Christmas Time. Vengeance is mine. Children weeping all of the time.

Here's a Christmas movie quiz. Very little additional help for ya'll, but if you need a clue, the internet is always at your disposal…

So why not give it a try? If you get all the answers right I promise to let them all go... who, you ask? That's for me to know and you to find in several different skips in the Berkshire area.

You can comment, Facebook or email your answers back to me and, if you are the first, you win a sticker (this is real. I have 2 stickers to give away). Yeah. Stickers. I bet you're thinking 'why, oh why, didn't I take the blue pill'

Anyways, happy landings.

1. How many gigawatts does it take to power a flux capacitor?
2. What kind of skills does Napoleon say he needs to get himself a date (other than owning a Sledgehammer or developing the ability to grow a moustache)?
3. What character links Christopher Nolan's debut film Following with his 2010 film, Inception?
4. What are the names of Alex's droogs?
5. Which characters does Mathilda dress up as during her game with Leon?
6. Can you name the creatures Dorothy so afraid of in the woods, other than flying monkeys obviously?
7. What is the name of Douglas Quaid's alter ego (or his other name, or his dream name, or real name, or whatever…)?
8. How many drummers have been in Spinal Tap?
9. What's 'like a virgin' really about?
10. What's the name of the little girl in To Kill a Mockingbird?
11. According to Henry Jones, what is Indiana Jones' real first name, and who does he call himself 'Indiana' after?
12. Name the actor who portrayed Hitler's Downfall.
13. Robocop had 3 prime directives: Serve the public trust, protect the innocent and uphold the law. What's the secret 4th directive?
14. In The Night of the Hunter, what words are tattooed across Robert Mitchum's knuckles?
15. What happens if the groundhog sees a shadow?
16. Which instrument does Gene Hackman's character play in The Conversation
17. Which oscar winning film was a remake of Hong Kong classic Infernal Affairs
18. See if you can name the American counterparts to these foreign language films too: REC, Reykjavik – Rotterdam, Seven Samurai and Let the Right One In.
19. Who played Rob Gretton and Martin Hannett in 24 Hour Party People?
20. Where's a good place to stay on Summer Isle (if you can stand the tinned fruit, missing pictures and creepy locals)?
21. Blow up is about a photographer who may have witnessed a murder. Who's the star?
22. How many Iron Man suits has Tony Stark been through already (up to and including The Avengers)?
23. According to Tyler Durden, what do you get if you mix equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate?
24. What was the working title of the first Scream movie (think about it)?
25. Explain the effect of crossing the streams (yeah, you might have to look this up, but what the hell…)?

Finish these written or spoken lines from classic films:

1. "Come quietly, or there will be….."
2. "Frank was here, went to get…"
3. "Ray, when someone asks you if you're a God, you say…"
4. "Some people call it a sling blade, I call it a…"
5. ""I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of him." Well I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is…"
6. "Never mind that shit. Here comes…"
7. "It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else…"
8. "You didn't let me finish my sentence. I said, I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to..."
9. "I'm not in the business…."
10. "You can't fight in here, this is the…"

Merry Christland Day. Enjoy your little faces off.

xxx

English Must Hard

This morning I decided it was high time to throw on my galoshes and take an extended stroll around the local community. No sooner had I removed my electronic tag and opened my Knife Crime Wound Spotters Guide, when some playful local oik approached me; “Dear Mr Savage, have you a copper to spare, I’m right on my uppers? I’ve n’er a single groat to spare for Special Brew.”

Post haste I replied, “Ahh, my sweaty, overweight, greasy, ugly, dim-witted friend. Fear not, for this is England. In this land of hard workers and strong backs you shall not go hungry. Go forth and work a day’s toil in my field, then thou shalt find me a generous master”.

When I woke, I continued my stroll to the nearest hospital to be treated for head wounds and report the theft of my almanac, my galoshes and everything I own.

Whilst making my way back to reservation towers, bandaged but proud, chomping on a cox’s and sporting a tweed bandana over my newly minted stiches, I took the chance to reflect on my Englishness.

I recently read an article about the national burden those German fellows feel in relation to their recent past and their desire to cover up their own history: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/16/bernhard-schlink-germany-burden-euro-crisis

Historian, philosopher and former judge Bernhard Schlink argues that the European project presented Germans with a chance to whitewash their history and replace it with the colours of the European dream. For Germans, the burden of shame stemming from the War and more specifically the holocaust, could be dissipated so long as their identity remained tied to a central European, rather than national, experience.

The faltering of the Euro has led to some describing German foreign and economic policy as dictatorial and ugly wounds have been reopened. If the European dream goes sour, Germans will be forced to confront their past once again.

Whilst the German experience has been examined and dissected, in no small part due to the West’s continuing obsession with Hitler as a kind of psychological bogeyman, I wonder how the English public would respond if they were to sum up their sense of nationality.

Many people seem to classify their relationship with their country as the same as their relationship with their flag – either hanging it out of the window to ‘reclaim’ it from the far right, or wincing at the sight of cars daubed with national emblems. This seems to be restricted to the English flag as there was something altogether more jolly about the Union Jack’s roger, which seems to be viewed as the kindly old aunt to the George’s Cross ASBO gathering teenager.

I can’t speak for the Scottish, Irish or Welsh relationship with their identity, but there seems to be an easy pride in the flying of the flag at least, something which English people seem to regard as a frontline in their national identity.

I hope that it is too simplistic to boil down the English experience to flag waver, flag hater, flag burner or flag ignorer, because a bit of cloth seems a rather pointless way to demonstrate your relationship with your country.

Whereas Germany has tried to position itself as part of a wider, cooperative community within Europe, the English have adopted the position of social pariahs, lurking at the fringes of the party, smiling at the host, but dissing their CD collection and stealing beers from the fridge when his back is turned.

The English seem to have a curious sense of false entitlement which stretches back to the chastening experience at the end of the war when foreign territories were handed back and the Empire was consigned to history. As my American friends ceaselessly remind me whenever a certain ‘George W’ is brought up, there isn’t many corners of the world that the English have failed to fuck up royally, something which we have never really been held account for.

Whereas Germans retreated from themselves by hurling themselves into the European Project, the English acted like spoilt adolescents, drunkenly swaggering around and picking fights whilst silently guarded by an American older brother, ready to knee the rest of the world in the balls if we get in a tizz, so long as we lend them our pocket money when they need to buy petrol.

English people seem to revel in our dominant ‘otherness’ and being viewed as eccentric or cynical while the rest of the world is emotional, excitable or moody. We position ourselves as above reproach, whilst going slightly bonkers, tortured by the memory of how we used to be contenders, a Miss Havisham of a country, jilted at the altar of history.

Looking online at the reaction to the opening ceremony of the Olympics, I tried to find comments to describe why so many people regarded it a success, especially as it was so individual. It was precisely its lack of a homogenising ‘one world’ corporate approach that seemed to make it so palatable. We know we’re odd, so you just have to go with it. And they did, American press reports gleefully passed the time commenting on the unique vision being somewhat baffling, hinting that it might have been a joke that the rest of the world simply didn’t get.

In spite of a spate of articles reflecting on what it means to be British, the English have so far remained immune to self-reflection or chastisement in relation to its sins and its responsibility to the rest of the world. All attempts to recognise ourselves as the cause of our own problems have been resisted, perhaps in fear of what we might find. Fingers have been placed in ears and we’ve started humming the theme to Super Ted.

Rioters remain chavs, protesters idealists and politicians fuckwits and everything is neatly explained away into its own little box, but sooner or later we are going to have to get to grips with ourselves or we might find that the after party has already started and no one gave us the address.

I guess it won’t matter. We seem to like it that way.

Goodbyeeee

Blog: Redux

The world needs better lighting.

We could also do with high fidelity sound and digitally enhanced colour. While we’re at it, can I order some jump cuts, Dutch angles and a red velvet curtain primed to descend when life gets too tricky? I could do with more montages when there’s hard work to do and more chance meetings with beautiful strangers who become instantly enthralled and seductive when I start blithering insecurely about spoons or milkshakes or catching ghosts.

I need a pithy and withering comeback for someone who barges past me in the queue at Tesco. Something to make them reconsider their life choices and reduce them to a burbling heap of angry tears. Then they transform into a mind altering cuttlefish of doom that I have to wrestle to the ground and behead with a spatula from the home wares section.

One thing’s for sure; if life were on film (the crazy, imagined, goblin fighting, ninja cat-scrap, dynamite version. Not the sofa jockey, haircut, tepid tea, bum picking version – i.e. reality) then I’m pretty sure it couldn’t be any less well received than Hollywood’s current output, which seems to be about as popular as a pie made of arses.

Looking through the movie blog bile duct (the internet), the anger and despondency seem to be divided into 5 categories of hatred. I like to call them;

The 5 Categories of Hatred *BOM, BOM, BOM*

(BOMs added for dramatic effect. Any relation to any BOMs living or dead is purely coincidental)

TV spin offs.

The Sweeny, The 3 Stooges, Miami Vice, even The Muppet’s Oscar baiting toe-tappery doesn’t cover up the fact that it’s pretty lazy. Chucking money at instantly recognisable no-brainers so they can expand their width from tellybox to bigtellybox doesn’t take a huge leap of faith does it? Come on Hollywood, if you had any guts you’d try the same with Rainbow or the Clangers or the weather. Surely Antiques Roadshow: Annihilation, is a summer hit waiting to happen?

Foreign Language minus Foreign Language.

Everyone likes homogenising, so REC becomes Quarantine, Let the Right one In becomes Let Me In and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo… stays exactly the bloody same, but with crap script and acting. Quite right too. All that wacky noise from foreign mouths and bizarre symbols no-one really understands is just a way for dusky looking otherplacers to try to be smug. Let’s get Justin Timberlake and Orlando Bloom in and remake Triumph of the Will.

Comic book adaptations.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all love whining about this shizzle, whilst slapping our tenners down on the counter of the Odeon popcorn hut; “I think Hollywood is a machine, designed to exploit established pop culture lamb chops, because it’s too lazy to season and prepare the filet mignon of tough and troubling, blah, blah, bumcakes, let off, wee, poo, cocknoise.”

Sequels, reboots and the seemingly bloody endless stream of vampire movies.

Speaks for itself…

Remakes

Nothing espouses more Soylent Green infested, guttural bile from the mouths of filmgoers than a straight up, merchandise hag, ‘buy yourself a ticket and I’ll tickle your balls’ remake. The potential harm remakes can inflict on an audience is most evident in the horror genre. At a creative peak during the 80s, poorly backed directors exploited the shock value created by handwringing censors and religious zeal, to grab attention, scream their guts up and satirise the age.

Fearlessly moist, fingers aloft and buttocks clenched, Sam Raimi, George Romero and Peter Jackson forged reputations. Now endlessly re-jiggled, classic zeitgeist gorefests have been boiled down and Hollywoodefecated until they retain the shock value of a rude and amusingly shaped carrot.

The remake backlash is strong and the arguments are endlessly trotted out as an example of the decline of the film industry. Still, I don’t remember anyone getting on at the RSC about their constant remakes of bloody Hamlet, or the ‘Richard’ trilogy that keeps popping up (I didn’t see the first one, but the sequels were ace). Come on Stratford, isn’t it about time you got a new flavour?

Well, no. No it isn’t. I’ve never been sure why remakes are immediately derided before even having been watched. Sadly, the wages and the potential profits involved mean there’s a deep suspicion it’s only trotted out for the benefit of people with deep pockets which weighs heavily on the back of directors, who in turn seem reluctant to try anything more radical than concoct a misty eyed episode of ‘I love 1982’ and be sure to name check all the ‘classic moments’ from the original.

The fact that most remakes are indeed cack doesn’t help, but simply being a remake doesn’t instantly equate to a bad film. It’s very hip to sit around in café bars, examining your vintage iPad collection and emitting high pitched squeals of derision about the lack of Hollywood creativity. It’s even easier to forget True Grit, The Fly and A Little Princess and only remember the turd stained undercarriage of Psycho, Planet of the Apes and The Wicker Man (“Not the bees!!!”).

Still, I don’t ever remember any directors or actors dropping much ‘new and exciting’ out of their collective bum hole in the recent past. If Seth Rogen, Christopher Nolan, Will Ferrell or George Clooney pitched a Victorian period drama about a terminally ill squirrel living in a wood made of car parts fighting a giant talking squid, the studios would probably see where they went with it, offer them a $100million budget, then dismiss it as a vanity project if it all went tits to the sky and bombed like Kevin Costner on a U-Boat.

The studios can only develop what’s out there, folks. Yes, we know they’re morons, but until the people who own the thinking caps start trying harder, rebelling against the studios or abandoning the gravy train, the whinging will go on for a long time to come. It’s not all bad. Go watch Submarine.

Lotsoflove xx

Back to the Present

And so…

Where once was calm, only chaos reigns.

The Earth is in the early throes of the second dark ages. The Book of the Dead has been opened and incantations of a deadly nature have been uttered. Where once professors with wild notions leapt from buttock to buttock with excitement at the prospect of creating a world where we summon the spirits of the past to instruct our future, now only glance suspiciously out of the log cabin window and await the sound of a cackling moose which signals their doom.

Dark forces circle like herds of cattle. Evil, demented, wild-horned cattle. Their once soft lowing now taint the air with their bovine wails. Zombie Cattle. Zombie Cattle from Mars. Cattle with Guns. Yeah, big laser guns that melt your eyes and rattle your teeth.

Humanity, morality, underpant elasticity… once constant and reassuring bastions of stability now fluctuate wildly and our lives spin dizzyingly out of control as we lack a moral compass to guide us. Even now the undead walk the earth, chanting repetitious bile from our telly boxes and radiotrons to keep us just bored enough. All the while, the detritus of what they have us consume clogs up our veins and our seas. The sun scorches our backs, but all we can do is lather up and sit burning under the decaying skyline. Wizards live in trees. A lamb shot a pensioner. Cupcakes give you cancer. It’s all true; I read it in a newspaper.

The modern world is failing and flailing, hunched under the weight of its own expectations and repeatedly slapping itself across the forehead in disgust. We are connected but distant, kept as pets by wax eyed automatons who occupy government while we provide compliant defiance by occupying the bit of concrete outside. Financial spivs treat the world like their own personal Playmobil barnyard, to rearrange and break at will and keeping us looking at the moving cups rather than the ball. Blood is pouring from the cracks in the wall and our own hand is trying to choke us.

Somewhere, quietly, in a backroom next to nowhere, a cold, desperate and desolate figure begins to cough and shake. Could there be life? Could there be someone to pick up the chainsaw of truth, to once again wield the shotgun of fury, to go down into that dark and terrifying cellar ready to ‘carve ourselves a witch’?

Yeah, I guess I’m back…

Groovy.

Hubris aside, since my last post (March? Really? How cruelly you have been neglected my faithful few) I do feel that there has been a lot more to be positive about. Perhaps it’s the Olympic hip-hip-hooraying epidemic that has me all mollycoddled and cutie-pied or maybe it was the tedious perma-drizzle giving way to ten seconds straight of good weather, but I was feeling pretty good and also pretty silent.

However, recently the dark clouds have begun to gather once again. American Senate candidate Todd Akin stuck his finger in the brain pie and pulled out the plum of ‘legitimate rape’. Lucky for us all, George Galloway waded into the rape debate and had a similar revelation that if you’re asleep (or drugged or mute or dead) you’re fair game, which is pleasing to hear, as I’m planning  to release a hoard of death row inmates into his bedroom at 3am to see how their ‘bad sexual etiquette’ impacted on his morning. Happily, as with everything that George Galloway says, does or even imagines, during the act of expressing his opinion, he simultaneously reminds everyone that his opinion can’t be taken seriously. It’s a sort of Mobius band of infinite twatbadgery.

Mitt Romney (est. wealth: $190-250 million. Hmmmmm…) danced into the popular consciousness as the Republican presidential candidate (Just think about that... This man could potentially become the owner of the finger dilly dallying over the nuclear button whilst looking at a picture of Iran on his wall and secretly hoping the coin lands tail side down. I wonder if he’d remain Pro-Life when it does) and apparently has an eye on increased military spending, expanding the death penalty and drilling a big hole in Alaska so he’s got somewhere to stick the straw and ‘drink their milkshake’.

Then there was Julian Assange letting down his golden hair from the Ecuadorian balcony for giddy journalists to scamper up and send everyone into a moral quandary over the fit and proper nature of his Ecuadorian sponsorship (which was reported along the lines of: ‘Ecuador. Why, oh why, oh why…’) and remind everyone that although his work, his website and his stance are not only right but required,  J-Ass the man is at best a bit of a tit and at worst a rapist who deserves to be tried and convicted for that crime.

In amongst it all, Georgie Porgie Osbourne can still be seen doodling pictures of helter-skelters and cobwebs in his exercise books whilst we surf a tidal wave of bullshit, Nick Clegg is still pretty sure he’s relevant and Camerobot2000 continues to channel the spirit of Kipling by meeting triumph and disaster and treating those two imposters just the same. As disaster.

Between Harry Hewitt’s twirling scrotum, continuing council cuts, The Unamazing Spider Man and the resurfacing of the Spice Girls for the taxi ride from hell, it seems there is, just as ever, reasons to be furious.

So with more of a spring in my step than a Brazilian Paralympian on a tightly wound trampoline, I leap back into the world of denouncing, decrying and decomposing for your viewing pleasure.

Beware. Once again, there be beasties here….

Isolation approximation

Blog me up, buttercup...

After spending a hard day toiling unflinchingly at the furious, white knuckle coalface of minor administration I'm lucky that when I'm released back into the the real world, I live in a kind of perpetual Cheers bar of bonhomie giddiness.

I can walk freely through every town and city of the globe, backslapped and 'go get em-ed'. I'm cheered and winked (WINKED) at by passers by who are eager to embrace my every move and support me along the yellow brick road of life. Everybody not only knows my name, but wants to take my name out for a candlelit supper and canoodle on a rowboat in springtime, take my name out for an awkward second date that failed to rekindle the magic, before ultimately declaring 'it's complicated' on Facebook and then never calling my name again. Poor my name. Always the bridesmaid.

Sadly, much like my name's dreams of a union that goes past the feeling up stage, my cheery, daisy chain, hippy commune fantasy is bothersomely deluded. Recently, while walking through town I'm feeling less and less like Sam Malone and more and more like there's ghosts everywhere. Dark silhouettes of danger, loaded with the potential to want to fight you, rob you or squawk ugly challenges in your general direction. Perhaps my failed dreamland fantasy of other people simply being extras in my own personal deodorant commercial has turned into bitterness and, in a fit of pique, my brain has created another, darker, fantasy. My head has constructed a mysterious world, populated by shadowy figures waiting to test my pain threshold with their fists.

What could easily be elderly men chatting to their grandchildren on the phone has become beer bottled, broken jawed, sawn off shotgun owners, mumbling the addresses of their latest hits to their mob paymasters. A group of youngsters on their way back from the gym are transposed into unshaven crack heads with riot hangovers, loaded with simmering desires to kick my face off my face, leaving me with a kind of pulpy mass where once my delicious features sat.

I'm not sure where it comes from. Is this fear a result of my disappointment now morphing into silent self harm, where fear and danger become the default setting for perceiving my world?When did it start, this walking around with eyes on the floor, avoiding people's gaze, waiting for a glass bottle to be pushed into my brain cavity by an imagined assailant? Why do we perceive the stranger as a ghost that you try to see right through rather than look at, to fear rather than ignore, to label rather than excuse?

Natural introversion is no bad thing despite the stigma the modern world tries to put on it. We put a lot of stock in extrovert toss bags who clutter up day to day life by appearing to be smarter, more 'on the ball' or even (sweet Jesus, NOOOOOOOO) have more friends than you simply because they squark the loudest in meetings and have the concentration span of a goldfish with Alzheimer's.

People like this are the kind of onion faced, cack eyed weasels who end up doing some kind of marketing knob-hole job, getting paid to swan up to you in the street, steal all the oxygen in the world by spouting pointless rhetoric designed to entice you to buy this tat or other, have 'banter' with you and then disappoint everyone by failing to crash through the window of a moving articulated lorry or duck the hot knives you've just launched towards their eyelids.

Introversion is not the same as shyness. Just because you don't high five everyone you meet is not the same as worrying about social disapproval or stigma until it prevents you from doing as you ple-diddly-ase. But when introversion becomes mutilated by shyness, it becomes suspicious or isolating. Then you can find yourself wandering in a world of fear, trying to see around corners or avoiding eye contact with both cuddly charity shop workers and slavering rapists alike.

I suppose there's a middle ground somewhere. If people didn't have a safety net of avoiding strangers we'd all be swanning up to every wrong'un on the street, trying to make small talk with murderers and excusing people who fart on buses. But I'll wager that no introvert ever got themselves into a scrap on a Saturday night, or a bellowing festival with a klaxon mouthed bint accusing you of 'looking at me'.

The other golden rule is to never take unnecessary risks. Unless you have a handy friend in marketing with you, then everyone will keep the fuck away.

Until next week, sexy.

I'mjustputtingonmytophat....

A lasting impression

Blog looks like a lady...

I forget the name of the minstrel who first uttered the immortal, haunting words:

"The very first time that I saw your brown eyes, your lips said hello and I said hi..."

My initial thoughts led me to Confucius, via Victor Hugo... or was it Shakespeare, Petrarch, Barlow?

For those of you looking smug, remembering back to your early 90's heyday, I can tell you that it wasn't even the twin forces of Brian Harvey's East 17 and Gabrielle (who first brought these beloved verses into the hearts of the nation in 1997) who actually wrote this lyrical ballad. In actually it was the great Carl Martin who penned this mastodon of melody.

What? Surely not THAT Carl Martin? Not the Carl Martin who was a member of 90's boy-band pan flashers Shai? Not Carl Martin, formerly of Howard University who formed the group aged 18 with college friends and who went on to submit the single "The Place Where You Belong" for the Beverly Hills Cop III soundtrack which placed at number 42 in the US charts? Yes, it was he, that very same songsmith who accomplished all the feats listed above, who also penned the thoughtful lines that open this blog.

Say what you want about Carl Martin (which I assume is absolutely nothing at all), he knew the value of making the right first impression. He knew this, apparently most acutely, when gurning in the general direction of a presumably startled, hazel eyed floozy who can only blither a startled "hello" before leaping in, breathlessly uttering bold and impassioned rhetoric, such as "Hi".

But Carl 'knew right from the start'. I too know the value of a great first impression, especially when I'm hanging around a wooded area, wearing my cut out cardboard Carl Martin mask over my own face and jumping out on dog walkers from behind a spruce and screaming "HIIIII" into their astonished faces, before making my escape to the chorus of rape alarms and hysterical screaming that usually signal the end of another successful date.

And it's not only woodland predators and chart botherers who can appreciate how important a good first impression can be. The recent Match.com adverts that have been plastered all over my tellybox espouse the benefits of instant attraction to the mating ritual (getting laid) and the importance of seizing upon that first chance meeting to snare your perfect partner. The fact that they do this by puzzlingly featuring a flaccid eyed, ukulele plucking tossbadger ("The girl on the platform smiled...") smugly serenading a stranger like he's a George Formby impersonator making a public information film warning commuters against dangerous stalkers, is beside the point.

Sadly not all first impressions go as smoothly as they do for the train stalker, whos' artless plucking (...I said 'plucking') eventually wins him a date and presumably the lifting of the restraining order. Most right thinking people would instantly assume that a man standing opposite them on a deserted railway platform and singing a song to himself about the colour of your hair is either an escaped convict, a dangerous sex pest or from Coventry.

Most first impressions are made within seconds of meeting, or even hearing the voice of, another person. It's depressing, but a fact that in my new job of sifting through CVs for suitable candidates to fill various teaching roles, the brutal reality is that my left wing champagne socialist ideas fly out the window quicker than a half eaten spam fritter from a bulimics' car.

I've become lost in a fog of requirements and mired in the soil of a lazy desire for an easy life, so I find myself taking less and less time considering each application especially if there is anything quirky or unexplained. Sometimes I find myself zoning out mere seconds into an interview because I already know that the person on the other end of the line didn't fulfil some mysterious wish list of 'needs', 'wants' and 'might possibly consider if I really can't be arseds'.

People have an in built 'kill switch' when it comes to new people that kicks in after the first 10 seconds of seeing someone. On one hand, it protects us from potentially dangerous liaisons with nutbars on train platforms, but it often leaves us perpetually afraid. I suppose this tendency towards making an instant judgement served as part of a long docile survival instinct, the same animal tendency that prevents lonely wildebeest shuffling up to lionesses, holding a tray of mixed canapes and making small talk about the state of the England team. Then again, as it's unlikely in most human encounters that a perfect stranger is sizing you up for a between meal snack and wondering how best to get that difficult but tasty meat from between the more fiddly bones in your spine, this instinct seems at best defunct and at worst totally isolating.

It's a sad part of our nature that so many people fear what they don't know, especially when it leads to more profound restrictions, cutting them off on an island of their own tastes, their own ideologies or perhaps their own company. Before we all start getting out our E17 back catalogue and heading for the nearest wood though, perhaps it is good to remember that privacy is one of the rights that makes us civilised. We don't have to like everybody, but being a miserable fucker is a different kettle of cod.

Unless you're carrying a ukulele, in which case you'd better get with the programme. Get a Carl Martin CD on and let the good times roll.

Night night cupcakes.

Daydreambelieverandahomecomingquee-eee-ee-eeeen

R.I.P Davy Jones.

Sleep queasy

Blogbeat, the word is on the street...

If I was to march into a room during a dinner party and declare at the top of my lungs that I was being hunted by a giant seal with the skin of a cactus and the voice of Martin Clunes, I'd be derided as an idiot, hauled into a separate room away from where the cheese course was being served and immediately be shot in the head with a crossbow, so that my pink brains were splattered across the walls like it was the inside of Bernard Matthews shed.

However, in the world of my dreams, my lunatic exclamation would be met with sorry acceptance from the assembled guests who would silently turn away to gaze apathetically out of the window across the salty planes and beyond the orange river running through the forest of guts.

Obviously, many people have dreams. Most of us in fact. Sometimes our dreams remember our 4 little children, sometimes they're interpreted by lengthy bearded hippies, or intellectual cigar chompers, preying on our insecurities. Sometimes our dreams scare us with their truth or simplicity, or because we don't like the thought of being chased by an army of plastic mannequin legs. In fact, most dreams are such a tornado of the personal and comforting, the unsettling and bizarre, that it's a wonder that we are ever able to sleep through them at all.

I've spent quite a lot of my twenties wrestling with the ticklish problem of getting to sleep. If you're lying in bed and start to think about doing it, you can't. If you're trying not to do it like while you're sitting in a church, driving on a motorway or attending a child's birth, nothing could come more easily.

I find that I need a failsafe; some kind of ludicrous drizzle of thought to think on in an attempt to 'trick' my brain into believing it's asleep and leaving my imagination take up the narrative automatically and drive the autopilot of my mind into sleepyville. My current favourite is to imagine I'm taking part in a massive competition to see how long I can stand on my head for. The ludicrous image of hundreds of people in row upon row of arse over titedness of set against the tedium of the endurance contest somehow combines the dreary and the ridiculous effectively enough to switch my mind on standby. It's a bit like imagining you're listening to a Newsnight debate on the colour of peanuts.

I'm not sure that it's a measure of my insomnia growing or a symptom of simply being too bored to sleep that I have to resort to waking dreams before slipping into an otherworldly coma. Perhaps it's a concealed desire to resurrect a part of my brain that becomes more and more underused the older I get - the simple, resuscitating power of imagination.

I'm envious of children who use dolls and action figures to construct elaborate worlds that exist in an imaginative universe. The power struggles of little green army men, facing an evil and tormenting plastic skeleton (won from a grizzly toothed carny in a ball throwing game) all the while controlled by my own omniscient and unflinching hand, were perpetual battles on my blue carpet when I was nipper. This followed an afternoon spent constructing impenetrable fortresses out of bedclothes and scaling the insurmountable mountain summit of my stairs using only tied together dressing gown belts.

The more I disappeared into whatever insane, nonsensical, misogynistic and derivative universe my friends and I had the care to recreate, the Z'ds followed as easily as cows up an abattoir conveyor belt. The more time I spend in my adult life, circumnavigating my own imagination and relying on TV, interweb, computer screens and staring at neighbours through my steamed up binoculars, the less I'm able to suspend the real world and wonder into snooze town.

Perhaps I'm a victim of my own desire to be switched on, alert and 'living in the real world'. A little suspension of disbelief could well be the remedy to induce narcolepsy.

Thank the lord there's still delicious rum to guide me into the abyss. Pirates are never wrong.

Later dudes. xx

IfyoustrikemedownIshallbecomemorepowerfulthanyoucouldpossiblyimagine.

Re-run Around #2

CHINATOWN

The private eye thriller is a well worn path, trodden by films since time was time and secrets were secrets. Vivid images come naturally to mind at the mention of the genre: incriminating photographs taken from unsecured rooftops. Trilby's shadowing grim faced ex-cops. Smokey eye'd, smouldering, cupid-bow lipped molls. Dirty fingered exchanges of cash, loot and threats.

All these cliches are present and incorrect in Roman Polanski's 1974 noir Chinatown, captured so perfectly that within the first ten minutes you feel comfortable inhabiting the offices of Jake Gittes's private detective agency as if you yourself have a wayward husband and you need a PI to snoop out the misdeeds.

Jack Nicholson lives, breathes and reclines in the role of Jake, showing his now customary combination of slick seduction and manic danger. Set during the chronic water shortages that blighted 1930's LA, Gittes is an ex-cop escaping the pressure and danger of working in Chinatown to take up more slippery work, uncovering private indiscretions for the highest bidder.

Jake is hired by the wife of a prominent water engineer Hollis Mulwray who is apparently playing away from home. With precision, Jake photographs and discredits Mulwray's reputation and soon Mulwray's body is found washed up in the reservoir. Nicholson is pitch perfect in his portrayal of the hardened ex-cop taking a sly relish in his work, enjoying operating on the fringes of the law he once upheld in Chinatown.

However the conventionality of the film begins to twist as, in the ensuing scandal, Jake becomes aware that he was hired by an impostor. Jake's incredulity is matched by a newly invigorated passion to discover who is responsible for fooling him and why. Soon it becomes clear that he has been dragged into a battle for control of the water supply to the city and must challenge sinister corporate faces with dark fingers lining the pockets of city officials, if he is to find the truth.

By resisting the urge to use a conventional voice over, Polanski draws his audience into the world of Jake, uncovering the clues as he does, taking each step alongside him and becoming just as emotionally entangled in the plot. Jake's profession is a paradox of uncovering what is hidden by exposing what is seen through the lens of a camera and we as an audience take the same journey to discover each delicious nugget of truth served up in tantalising portions on the screen.

Chinatown becomes a paradox in it's own right, a juxtaposition of horror and joy. The joy in the film lies in uncovering each mystery, of piecing together how Mulwray's true wife, played with understated regality by Faye Dunaway, fits into the schemes of her wealthy father who has vested interest in the water supply. The horror in the film comes when we realise that uncovering that which is hidden, leads Jake to face dark secrets and subversive lives.

The legacy of Chinatown is clear in its familiarity. The cliches are a flattery, the copy cats a homage. Such is it's influence that a second look at LA Confidential, Blade Runner (at least in the directors cut) or Who Framed Roger Rabbit are a deja-vu. However, the real legacy of Chinatown is as a pillar of storytelling without patronising or over indulging your audience with distractions and grandstanding. Polanski treats us as grown ups, capable of discovering the nature of people and being horrified by the consequences.

This is never truer than as Jake makes his final and brutally dark discovery. A discovery which subverts both the genre and most people's fundamental understanding of what people are capable of. Jake is forced to realise that sometimes the horror is just too great, justice no longer worth the sacrifice. So, just like Jake, the audience cannot help but look away as the edifice of slick PI's, corporate money men and finding redemption in truth are torn apart by the gruesome nature of the world we live in.

"Forget it Jake... it's Chinatown"

xx

Derisory Inquiry

Blog Hawk Down

As is customary for a Wednesday morning, the tendrils of the dawn light rip open my sleep and I step dry mouthed and dizzy from bed (nearly tripping over the hooker's corpse) and into the bathroom for a shower and a fag, all the while consumed with hangover regrets. How did a 'quick ale' in the Lamb and Screwdriver turn into a 8 hour search for liver failure? Did I really declare all cheesy snacks crack lined agents of the devil and start a fight with a bag of Quavers? Could it be true that spray paint doesn't come off tombstones? Does a whole bottle of rum constitute 'reasonable doubt'? I'm sure you know the feeling.

After a refreshing Alka Seltzer enema and a few hours on the sofa weeping and shivering like a puppy in an RSPCA advert, I'm back on form with a determination to forget everything that went before. It's in these brief moments of sobriety that I'm prone to ponder why any sane person would then wish to assemble a panel of their friends together the next day and joyfully pick at the carrion of the previous night's debauchery like insects suckling on a cream horn.

Why gather braying, giggle trumpet pals to reminisce about your indiscretion with a hose? I try to ignore times when alcohol releases inhibitions by continuing to test my theory that drinking Toilet Duck can induce amnesia.

"Sure thing Alan, lets meet up down the pub, re-live some horrors I can't alter. While we're at it, why not invite all my ex-girlfriends over to discuss my individual failures armed with penknives and pepper spray? We could bring along an old school teacher and go over my lack of talent, perhaps uncover the reason I spend my days morosely tippy-tappying into a keyboard rather than building a business empire, dating international catwalk models, selling T-Shirts of my face and establishing a private army? Is that what you want? Is it Alan? What good would it do me now, Alan? WHAT GOOD WOULD IT DO ME NOW? YOU GUSHING TURDHOLE OF A PERSON, ALAN. ...what's that? Yeah, I'll see you Friday."

I really can't understand anyone wanting to haul their conscience over the hot coals of shame and make bold claims that "it could never happen again", whilst simultaneously turning hair of the dog into an Oliver Reed tribute concert and getting just as leathered all over again. It seems to me that gathering more tits in one place than Jordan's Guide To Ornithology and discussing my failure to keep my trousers on in a nightclub, has no effect whatsoever as a preventative measure for future idiocy.

I suppose it's fashionable to have a retrospective inquiry into mismanagement, misdemeanors and mistakes despite the fact that the horse has not only bolted but has run out of the paddock, spent all his sugar lumps down the dogs and been forced to live rough on the streets selling his arse for glue. Every time things are buggered, we like to celebrate the fuckupishness off it all with a big inquiry party and pick over the bones.

Leveson, Chilcot, The 9/11 Commissionandonandonandon. Nothing says 'Western Regret' quite like governments screwing up royally and, fearing the public are getting a bit miffed about all this murder and mismanagement, scrambling to avoid actually altering their ways by having a good old hand wringing session at an inquiry.

The standard model for an independent inquiry is to get some dusty bookend peer with time to spare between AA meetings and thrashing his children to sit at the end of a long table and fall asleep while bickering law schoolers spout non-sensical guff towards minor celebrities (like the Prime Minister) and look very pleased about how much they're getting paid.

Everyone called before an Independent Inquiry adopts the correct facial expression (an alarming combination of seriousness and attempting to break the world record for holding marbles up their bumhole) to give their version of events. Although, oddly enough, their 'version of events' always miraculously points the blame in every direction other than their own. The inquiry becomes little more than a desperate attempt to cover more arses than the trilby department of a Topman factory. On top of this, the process goes on so long that independent inquiries now appear to be a new kind of endurance sport where the winner is determined as the person who doesn't die of old age before the end.

These thrilling sessions are usually followed up by a handy 30,000 page report that no-one bothers to read and half arsed calls for an 'overhaul' of something or other, leaving all involved free to pat their bellies in a self congratulatory way and put in an order for enough Guylian chocolates to double the GDP of Belgium. By this point the press and public are so disinterested they can't remember the thing that was so wrong in the first place that we needed and inquiry to investigate it, and the calls for the overhaul in question are highlighted on That's Britain in a hilarious skit entitled 'political correctness gone mad!'

My favorite inquiry of the last week was investigating the high cost of the closing ceremony at last summer's under 20 Football World Cup, especially the payment of $12,000 to retain the services of a shaman employed to prevent rain. As organiser Martha Ana Pizarro rightly points out, "It didn't rain. We'd use him again", a particularly encouraging outcome for me as my meteorite preventing tea-cosy is currently available to the highest bidder on Ebay.

It seems that people are now asking awkward questions as to why sinister executives enticed a terrified, pig fearing government to fork out cash like Scrooge McDuck in Vegas on enough flu vaccine to allow us to cut off the heating in every nursing home in Britain and still keep the residents cough free until the rapture. Various agencies are united in 'calls' for an inquiry, presumably by hanging about in the woods with a special whistle, hoping an inquiry rears it's head up long enough to be pumped full of buckshot.

In that vein I look forward to a future Mirror Replacement Programme where Tamiflu executives are installed behind your bathroom reflection weeping for your future and humming a funeral durge each time you look inside the medicine cabinet for Lemsip or moan about a vague feeling of dreariness.

Any hope that future generations might learn from the past by ceaseless inquisitions probably rests on our own ability to press gang nervous officials to act responsibly and with accountability, but right now it seems that repenting at leisure is the only way forwards. Makes you want to turn to drink, doesn't it?

Come on. I'm buying...

Solongandthanksforallthefish xxx

Re-run Around #1

Note from the Reservation:

As of this week my ranting, non-sensical and semi-coherant views on retro movies are being inflicted on the population as a whole via Source Radio. If you have no regard for your sanity, you can catch my retro movie reviews live and in living sound-o-rama every other Wednesday. If you fancy, you can catch up (Retro-retro-reviews, anyone?) on this weeks review here

I'll be following each one up with a written version which replace banal mutterings with banal scribblings, but will still be a damn sight better than Radio 1's.

Thanks for listening, enjoy the film.

NETWORK.

The 1960's and 70's saw society lurch forwards into a new age of enlightenment, fighting the trends that had restricted and restrained society, popular culture and embittered people's lives. The sexual revolution, drug counter-culture, black rights, women's rights and the rise of populist television made for a molotov cocktail of conflicting and emboldening viewpoints, especially in the United States, where an increasingly enraged public fought a war on intellectual frontiers.

For the baby boomers, their war wasn't on the battlefield. They paid no homage to those who returned from World War II and opposed the anti-communist strategy in Vietnam. Their rage, fear and mistrust of the government was growing as was a sense of disenfranchisement. Hollywood was becoming a melting pot of political and social agendas and with a government isolated and mistrusted and television media outlets compromised, it was Hollywood who held a prism up to society, at once reflecting and refracting the concerns of the populace.

Set in the world of a fictional 4th television network within the American broadcasting system, Network was born out of these concerns and used both satire and realism to create a grand allegorical parable, warning this enraged generation that their rage and their desire for change could be manipulated and redirected by the one tool that was bringing them all together: television.

In the fictional network UBS, television news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) becomes increasingly morose as the measure of his success becomes reduced to ratings rather than factual content, until the time comes when his boss and great friend Max Schumacher (William Holden) is forced to fire Howard to appease the new owners of the Network, CCS. It's only when Howard returns to give one of his last shows as news anchor that he informs the public, live on air, that he intends to shoot himself on camera and quips that the ratings will soar.

At first, all hell breaks loose and Howard agrees to apologise, only to embark on a live, on air rant against the 'Bullshit' society that allows the hypocrisy of the world to continue unchecked. This public meltdown creates huge controversy, but at the same time, manipulative bosses played by Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall conspire to turn the news into an entertainment show, placing Howard's rants as the centrepiece and 'articulate the public rage' all for a larger share of the ratings.

As Howard's sanity gives way, his speeches become more and more alarming, culminating with his furious bellowing of "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" in a barnstorming performance from Peter Finch. The audience, finding in Howard, someone to represent their isolation and anger, lap it up and the machine of the corporation turns this disturbed man into the biggest thing on television. In doing so, the producers make rage mainstream, fury primetime and the exciting banal. The 'whorehouse' network which has solicited ratings from every possible source can now use the counterculture movement to distract and placate the population whilst at the same time insulating the public from the horrors of the age.

Part of the genius of Sidney Lumet's direction lies in how the details of the film were designed to reflect the central corruption by the networks, who streamline feelings into ratings. The film itself manipulates the audience into compliance through the lighting set up, which at the start of the film is whitewashed and grey, gradually improving throughout until the final scenes are as glossy and 'television' as possible.

The film is also strangely prophetic, as eventually Fox became the 4th US Network and their News programme is often little more than table thumping rhetoric designed to entertain and editorialise rather than impartially relay current events. The anchors on Fox News sometimes make Howard Beale's enraged rabble rousing seem positively tame in comparison, seeming more like a call to arms than a factual programme.

Following Max's sacking when he opposes the exploitation of Howard, he embarks on an affair with one of the bosses responsible for keeping Howard on the air. Faye Dunaway's depiction of a woman in a man's world, sees her strip her character of emotion, feeling and sexuality. She explains to Max that she loves like a man, "Arousing quickly, consummating prematurely", while Max retains his humanity as he is in the twilight of his years, seeing death as real with 'definable features' and wrestling with the guilt of leaving his family for a person who reduces human life to "the rubble of banality". The story itself becomes melodrama, moving between emotive afternoon play sentimentality to the stark reality of modern living. The film Network takes on a new life, aping the affectations of TV and reflecting how it reduces the human experience into soundbites, seconds and ratings.

As Howard becomes increasingly unhinged, he eventually directs a tirade against the network bosses for a proposed deal with Saudi Arabia, to the great displeasure of the head of the corporate machine Mr. Jenson (Ned Beatty). He is summonsed into the grand boardroom of CCS and stands before Jenson who, in the most memorable section of the film, sells his philosphy. In explaining to Howard that there are no peoples, there are no freedoms, there are no democracies, there is only a system of businesses and money that unite the world, he foretells the future of both television and delivers a pointed warning to politics that it is corporations not elected officials that control our lives and, far from informing us, television is there to insulate and alienate us from the machinations of a world we don't understand.

The philosophy of Jenson is where the film is at it's most terrifyingly prophetic. The financial crisis gave us an insight into how faceless banks and corporations affect us, right down to our jobs, our food and shelter and our health, yet we were totally unaware. As television news struggled to explain the intricacies of how this all worked, to a public starved of transparency for so long, we can see how ill-equiped the instrument of television is to inform us. Its forgotten how to.

Where Network fails is that there are so many targets, so many sub-plots, so many issues to uncover. The danger with this is, although all are valid, the arrows of satire can sometimes miss the mark, simply because there are too many to hit such a small bullseye, perhaps a reason Sidney Lumet missed out on the Best Director Academy Award that year, as he struggled to reign in the strands of the film.

However, this is a minor issue that should not distract from the importance of this film as a prophetic and satirical miracle that is so relevant today, it actually makes you wonder just how many of the problems we have could have been avoided if Hollywood, TV and our media could only continue to be so brave.

And it's bloody entertaining. The greatest show on Earth.

Sametimenextweeksamebattimesamebatchannel.

Past Perfect (and) Tense

The blogtown rat...

Never let it be said that I don't move with the times (for if thou shalt besmirch me so, I shall offer you out on the cobbles for a darn good thrashing with a rolled up newspaper and mine butler's heel) as here at Reservation Towers we are constantly striving for new and modern living. Our sound system, RoBono, pipes bland, self important muzak into my brainspace 28 hours a day. I get world information through News Internanal, a continual news feed that keeps me up to date on current events through the medium of my own colonic irrigation detritus being spread onto the bathroom window whilst my personal psychic steals the spirit of Rupert Murdoch from his own weakling frame long enough for a ghostly forefinger to smear cryptic messages into the grizzly mess outlining the current status of the Levinson enquiry. Our big screen entertainment is obtained entirely out of my newly installed 4D Tellysaurus which allows you to wallow in the self satisfied smell of Jamie Oliver's farts as he squirts the recipe for plastic olives out of his pudgy jowls.

Not every mansion (everyone has one of those, right?) can be as rad as that though. Apart from looters with a local Curry's and a handy homemade cosh, most people have to pay for such sublime entertainment and surprisingly choose to prioritise food, shelter and paying off leg breaking debt collectors over obtaining tedious gaudy techno arsewipe. Not that this has led to a revival in sitting around playing Mousetrap, Connect 4 or actually conversing with real people, as we remain distracted and bored in equal measures by the technological what-nots we retain or failed to trade in for porridge.

As we reject those outmoded forms of pleasure, I've noticed strange ghosts from the past cropping up on TV. Just recently I've been feeling like I'm watching a continual re-run, seemingly descending into a personal "I love 1984". Last weekend I finally caught up with Sherlock, the latest in the BBC dramas trying to tap into the mystique of icons who have fallen out of fashion (Robin Hood, Dr. Who, Merlin, Charlie Brooker's hair) and been rebooted, saucified, cult-ificated and thrust, genitals forward, into the prime time.

The trend of updating a previously bankable gimmick by furnishing it with some heavyweight writing talent (Steven Moffat, Russell T Davies, Dominic Minghella) and a budget that would make Fred Goodwin cough up his swan fritter, has enabled these writers to grasp the mandate to enliven TV schedules and breathe life into dead corpses. A hard hitting Paul Abbot re-imagining of He-Man as a urban terrorist battling a disenfranchised, youth culture Skeletor (he's a hoodie, after all) can only be days away.

This has extended into light entertainment, with the One Show starting the trend for providing retro style 'naf' TV, gaining a following based partly on it's own whimsy. The success of the televised village fete The Great British Bake Off, provided a sunny hearted alternative to sneering, hard nosed, Cowell based cluster fucks that continually barked at feeble willed contestants while press ganging the audience into dialling premium rate phone numbers to whittle the saps down to the least offensive. The embracing of more traditional, revivalist programming harks back to a time when TV laughed with, rather than at, the general public.

This all feels rather nice, especially as all the above mentioned shows are generally exciting or compelling. But, although each is individually good, they only exist on a platform of nostalgic understanding and complicity. Take the names Sherlock or Dr. Who out of the title and the knowing, nodding references to well known baddies such as Moriarty or the Daleks, but keep the exact same scripts and acting and I wonder if they would have been made at all? Would the BBC have had the guts to chuck a disturbed detective or a psychopathic face changing alien onto the screen at all? They did once, of course, but does the same sympathy for something totally new exist? It seems that the new can only be experimented with on the outskirts of BBC 8 at 9pm every other Wednesday to see if it catches on.

The fear seemingly filters down into all areas, where people trying to create original concepts are frustrated by a cultural aversion to anything which steps outside of the comfort zone of instant cool provided by the past. Amy Winehouse's soulful singing sounded like something half remembered, which was then followed by Adele's post Springfield warbling. Folk and 80's revivalist bands add to the mix of Hollywood's love for remakes and biographies until, suddenly, popular culture feels like it's riding on the back of a one legged duck in ever decreasing circles. It's also increasingly difficult to take financial risks on totally original work thanks to the world apparently being in so much debt we owe Mars a fiver for red soil and eggs.

The purse strings are pulled tighter than Victoria Beckham's butt cheeks and the effect is to cut the UK Film Council and restrict access to grants and support from public money. I feel that we are stuck inside a continual mash up, DJ'd by a retro mafia of angular haircutted Tweeters not concerned with creation but a preoccupation with a new kind of Anxiety of Influence; not an anxiety born out of doing justice to the old masters, but the anxiety of being seen to be influenced; to be better read, better watched, better than you.

I long for a backlash of neo-punks, ready to take control of the cultural landscape, armed not with a showy offy desire to inform me how much they can quote, but an iconoclast spirit which says; 'I've read nothing, but look what I made'.

In the meantime, I'm going to stick the telly on. It's pretty good, but not as good as the first one...

EverythingIdoIdoitforyouandyouandbahbabahbabahba

Year in Refutile

Oh come, all ye fanciful...

It's one of the strange Christmas paradoxes (along with being 30 years old and watching 6 straight hours of Pixaardman cartoons or gut bubblingly awful episodes of some shit cake, money felch, cocktease game show because the word 'Christmas' has been dumped in front of the title and a bit of tinsel is draped across the studio. Come to think of it, there's something paradoxically dreary about good old shiny tinsel. It reminds me of a sort of enforced, Daily Mail Campaign underdoggery that forces us to clap along with the 'superdooperousness' of Christmas while costing 18 pounds a yard and looking a bit shit as a background to annual misery and passive aggressive family bickering) that at this time of year, my perception of the world both opens up and contracts at the same time, like a sea anemone with a personality crisis.

As I am reminded of the increasing size of my family due to apparently unceasing embryo production and also put in mind of the dismal size of the problems in the world (normally by cynically heartbreaking TV ads encouraging us to give 2 pounds a month instead of pushing obscene quantities of spun sugar into our cavernous head holes) in the same instance, I also feel the world closing in and my range of understanding contract. What's going on outside the realm of oven times, nibble quantities and the best time to put out the ruddy cheese cake because I hate it when it ends up going all mushy, seems a distant nightmare of sight and sound that I can barely make out in the middle distance, allowing me to bob my head back under the water and become soothed by the muffled screams of the lifeguards.

As I spent most of 2011 working in another country, returning to England in early December thrust me immediately into the clunking 'review of the year' hand wringing of newspapers, 4 hour talking head list shows (containing the absurd insights of mysterious comedians) and online photo gallery 2011 obituaries, which, rather than bring me pleasingly up to date, actually added to my sense of disconnection. As Noel Gallagher Version 101 once said; "The more I see the less I know, the more I know the less I understand" which sounds like a grim epitaph for society in general (or it would if we weren't too busy giggling at Royal arses or watching omnipresent perfume adverts that make you want to fall on your knees and pray for the apocalypse).

List shows are pretty anonymous and exist merely to fill your time with soundbite guff, but it's now essential for every channel or digital output medium to scratch around like they're CSI investigators, looking for that last crumb of insight or reduction to capture the feeling of the nation as though it would lead to some sort of glorious event horizon where all meaning is condensed into the single, one sentence opinion from Alan Whothefuckisthatguy from off the tellybox and all races, languages, opinions and facts deemed superfluous so at last we can all go home and I'm left free to establish my Empire (I think that's what they're doing...).

But it's not true. I feel absolutely fine not being able to reduce the London riots into 3 sentences. I actually feel quite satisfied that I have no ability to reconcile the cigar blowing, backslapping pandemonium surrounding the killing of Bin Laden and Gaddafi, whilst simultaneously condemning their own murderous lives. I'm glad I can't put my finger on the pulse of why we both stare through our electrical eye boxes, snickering into our elbows like five year olds, at the death of Kim Jong Il whilst looking the other way as North Korea starve their own people. I feel fine not weeping over the bubbling stew of a year, pleading for it to reduce into the kind of flavoursome jus that would delight the podgy faced, talking egg, greengrocer man from Masterchef.

Perhaps it's a symbol of a struggle to cope with the everyday problems and failures I encounter (failing to retain the receipt for overly snug trousers, suspicious breath tests, tasering strangers and murder charges) that there's a cold but intoxicating comfort in 'rounding up' the year into a drop down menu of 5 minute nostalgia fixes recounted by awkwardly haircutted giggle merchants collecting cash in return for reducing existence to less than 140 characters. Having seen uprisings, fighting, natural disasters of inconceivable power, hacking, humping, injunctions and Royal functions, a never ending picture postcard slideshow of the 'best and worst' of the year seems vastly superior to the horrors of actually having to live through it.

So here's my best of and worst of list of 2011:

Best thing: All of it

Worst thing: All of it.... and Piers Morgan. Obviously.

Cheerio my lovelies, see you for tea and sandwiches on the next episode of Life:The Movie. I've seen the trailer and it looks crap and brilliant all at the same time. Must be a paradox.

IcantstanditIknowyouplanneditI'mgonnasetitstraightthiswatergate xxxx

National Fail

Deck the halls with boughs of folly....

Here's a jolly festive quiz for you: What does this blog, the career trajectory of Tinie Tempah, the continuing TV presence of Tess Daley and Nation Rail Travel all have in common? Time's ticking... tick, tick, tick. (Adopts patronising, student baiting Paxman voice) "Come on, let's have your answer now..."

The answer is that they are far more incomprehensible than they have any right to be. (Oh yes. that really is the best I could come up with to start off the blog, but they can't all be winners can they?) Actually, I'm pretty sure that the Nation Rail Enquiries Help Line is some sort of sideways glancing, Shakespearean aside to the continuing farce of my life. The name 'help line' is itself a textbook example of knockabout comedy, consisting as it does of a useless voice recognition system which has no ability to understand a single word you're saying unless you bellow like a mental lost in a wood or speak so slowly and clearly that passers by think you're trying to instruct an elderly relative how to manoeuvre themselves to the toilet by mobile phone.

For example, the simple act of finding a train from York to Birmingham went as follows:

Help line: Welcome to National Rail Enquiries. So, which station are you travelling from?

Me: York.

HL: (continuing, oblivious) For example, if you want to travel from Leicester, say Leicester.

Me: York.

HL: I'm sorry, was that "Dunstable"?

Me: No.

HL: If you want to travel from Dunstable, say "Yes"

Me: NO.

HL: OK, where are you travelling from?

Me: York.

HL: OK, I'll look for trains from Liverpool Lime Street.

Me: NOOOOOOO

(How is that even possible? York is a monosyllabic city in the North East of England. There's 3 different words in Liverpool Lime Street!!!)

HL: (2 second pause) Can you repeat that?

Me: Listen to me my robot friend, I do not wish to travel from Liverpool or anywhere even near Liverpool and, in addition, I'd like to find the actor who supplied the voice for this pitiful system, go to his house, murder everyone in his family, then use the sharpened edge of a SPAM tin to cut his stomach open and spill his dinner into the bath like a student after a heavy night out puking up her guts into a handbag.

HL: OK, that's great. I'll look for services from York....

Me: (No words, just the sound of me opening up my jugular with my own coat zipper)

My attempts to use this service and potentially discover the exact time a train will miraculously and arbitrarily appear became so ball crushingly infuriating that I decided to throw caution to the wind and rock up at the station, sans ticket, sans hope, sans everything. I became a soldier of fortune, bravely facing up to potential random ticket inspection and irritating little barriers that, although cutting you off at the waist (and thus being as effective a barrier against ticket dodging as whistling is to a prolonged nuclear assault) appear to be a forcefield of terrifying strength and mystical power.

I'm no bean counter or right wing social crusader but I'm pretty sure that infinite half bearded, Adidas promoting, slack faced cornholes before me have been absolutely fine with not buying a ticket and probably travelled uninhibited to their chosen destination (casino / dog track / crown court) mainlining Carling and uttering unintelligible profane slurs. I felt it was about my time for a slice of the action, as only a middle class champagne socialist could think that not paying for a train ticket is in any way 'action'.

I hopped on a waiting train with a lump of adrenaline in my veins like gristle and a slice of non-conformist pie in my belly, only to be immediately confronted by a planet arsed, humourless ticket inspector with the look of a Bulgarian shot-putter about her and murder in her eyes. As it became clear from my embarrassed shuffling and sorrowful mutterings to the tune of "can I buy a ticket from you..." she didn't exactly have a hardened criminal on her hands and as such spoke to me like I was a five year old who'd waited too long at the Tesco's checkout to tell mummy I had to 'do a toilet' and had dumped a wad of filth into my dungarees.

I managed to purchase the ticket from her and immediately became self conscious of looking like some scumbag who'd tried to cheat the same system everyone else was obediently conforming to. In my head, they had me pegged as the reason travel prices were on the rise; I was the type of junkyard punk who rioted in the streets and caused some corporate office literally 0.2% of diminished returns; I was to be hated, feared and cast out of the window immediately. Needless to say, I didn't consider that I was in any way responsible for my own ridiculousness. That would have been the easy way out, of course. That ticket inspector was now my enemy. Nemesis.

Of course, my feelings subsided and I remembered that I was in fact a massive idiot-o-bot who equated the failure of a simple enquiry system to my own decision not to buy a ticket and subsequently look like a bit of a tit. By immediately creating a 'bad guy' I gave myself an easy excuse which allowed me to differ my own guilt long enough to scoff down the rest of my chicken pasty and look at my reflection in the window without wanting to hurl it all back up and write 'cock eyes' in the chickeny spew with my forefinger, like any sane person would have done.

It worries me that there was something comforting in creating an enemy to pin my failures on, as we seem to do it readily when dealing with larger scale events. Rioters on the streets of London? - it's common looking thugs not cultural inequalities and youth disenfranchisement. Can't find anyone to shoot for attacking us? - it's evil Saddam, not spoilt brattish oil gathering and distraction mongering. Economy falling in around our ears like the conclusion of an Indiana Jones film? - it's (booooo) Fred Goodwin, not a house of cards monetary system that makes pyramid selling look like Wall Street's wet dream. Someone's always to blame, but that someone is conveniently never us.

It suits our desire to feel secure to deflect guilt onto a nemesis, but dooms us to remain insulated from uncomfortable or difficult truths. Luckily, creating a comedy 'Satan' onto which our fears can be projected is something the media jumps all over the chance to do for us, which is handy. All the while, it becomes harder and harder to render an informed debate, regardless of your opinions, because lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) are around every corner and behind every tree. Eventually every issue and newsworthy event will be reduced to 'goodies' and 'baddies' and we're forced to sit impotently booing and cheering on command, like red necks at a wrestling match.

As a result, I have decided to give up on hatred and become the hated by spending my mornings pushing razor blades into birds nests, placing soft toys slightly out of the reach of babies and eating panda hearts. I prefer things on this side of the nemesis equation. As Calvin once said, "virtue definitely needs some cheaper thrills".

We'llmeetagaindontknowwheredontknowwhen xxx

Euro Trash

Don't look blog in anger...

Did those feet in ancient times walk across England's mountains green? I seriously doubt it, as the owner of the feet in question is a potentially fictional 30 year old male born in Palestine 2000 years ago, a time noted for being notoriously difficult to obtain cheap air fares or quality budget coach travel due to substandard Holy Land broadband. Mr Of Nazareth had no desire to spend hours on Expedia, for it was written, he had little tolerance for pop up adds and was easily distracted by CountenanceBook.

Despite containing enough historical inaccuracy to make Braveheart look like a Simon Schama 98 part documentary on the history of lambing in Wales, the stirring words of Jerusalem inspire nationalistic chest pumping and eye reddening, Union Jack humping fervour until you feel ready to munch down a Yorkshire pudding sandwich and invade France, brandishing a cutlass from the back of a milk float.

It makes me wonder if David Whatamaroon had accidentally flicked his iPod on shuffle this week and spent 2 hours listening to Margaret Thatcher's Hymntime Karaoke Songbook with Jerusalem on repeat, before landing in Brussels and making a bit of a spectacle out of himself in the best traditions of a man so consumed by self promotion and wax faced posturing that, like a 14 year old farting during school assembly, felt the need to turn all the attention on 'me, me, me' in the hope of appearing vaguely relevant, a notion which flies in the face of public and political perception.

The effect of DC comic exercising his veto at the Euro Summit has been seen by some as a mere gesture of independence from a Eurozone crisis that is outside our remit due to the UK's none participation in the single currency. This shields us from two key points that have short and longer term significance for us and Europe. The first is that by turning the meeting into a crisis of the European Union, the political debate surrounding how the Euro can be saved was pushed to the sidelines and turned into a row between 'us and them'. The Euro remains precarious, as Germany and France are now essentially guard dogs and CCTV bullies checking the homework of profligate nations who failed to balance their books. However, as stated in the Guardian's Editorial;

"that founding economic analysis is of only limited relevance to Greece – and no help at all in dealing with Spain and Ireland, both of whose slumps stem from housing and lending bubbles"

It appears that the cracks in the currency are being papered over by the big guns of Europe rather than providing a solution to the long term issues facing a single currency tripping balls, throwing a whitey and sitting on the floor of the cubical trying to regain it's equilibrium before the bouncers wade in and chuck it out. There is still no central bank for the Euro and no treaty in place to form one, leaving the big economies free to rule the roost, dish out sanctions to over-spenders, but doomed to scratch their heads should the fault lie elsewhere.

The second problem with viewing this as 'not our fight' is that it's easy to overlook the significance of our old chum Dave bringing the Euro sceptic dinosaurs a prezzie back from his holiday to stop them grumbling over having to share the Government canteen with the Lib Dems. The country suddenly becomes even more insular, isolated and bitter, essentially locking ourselves in our bedroom and listening to Marilyn Manson records dreaming of a time when we can trade with ourselves and ignore those Europeans who 'just don't understand'.

It all makes me wonder how long the Liberal Democrats will sit quietly like castrated puppies or if they've actually morphed into some sort of post-modern art installation, commenting on modern life by expressing everything and nothing simultaneously in a bewildering volley of comment without content. In fact, the coalition appears to be experimenting in a breed of anti-politics where the opposing concepts of power and dissent are gradually removed from the political process, leaving a silent and turgid hegemony which lacks the brazen wrongness of totalitarianism in favour of an impotent perma-government.

None of this is particularly relevant at street level, where the dark satanic mills of civil unrest, riot hangovers, pension cuts and an inequalities gap the size of Bournemouth are of more immediate concern. But it makes me wonder how long we're going to be stuck with a non-government, more concerned with sellotaping itself together than actually identifying a strategy to haul us out of this economic bum pit.

At least we can count on big Dave to fight for Britain at home, as well as on the European stage. Unless of course, the whole meeting turned out to be a bit of a 'damp squib'. Oh well...

Imissyourface xx

Blog To The Future

Hiya, what's this...? Blogging again...? Jeeeeeeezus

When the scientists who first dreamed up the large hadron collider at CERN first got together around the kitchen table (do scientists who build large hadron colliders - or even mini colliders - get together around kitchen tables? I like to think of them sitting around their in-house bars, on stools shaped like beer barrels, dipping their wispy beards into mugs of foamy home brew, whilst giggling about smashing stuff together and using words beyond my comprehension like 'science', 'collide' and 'achievement'. Am I getting off the point a bit? Sorry) did they realise then that their discussions and the ramifications of those ale infused chats would in time lead to incomprehensibly important discoveries that open up new and exciting frontiers in a phenomenally boring way?

One would imagine so, as science is the study of cause, effect and observation. Each step taken on the road which started with the discovery of fire has led inevitably to each new horizon as the blinkers of ignorance are trumped. The men and women working on the colliderscopeotron had achieved all they could on paper and the time had come to build a massive thingy to test it all out. This in turn will lead to decades of people sitting around kitchen tables, using what their predecessors observed at CERN to make their own innumerable fag packet calculations and figure out the next big thingy they have to make (please let it be cooler next time - is using a DeLorean really so hard?).

My point is that these people have purpose. Those who went before them laid down their discoveries on paper for the next generation to pick up and carry forwards, unrestricted by the technology of the past. Einstein wrote a bit and had funny hair, meaning that the bloke from D:Ream could write a bit more and have slightly better hair. They had vision, purpose and despite being isolated on the cliff face of discovery and battered by the winds of conformity, they were driven to excel. They have vocation, they have ambition, they have a selection of delicious cheesy snacks to get them through late night sessions trying to make X = something giddy.

I have returned to England from the comfort, guaranteed income and hedonism of living in Saigon this week and face a challenge to build my own metaphorical CERN. Coming home gives rise to the usual ponderings, especially when faced with the big question: "So, what are you doing now?". Frankly my dears, I don't have a clue. If I was a welder, I'd start welding things together. If I was a plumber, I'd plumb things. If I was a drug dealer, I'd move to Rugby. But I'm not, and I wont (although option 3 is always a possibility - it's a sellers market).

As it is, I'm part of a generation of lost little puppies who are on the cusp of larking about and getting their shit together. Overeducated and underemployed, we wonder the bedroom harvesting opinions from Guardian blogs and posting artistic mish mash scavenged from YouLube in an attempt to appear 'connected' and not at all hollow eyed insomniacs suckling at the internet crack pipe, jealously 'Icoulddothat'ing at all the smart arses getting rich off blogging or actually achieving things while we silently stare at a luminous laptop screen waiting for our Pot Noodles to cool down.

Still, I've only been back a week and a half, so it's not time for panic just yet. I'm still feeling the cold and people are still honestly asking and appearing to be interested in my Saigon adventures. But it can't be long before a single mention of 'noodle soup' at a restaurant will cause my mates to leap across the table and use a funnel to force lighter fluid into my windpipe before setting my vocal chords on fire until they pop like pork fat under a hot grill. Actually, my pals are so polite it will probably go the other way and they'll smile and nod while secretly pushing steak knives into their thighs in an attempt to stave off the narcolepsy.

I'm glad to be home, I'm glad to see seasons again and not be the walking freak show who's twelve feet taller than everybody in the country. Now if I could just channel this into something productive I'd be a'OK. The time for talking is over. It's action stations. It's Countdown.... oooooo.

Th'Th'Th'Th'Thatsallfolks xx

Rich's Wanderful: Underwater Cycling

Bloging from Miami Beach, B.O.A.C,

The United Kingdom, Atlantis, Ho Chi Minh City and Robert Maxwell... what do they all have in common? Currently all of the above are lurking below a considerable amount of precipitation with no hint of an end in sight.

So while the UK version might be the cuddly-wuddly, roll it into a ball and stick a carrot in it, sliding down hilltops, pensioner murdering, chillier than Mr. Frostie's handle, frozen kind; here in HCMC we are still labouring under the literal and figurative cloud of a never ending rainy season.

There's real problems with the rains here, most of which are linked to the ZX Spectrum powered, city electricity structure collapsing like a foppish uncle with the vapours every time the sky 'looks a bit Lancashire'. The other problems are to do with the aftermath, as the immediate flooding of the major city streets prevents you getting anywhere (which, if you're somewhere with a cocktail hour, isn't too bad) and even when the streets do clear, walking on them becomes a process about as pleasant as cleaning your toilet with your bare feet while a cackling Ferne Cotton plucks your eyelashes out with her grimy fingers.

In Saigon's constant mission to always be counter intuitive, rain doesn't clear the streets of filth and grime, rather it brings up the cess and cack and detritus to the surface like blood to a beaming child's ruddy cheeks on a cold day. In this way, the personality of Saigon will always remain intrinsically linked to the stench.

My flatmate recently made a diary of the aroma's around Saigon, which basically boiled down to:

Monday: Toilet, rotting flesh, over ripe fruit, beer, poo

Tuesday: Toilets, rotting flesh, fruit, beer, sick and poo.

Wednesday: Toilets, flesh, fruit, beer, sick, poo and just a hint of lavender.

It's quite a thing to autosave a list of disgusting things to your hard drive so you can reproduce them in your blog (just ask Leslie Grantham) but it is absolutely true that Saigon smells like nothing, nor anywhere else that I've been, read smell biographies about, or had some street grime sent to me from.

If, perchance you disagree and wish to send me some filth from your city or town, then please do so. Perhaps we could have a low budget X - Factor where some piles of shite are paraded as entertainment. We can call it "Britain's Got Talent" ('parp').

Wakemeupbeforeyougogocusimnotplanninongoinsolo.

xxx

Rich's Wanderful: Pho Kit

GOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING VIET..... oh, sod it.

Through time, the great philosophers (Socrates, Nietzsche, Kyle) have all mused on the life of a man through reasoned consideration of the human experience and lie detector tests. Great literature is constantly preoccupied with the cyclical nature of the human experience. In the mater bothering, eye gouging, orgy of Oedipus Rex, the Sphinx posed the riddle of the three ages of man; In Twelfth Night, Feste the clown muses that 'What's to come is still unsure', and the Very Hungry Caterpillar had to eat his way through 1 red apple, 2 green pairs, 3 purple plums, 4 red strawberries, 5 whole oranges, a cake, a salami, a swiss cheese, ice-cream, cherry pie a whole watermelon and a single leaf before he could realise his full flutterby potential. It's a fable which is either a nuanced rhetoric on the importance of experience to formulation of the psyche, or Kerry Katona's daily 'to do' list.

So it is with these musings in mind that once again my feet have itched like Usain Bolt's slippers and I have relocated the blog to the streets of Ho Chi Minh city, better known as Saigon. Like the US army, various stoned pack-packers and a very successful Vespa sales rep before me, I now find myself pitched up in this often filmed but little visited city in the South of Vietnam.

The tedium and tiredness of a 16 hour journey (highlight = the peanuts) quickly gave way to befuddled anxiety when I reached the Vietnamese boarder control and realised that the local immigration processes were probably sketched on the back of a fag packet and hidden in a safe that everyone was looking for the key to. Scrawny, clueless looking officials in ill fitting olive green shirts stood around attempting to adjust their frowns just enough to convince their superiors that they were taking it all very seriously and not standing around idly while a gazillion new arrivals jostle pointlessly for some indication of what the bloody hell was going on.

In front of me in the queue were two Chinese Monks apparently failing miserably to be allowed to go about their business. The argument which followed regarding the legitimacy of their papers took approximately 14 hours and so many officials that it appeared that they were recruiting, training and dispatching new officers to add to the futile squabble. After a while they were led off to another room, presumably to be frowned at in new and exciting ways, leaving me free to approach the counter, cough up my $50 and be waved instantly through. Money definitely speaks louder than mixed metaphors in this part of the woods.

Once I was able to leave the airport, I was feeling sweatier than Satan's jock strap, so to get into the icy, air conditioned cab was exquisite. The heat is almost terrifying, because it seems to suck all the air out of the room, leaving you with only a kind of moist stew which occasionally allows oxygen to enter your lungs. Sweat beads gather on glasses, on shirts, around your wrist watch and if you wear tight pants, you might as well cut out the middle man and simply boil your gonads in warm marmalade.

In this type of oppression, the last thing you want is to be swapping barely understandable platitudes with a hotel owner in the middle of the back-packer district of Saigon whilst wondering if the ten thousand or so locust-like scooters which swam the city streets are actually participating in a kind of live action Grand Theft Auto where the mission is to attempt to fracture your spine with a wing-mirror.

Still, as a hotelier, Mr. Binh is friendly enough. The only real draw back is his increasingly hostile attempts to sell you whatever shite he was able to pick up off ebay the previous week. Sim cards, chocolate, water, fags, T-shirts, tactical nuclear weapons. He's so excited to have a captive audience of bewildered teachers to flog his wares to he actually leaps from buttock to buttock in his chair with excitement if anyone so much as shows a passing interest. His reaction to a knock back is more disappointment than anger, but don't feel sorry for him. The mark up is at least 50% and the quality is at least -40%. Who said business was difficult? - think of a number, double it, sell it. If you can't do that, you're fired.

So over the next week I'll actually start teaching English to the little darlings of Vietnam, which should provide ample distraction from the fifty cent beers, trying to count money in the millions and blocking up the holes in the walls from the gathering armies of furious looking ants.

More updates to follow - probably in their thousands. In the meantime, remember, this is the country where 'five dollar' can get you some things, but it still can't get you through customs.

Saigoneroaming xx

Return

No Mr. Bond, I expect you to blog...

Blinking, red eyed, white skinned and looking leaner than a butchers dog after a weekend at a swanky health spa, eating hummus sausages and playing mixed doubles with Cheryl Cole and Lassie, I finally emerge from the dark cavern of my blog-exile and launch into the second phase of the life and times of the reservation.

This is indeed the second phase of my project to bring whimsy, foolhardy rhetoric and misleading opinion to the masses. Actually, when I say masses, I'm referring to you, the tens of people who actually take the time out to read this grim nonsense.

You make me very happy and sad in almost equal measures mainly because I worry that to some people I must be at least as entertaining as stalking ex-girlfriends on Facebin, losing to the computer at chess in 9 seconds and looking for ways to avoid the NSFW tag and avoid detection from the morality police (i.e. your boss at work). I feel the weight of responsibility to match the entertainment value in these wholesome pursuits and spend my nights shivering and wailing that I can't live up to the expectations.

Luckily for me, since my last blog, quite a bit of excitement has been taking place in the wacky world. Oh boy, hasn't it been fun? There's plenty to enjoy out there, like 6 month Chilean potholing expeditions, the George Michael driving school, BP vs. the World and the Pope-aid concert tour. Eventually, I fear that the spending cuts imposed by the gay pin up couple (Cleggover and Camoron) may lead to some actual news being deposited on the telly box, and Natasha Kaplinsky will have to switch her robt face to the matronly 'stern face' setting to report on the 3 day week and public sector walk outs. While it's still the silly season, we can keep ugly things like 'facts', 'debate' and 'information' out of the news, and look at Katy Perry's magnificent swirrling ass instead. Mmmm. Twirrly.

I'm guessing that to some people the visit of the Pope to these shores is significantly newsworthy. In fact, so much time and reverence is being dedicated to Benedictators trip, that the Daily Mail hasn't even mentioned another foreigner on these shores driving down house prices. The BBC has even wheeled out a special 'Pope 2010' graphic to accompany their reports.

You know the BBC are getting serious when they enlist the work experience kid with an A-Level in Fonts, to make some curly graphic appear behind the newsreader, but ultimately making News at 10 look like a low budget PowerPoint presentation by a biscuit company salesman on the quality of Bourbon sales in Scunthorpe. Thus is the power of the Pope. Look upon his wonders and despair.

Well, actually I have despaired a little bit. The trip has been largely a mask of mass public mass delivered with all the mediocrity that attending an open air gig starring Carol Vorderman, Susan Boyle and an old man in a hat could possibly provide. All they needed to do was to add Daniel Bedingfield and Sooty to the bill to make it so boring that members of the congregation start melting each others faces with pilgrim candles just for something to do.

There's a typically British feeling to the way the visit has been staged, lacking the pizazz and balls out, dick swinging largess of an American event, or the class, tradition and reverence of religious events in Europe. We always seem to find a way of giving a large scale event a touch of middle management, patting each other on the back for 'staging this scale of event so very bloody well' whilst the whole thing looks like it's taking place on the main stage of a minor peace festival in the Cotswold's, attended by badminton enthusiasts and sponsored by Muller Rice.

However, underneath all of this, the whole even is stalked by the spectre of the systematic cover up of paedophilia in the church, making the pale white plastic staging look all the more desperate. The mire that the Catholic church has become central to in its role covering up the mess it's responsible for resolving, shows how reluctant mass organisations are to confronting and dealing with their own failures. The head of the Church is seen as God's representative so can't exactly resign, however great the pressure becomes. The scandal is one thing, the cover up quite another. It is always in the cover-up that the true evil becomes exposed, as the people who know but do nothing become as culpable as the monsters perpetrating the crime.

Whatever your views on the church in general, the central idea of faith (be good, treat others as yourself, take responsibility, help the weak) are good values to live by in a socially responsible world. If you want to add having a finger wagged at you by a mythical man in the sky to the mix, then who the devil am I to argue the why's and wherefores. I don't care if you think Noel Edmond's is is judging you from the back of a tortoise made of ham or that we all live inside the anus of Anneka Rice, if you live by the principles of being quite nice to people and not stealing my crisps, then as far as I'm concerned, you're A-OK.

Religion, however, is a very different horse to 'faith'. Religion is hierarchy, corporate responsibility and fund raising. Religion is political, personal, furious and moralistic. It decrees war, outlaws contraception, builds monasteries, desecrates monasteries, chases people down the street, forgets to flush the toilet, gets newsprint in the carpet and hides in places you wouldn't expect then jumps out at you giving you quite the fright. Religion causes as many problems as it solves and as such, like dairylea dunkers and The Pussycat Dolls, the Pope isn't necessarily a good idea.

But, he's here now whatever I think about it, so it's time for him to offer support and offer an ear to the victims of hideous crimes committed by servants to his church. If change comes as a result then this Pope could be seen as a great man, who faced up to and conquered a culture of protection and obstruction. I fear though that all that will come to pass is tedious distraction, pretty fonts and a selection of Pope related merchandise intended to bore us into distraction.

So all that's left to say is a big welcome back to the reservation. Follow me. The alternative isn't too good.

Solongandthanksforallthefish xx