And the Winner is . . .

Best Thing

You have to understand that most of the people, and all of the children attending our overstuffed Christmas Day celebrations come from SO's side. At present-unwrapping time, the form for demonstrating one's gratitude consists of remaining on the sofa, waving the received present until gaining the atttention of the giver, mouthing 'Thank you', then moving swiftly on to the next parcel.

My favourite eight-year-old, see Fri Dec 15th, on unwrapping the gift from his other grandmother hurled himself shrieking across the length of the sitting room to hug his thanks. (A home baked chocolate cake decorated with five £1 coins, since you ask.)

Most Hilarious Thing

An eleven-year-old cousin playing 'Frosty the Snowman' on his sax, getting crosser and crosser, and finally throwing the most glorious tantrum because his younger sister wasn't taking him seriously enough. I know this makes me a bad person, I really do.

Worst Thing

A present. I kid you not. Did you see the price? And given by a bloke whose major topic of conversation over the coming months is going to the damned thing, how lovely it is, how genuinely crafted, and does it keep good time usw usw usw. Argh.

Just for me

Hugh Macleod, the blogging GOD over at Gaping Void rules that a successful blogger blogs for his/her readers, not for him/herself. Well shucks and anchors aweigh, here's a post that is just Just JUST for me.

BiB asked for lists of people of the 'wrong' gender that you could see yourself . . . *ahem*. Go look at the post. Bless him, he has worn his fingertips bloody Googling images of everyone's suggestions, but had little luck with mine. So here most of them are. Won't do ex-girlfriend, coz she's real life.

One thing I notice, is that if they're a character, then the character is clever. If they're a sleb, then in RL they're - well, clever. Clever has always floated my boat. On those grounds alone, here in Blogland I am surrounded by examples of unparalleled human pulchritude. I love it here.

Oh - not forgetting the funnies!
Andrew Marr and Stephen Merchant. Cannot for the life of me understand why I can't publish pics of these beautiful men, so they have to be links.

Jude Law? Really?

I just don't get it. I don't deny that the man has some acting talent, but good-looking? Surely not. His eyes are too small, as is his mouth, his face is flat, and square, and his hair is a cartoon. None of which matters in the slightest, except that he keeps being cast as someone really handsome, and that, to my way of thinking, contravenes the Trades Descriptions Act. I have never seen him in a movie where being handsome wasn't part of the deal, but put him in a movie where he also gets to be slightly creepy and he does actually score. Think Talented Mr Ripley, and Gattaca.

So, last night's movie outing was The Holiday. Well, I hadn't expected it to be quite such a chick-flick. Also unexpectedly badly-written. Winslet and Diaz faxed in their performances, and Jude Law and Jack Black as the love interests? Puh-lease. Rufus Sewell was, as ever, cracking, and Eli Wallach was a treat. But honestly? You can wait until it gets shown on telly, and then you must really not have anything better to do.

(I also don't get Brad Pitt.)

Carols by Candlelight

. . .was, I'm sure, no different from a thousand other carol services across the country. From the startled thrill at hearing those few small treble voices bring the hubbub of a large congregation to an instant halt, through the familiar freshness of the readings (my favourites are Isaiah* and John**) and the exultation of the carols themselves, it's the closest I get to Christmas.

I'm very sure that in the next few days at least one post is going to be titled 'Bloody Christmas' or 'Five Things I Hate About Christmas' or 'Christmas? No Thanks, We Did That Last Year' or somesuch, but not tonight.

*Isaiah 9:6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

**John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Boys will be boys

In his diary, for which he was being paid, a deal he had struck to finance his expedition to the South Pole, Ernest Shackleton, on the occasion of the final destruction of his only means of transport, and therefore his means of ever getting home from the South Pole, his ship Endeavour, wrote

27 October 1915. The end came at last about 5pm . she was doomed, no ship built by human hands could have withstood the strain . I ordered all hands on to the floe and as the floe near us was cracking we started to sledge all the gear .

How matter-of-fact is that. I couldn't help but feel that the newspaper which was paying for this was short-changed. Wasn't his heart breaking along with his ship? There's absolutely no inkling of it.*

This afternoon I witnessed the return of an eight-year-old boy from his day at school. I like this boy - he's articulate and clever, and has recently - September I guess - started guitar lessons. As that's my instrument, I have to be careful not to be over-enthusiastic and risk putting him off. I gather that he is picking it up like a good'un, and by his own self-motivation finds himself very far ahead of the pack. He greets Fridays with a song on his lips, primarily because it's music-lesson day. I asked how his day had been, and he told me, 'Fine'.

His mother, who was surprised to find herself pregnant at all, and staggered to find it was a boy, has since opined that any woman who wants to make a successful marriage really needs to bring up a small boy first, as it explains so much.

* There's always Beryl Bainbridge's The Birthday Boys, if you want heartbreak.

Why did I bother doing the '5 things' meme when I could have done this?

Thanks so-oo-ooo much CB!

Heavens to Betsy, look at the time . . .

I didn't have time for a Sunday post - too busy finally filling newly-built shelves with books which have been crated for years. I thought it was still Monday until I looked at the time. So here's one I prepared earlier.

Funny Church Bulletin Mistakes

The service will close with "Little Drops of Water." One of the ladies will start quietly and the rest of the congregation will join in

This afternoon there will be a meeting in the South and North ends of the church. Children will be baptized at both ends.

The eighth graders will be presenting Shakespeare's "Hamlet" in the church basement on Friday at 7 p.m. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.

Thursday night - Potluck supper. Prayer and medication to follow.

Tuesday at 4:00 PM there will be an ice cream social. All ladies giving milk will please come early.

This being Easter Sunday, we will ask Mrs. Lewis to come forward and lay an egg on the altar.

Next Sunday a special collection will be taken to defray the cost of the new carpet. All those wishing to do something on the new carpet will come forward and do so.

Bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow.

The rosebud on the altar this morning is to announce the birth of David Alan Belzer, the sin of Rev. and Mrs. Julius Belzer.

At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be "What is Hell?" Come early and listen to our choir practice.

The preacher will preach his farewell message, after which the choir will sing, "Break Forth With Joy."

During the absence of our pastor, we enjoyed the rare privilege of hearing a good sermon when A. B. Doe supplied our pulpit.

Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our church and community.

The church is glad to have with us today as our guest minister the Rev. Shirley Green who has Mrs. Green with him. After the service, we request that all remain in the sanctuary for the Hanging of the Greens.

Thursday at 5:00 PM there will be a meeting of the Little Mothers Club. All ladies wishing to be "Little Mothers" will meet with the Pastor in his private study.

For those of you who have children and don't know it, we have a nursery downstairs.

The Rev. Adams spoke briefly, much to the delight of his audience.

Don't let worry kill you -- let the church help.

Wednesday the ladies liturgy will meet. Mrs. Johnson will sing "Put me in my little bed" accompanied by the pastor.

The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind. They can be seen in the church basement Saturday.

Thanks to the Salvation Army in Addlestone!

The pressure, the pressure

My sister, whose judgement is, in my opinion, second to none, tells me I put far too much pressure on friends, acquaintances and occasionally passing strangers by my enthusiasm for whatever book or movie or whatnot has grabbed my imagination. By recommending it so glowingly, I make it hard for the hapless enthusee to judge it on its own merits, as I have raised expectations so high, and of course really hard to tell me that they didn't like it all that much.

So when I discoverd to my horror that two friends of mine had never seen Singin' in the Rain I invited them over for supper and the movie. Because everyone should see this movie, it's an absolute cracker. Isn't it just? I braised a shoulder of lamb, and served it with rice and peas, with Luxemburgerli for afters.

Well. Rachael opined that Gene Kelly's outfits, with the wide trousers and high waistbands, and the shirtsleeves rolled up high and tight, made him look - well, gay. And Jill had spent the entire flick wondering why Kelly exhibited absolutely no VPL*, even though some of the dancing gets pretty athletic.

Did we just have a total bust of an evening? Have I just sent hours of my friends' lives down the tubes? But it's a terrific movie! How can anyone not like it!

After they left, I tidied up, and had a game of Scrabble with a woman born and raised in Cardiff, who currently lives in the Bahamas and owns the local radio station. She asked me to tune in, and what I wanted to hear, and blimey if a DJ half way across the world with the voice like chocolate didn't play It Never Rains in Southern California and dedicated it to li'l ol' ME! She also told me that, until he died, she was good friends with Count Basie who lived round the corner from her. COUNT BASIE! *lots of little squeeking noises!* Please please shoot me the day that I start finding this ordinary.

* Visible Panty Line

Sunday. Here's why

I watched my mother being baptised by the Bishop of Jerusalem. I was quite small at the time, and in them thar days the travel restrictions around the Middle East were Byzantine. Suffice it to say, some border official somewhere needed paper proof that we were a Christian family (Ma, Pa, me, li'l sis), and the easiest way to do this was to find a baptismal certificate quickly. Pa's, if it wasn't lost, was in Hoch Deutsch, mine was in Spanish, sis had never been done, so Ma offered herself up. She thought, what the hell, and started taking it all seriously. So belief and the Church were an integral part of my growing up.

I never questioned any of it - it meant a bunch of friends and activities different from the school usuals, membership of choirs, starting with the Cathedral Church of St Mary the Virgin, Johannesburg (then a hotbed of political sedition - I remember a young curate called Desmond Tutu) where I learned the fabulousness of liturgical music, and a standard bunch of certainties.

Then in my second year at Uni, I had to have small operation on my eye. I hadn't had a particularly Godly few terms, but hey - who does? Nevertheless, I asked for communion on the eve of the op. So there we were - I had the whole ward to myself, empty beds stretching either side, shafts of sunlight making the long room glow, me in a simple white hospital gown, a black-robed priest made anonymous by his office. At the highest point of the celebration, I suddenly thought - 'ooh! I'm starring in the most fabulous piece of theatre!'

And, just like that, it was gone. And I want it back.

Context is Everything

The exhibition in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall is currently these wonderful slides. They're not just for looking at, you can go down them as well. As the tallest one is five floors high, it's quite a ride.

But is it Art? If these slides were in a swimming pool or in a park, no, of course not. But they are in the Turbine Hall, which makes them, by definition, Art.

Condensing an obscene amount of intellectualising, academic back-and-forth, and general erudition, Art reflects, emphasises and amplifies life. So, why Slides? Well, last time I passed a playground with a helter-skelter slide I thought, 'how elegant'. The artist's work was done.

So, there I was, in the middle of reading The Swimming Pool Library, which, surprisingly for a novel set so firmly in the gay milieu had been very well received by the mainstream press, and enthusing about it to a gay (relevant, OK?) friend. He hadn't come across the Hollinghurst, but suggested that I might also enjoy Slaves of the Empire, by Aaron Travis, which he lent me at the next opportunity.

It's a slim volume, but as we all know, size really matters - it has to be the right size. I started reading. I couldn't make it out. I understood the words, and the order they came in, but I could not for the life of me grasp what the author was aiming at. Was the tone ironic? Was it a pastiche? Was it allegorical, with the gladiator slaves standing for the honest hard-working sons of toil, and the slave-masters being AIDS or summat?

And then I got it. It was Porn. Badly written porn. Exploitative, voyeuristic, improbable porn. And none of the last three adjective would have applied if it hadn't been so-oo-oo badly written. I was reading the Travis in the context of the Hollinghurst and came completely unglued. With that burden of unnecessary expectation lifted, I could finish reading the thing with a light heart, laughing, crying and cheering the travails of our various (extremly well-oiled) heroes.

And now I have a yardstick for homosexual pornography, hooray. Nothing so far to measure against it though. As to whether it's Art? . . .


UPDATE - I took out the picture that should have been at the top of this post. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get Blogger to insert the pic. - the Add Image pane looked like it was working, but the post wasn't updated. I coded the HTML manually, but it seemed that it just worked for me and no-one else. Argh.

Word of Mouth

Well how about this then. Threshers is making this offer, good until mid-December, and they're not telling anybody about it. It was let loose on some blog somewhere (I'm going to try and find out where and when I do I will be sure and let you know - if you get there before me please tell me!) and now they're sitting back and seeing what happens. I'd love a look at the stats they will collate.

(Download coupon)

Monday night is tidy-up night

because, on Tuesday morning, the cleaner comes. Oh Frabjous Day! I lurch from Tuesday to Tuesday, wondering how on earth the place gets into such a state, but for a few precious hours every Tuesday just after Sue has finished life is perfect.

I know, I know, why on earth do I tidy up for the cleaner. Easy - I want her to clean. She can only vacuum the floor if she can find it. Some days even I can't find the floor, and I know whereabouts its supposed to be - I live here after all. It's not that I can't be tidy, it's pretty much that I won't. I tried tidying away a pair of trousers the other week, and a wasp, which had made its ridiculously unseasonal home in the folds thereof, stung me. On my finger. It really hurt! That'll teach me to tidy - HAH! Whereas cleaning - that's an art the mastery of which has spent years eluding me.

All I want for Christmas is - a place for everything, and everything in its place. In a house as unkempt as mine, I go crazy if something - a book of stamps, say, or the sticky tape, is left lying about, because dammit, they have their place! In the top drawer in the little Lock'n'lock box! In the other drawer with the plastic bag clips! Not lying about on the work surface piled in with a dirty great pile of other stuff!

But you know what they say - if an untidy desk is the sign of an untidy mind, what's an empty desk the sign of? . . .

And V is worth 4

Playing Scrabble, when through stupidity or desperation I open up a Triple Word for my opponent, it is my habit to type 'present 4 u' in the chat line. I imagine that this makes it seem as if I have a plan, as if my playing is so good I can afford to be kind, as if, in short, its what I wanted to do all along.

Thanks to who or whatever was watching over me last night, and stopped my fingers from typing my usual line.

The word I had just laid was VULVA.

Comedy or Bust

Well bust in this case. Dragged along to the Comedy Bunker because 'We saw Paul Chowdhury support Omid Djalili and he was so-oo-o funny and now he's the main act and it'll be great!' , it became apparent that 10 minutes' support act doth not a great 45 minute set make.The 10 minutes were quite amusing, but with the rest of the set devoted to getting a 17 year old boy from the audience to eat what turned out to be pulverised chewing tobacco was - well, can you imagine a boring car crash?

He calls himself Britain's finest Asian stand-up. Is this allowed? Sure being Asian allows him to be funny about race in a way not open to palefaces, but the 'Asian' adjective makes him either desperate or crap. Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar are safe on their pinnacles - of course it's been one shared pinnacle for a while now. Wish them joy.

On the other hand, the support for this debacle was Shappi Khorsandi, who did a good job. Hmm - I bet she would be a great main act - I wonder when she'll be back . . . ?

Blogger culpa, Blogger maxima culpa . . .

Somehow the word verification for this blog got turned off. No idea how. Must have been when I was posting last night, but I didn't go near that bit of the dashboard. So now there is a pile of steaming yeeuch as the first comment on my Casino Royale post. And of course the glorious First Nations sees it when she comments* for the first time on this blog. Is this why people have been jumping ship? It's bloody catch-as-catch-can out there.

I am SO CROSS!

* And it's not really a comment - it's that she may be gracious enough to accept my Meme tag. Still don't know how I had the nerve . . .


UPDATE During my (unavailing) efforts to get the fucker off the comments I switched Moderate Comments to ON. And left it there. It's OFF again now. Argh.

Casino Royale

I've just seen it, and Significant Other doesn't go 'til Wednesday - O the power! That's one evening out I could destroy with a word. OK a few words. Like

That Eva Green is one odd-looking woman. As is the Lollipop-head he tangles with early in the movie. I have to fall back on criticizing they way they look as there was no glint of personality to distract me. No wonder Craig is so stilted in the romantic scenes - he can't pretend hard enough that they are even slightly attractive. Who could?

The editing is rubbish. The Baccarat game in particular has no flow, jumping from beginning to end to beginning of sessions so you have no idea of how much time is elapsing, and consequently no proper build-up of tension.

And then they call a patently Italian bloke 'Mathis'! I ask you - for a start you wipe the name from your consciuosness as soon as you hear it, because - well, the bloke's Italian! He's not going to be called 'Mathis'! Remind self to get ears checked. (As if SO hadn't been suggesting it for a while now.) And then, o bugger, someone called 'Mathis' all of a sudden gets even more important plot-wise, and you are left thinking 'Mathis? Which one's Mathis?'

The shoot-em-ups are terrific, really visceral. The opening sequence is edge-of-the-seat, the external shots of the Venetian house are tremendous, the airport sequence had me not knowing which way it was going to go - a very unusual feeling for a Bond movie.

Craig does a perfectly servicable job, and I saw what Wyndham meant by the gayness of it all, though I'ld have put it more in the S&M line. I read the book when I was about 14, about a quarter of a million years ago, and the one thing I remember is the seatless-chair bit. I found it shocking then, and - yup, it all came flooding back.

Not another Sunday

I was going to do something pithy about how I reckon Philip Pullman is a closet theist - so tightly closeted that even he doesn't know. But that's going to have to wait until I finish the trilogy. I should have finished Desolation Island before I got to Northern Lights, but lost the book, and only found it again halfway through Subtle Knife. Now I'm in the uncomfortable position of having two gripping reads on the go at once.

And I had to start Northern Lights because my mate Janie, who only reads biography and history, wanted a reason to read something out of her normal run. She suggested I start a book group, and as she is a person of deeply held Christian belief, I suggested the Pullman(!) for the first meeting. Which happened last Thursday. I wish it had been more of a success than it was. Only three of us were prepared to do much talking, and when you leave deliberate gaps for other attendees to leap in, and they don't, then you rather run, however unwillingly, out of steam. Nevertheless, the next book has been suggested - Claire Tomalin's Samual Pepys.

I got back to Desolation Island, as I will have to time my reading of the end of Subtle Knife quite carefully - last time I read it I wept aloud, and if it happens again I don't think I'd care for an audience.

Watched Master and Commander this evening - didn't hate it nearly as much as I thought I might. Actually liked it quite a lot. Though I would still recommend the books heartily - exciting, atmospheric, thrilling, and occasionally hilarious. Realdoc, if you read this, I don't know how I could have not added Dr Stephen Maturin as my vote for Best Fictional Doctor. And he worked without an anaesthetist.

Meme

1. I grew up in South Africa (we left at the insistence of my mother, who deeply disagreed with the prevailing politics), which means I cannot not notice the colour of someone's skin. I bitterly resent that.

2. I play classical guitar to a not-very-advanced level. Which, considering how long I've been doing it, is downright embarrassing.

3. I am the laziest person I know. By a long way.

4. I had a same-sex romance which lasted about 18 months. Ended in tears, but while it was going - yowza.

5. A favourite thing is toasted granary bread with a bit of butter, spread with Bovril and raspberry jam. Excuse me a moment . . .

*wiping buttery crumbs from fingers*
PLEASE LEAVE THE FOLLOWING IN ALL POSTS
'Remember that it isn't always the sensational stuff that writers are looking for, it can just as easily be something that you take for granted like having raised twins or knowing how to grow beetroot. Mind you, if you know how to fly a helicopter or have worked as a film extra, do feel free to let the rest of us know about it.'

I tag Marsha Klein, the Blind Flaneur, and First Nations. As none of them come anywhere near this blog, I better go leave comments on theirs. Before I lose my nerve.

ps - Blast! I did a day's work as an extra on 'Tom and Viv'! I only just remembered. It was in the dance-hall sequence and we got to wear original WWI clothes.

Memes again, with a bit of Scrabble

By rights this should be BiB's post, but as he won't, I will. Oh, where to start, where to start . . .

I was tagged by Realdoc in the current meme-go-round. I've been thinking not only about the five things (it's a tricky one as already discussed) (isn't it the Jesuits who have the Four Last Things? Major meme-ing there) but also whom I might tag in turn. I asked BiB if I might tag him, and made a suggestion as to one of the five things he might offer, but he declined. Remember that last bit, it's going to crop up again. Not the declining, the suggestion.

AT THE SAME TIME, BiB has been making ingenious plans for a radical life-make-over, part of which depended on him learning the German for 'Fucked if I know'. Bizarre but crucial. Then the ingenious plan had a rewrite, this time relocating to Pyongyang, but this meant acquiring the Korean for 'Fucked if I know'.

AT A VERY SIMILAR TIME, BiB and I coincided at online Scrabble. ( You have to know I will never be good enough to play this man. His 'rating' is ENORMOUS - biggest one I've ever seen, no word of a lie. The one and only game we had was a pity game. In more ways than one.) During our respective games we chatted, and - oh bugger, I can't remember what actually led up to it, but he was all for storming the Romanian embassy demanding blood. I wondered idly what the Romanian for 'Fucked if I know' was, and he said 'fuckinescu'. I lost it. I laughed so much my forehead hit the keyboard hard enough to leave attractive plaid indentations.

ANYWAY. My suggestion to BiB was that one of his five things might be that he had amassed the largest collection of translations for the phrase 'Fucked if I know' in existence. Any linguists out there who can offer others?

Sunday again

. . . and look what I found. Under the link for FREE MUSIC are five items, four of which are hymns, two of which are among my favourites. And crummily enough, one of which is not complete! The shade of J.S. Bach is probably taking this very calmly, sub specie aeternitatis and all, but I am spitting. Of course I mailed them about it, but if you wouldn't mind mailing too, then maybe together we can make a difference! Yay! Together we are One! Shoulder to Shoulder! We Are The Champions! usw usw usw.

3:46, and 9:10 and 3:43

RealDoc, this is for you.

Everyone, this raised a smile. More of the same here.

'Mi chiamo MEME'

I've been tagged by RealDoc in this meme merry-go-round that's exploding over the known blogworld like a rash. I'm supposed to post Five Things About Me (and then tag three other bloggers.) Fine by me - besides being as flattered as all-get-out, there is nothing I like better than to go on and on about li'l ol' ME (thinks: is that the origin of the word? it was Richard Dawkins after all*). One of the few hours in my life the memory of which still shines (not that I've had a particularly grim life, far from it, but after a good few years memories recede, textures get rubbed flat, colours blur) was a 'second interview' for an IT company. Now, most 'second interviews' are conducted by the Personnel Department of the company offering the job you are seeking, and all these lovely people-type people are doing is making sure that if you are an actual axe-murderer that the axe stays in the handbag. This particular IT company was teeny-tiny - a man, a woman (who I discovered far too late in the day were partners in more ways than one, but that's a whole other head-game) and, heaven help me, a Girl Friday. Certainly no Personnel Department. Instead, I found myself being interviewed by a brass-plate, deep-leather-armchair, teetering-piles-of-books, bearded psycho-pick-your-own-suffix (who I discovered far too late probably in the same day was the actual shrink of the male partner who had been in intensive therapy for years, but that's part of the same head-game). It was the closest by a LONG way I had ever come to a practitioner of this or any related psycho-PYOS so I had no idea of how to play it. In the event, it consisted of a 'chat' consisting of me talking about myself, and him paying so much attention that every question he asked was specifically designed to get me to talk about myself some more. It was heaven. So, Five Things About Me should be easy-peasy**.

But how is it metic? (Neologism there - no idea what the adjective from Meme is. I tried 'mimetic' first, but that means something different). A meme tells you how to do something, how to bake a cake or celebrate mass or play pelota, none of which I am competent to do (well, my cakes are OK I guess, but I think I beat the mixture too long after I've added the flour)***. Oh hang on, maybe that could be a meme - 'I bake cakes, but I think they are too tough - maybe I beat the mixture too long after I've added the flour.' *hastily* that one doesn't count, I was only f'r-instancing. Also it's dull. Oh bugger -

Maybe Five Things About Me is not going to be easy-peasy after all, as the unwritten adjective is 'blogworthy'. Ah - this is where I get to use 'mimetic' in the sense of art framing nature by selectively representing it.

I think I'll have to get back to you on this one . . .

*nope - Wikipedia says 'a shortening of the Greek "mimeme" (something imitated).

** Bugger - I've used up my annual allocation of hyphens in this post alone

*** Anyone got any spare parentheses they can lend me? Just 'til the end of the year. . .

Freecycle

Have we all heard of this? Great that the western world came up with this, embarrassing that it has to. Please all sign up and save the planet.

The History Boys

Made me wish I had seen it on stage (only because I love theatre but have very little chance of going, rather than any deficiency of the movie). Bennett packs so much into his scripts it makes me want to grab the nearest copy, quantities of coffee and chocolate-covered rice cakes and hole up until I have read the thing many many times, highlighted all the important bits using a colour coded system for crossreferencing and footnoting, and underlined all the really important bits and written in the margin 'how true . . .' . And learn half the dialogue for casual insertion into conversation and passing it off as my own.

I haven't seen enough Bennett to pontificate, but it does seem to me that the bottom line in all his work is LOVE. Many-formed, many-splendoured, and many-prosecuted. No writer I know makes the occurrence of love between men such a tender thing.

p.s the piano-playing hottie is Jamie Parker, MUCH sexier than his photo.

International Leather II

Trying to keep my mind on the Scrabble game,

HER: We were at Erotica, the trade fair at Olympia, the usual, y'know, happy hookers, hermans in 5" stilettos and 5 o'clock shadows, and so on, when I spotted a pair of VERY pally young men wearing chaps and not much else. They were walking in perfect unison, very very close to each other. I realised why when I spotted that they had a joint penile / scrotal piercing.

ARGH!

I lost.


Then I had a game with a first-timer who turned out to be a 16 year old schoolgirl in New Zealand. On my turn halfway through the game the only play I could reasonably make was - well, I typed furiously into the chat box, "I'm really really sorry about this, but it does give me a score of 36, and gives you the possibility of a K in a triple word, and please please don't tell your parents!" as I laid down the word FUCK.

Hey, if she can't stand the heat she has to get out of the kitchen. In the event, she told me that her father had dropped his gardening, her mother the cooking, and her brother his - well, whatever teenage boys like to hold - all to stand round the monitor to watch the game. Great - a whole kiwi family watching me lay obscenities on a virtual Scrabble board. And she didn't even use the triple word - I did. HA!

International Leather

Me, early hours of the morning, playing Scrabble with a lovely chatty woman from - well, I guess I had better not say, three grown-up kids, just in from her salsa class. As near as I can remember it,

ME: So what do you do?

HER: My husband and I have an international leather business

ME: (spluttering) Its late and I'm tired - I daren't comment as anything I say will be so inappropriate

HER: But you'd be right

ME: ??????!

HER: we cater to the BDSM trade (I dunno what BDSM is but I guessed at the SM bit)

ME: I just laughed so much my forehead hit the keyboard

HER: We had a customer who ran a business in Southend. Dennis is the name, perversion's the game. He commissioned full face masks, with zips for the mouth and eyes. He went out of business because customers complained that they were catching their eyebrow hair in the zips!



At which point I cracked up - I thought I would wake the entire household I was laughing so much. What I didn't get was why poor Dennis went out of business - surely he could have charged extra for the eyebrow torture! Why on earth don't eyebrows count?

She has more stories for me - I expect the coming few Scrabble games to be eye-openers . . .

Another Sunday . . .

Q: How do you make God laugh?

A: Tell Him your plans.

Good one, eh? Funny, clever, thought-provoking. The thing I really don't like is that in order for the joke to flow, it needs the masculine pronoun in the answer. Actually, the feminine one would flow as well, but nothing gender-neutral does. I tried the answer as 'Tell God your plans', but that didn't work either.

The way that language defines the way we think, what we think and how we think it has been a matter of discussion for years and years. In '1984', Orwell posited a government-run project to prune the language of 'unneccessary' words. If there is no word for 'treason', you can't commit it. If there is no word for 'love', you can't fall into it. This pronoun thing is another straitjacket which seems to me to be invisible to everyone interested in matters religious. Except me, of course.

All they (the ones in charge) ever do is brush the issue aside with a reference to ?*. Great - one biblical reference to counterbalance acres of masculine pronouns. And the others (the willing participants) just tell you of course they know God is both, or rather, neither, male and female but it's simply convenient usage.

But I can't discard the notion that anyone who doesn't question this, au fond only ever believes in an old man with a long white beard, which is demeaning to all parties. Every time I hear it I run into a perceptual blank wall and I stop thinking and start fuming. I don't know how to get over this hurdle.

* I have no idea what the verse is, something to do with God being one's father and mother, but I have just spent an hour searching Wikipedia, online concordances and discussion sites, and can't find a thing. (A whole hour! When I could have been playing Scrabble online!) Anyone out there know what I am talking about?

Scam at ASDA . . .

A new scam is being pulled on women mainly in broad daylight in ASDA car parks.

What happens is that when the intended victim goes back to her car to put her shopping in the boot, an almost naked, good looking, tanned, muscled young man comes up to her car and pretends to wash the windscreen.

While he is doing this, another two handsome, young athletic men open the back doors of the car, jump in and insist the woman drive off with them to some lonely spot, where they have their wicked way with her and steal her handbag.

They are very good at this…

They got me three times Friday and five times Saturday.


I couldn't bloody find them on Sunday.

Just a quickie

Have a look here - the cake made me laugh immoderately, and the post for Sep 25 made parts of my unravelled life click smoothly into place.

Playing games

Just got spanked by BiB. Virtually, of course, but my cheeks are still glowing. And he kept talking all the time he was doing it! It takes a corpus callosum of staggering proportions to do that. I was agape with excitement.

On the Scrabble website! What did you think I was talking about?

Morgan Szymanski

What a cracking name. Forename Welsh, surname Polish, and the man himself is Mexican. He also plays one mean guitar. We heard some Giuliani, Albeniz, Tarrega and Piazzolla. The last I had only heard played on a bandoneon which I found painful in the extreme, but young Mr Szymanski quite converted me.

I find it interesting that while the performance itself was not as flawless as you might find on a recording, the the very occasional, microscopically small imperfections added to the huge excitement of the live performance.

He is also a lot more handsome than his picture . . .

Barclays b*ll*cks

I taped an hour and a half of ITV on Monday just to be sure of catching the new Barclays ad - oh sad me. And even sadder me to be so disappointed by it. If these schmoes are supposed to be their GW characters someone needs suing. The JRT one just about does it, until he gets to the bit about interest levels dropping (in SO-OO-O many more ways than one!) when I just wanted to cry, and SM just cannot do stupid. Arrogant, opinionated, self-obsessed yes, but stupid, no. And all to impress a girl? When girls are there to impress him? I don't blame the actors one bit, but the scriptwriters have blown it badly. And what the hell is wrong with Kent? What did I miss?

I'm off for a game of Scrabble, courtesy of a recommendation by BiB. I haven't got anything remotely as urgent to do!

Tale of the Unexpected

Tomorrow (well, later today) it's Cleaner day so today (well yesterday) is Tidy-up day, so of course I settled down in front of the telly. Having more than five channels is a recent novelty, and I am so pleased to have found another way to aggravate the RSI already caused by over-mousing.

ANYWAY. Synchronicitously, the opening credits of something I had never heard of called 'Birthday Girl' were rolling, so I left off depleting the stock of sinovial fluid round my right fore-knuckle. Actress with Fake Russian Accent turned out to be Nicole Kidman, a piece of casting I felt was a bit of a mistake. Mind you, I think casting La Kidman under any circumstances is a bit of a mistake.* But the piece of casting I did like was, as Smarmy Bank Employee, my very own favourite, let's hear it for, Mr Stephen Mangan! In, it has to be said, a really crap hairstyle. And sporting a charisma bypass. With, as Terry Pratchett said, char-isn't-ma. Can anyone out there tell me when SM crossed the line between eeuw and phew? Same thing happened when 24 hit UK screens - only question I had was, when exactly did Kiefer Sutherland get so hot?

* JOKE! Honest! Certainly don't want a copycat Gina Ford / Mumsnet scenario erupting. By the by, I heard that at her recent photoshoot at Waddesdon Manor, Kidman ate with the family in the room where Ingo Maurer's Porca Miseria hangs. There is an upside to mega-Hollywood-stardom after all.

It's Sunday, so . . .

How does redemption actually work?

If we go partway with the analogy of a pawnshop, we get a pawnbroker who is powerful enough to exact payment for our souls, in the of the life of God's son. Where does that leave God? Not powerful enough to claim our souls without paying some entity as strong or stronger? Not very God-like, that.

And I really, really don't get why a punishment meted out to someone else exculpates me. Especially someone not guilty of anything. I don't believe that people (99% of them anyway - of course there are glaring exceptions) can commit crimes against God that can't be atoned for personally, in some sort of after-lifey, purgatorial way. Metempsychosis does it neatly.

I did wonder whether the whole redemption thing wasn't some sort of uber-parable, a way of using physical symbols to explain the human relationship with God, in a way that we humans can understand, but blimmin' heck if we need a story of such sheer bloody nastiness what the hell does that say about us?

Of course the whole concept would have been much more accessible to a Jew of 2000 years ago because of their tradition of the scapegoat. Rene Girard notwithstanding, anything located so firmly in a time and place has a limited unsefulness, neh?

I am fuelling this post with far too much chocolate . . .

I love a good wedding, me

. . . and the three in 'Confetti' were splendid. Naturally not nearly enough S. Mangan, but inordinate amounts of Robert Webb. I mean LOTS of him. Really, really lots. WOW. I was left feeling that any putative Mrs Webb will be one contented lady. I struggled a bit to find a good review for the link, most reviewers were luke-warm, but then they were American so what do they know. (Not thoughtless racism (this time) but you have to be English to get English humour. Hmm - maybe I liked it more because I am familiar with a lot of the cast's previous, which is mostly terrific, and therefore saw the film as funny, than because it actually was.) Nevertheless and in spite of everthing, mazeltov Mrs Webb.

Brand New Blog

Can I actually have a blog without having a paying job? Looking around Blogworld it appears that, like a salary, a necessary adjunct to employment is a displacement activity. We didn't have blogs in my (working) day, I had to be far more inventive to avoid work. You youngsters don't know you're alive.