Song 4 wrapped

It's been a bit quiet on the music front, in case you were wondering. Our last recording session - September 9 - was spent re-recording one of the vocals we weren't happy with, which didn't really count as progress in my mind although the result was much better, and since then we've been on another mini-hiatus what with one thing and another. Sore throats, other projects and commitments have conspired to mean the September 9 session will be the only one this month, and an autumn release of Weird & Wonderful (the title of our second album) is looking increasingly unlikely.

On the upside, it's given Annie the time to concentrate on production, and last night she announced that she'd finished work on our fourth recording: Sovereign Stranger.

All this is relatively relaxed and comfortable, but that's about to change. In an effort to promote our stuff, Annie recently suggested we do a local live gig. Chorlton is a thriving centre for live music. Mainly artists building a reputation by gigging their way around local pubs and clubs but it also has its fair share of famous names - the Bee Gees and Badly Drawn Boy to name but two. So with that in mind she's approached one of the bars which regularly hosts live events to see if they'd be interested in putting us on.

Have to admit the thought of it gives me a clenched sphincter. Apart from the odd karaoke session (a relatively safe environment with the words scrolling up right in front of you) I haven't been on stage since I was 9. I've determinedly - and so far successfully - avoided being roped in to any of the Chorlton Players productions during the nine years I've known them. Now it looks like I won't be able to avoid the spotlight. Assuming bars have spotlights.

Don't go running off with the idea that I can remember the lyrics to our songs just because I wrote them. Unfortunately it's not that easy. MUCH practice will be required!

Locking horns

A short hiatus between painting doors is coming to an end, but because the bathroom door is next on the agenda, timing is everything! It would be very embarrassing to have anyone in the house except Nikki and I during the (approximately) ten days the door will be off. Heck, it'll be embarrassing enough with just us!

So with that in mind, I've stolen a march on the job by fitting the new lock first. We bought this - along with a full set of new brass knobs - about eighteen months ago when we found them online at Cast In Style. Most of the rim latches on the bedroom doors are in fairly good condition, only needing replacement knobs, but the bathroom door latch was pretty chewed up, with its small shoot bolt bent almost at 90° and not looking very secure. When we saw this "Regency Cast Iron and Brass Rim Latch" we knew immediately it was exactly what we wanted.

As you can tell from the exposed screw holes, it's considerably more compact that the previous latch, which will give me a Polyfilla challenge on the edge of the door, but I'm really pleased with the look - even on the unpainted door - and the latch is a thousand times more solid and secure. So much so that I'll be sure to fit the "emergency release" mechanism once the door is painted!

A visit from the squad

Ding-dong!

Always an annoyance that, when we've locked up at the front after returning from a highly successful shopping expedition, and weren't expecting to have to sally forth again until Monday.

"Hello!" *smiles*
The face of the twenty-something girl on the front step positively gleamed with her inner radiance. A twenty-something lad shuffled awkwardly from foot to foot on the path behind her. She clutched a thick, black-leather-clad book in one hand.

"Is that a Bible?"
"Yes!"
*slight pause*
"Seeya then." *closes door gently*

I wonder what their conversion rate is? Oh, hello, we've come to talk to you about God! Really? How wonderful! I've never thought much about it before, but you're right! Where do I sign?

I don't think so.

Half way-t

Today marks the 6-week anniversary of my manuscript submission as a result of Query 44. The agent's quoted turn-round time for reading a full manuscript is twelve weeks, so I'm half way through the wait. Half wayt.

I don't know their modus operandi. Is it queued, waiting for a reader? Is it with a reader, and they're half-way through? Do they use more than one reader to gain a consensus? Have they already read it, and made a decision, but not got to the part where they send the email yet?

It hardly ever leaves my mind, my story. Out there in the big wide world, trying to impress someone who could make it famous, or condemn it to a few more months or years gathering dust on my hard drive. Proponents of positive thinking claim you can influence events by envisioning the outcome you desire, so I do spend a few minutes each day "seeing" myself responding to their positive email; signing a contract; telling family and friends about publication dates. Right now, it's still a dream. But everyone needs a dream, right?

Almost imperceptible...

I rehung the dining room door yesterday. All painted up and with nice shiny new brass handles, it went up without any bother and looked really spiffy. Closed perfectly too, the latch clicking satisfyingly into place. Good job!

Except I couldn't open it again.

It was binding at the top right-hand corner. And when I say binding, it had grabbed hold of the door frame like a dear old friend that it had missed desperately all those long lonely weeks it had been lying on its back in the conservatory being subjected to the unbearable heat of day; the chill of night; the indignities of sanding and painting; not to mention the forceful SCREWING in of new hinges, but now it was back - BACK! - and it was damned if it was ever going to let go of its frame again.

In the end I had to use a chisel to lever the blimmin' thing open.

A few seconds with the electric plane while I buzzed a millimetre or two off the top edge, and all was well.

It's a funny thing though. The door was off for three weeks. When it first came off the room looked incredibly bare, but we got used to it. Kinda. Now that it's back up, and having a door in a doorway, well, it's not exactly unusual is it? But the room looks different, so I find myself squinting at it with a vague sense that something's changed and taking a moment or two to realise that it must just be that the door is back from treatment.

A long way to climb

The new series of Strictly Come Dancing started last night here on UK TV, amid a huge media hoo-ha regarding the replacement of long-time judge and dance expert Arlene Phillips with 2007 winner Alesha Dixon (pictured). Were the BBC being ageist as some commenters claimed? Were they trying to redress the overwhelming whiteness of the panel and meet their ethnic quota? Or were they just after another bit of eye candy to brighten the programme up for the blokes?

There's no doubting that Dixon ticks all those boxes - young, black and attractive - but are any of these suitable credentials for joining a panel of judges whose job it is to critique a dancing competition? Judging by her performance last night, I'd have to say no. And judging by the reported reaction of the television audience, forum and chat room posts, and media critics in all their various flavours, I wouldn't be alone. Thousands of nos have been resounding up and down the country. Compared to the knowledge and experience of her fellow panel members - Craig Revel-Horwood (dancer, choreographer, theatre director), Bruno Tonioli (dancer, choreographer), and head judge Len Goodman (four times British champion Exhibition dancer, dance teacher and professional judge) - her single credential is having won the competition itself two years ago.

So having her comments restricted to knowing "how the contestants are feeling," enthusing about the way they relate to each other, and agreeing with the other judges tells us nothing more than we can see for ourselves.

Question is, will the BBC be big enough to admit their mistake, climb down, and offer Arlene her old seat back for the next series? Because for now, a lot of the sparkle seems to have gone out of Strictly, and putting more sequins on the costumes won't help.

The fun gets funner

More work-time language fun, this time from one of our... no... I'll stick to my Principles of Anonymity. This arrived in an email yesterday:

... as far as I am a ware...

What? As far as you are an illegally-obtained piece of software? As far as you are a piece of pottery? As far as you are an ethnic native of Tanzania? As far as you are a small town in Hertfordshire? No, dear boy. You are aware. Or rather, you ain't.

ZoomZoom

A few years back I joined ZoomPanel. You may have heard of them - they run online surveys on behalf of marketing companies to gauge opinion before adverts, products, etc come onto the market, and also keep tabs on the public's views on issues of the day. With a self-selecting audience I'm not sure how meaningful the results of the latter are, but let's not get sidetracked with that.

In exchange for completing their questionnaires, members rack up points which can then be exchanged for "gifts." When I first received an invite to sign up it sounded like a bit of a laugh. Register my opinion (always an attractive proposition) and win some prizes while I was at it.

Two things weren't immediately apparent:

• the rate at which points would be accrued
• the value of the "gifts" on offer

The reward for any survey is usually around 50 points, but with survey requests only arriving sporadically, often with several weeks between, the maximum rate at which points can be won is limited. The reality is worse than that. Surveys are often oversubscribed, or aimed at a different demographic, so I'd often answer a few questions only to be told that the survey had closed, or they were looking for someone with a different profile.

Far be it from me to cast aspersions, but it did seem after a while that some quite useful marketing information was being gathered before the survey suddenly announced it was full, or decided I didn't fit the bill. Not only that, but every survey always asked for information - gender, location, age etc - that was already available in my profile. Tedious, to say the least.

Even so, with the eagerness of youth (this was about three years ago) I pressed on, keen to make my first 1,000 points and gain access to the cornucopia of delights available to me. Gifts are arranged in "portfolios" which require a certain number of points before they can be opened. 1,000 points for the first, 2,000 for the second and so on. When eventually I began to approach the thousand-point mark, I took a look inside the first portfolio.

Hmm. Nothing much there to get excited about. I decided to press on towards the 2,000-point barrier. It's taken more than three years, but I did eventually reach it. Sadly, the prizes in the second portfolio proved almost as uninspiring as the first, so I cut my losses, ordered two things from the first portfolio, and cancelled my account. What had appeared to be "a bit of a laugh" actually proved a complete waste of time. The surveys took around 20 minutes on average and to reach 2,000 points I must have completed something like 40 of them. Over thirteen hours effort in exchange for two objects worth no more than a couple of quid.

So why am I telling you all this?

Well, the first of my two shiny new toys arrived yesterday morning. A small tripod "ideal for use with all types of camera."

Unfortunately, mere seconds after removing it from its blister packaging, I made the mistake of trying to deploy the legs. One of them snapped off in my hand.

When I stopped laughing I did wonder whether it was worth breaking the other one off and using the pathetic thing as a monopod. One more look at its cheap plastic construction was enough to dispel that idea. It's now in the bin, along with my ZoomPanel account.

And then I noticed...

...people who can't tell the difference between 'then' and 'than'.

My latest example: I just read a blog post by a famous author; some idiot flamed him in the comments; and a later commenter wrote (and I quote): "There are better places to be a troll then here."

I don't know whether this kindergarten grammatical error is becoming more common or if it's just that I'm *seeing* it more often, but I've caught it dozens of times in the last few weeks and it's becoming about as irritating as people who write "I should of been there" or "I would of come if I'd known."

What's more, I suspect it has the same root. That is, people writing how they speak. Should of, could of, would of, all come from hearing should've, could've, would've in their daily lives without ever seeing them written down properly or being taught the grammatical explanation for the contraction. I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover "better places then here" has a similar explanation. It probably started in the U.S. where "than" is often pronounced closer to "then" and pretty soon with a lame school system (both there and here, sadly), no-one knows the difference.

The real sad thing is that it's not confined to kids and illiterate forum dwellers. Even those who should know better - professional writers among them - have fallen into the trap.

We recently watched the final series of The Wire - a marathon viewing session lasting most of Sunday - and I was struck by the way not only the kids manning "the corners" but also senators, lawyers and the police expressed themselves with minimal vocabulary. A single word like "shit" - uttered with variable expression and dependent on context becomes something like a universal noun.

An expression of surprise: Shit!
An expression of disgust or disbelief: Sheeeeeeeeyit.
A generic description of one or more objects: Don't mess wit' my shit.
A reference to a horrific event or something that must not be spoken of: Shit like that.
A misdemeanour: What's with that shit?

etc, etc.

After a few hundred years of increasing literacy - pretty much since the invention of the printing press - anarchy is returning to language. At this rate it won't be long before we're all communicating in a series of grunts again. Sheeeeeeeeyit.

Say what?

A lifetime love of language occasionally manifests itself in mild amusement at the verbal knots tied in the sentences of others, malapropisms and general mis-speaking. Mild internal amusement, I should add. It's not my style to wag fingers and snort with derision or anything like that. I don't get pleasure from others' embarrassment(*).

So there'll be no names or other identifying material in my relating a comment from a colleague on a recent voice conference, when describing how his current project was going:

It's got a status of 'quo'

I wonder where they get it from sometimes.

(*) Note: I don't count forum dwellers. I'll wag fingers, snort, pick apart, ridicule, correct, bang on about apostrophes and generally not give any quarter when I'm on a forum. It's all part of the fun. Besides, they deserve it.

Eradicate!

For several weeks now we've been finding dead wasps about the house. The odd one on the stairs (one perched rather precariously on a newel post), in our bedroom or the lounge. Occasionally flying around a lightbulb or crawling dazedly across the carpet. But mainly, and in copious quantities, in Blythe's room. Now regularly shared by Nat.

The last time they stayed for any length of time Blythe mentioned casually that there were a lot of wasps flying OUTSIDE the bedroom window too. A quick glance up at the fascia board above her window revealed a constant stream of the little blighters crawling under the eaves, and flying out, while several hovered about like transatlantic aircraft stacked above Heathrow.

We had a nest in the loft.

With an alarming lack of procrastination, I booked a pest control officer from Environmental Health. He turned up yesterday afternoon. I expected him to be kitted out in a full-body protective suit a la bee-keepers. No. Jeans and a T-shirt. Clearly a man of experience. I offered him frontal access, or the alternative of a short crawl across the rafters. "I'll do it from here," he said, and went to fetch his ladder.

The information sheet he handed me on completion of the job a few minutes later stated that we "may see increased activity around the nest for 2-3 hours after dusting." They're not joking. Heathrow never had a stacking problem like the one around my eaves. A temporary phenomenon - they should all be dead in a day or so.

Your call is really important to us

Those people who record the well-meaning messages that regularly interrupt the music on IVR systems. Do they realise how counterproductive they are?

All our operators are still busy.
Your call is really important to us.
Please continue to hold and someone will be with you shortly.

Sounds so friendly and comforting the first time you hear it, doesn't it? You're REALLY important to them and they're so sorry you have to be kept waiting, but hang in there. It won't be long now!

By the tenth time you're ready to wring the stupid bitch's neck. If I was so sodding important to you, you wouldn't have kept me waiting fifteen minutes, and that bit about "shortly" is clearly a total lie. Why don't you STFU and answer the call, damn you?

I know how helpdesks work. I know that the usual reason they want you to keep holding is they have targets about minimising the number of lost calls. People who phone and refuse to be kept waiting. They just hang up and try again. Or, worse, hang up and don't try again. I know that whoever answers the call, finally, knows how long you've been waiting. So, armed with that damning statistic, do you think they apologise for the wait? No...

>click<
Hello-this-is-Simon-do-you-have-an-account-number?

I can't help myself. I sink to their level. I recite the account number in a bored monotone. I attempt no normal human interaction. Simon's frustration with his job has communicated itself to me and been converted in real time into my frustration with him and his organisation. Want to change that? Don't keep interrupting your music with messages of false hope and meaningless overblown declarations of my importance to you.

Healthy debate

A three-and-a-half-thousand mile perspective on the current debate in the U.S. about health care can make the whole thing seem like some sort of political pantomime played out on the nightly news bulletins. Living in a country which, for more than 60 years, has had ubiquitous health care free at the point of use (or as near as makes no difference), is a far more significant barrier to understanding the issues than distance. I wonder how many in this country stop to realise how fortunate they are.

A package on this morning's Today programme brought it home to me in a "WHAT?" moment of epic proportions.

The article concerned a regular working mum in the US (so I should probably say mom?) for whom one thing separates her from most other regular working mums. Her medical condition: rheumatoid arthritis. Her health insurance allows her one course of treatment per year costing $500. Unfortunately a year's supply of just one of the medications she requires to alleviate the pain from her crippled hands costs $50,000. As a direct result, she lives with constant pain.

I didn't quite catch whether or not this was directly related to the problem with her hands, but she was recently dug out of a car wreck in which she almost died, and found an ambulance waiting to take her to hospital.

Shaken from her near-death experience and having sustained several injuries, she was nevertheless reluctant to step into the ambulance. She knew she couldn't afford the trip to hospital, let alone the treatment when she got there.

A single ambulance ride costs $11,000.

That was the double-take, jaw-dropping moment for me. First, a silent prayer of thanks that if I'm ever unlucky enough to have a significant car wreck, and lucky enough to be pulled out alive, the last thing I'll have to worry about is the trip to ED. Because our ambulance service, much maligned as it often is, doesn't cost a penny. But second: how much? $11,000?!? How on Earth can one trip by ambulance have that kind of price tag. Someone, somewhere, is raking in an enormous, toe-curling and utterly immoral profit from that, while ordinary people standing beside their written-off vehicles try to work out whether they can afford to be taken to a place of safety and given the treatment they need.

And this, in what is supposedly the richest nation on Earth.

A nation now engaged in an almighty bickerfest of shouted half-truths and vested interest, trying to protect the profits of those health insurance companies at the expense of that nation's most disadvantaged citizens. Wake up people. Someone said that most of middle America is only a single accident away from bankruptcy. It could be you tomorrow.

Thank God for the NHS. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, it needs reform. Yes, it's been allowed to bloat until it is, apparently, the world's fourth largest employer at approximately 1.3 million staff. But for all its faults it will be there when you need it most, and whether or not you can afford it.

Spider Mum

For the last few weeks we've been nature watching through our new kitchen window. A spider took up residence there and shortly after we noticed she'd spun a small sac. By a lucky coincidence I happened to be standing by the window when she started laying her eggs into it, which gave me a kind of "godfather" proprietary feeling towards the little guys as I've watched the sac grow and swell over the weeks since.

Pretty soon individual spiderlets began to be discernible through the silk and then, shortly before the weekend, one of them crawled out. Followed by another. Pretty soon they were all moving slowly about in the space under the window rail, protected from wind and rain by a large web their Mum had spun over the corner of the window.

Now my camera is notoriously bad at extreme close-ups - the autofocus is always totally defeated (in this case it insisted on focussing on the neighbour's wall) and the manual focus is totally useless - so I've had to back off and zoom in from a distance for this shot, but if you click on the pic to expand it and then zoom in you should be able to see the little guys, who at this stage are still spending most of their time inside their old sac.

During the period of development, Mum has faded away almost to nothing. I mean literally. When she laid the eggs she looked like a regular small spider, but having not left their side for two whole months she's become gradually more transparent. A shadow of her former self.

All this has been a fascinating pageant, developing in front of our eyes as we check up on the family every time we do the washing up or make a cup of tea, but we've decided that once is enough. If there are any signs of sacs or egg laying next year I'll be deploying the hose. Incy Wincy she ain't.

Twitterati

Sorry, I'm still thinking about this bloody Twitter thing.

It's like a few guys thought "hey, let's think up the most seriously messed up Internet thing. You know, something that's really stupid and off the wall, and then we can pretend it's like the coolest thing ever."
"Yeah! We can get all our mates on it, and they'll get all their mates and pretty soon it'll go viral and all the sheeple will join in cos they'll be scared shitless that they're gonna miss out on something."
"Right!"

Actually the Twitter page on Wikipedia makes really interesting reading. Some serious up-front investment with very little money made so far, but "revenue projections" into the billions. Makes me laugh. They assume it'll keep growing at the same rate - or faster - that it has done so far. Totally failing to grok that the sheeple they rely on can be distracted to "the Next Big Thing" just as easily as they were to Twitter in the first place. And the fact that the mainstream media has caught on to it - witness Burns and Humphreys starting to Twitter as I mentioned yesterday - could well be the kiss of death for their target demographic. We're already hearing "I'm SO over Twitter." Once it loses that cool cachet, it has nowhere to go.

The Twittering classes

Before you ask, I don't tweet. I mean, I like to think I'm considerably more net-savvy and "down with the kids" than yer average 52-year-old, but I really don't get Twitter. OK, there might be a slight buzz in knowing what someone like Stephen Fry - a famous twitterer (notice I avoided saying twit. Oh. Damn.) - is doing from moment to moment, but for most people it must be a constant stream of mundane trivia.

Maybe that's the point.

Someone recently wrote that updating your Facebook status (something else I've stopped doing more frequently than once every couple of weeks) is equivalent to stepping out into your street and shouting "I'm going to have bangers and mash for dinner tonight!" and then going back indoors.

A good analogy which, if true, must make tweeting the equivalent of
"Going to the toilet now"
"Oh - I think it's solids"
"Wiping my arse now"
"No, still leaving a mark"
"Still wiping"
"OK. Clean now"
"Washing my hands now"
etc.

I think people sign up because they're afraid they'll miss something. Trouble is, the more people that sign up, the more likely it is that you will miss something. It's like having a website. Not so long ago - maybe, what? Ten years? Fifteen? - you were bleeding edge if you had a website. Now URLs are everywhere and you're considered a bit weird and antiquated if you don't have a website. Businesses especially. Everyone expects to be able to type in "hoover.com" and immediately find product details, nearest dealers, latest news, history of the firm, returns policy, recent recalls, whatever. It's just part of the fabric of society. And with immense and frightening rapidity, Twitter is getting there too.

Now, I'm seeing "follow us on Twitter" on company websites. Imagine that. You can follow Hoover and get minute-by-minute updates about new vacuum cleaners. Sorry, what? I mean, seriously, WTF?

So last night, North West Tonight (for the benefit of non-UKers and, probably, most non-Northwesters, that's our local magazine news programme) Gordon Burns was making a big thing about His First Tweet. He's been sending out an email newsletter for ages, which is pretty net-savvy and down-with-the-kids in its own right. I mean the guy's 67 ffs, so all credit to him. But now he's caught the Twitter bug too.

And then bugger me but here's John Humphreys on the Radio 4 Today programme this morning - that bastion of British Correctness And Rectitude - and he's doing it too!

Christ on a bike.

Niagara revisited

I don't write about the weather very often. I know it's supposed to be British to talk about it a lot, but for blogging? I don't think so. Unless it's extraordinary. Well this afternoon, it was.

In a moment of total awe I failed to take a photo of the deluge, or the longest and most violent hailstorm I have ever witnessed, but the memory will stay with me for a long time. So much rain that it overflowed the gutters back and front, delivering a sheet of water across my study window to almost rival Niagara. So much hail that the lawn turned white and the deck was completely hidden from view. When I left to pick Nikki up from work an hour later, there were still piles of hail beside the front path. When we returned 40 minutes later, two of them hadn't yet melted.

The good news: this was the first serious rain since I painted the damp patch on the study ceiling. After close scrutiny, there's no new evidence of damp. The roof held up!!

The bad news: all that water pouring onto the study window sills somehow found its way into the conservatory, saturating the dust sheet underneath my half-painted door and splashing up onto the door itself. Painting activities will have to cease until it's dried out. Rain stopped play, you might say.

An Internet era closes

About twelve years ago, having already spent 4-5 years reading and contributing to Usenet newsgroups from work and generally browsing the embryonic web, I decided the time had come to get myself online from home.

Even back then AOL had an appalling reputation, but one of their freebie CDs stuck to the front cover of one of the glossy magazines gave me a bootstrap account with which to do a little investigation and sign up with an alternative ISP. The one I chose: FreeUK. Still a fairly new service back then, as evidenced by the fact that my preferred username - earthmover - was still available, it was simple to sign up, fast (a whole 28.8kbps for my first connection), and best of all as its name implied, free.

Sounds almost too sadly geeky now to be true, but I'll never forget the thrill as the modem popped, whistled and gurgled its way to establish its first connection and open up those worlds of possibility. FreeUK even offered a small amount of webspace too, allowing me to experiment with web design and start down a path that has kept me busy making sites for friends and family from that day to this.

But their business model, built as it was on taking a percentage of the charge for dialling up using a LoCall number, was doomed with the advent of ubiquitous ADSL. Sure, they developed other models. A broadband offering and a paid email service. But having these under the banner of FreeUK always struck me as a bit fail. With them not being free, and all.

A few years ago they introduced a requirement to dial up at least once every 120 days to keep the account alive, and for a short time I did: setting a reminder, listening once more to the modem's song, and leaving the connection up for a minute or so to reset the count. I wonder how many other subscribers with broadband access bothered to do that? When we moved here, in October 2006, it became very awkward to string a modem cable across the study 3 or 4 times a year, so I stopped bothering.

FreeUK emailed me today.

"According to our records you have not used your dial-up service in the last 120 days and as such the account has been flagged for deletion."

Either their records are woefully out of date, or they simply don't bother to check them very often, because by my reckoning it's been at least TEN TIMES that long since I dialled up. Still, they caught up with me. And having flagged the account, they tell me, any further dialling up won't save it. The only way to keep it is to pay for one of their email-only accounts, at a totally non-free price of £14.99 a year.

It gives me a nostalgic pang, but I'm going to have to say goodbye to earthmover@freeuk.com. I can happily render the address here, in full view of the spambots, because in a couple of weeks it will be gone. It has been grossly spammed over the years, as my 1997 self was not so Internet savvy as he thought, and built a personal website with the email address in plain sight. The spam count was small to begin with, but climbed rapidly until at one point I was labouring under a deluge numbering over 100 a day. It's a bit better now. I guess FreeUK spam filters are cleverer, and I haven't ever replied to a spam mail, even to "unsubscribe", so there's been no positive feedback on that address for years. But it was kinda useful as a registration address on the lame sites that require an email address but don't offer you the courtesy of protecting it with an encrypted connection.

I have a googlemail account for that purpose now, but I'll always have fond memories of earthmover@freeuk.com. My very first and, so far, longest-lasting personal email.

Door #3

It's over a year since I painted the first internal door, and in that time I've only managed one other - the study door that long-time readers may remember was propped up on the landing for several months. No particular reason, except other projects (and life in general) got in the way.

I get the impression Nikki is keen for me to get on with it now. Or get on with something at least. First it was dealing the various bits of bare plaster and damp damage and now that's done, the remaining five doors are coming under scrutiny. Which is fair enough. I feel like I've had quite a long break from "home improvements," especially as we spent what little bit of summer we had tidying up the garden.

A few moments' head-scratching was required to come up with a workspace for this small project, which if I carry on and do each door sequentially I estimate will take about two months. The lounge door was painted in the lounge, before plastering, so clearly that's out of bounds now. I painted the study door in the dining room (wooden floors, a bit of sheeting, simples!) but since then we've bought two new arm-chairs which now occupy the painting space. Only one answer: the conservatory. Using that as a workshop will give me an added incentive to get on with the job, as it won't be long before it starts to get very cold in there. Autumn is, after all, just around the corner.

So I set myself up in there yesterday, took off the dining room door and filled/sanded the first side. It's not in bad condition - there are no cracks in the panels and only a few small gouges in the rest of the frame. Today saw the first coat of undercoat, and I'm always freshly surprised by the difference a single coat of white paint can make to the look of a door. If I stick to the normal schedule this one should be back up just over a week.

Shifters, shifters, there were never such devoted shifters

It was all hands to the pumps today to help the shifters... shift. The idea being that if each person took responsibility for their own stuff the job would go a lot smoother. Many hands and all that. 'Course the theory falls down when some of them can't make it owing to prior engagements, so we ended up wedging two lots of desktop kit and three people's boxes into the back of the car for the short journey to Cheadle.

Ironically, this was my first sight of Nikki's old offices. Having parked outside them virtually every working day for almost three years when picking her up, I'd never ventured inside. As you might expect from a small office in an old building, they looked very tired. The general demeanour was not helped by the empty desks, piles of boxes, and small heaps of detritus left behind when desks had been moved from positions they'd occupied for 30 years. But even looking beyond that it was clear that the offices would have been quite poky and dark to work in. Narrow corridors, old furniture, and very reminiscent of the kind of working environment I "enjoyed" for at least the first ten years of my career.

We dodged around the professional removals men who were taking the old desks away to a charity auction, and soon had the car loaded up and ready to roll.

The new place is a complete contrast. In fact I get the impression the amount of space has taken everyone by surprise. The phrase I heard most often after arriving there was "it didn't look this big on the plans." Which, you know, is nice for them all. Plenty of light, airy space. Brand new furniture. A newly-fitted kitchen (not yet complete when we were there, but with fitter beavering away), new phones, new network and, for those who had not had flat panel monitors before, all new monitors.

All this newness inspired Nikki to want some new desk accoutrements, so we headed off round the ring road to IKEA and wandered through the store enjoying the fact that we didn't have to rush for once. She found exactly what she was looking for: a set of two stand-up magazine holders and an in-tray (both called, confusingly, DOKUMENT), and we picked up a few things for our place too, including a pair of KASSETT boxes for the study. No amusing ikease names jumped out at us today, sadly.

A quick hop back to the business park, narrowly avoiding the Canada geese that have settled in by the lake, and an even more rapid assembly of Nikki's new in-tray and we were ready to come home and enjoy a midday cuppa. Our leaving was delayed slightly by the arrival of her new IP phone. We had a play with it before we left but disappointingly I was unable to find a CTU ring tone. An admittedly small drawback in the face of all the smart newness.

Curry mark 2

Not often we go out for a drink on a Friday night, but this was a special occasion: the last working day for Nikki and her colleagues in their old offices in Northenden. They're moving to posh new offices in Cheadle Royal Business Park over the weekend and have been clearing out almost 30 years of "archives" for the last couple of weeks in preparation for the move.

First stop: the Farmers Arms. Closest pub to the old offices and hence a favourite watering hole, until a recent altercation about something and nothing made the... er... decision makers of the group decide to take their custom elsewhere. I guess they must have put their differences aside in a nod to the long years' tradition for one last night. Two rounds here and then a short walk to...

Lounge About. A rather nice bar in the middle of Northenden furnished with extremely large, old, comfy sofas. What a brilliant idea. Sadly the choice of beer was only what you might call "bar standard" - Peroni, Sagres, an IPA, an Extra Cold or two, etc, etc - but in the end it didn't matter much, as we only stayed for one. It was soon time to move on to...

Jai Kathmandu. This "famous" curry house further down Palatine Road has been made legendary by tales from many of Nikki's colleagues, so I was expecting great things. At first glance there didn't appear to be a table free but once the manager recognised Bob, a couple who had not yet been served were moved over to a smaller table, and two large tables pushed together to accommodate eight of us in style. The advantages of being a regular, I guess. Little did the manager know that this was likely to be his last visit from this particular group (even though Bob did suggest the odd trip back, possibly for a Christmas curry).

On the evidence of tonight's meal I have to say I won't be joining them for that Christmas curry. Whether because they were extraordinarily busy - they'd initially told us to come back in an hour and even after seating us it still took almost an hour to be served - or because their curries tend towards Nepalese style, I don't know, but I wasn't tempted by anything on the specials menu and having fallen back on the old standby of chicken vindaloo I was served the most insipid example of that dish I've ever eaten (and I've eaten a few). It delivered only the merest hint of the vindaloo's traditional sourness and almost none of the heat. A real disappointment after the big build up. Their Peshwari nan left a lot to be desired too. Dry, burnt, and with no discernible sultanas. Tch! Strike one!

Curry revisited

Having made contact with a bunch of ex-colleagues last month, it appears I'm now "in with the in crowd" again, and not long after that outing I received a permanent invite to their monthly curryfest.

Mates' etiquette was at the forefront of my mind when accepting this month's invite. Left to my own devices, I wouldn't go every month, but since this was the first "non-special-event" invite, I felt it important to establish my credentials, as it were, as part of this small fraternity of curry lovers.

As it happened, the restaurant we'd used last month - Garlic Spice - was closed this evening. Unclear whether this is a temporary outage or a more permanent demise in these credit crunchy days. Either way it meant we had to choose between the other walkable options which, I was pleased to discover, numbered at least three. After a brief debate we opted for Eastern Revive, only a couple of minutes walk in the opposite direction and one which, a short Google revealed, is very well reviewed and liked by the locals. This was obvious from the moment we walked in. Not only was the place surprisingly busy for a Thursday (and also in view of the aforementioned crunch of credit) but we were welcomed fulsomely and a table large enough to accommodate the seven of us assembled before our very eyes.

Having never tried, or even heard of, Chicken Silsilla before last week when Nikki and I made an all-too-rare trip to Chorlton's marvellous Asian Fusion, I was surprised and delighted to find the same dish available here, and persuaded two of the others to join me. The meal was of equal quality to that enjoyed at Fusion, and the conversation flowed so freely we were still sitting chatting when the waiters collectively cleared their throats at 11.15.

Book review: The Book Thief

August's book club book - The Book Thief - is a hugely bestselling, award-winning, and well-reviewed account of the events that befall young Liesel Meminger during World War II after she is orphaned and sent to live on Himmel Street with foster parents Hans and Rosa Hubermann. The book is narrated by Death, who despite his stereotypical depiction on the cover art, insists that he doesn't have a skull-like face, or a scythe.

The Book Thief is undoubtedly well-written, in a literary way. As usual with literary works it has almost no plot to speak of, but meanders its way pleasantly enough through Liesel's few years on Himmel Street. There are no spoilers here (unlike in that Wikipedia entry linked above), but several things conspired to dull my enjoyment of this book to the point where it ended up on the metaphorical pile of those I've read and ended up thinking "so what."

So much of this novel seems cynically designed to appeal to lovers of literary work. To make it stand out from the crowd, rather than concentrating on its story. The device of using Death as narrator adds nothing to the work, and Zusak's depiction of Death has none of the humour of Pratchett's Mort, and none of the chill horror of the traditional Grim Reaper. He's just a sad old gatherer of souls, disinterestedly looking upon the lives of those he waits to collect and enjoying only the faintest and most occasional glimmer of excitement when he comes across a story like that of the book thief. How apt. Because only someone with an equally boring and monotonous existence could revel in this tale.

Even the descriptive passages and figurative language felt calculated to me. Calculated to elicit the maximum effect from the literati as they ooh and ahh over each new turn of phrase. 'Tears like wire', 'hair like splinters (or twigs) brushed away from a face with a wooden hand'. As if the author pored over his work groping and grasping for an original way to say something and - yes - finding it, but in the end, so what? Mostly they stuck out like the points on barbed wire, scratching my eyes as they scanned the text.

One or two of the characters stood out - Hans and Rudy are probably worth mentioning - but overall I couldn't develop any empathy with any of them until the last 30-40 pages, by which time I'd long since written the book off. I'm not a huge fan of WWII literature in any case (see my February review) so in the end this was just another heap of meh. I gave it 5 out of 10, but in the group discussion it gained two 10s and a good smattering of 9s, so don't take my word for it.

An absence of being moist

Ever been irritated and satisfied at the same time? I finished those small (re)decorating tasks today, finally. So the irritating part is that small jobs like this (I reckon all three areas we're talking about here add up to no more than 25 square feet) need just as many individual visits - stain stop; replastering; two coats of paint; and, in the case of the study ceiling/walls, additional days because the ceiling and walls can't be done on the same day owing to one or other edge being wet - as a much larger project. Which means just as many brush- and roller-cleaning events too.

The satisfying part should be obvious. We now have a kitchen ceiling that doesn't stare balefully down at you with its one plaster eye (albeit the painted part is slightly whiter than the non-painted part, but that's only temporary), the landing doesn't look so much like a building site, and the study doesn't have that mouldy, mottled, bubbling aspect of something out of Skellig's shed. Result! It's only taken a week.

Or two years, if you count the elapsed time.

More Stupid Signage

While we're on the subject of signage at the Wildlife Park, the last photo of the day on Monday was this one - a sign displayed on the fence beside the gate leading from the final animal area to the shop.

Now I've seen some rip-offs in my time, and dealt with some tightwads, but this really took the biscuit. For a start, there are signs all over the place telling you not to cross the barrier, so the chances of finding a peacock feather on the path must be fairly remote, but to then expect visitors to hand them in, and then pay two quid - TWO QUID!! - to get them back again.

Well, it made me laugh. You know, on top of the £11.50 we'd already paid. Each. Which includes a £1 surcharge for their charity. AND signed the Gift Aid declaration so they can claim the freakin' tax back. It's a damn good job we had a voucher allowing one of us to get in free. The one paying the lowest admission price, naturally. So I said to Blythe, even though she qualified for their child rate, she could blimmin' well claim to be an adult, and then at least we could save paying £11.50 for her rather than saving £8.

That made all the difference.

An ass among asses

It's often said that the law is an ass, and while we were at the Wildlife Park yesterday, we saw signs all over the place reminding us of that very fact.

No smoking in any part of the park, they said. Anyone wishing to smoke must leave the park. This is, I'm sure you'll appreciate, an OPEN AIR wildlife park. Sure, there are buildings. Restaurant, shop, animal houses, but these areas are outweighed many times over by the paths, walkways and open-air enclosures.

Now I've never been a smoker, and it's true that I've been known to rant against inconsiderate smokers in the past, but come on. This is taking persecution (and the letter of the law) a bit far. It seems they've classed the entire park as one huge "place of work" and banned smoking everywhere. So if you feel the craving, you have to step from one section of open-air path to another, through a small metal barrier.

I didn't see anything preventing the smoke blowing back across the barrier. I think they need another sign warning anyone standing in the vicinity of the barrier that they might be at risk.

These Animals May Bite

First day of a week's holiday yesterday that I've taken off to spend some time with my lovely daughters. It's great having them around the house, but when I'm working our chats are limited to lunchtimes and snatched conversations around a teapot while it brews our latest cuppa, so I wanted to take advantage of my extra holiday and have a week where we could all relax together without the distraction of earning a crust.

Since this is a British summer the weather forecast for the week isn't brilliant, and when Nikki happened across a leaflet for the South Lakes Wild Animal Park we knew we'd have to go early in the week if we wanted to avoid being rained on.






The usual crop of giraffes, rhinos, lions, tigers, penguins etc were entertaining enough, but the real fun of the day came from listening to our fellow visitors. See the lemur shots up there? As you can see, most of them are ring-tailed lemurs, but casually draped in the grass on the left side is what may be a red ruffed lemur. One knowledgeable young man informed the rest of his family that this was "probably an orang-utan," while his grandma remarked that the huddled group of lemurs "looked like refugees."

Climbing up the steep slope past the flamingo pond I overheard one guy ask if his group wanted to come see "the flamencoes" and I almost tripped over a mother entreating her toddler to "stay on the path, or you'll be eaten by a wild animal." Poor kid will grow up never remembering why she has a life-long dread of zoos.

But the best comment of the day came from the mother taking a photograph of her son standing beside one of the rheas which were wandering loose on the path outside the main aviary.

"Smile Jeremy. No, smile like a person."

Being Moist

When a friend of ours recently stated categorically that he wanted to be moist, I thought he'd lost his mind. Being moist has been nothing but trouble for us since we moved into this gaff. In his case, however, he was after playing the part of Moist in any potential production of Terry Pratchett's Going Postal. Whereas in our case it's a question of too much rain and leaking showers.

Since we first had those problems, the roof has been fixed and so has the shower, but what we're left with is some damp damage to the decorating in the study, and a small area of replastered kitchen ceiling that's a bit of an eyesore.

The damage in the study comprises flaking paint on the ceiling above Nikki's chimney breast, together with some slight lifting of the plaster on the vertical surfaces just below, so the first task was to scrape back all the loose material and paint it over with some "stain stop" solvent-based paint.

There's no evidence (in terms of damp smells or watermarks) that this area is still being moistened on a regular basis, but I know from experience that damp stains are tenacious buggers and will bleed through regular paint unless special measures are taken. I've had good results with the stain stopper before, so I'm sticking with what I know works.

Since the plaster damage extends over quite a large area I've invested in a tub of SmoothOver along with the relevant toolset. Parts of the kitchen ceiling will also benefit from a liberal application of this jollop (the bits where our plasterer hadn't taken as much care as usual owing to us making the mistake of admitting we'll be having the whole ceiling replastered at some stage), and while I'm at it there's those large cracks around what used to be the bathroom door, where the jobbing plasterer subcontracted by the World's Worst Bathroom Fitters didn't give a shit and slapped his mix on the minimum possible area to qualify as "his job."

Hard to believe that one small tub of ready-mixed Polyfilla could be so versatile in fixing three of the niggling little jobs left over from some of the major works of the last two-and-a-bit years.

The Lull

Haven't been blogging much lately because tbh there hasn't been much to blog *about*. Ironic really, that I could be on the brink of a life-changing event, but until something happens on that front everything seems somehow quieter and flatter than usual.

Sure, I've had another couple of rejections arriving from the queries I sent out before #44, but as you might expect their pain is massively dulled by the knowledge that someone, somewhere in New York City, is reading my manuscript.

I've half expected a second request for a full or a partial to arrive on the heels of the first, which would be doubly ironic. The rules of querying would forbid me from sending it to anyone else while it is being considered by the first requester. For that very reason I've suspended sending out any more queries for the time being, although there are still 14 out there that I'm waiting to hear back from.

Visit UKwriters

I have joined this place though. I came across it via the blog of one of my recent commenters (thanks Laurence!). I know received wisdom is that it's good to join a writers' group but doing this IRL never appealed to me overmuch. Writers as a breed are solitary folk sitting in garrets sharpening pencils and staring out of windows waiting for inspiration, or crouched over their keyboards with semi-maniacal stares illuminated only by the soft glow of a desk lamp and the reflections of their monitors in their wire-rimmed spectacles as they bash out another best-seller. They don't do groups. But they DO do virtual groups, so this could well be perfect.

Query No. 44.

I'm going to have to stop checking my email immediately before bed.

It was incredibly hard to get to sleep last night after that pre-nocturnal check revealed the words:
Thank you for your query. We read it with some interest and would like to see the full manuscript.

Yes, after 43 attempts ended in total disinterest (we're not taking on new clients; this isn't the kind of thing we're looking for; we no longer take email queries), someone finally wants to read my book.

OK, it's a bit early to be breaking out the champagne, but to be honest I feel like I've already had three glasses.

Odds of Evens means a sure-fire loser

We sped over to Nottingham at a snail's pace this morning (owing to the M1 roadworks, which have now reached new heights of ridiculousness) for a long-delayed visit to my Mum. We haven't been over since the weekend before her birthday, which is in March, but to be honest we've (I've) been putting it off. These visits are becoming more of an emotional ordeal with each tick of life's relentless clock. With a rapidly failing memory, she hardly ever has any news for us, simply on account of her not being able to remember much of what has happened, and so has fallen back even more heavily on her stock of extremely well-worn and oft-repeated phrases in lieu of real conversation.

This time around, even my standard levels of dread were insufficient to set expectations for the new depths this visit would plumb as I embarked on the pointless task of relating our news. I say pointless, because it's obvious even during the telling that most of it will be forgotten moments afterward, but there is, clearly, no other option. We can't sit it in silence for four hours.

One of our snippets was that I've recently hooked up with my cousin Joanne on Facebook. Now it's hard enough explaining the concept of Facebook to someone who has absolutely no interest in the Internet, and pretty much no concept of why anyone would want to spend time on it, but I'm used to having to dish up copious quantities of modern-day cultural scaffolding to shore up my stories so that wasn't much of an issue. I was totally unprepared however for the complete lack of recognition on my Mum's part for the name 'Joanne'.

"You know. Jacqueline's daughter."
Blank stare. Slight shake of the head.
"No, I don't know who she is."

We had some photos of Nat's recent Belize trip on our iPod/Phone too.
"Here's one of Nat with a boa constrictor round her neck."
Short pause.
"Who did you say this was?"

But this post isn't really about Mother And Her Failing Memory. To counteract the stress of these visits we occasionally treat ourselves to a pub meal on the way home.

We initially intended to stop at our favourite journeying watering hole - the Dog & Partridge at Dunford Bridge. Home of the UK's finest fish supper as well as an extensive range of main meal alternatives and a good supply of fine local ales. However, since our last visit to the Dog, we have sampled the delights of...

... the Bull I' Th' Thorn just outside Buxton; scene of much hilarity (not to mention temporarily misplaced tempers) during Annie's birthday weekend. Nikki had had a hankering for one of Graham's meat pies for a few days, and casually dropped the stone of the Bull into the calm millpond of our chosen eatery just as I'd thought everything was all settled.

As usual, the final decision was left to me.

"Why do I have to pick? I always pick."
"Because I'm not bothered which one we go to."
"Neither am I."
etc.

I didn't know which one I'd end up heading for until we set off back home, at which point I plumped for the Bull. Mainly, it has to be said, because the sun had broken through the mid-afternoon cloud, and I fancied a leisurely drive through the rolling hills of Derbyshire in preference to the "same old same old" aspect of the trans-Pennine route.

Bad decision.

As we approached the Bull from the south, we were almost upon it (in fact I'd already started indicating to turn into the car park) when we noticed both entrances were cordoned off with dayglo orange barriers, and the camping field next to the pub was awash with multicoloured canvas. One of Graham's famous biking rallies? A camping weekend organised by a group WAY more into tents than the Chorlton Players? Whatever it was, the pub was clearly closed to all but the chosen few, and our dinner plans were left as ragged and bloody as a piece of weekend roadkill.

A few hundred yards further up the road we tripped over the Duke of York, which proved to be *almost* the equal of the Bull in terms of comestible quality, and what's more served up a cracking pint of Robinson's. Result!

Can there be anything more satisfying...

...than sitting in one's study while working, and hearing the strains of one of your favourite albums of all time coming up from downstairs, because it's being listened to by your daughters?

Well, I'm sure you have your own list of "most satisfying moments," but this *definitely* qualifies as one of mine.

It's like... passing on the baton of prog rock enjoyment to the next generation. What a pity there are so few contemporary bands with the musical prowess of those great 70s icons to create new stuff that's equally as good.

*waits patiently for the denizens of bothbarson to hotly contest that last point*

That syncing feeling

Woke up to a little message from iTunes to say 8 tunes had not been copied because they couldn't be found.

Which, out of 1930 tunes, isn't a bad hit rate, but it still surprised me. I thought I'd sorted everything out. Turned out to be songs from my old "Caraoke" folders (yes, I know it's spelled karaoke. These songs were for listening to in the car. Geddit?) some of which I'd already spotted had been *moved* into the folders from their original locations, rather than copied. Don't ask me why; I must have been having an off day.

Anyway since the magic of playlists means I no longer need duplicates for the purposes of practising my karaoke warblings while on long drives, I'd decided I could delete the Caraoke folders. All three of them. Which explains the missing eight tunes. Damn.

Luckily they're all songs from compilation albums currently gathering dust in the top room. At some stage I'll need to dig them out and re-rip the missing tracks. For now, the other 1922 will just have to keep me going.

I'm starting to sync

Almost three weeks after I started on this tagging/album art business, I think I'm finally ready to go. To... you know... plug the damned thing in and let it rip.

The last item on the list, and easily the most tedious, was finding art for every single one of the tracks that I'd called "Singles" and Paul had lumped together as "Tunes." Removing the duplicates, listening again to the Tunes I didn't recognise, airbrushing some out of the picture, and deciding whether to go with a grainy scan of the original single's cover, or the album sleeve the track is from, or just some random picture associated with the artist.

But now, it's all done. And I'm syncing fast. Well, as fast as iTunes can manage, which looks like it'll be done sometime in the early hours of tomorrow.

The march of environmental fascism

For reasons I won't bore you with I was trawling through my posts in the Blogger window the other day when I came across the draft below. Somehow it had slipped unnoticed onto the second page without ever being published and, thus hidden, had languished there ever since. Which is a shame because (a) it was a finished post and (b) it's a rant, and everyone loves a good rant.

So I've bumped it and, although when it reads "yesterday" it actually means some time last year, I think the rest of it still holds. We've bought our own canvas bags for shopping now. Pass the hummus...


Hulme Asda were doling out warnings yesterday about their stopping supplying carrier bags from next week. This warning is accompanied by a relocation of the bag supplies under the till, thus making it more awkward to insist on using them. They've been replaced by "bag-for-life" type bags on sale for 5p, or 10p, or something.

Doubtless I'll get pilloried by the hummus-lovers, but (and pardon me for saying so) I think there are about a thousand environmental problems in need of more urgent attention than plastic bags. But sure enough, the "plastic bags" issue is the one this bankrupt government concentrate on, and the major supermarkets, with all their massed commercial might, are only too delighted to toady up to them and go along with it.

And why wouldn't they be? Supplying carrier bags for free has, until now, been seen as a cost of being in business. Here's a chance for them to pass that cost onto the hapless consumer, and LOOK GOOD IN THE PROCESS! Oh look at us, we're being environmentally conscientious. We're doing our bit for the planet. This is such utter b0ll0cks. How many billion pounds a year profit do these ba5tards make? I don't know, but almost certainly enough to swallow the entire cost of recycling every single plastic bag in the country. They could even afford to pay us a penny every time we reuse one, as an incentive. Oh look! Some of them HAVE been doing that already! Until the government let them off the hook by declaring the plastic carrier bag Public Enemy Number One. A nice, easy target. One whose destruction will only affect the poor old consumer, right at the bottom of the corporate food chain, who now has to cart around a dozen bags every trip, bags that will get dirtier and smellier as the weeks go by.

Meanwhile the number of 4x4s on the roads continues to climb, the icecaps keep on melting, China and India continue to pour millions of cubic metres of concrete, the rainforests are almost gone, fish are being caught at unsustainable levels and drug companies defy testing regimes and outright bans. But it's OK, the planet is safe. As long as you use a sustainable form of plastic bag. God.

July Wednesdays. Number 5: Book Club

With me "officially" in the chair - because it was my selection this month - rather than my normal "unofficial" chairing (i.e. supporting the official chairperson when they can't remember the running order).

Last time I chose the book - by some strange coincidence exactly two years ago in July 2007 - only 7 people turned up at the meeting to discuss it, so I guess on that basis you could say I did well to garner a turnout of 12. When compared to recent numbers though, it looked a bit sad. We've been having 20-25 people attending for months now. If I felt like being kind to myself I'd say something about it being holiday season, or the good weather keeping them away, but if I'm being honest I know there'll be a lot of the group who decided right off they wouldn't read the book this month because they hear the words "science fiction" and the shutters come down.

I can hardly blame them. There have been at least two months this year when I haven't read the book either, and another couple of occasions where I've either not finished it, or wished I hadn't. It seems that the idea of joining a book club to read books you wouldn't normally read is good in principle but too easy to avoid in practice.

Still, I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction. A few people enjoyed it. Kind of. Only one absolutely hated it (and didn't get past page 70). I wanted to point out that I'd made my eyes bleed reading through HIS selection, so maybe he owed me similar respect, but I didn't have the heart. This is supposed to be fun, after all. And having not really enjoyed the read myself this time around, I'd have been on shaky ground arguing with him really.

So that's the end of the July Wednesdays. A month of almost unheard of mid-week sociability and activity. I'm exhausted. I think I better have a lie down.

Book Review: Stranger in a Strange Land

For only the second time in three years, I chose the book club book for this month. I offered a choice of (what I thought were) three outstanding SF novels from different times, and this - Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land - won the vote.

Billed as "the most famous science fantasy novel of all time" (Heinlein was never known for his reticence) I've been trying to remember when I last read this. The obvious answer is "thirty years ago" but I don't think it's quite as long as that. What I *do* remember is a lasting impression of a book I enjoyed immensely, back then.

So... what book was that then? Because when I started rereading this, I thought it was the most pompous, inflated, self-important drivel I'd ever read, with stilted dialogue and unbelievable leaps of plot. The idea is great, the execution? Not so good.

Clearly, the book hasn't changed. But somewhere in the intervening 25-30 years, I have. And so have social mores. And on top of that, the landscape of acceptability, equality and political correctness has shifted radically, as if borne on sociopsychological tectonic plates. The end result is that Stranger has been left behind in the very early 60s and now reads like an anachronistic diatribe rather than a piece of cutting-edge science fiction.

There's a famous quote from the book (which I won't bother repeating here) on the subject of rape and my God! It leaps out at you as (now) totally incongruous and... well... just plain wrong-headed. Much of this conspired to dull the enjoyment of what I had expected to be a pleasant experience, refreshing my youthful memories of a damned good read. Instead I found whole swathes of text tedious in the extreme. Even the better parts were less than good. My self-created illusions about this author were severely dented and I regretfully concluded that I won't be able to bring myself to reread any of my (reasonably extensive) collection of Heinlein for fear of repeating this unhappy few weeks. Honestly, I couldn't wait for it to be over. What a disappointment.

Theatre night

We had another book club outing last night. Dinner at Chaophraya followed by theatre: Everyone's A Winner at the Royal Exchange.

It's so rare for us to spend any time in town - at all, let alone in the evening - that virtually every eatery or pubbery is a new experience. We'd certainly never visited Chaophraya before. The first to arrive, we busied ourselves drooling over their extensive menu and sipping on a couple of pints from the bar.

Imagine my disappointment then to learn, once everyone had arrived and we'd taken our seats upstairs (11 of us were dining) that the restaurant has a policy for "large parties" of not taking orders from the menu. Diners are expected to select from one of the five set menus, although these can be mixed. So it would be possible, for instance, for a party of ten to order every one of the set menus and then be faced with the near impossible task for each pair to chomp their way through a plate of starters and FOUR main courses.

Not to mention the fact that the cheapest set menu is twenty quid per person, whereas our preferred selections from the menu would have set us back only a little over half that amount.

Sadly, on that basis alone, it's clear where their "policy" is coming from, but it wasn't really the money that pissed me off so much. Part of it was the extreme waste of food, but most of it was my lifelong hatred of being arbitrarily told what to do. Ordering from the set menus was not going to make their life appreciably easier, was a needless imposition, prevented us from eating what we had already decided upon (*none* of the set menus included our preferred dishes), and on top of all that cost us more than we would otherwise have paid. I ended up having to bite down really hard to stop their attitude spoiling the whole evening.

The food, when it eventually arrived, was OK. I've had better. But frankly even if it had been the best Thai food the world has ever seen I would never go back, and I wouldn't recommend going there if there's more than four of you.

In contrast, the theatre was a delight. I won't spoil it for you - I realise it's unlikely any of you will get to see the show, but even so - except to say that the whole thing revolves around an urban bingo hall, the audience get to participate in the bingo, and in the second half someone really did win £200. Two hundred real pounds. How cool is that? It could have been me. Next time. Etc.

We don't go to the theatre half enough. In all the years (thirty, naturally) I've been going to the Royal Exchange I can count the bad shows I've seen on the fingers of one finger. Great entertainment, even if the second half did somewhat abandon the comedy in favour of some half-baked social commentary.

More iTunes madness

When Paul came to stay last year, I took the opportunity to dump his iPod onto my PC. That was 16 MONTHS ago and as yet none of that music has found its way onto mine. Not that I've been doing nothing. It takes a while to listen to 80GB of music and decide whether it's something you'll want to listen to again and, Paul would be the first to admit, he does listen to some weird shit.

Having jettisoned the weirdest of the weird, there's considerably less than 80GB of the original stuff left, but even so what I added to the pile virtually doubled my music collection, and along with the fact that I've bought quite a few new albums recently, I was coming in for some serious nagging (well, exasperated sighs anyway) from some quarters at the fact that *another* car journey was taking place and there was *still* nothing new on the iPod. I'd already ticked the WMA to MP3 conversion box, so I was running out of excuses.

It's been a while since I used iTunes and I soon remembered why. Sure, I'd had some pretty bad experiences with it when I first loaded up the iPod, and since then I've avoided it as much as possible. It didn't help that every time I opened it up it would tell me a newer version was available, and then pretend to download that newer version but never get anywhere.

I decided that upgrade had to be first on the agenda. A newer version *might* be more stable, and if the auto-upgrade wasn't working for some reason, I'd just have to go over there and drag it off the Apple site myself. Installation complete, I set version 8.2.1.6 off on its crawl through my hard drive again, to find all that lovely new stuff from Paul, and those purchases from the last sixteen months.

One of the things I really, really wanted to sort out was the lack of Album Art. I've always had a thing for album covers (I even bought Roger Dean's book ferchrissake), so it was a source of some irritation that almost none of the music I copied over that first time had any art associated with it. I'd done some research and discovered the iTunes Library album art fetching thingy, which looked like an obvious first step since it involved no effort on my part beyond a click or two.

Sadly - a common experience by all accounts - iTunes managed to find less than half the album art I needed. For one thing it's extremely sensitive to naming inconsistencies, and beyond that it simply doesn't have a very extensive collection. So here's where I trip over the first of today's stupid iTunes annoyances. See, being an Apple product, iTunes has to pretend it understands nothing about Windows, or how the Microsoft Media Player rips CDs to your PC. Most CDs come with their album art stored on the disk as JPEG files, and Media Player conveniently copies these to the same folder as the music, and calls the files "album art." That's too subtle for iTunes. It pretends it can't find them. OK, so they're hidden files. Don't get technical on me. If I can see them, so can iTunes.

I reverted to the manual method - dragging the (hidden) Album Art files into iTunes. But what about all those albums from Paul, that I didn't have files for, hidden or otherwise? Two words: Google Images. Just typing the artist and album name into Google Images, in most cases, resulted in several thousand copies of the right picture file being presented for my selection. Brilliant. Brilliant and tedious, but brilliant even so.

Did I say "the first" of the iTunes annoyances? Yes. There's at least one more. Track numbering. iTunes will interpret ID3 tags correctly, and list the tracks in the right order if they're there. If not, tracks are listed alphabetically. But once again iTunes deliberately ignores, or pretends to have no knowledge of, the standard Media Player method of naming the music files it has ripped. "01 First Track Name" "02 Second Track Name" and so on. So even in the absence of correct ID3 tags, there is the smallest CLUE there as to the correct order, and I REALLY didn't want to have to trawl through the majority of my music collection telling iTunes what it should already have been able to work out.

Still, you know, it's not like I've got anything else to do.

July Wednesdays. Number 4: A recording session

I didn't know when I arrived for our fourth recording session that the switch to Wednesdays was going to be a permanent thing. We'd moved it for this week on account of Annie's committee meeting tomorrow, but as of next week she's going to give aquaerobics a shot, and that's on Thursdays. Could be a good move, cos I'm pretty sure that's something Nikki would like to join in with, so Wednesdays it is from now on.

Apart from any Players dress rehearsals and book club nights, obviously.

Fourth song, and another one of Annie's vocals. When I recorded my first two, I found the second session went much more smoothly than the first, and the same thing happened with her. Almost as if that first session scraped the rust off one's pipes leaving them smooth and shiny for the second session. Whatever the reason, things rattled along much easier than last week and before we knew it another main vocal was wrapped.

Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Took Natalie & Blythe to see this at the IMAX on Sunday. IMAX has somehow become our preferred venue for movie-going, probably on account of us being somewhat selective about what we see in the cinema and, having decided that something is worth watching on a big screen, it makes sense to go for the biggest screen around!

The first 12 minutes of HBP was presented in IMAX 3D. An entertaining and absorbing experience but ultimately I find it distracting. When I'm not trying to duck out of the way of the revolving Warner Brothers sign that's threatening to chop my head off, I'm thinking about how clever the effects are, and lifting the 3D glasses off to see what the film looks like without them (I've done this at every 3D presentation I've ever attended, going right back to Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone). So I was quite grateful when the little red heads flashed up to tell us it was time to remove the glasses and get on with the rest of the film.

And what a film it was. Easily the best of the Potters so far, screenwriter Steve Kloves did an admirable job of turning another overlong book into a watchable movie with many levels of interest. From what I've read opinion among HP fans is sharply divided. The ending was all wrong, too much was left out, scenes invented that weren't in the book yadda yadda yadda. I'm coming at it from the perspective of someone who's only read the book once. For me, the further you get through the HP series, the more long-winded and tedious the books become. I've long said that it's as if the publisher gave up any pretence of editing Rowling and decided the whole thing was just such an amazing money-generating machine they may as well roll over and publish whatever she came up with. As a result the books became ever more self-indulgent, flabby and overwritten.

That approach won't work for a movie. You only have so much time to play with. So what's important? To make an entertaining film that stands on its own merits, or one which is less entertaining for the masses, but ticks all the boxes for the few who like to steep themselves in Potter lore and know every nuance and motivation of every character backwards?

I know where I sit. HBP was entertaining from start to finish. Some great comic moments, many centred around the wonderful character of Luna Lovegood (played brilliantly by Evanna Lynch), some excellent character development, and overall a superbly fell and claustrophobic atmosphere pervading the entire 153 minutes. OK, maybe we could have spent a bit less time on the various teenage relationships, but for me this only added realism to the piece. With hormones raging, many teenagers DO think their relationships, real or imagined, are the most important things in the world, even when there's dark magic invading every corner of the world and threatening to destroy life as we know it.

One downside of the massive amount of story we had to get through in a (relatively) short time, was the number of characters effectively reduced to cameos. Hagrid, Professor McGonagall, most of the Weasley family, Tonks (more Natalia Tena please!), Lupin, Neville, Wormtail, even Crabbe and Goyle, have mere seconds on screen, although without exception they manage to make the most of their moments.

Conversely, those who enjoy the most screen time pull out performances that, each in their own way, are stronger than anything that's gone before. The three main characters get better with every outing, Michael Gambon's Dumbledore enjoys some of his best scenes ever, and Tom Felton finally has the chance to turn Draco Malfoy into more than a two-dimensional cipher of a baddie. He grabs that chance with both hands.

I guess the next instalment will be subtitled "the search for the Horcruxes" which will have a tightrope to walk to keep the interest up. Is there really enough material in the last book for two movies, or is it merely an excuse to wring every last drop of profit from the franchise? Time will tell.

Another 4x4 rant

Now that the schools have broken up and the roads around our house are mercifully free of the damned Chelsea tractors for at least 6 weeks, I can afford the slight rise in blood pressure to write about my reaction to a recent Mitsubishi advert.

Apparently one of their tanks has the lowest CO2 emissions of any 7-seater 4x4. Wow. Big deal. Still worse than a regular car though eh? How many of you really *need* 7 seats? How many of you benefit from (or even know how to engage) the 4-wheel drive?

Wankers.

Kabin Konundrum

Last Friday, Norris was heard to mutter something about how he wasn't aware that it was a nice day on account of it being "dark when I started work." Excuse me? Are the scriptwriters not aware that it's light by about 4.30am at this time of year in Manchester?

Even newsagents don't start work THAT early.

That wasn't the only gaffe in that Kabin scene either. Sloppy writing. (And yes, I take this stuff far too seriously)

Fun at IKEA

Bit of an oxymoron you might think, but the daft Swedalike names that IKEA use for all their products never fail to amuse me. I know, I'm a big kid. You have to do something to relieve the boredom during a trip to somewhere like IKEA.

So we dropped in there last night during the journey home on account of Natalie needing some new stuff for her latest student digs, and tickled ourselves helpless at the merchandise's expense.

Later, at the dinner table, we relived the hilarity of the visit for Nikki's benefit and recalled that the woman in front of us at the till had, among her other purchases, a toilet seat.

Not knowing what the actual name of this item is, I set everyone a challenge of inventing an IKEA-type name for it. Here's what we came up with:

POOJAR
POORING
CHET
BUMSIT
ÅRSRING
and, my personal favourite, DOKNUT

It's actual name? Online research reveals it to be almost funnier than anything we came up with. It's called RACKEN.