers which happens to include vampires, whereas Let Me In is a movie about vamipires which happens to include teenagers. He’s exactly right. Matt Reeves (directed Cloverfield before this…) has completely missed the point.
The third wrong thing concerns the special effects. Let the Right One In didn’t have many. Certainly no CGI. Let Me In crams them in all over the place, especially making the monster’s features all classic-vamp. This gives the film a glossy, monied effect, completely detracting from the original’s bleak atmosphere, which added so much to the theme of teenage alienation. Plus, the interesting local characters have been removed. Instead, we get sketchily drawn non-people who make no comment and have no role other than to get eaten and flash a bit of tit every now and again.
So, in short, it was not a successful trip to the cinema. More successful has been Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium, which is nicely written and short, although a bit predicatable.
I’m going to go now before I drown in my own ego.
Not-reading, not-writing and not-watching-films
I haven’t been reading much recently, or watching many films. Hence the lack of blog-posts. I have also been doing a drastically small amount of writing, which is a bit depressing. Nevertheless, I’m hopeful that things will pick up.
Of what I have read, JG Ballard’s The Drought was by far the highest quality. The only writer I can think of who seems to have created his own genre. Ballardian. Bleak, apocalyptic, but also strangely positive. I also re-read In a Country of Mothers by A.M. Homes (why all the writers who publish using their initials, I hear you ask? I’m not sure). Homes writes intricate realism, the type of which you see displayed by the likes of Ian McEwan (except set in America), and the sort of writing about which I am insanely jealous. Aside from these two books, I have pretty much been sustaining myself using my subscription to Stack (Google it, I can’t be bothered with links), which this month provided two excellent magazines Article and Oh Comely (Google them, too).
Aside from not-reading, not-writing and not-watching-films, I have mainly been painting. The bathroom first, after wallpapering it, followed by the stairway. Tomorrow we are having carpets installed on the stairs, which feels quite middle class. The next home-improvements shall come in the form of a flurry of putting up shelving. We need to rid ourselves of the two Billy bookcases which have propped up all of our reading material for the past four years. Considering how cheap they were, I find it amazing that they’ve survived all this time. They’re flimsy and dented and they have a variety of holes in them, but they’re still standing, even after three moves.
Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to put up enough shelves to hold all of the books, so some are having to go. This has been another job, sifting through the collection and weeding out those that are dispensable. I formed an Amazon storefront for about fifteen books, and I’ve lost money on nearly all of them so far. This is because I have been selling them for a penny, in the hope that I will gain profit from the postage. I haven’t. What an idiot.
So, life has been fairly busy. A few weeks back, Abi and I went to Camden to see the Hot Club of Cowtown (Google, Google…) at Dingwalls. It was the best gig I have ever been to. If we end up going to see them again, I will personally insist that everyone comes with us.
Minor update pt.5
I just uploaded a shedload of 18.13 photos. I wondered if the evenings were getting darker, but as this old one and this new one shows, it doesn’t appear to be yet.
Currently reading The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. Before that, I read The Scheme for Full Employment by Magnus Mills. I also received two excellent magazines from Stack. They were literary ones this month. There was The Drawbridge and another one I can’t remember the title of. They were both in the newspaper format, which I still hope to use one day to present some short stories.
Tonight I think we are going to see The Other Guys, which promises to be hilarious. I’ll let you know how it goes.
(Oh, and I think too much time has passed to write anything comprehensive about Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, so I won’t. Shame, because we also watched Kick-Ass recently and I think they’re comparable. Scott Pilgrim was better, in my opinion. I still think it is perhaps the most original mainstream film I have seen in a long while.)
Who needs an X-Box/PS3/Wii etc. when you’ve got NBA Jam on the Playstation 2. An amazing game.
TV-wise, I am currently enjoying This is England ‘86, although ‘enjoying’ is the wrong word really. Last night there was a graphic rape scene involving a teenage girl. Still, it is disturbing and dark and funny and intense and realistic. (Disclaimer: I was only three in 1986 so I can’t actually confirm that it’s realistic, but it appears to be). The jury is out as to whether or not you need a graphic rape scene involving a teenage girl on TV. I didn’t particularly want to see it, but then it fit with the story and it was hard to imagine the scene not being included in the programme. I suppose it’s about context. Whichever way you look at it, the acting was fucking incredible.
Aside from that, X-Factor is on at the moment. Need I say more?
Many birds are now enjoying the bird feeder. There are robins and tits and our friends the wood pigeons. They all seem to get on alright, although the pigeons mostly get the lion’s share.
Minor update pt.4
For a few reasons I need to try and finish Don’s second draft by the end of September, which is a challenge. I am trying very hard to ‘take writing seriously’. The aim is to write a thousand words a day, and four thousand a day at the weekend. If I manage this then I will just about cross the line if I really get my head down over the final few days. (I probably won’t manage it).
The Good Angel of Death was excellent. Kurkov went a bit mad with his last novel, The President’s Last Love, which was over-ambitious, so you could say that it’s a return to form (if you were fond of using cliches like that). I’m currently unsure what to read next.
I haven’t watched any films today. I started watching Once Upon a Time in the Midlands but then thought that Abi might like it, so I’m saving it for when we have an evening free. I have watched one episode of Jonathan Creek (guilty pleasure). It was a two-parter, so I’m now in suspense until Tuesday.
I have also played rather a lot of NBA Jam recently.
(Did I mention that I watched Donkey Punch a few weeks ago? If I didn’t then I should have done. I thought it was pretty good. Jaime Winstone was excellent, as she always is. I didn’t even think it was too disturbing, except for the bit when she carved up the guy at the end.
Have also recently watched and not mentioned Underworld [shit], Land of the Lost [better than I thought it would be] and Jurassic Park III [can’t argue with it, really, it is what it is].
At the cinema Abi and I watched Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, which probably warrants its own post if I ever get round to it. Suffice to say I loved it, but what I loved the most was just how much it polarised the audience. Several people walked out after ten minutes, and those that remained said it was the best thing they’d ever seen. Plus, you just have to love Edgar Wright. You have to. [Not sure I’m going to be able to bring myself to apply the same theory to the otherwise brilliant Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s new film Paul, as it looks terrible.]
I just thought of something else, too. I found this video of Jack Heal on the internet, who won the Chortle Student Comedy Awards 2008. Very funny indeed. “‘Affirmative,’ I said, because I’m a bit of a twat sometimes.”)
Minor update pt.2
Uploaded a bunch of 18.13 photos stretching back to 5th August. As usual they are not artful or interesting. They just exist. There’s a 7 day gap while we were in Barcelona. I tried to keep up with it, and Abi kept reminding me, but in the end I was having too much fun not giving a shit about the time.
I have started chewing matchsticks. Found a load of them at the bottom of a drawer. I find that they add a little Clint Eastwood to your day.
Recently read: The Comforters by Muriel Spark, Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Creation Revisited by Peter Atkins and The Broker by John Grisham.
We have a bird feeder now. Every morning there is a fat juicy wood pigeon stuffing its face. There are also two blackbirds. I like to think that they are the same blackbirds that visited our garden for a few days when they were adolescent. If so, they are probably thinking something along the lines of, ‘Where was this fucking food when we really needed it?’
This matchstick in my mouth has just started going all stringy.
Have kind of lost interest in data collection. Still quite obsessed with light and parallel universes. And time travel.
I wrote a short story. It’s a bastardised version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As advertised on Twitter, I am planning on writing some more then turning them into a newspaper. I will give everyone a copy who asked for one when I initially wrote the tweet. You may be waiting some time.
Other writing is ticking over. Slowly. Very slowly.
