It has not been a happy weekend. Our good friends Mike and Morag lost their baby on Saturday. The baby was several days overdue but, as far as everyone knew, healthy. Both Morag's boys were born several days late so no one was unduly concerned. Morag started labour on Friday night and went to our local hospital in Fort William. The contractions stopped, but that is is not uncommon. The baby was still moving well. On Saturday morning the baby's heartbeat became faint and Morag was rushed up to the Raigmore hospital in Inverness. The baby died on the journey.

It is hard to think about, though I have done little else over the last couple of days, and I'm finding it almost impossible to write about. For the amount of time I have spent going over this in my head I find it hard to put anything down that makes any sense. It is bewildering. I have no scheme of things to fit the death of a baby, I suspect very few people have. I am angry, confused, frustrated, bewildered - grieving. I'm glad I have never believed in god, because if I had I would have been burning down a church by now. There is nothing to say. Merriol and I have both been bursting into tears most of the weekend and I can't begin to comprehend what Mike and Morag must be feeling. They are the best people. They didn't deserve this. No one does.

Eva Anderson Pitt

28th July 2007

Loved







.

Space Chickens Are Chickens in Space

Gah! Gerk! Pfui! - and other noises of disgust and annoyance. My sleep patterns are all ballsed up again - all my own fault.

Tonight, after a long day frolicking with the kids and trying to persuade them at meal times that bread pudding is wonderful - which it is - I think I just need to find a sexier name for it. 'Bread Pudding' just doesn't have "Mmmmmm-yummy!" written all over it. I really like it though. It's good old British stodge, the sort of food that made the Empire great and constipation a national obsession for a hundred years. Working class, frugal food, the major constituent is stale bread and, cheapness and ease of manufacture aside, a favourite of mine. I wish other people in this house liked it too - because I made a hell of a lot of it yesterday. Half a fridge full.

So, to get back on track, tonight, after this fun-filled day moving stuff around the house trying to make it look smaller and trying to convince the kids to try some of their cultural food heritage by burying it under custard, I flopped in front of box to watch, for a change, a good movie (or at least not a Teenage Lesbian Vampire Zombie Bikers From Outer Space Vs Gozilla's Evil Twin Sister 2* type movie) . I chose to watch Confidential Report a deliriously weird, Orson Welles flick. One of those ones he kept adding bits to as and when he had the money, wherever he happened to be in the world, even if it meant having to rewrite great chunks of dialogue that had already been shot. For half of the movie no one's voice is saying what their mouths are. It is a very strange, very funny, very odd movie. I love it to bits.

I fell asleep within 10 minutes. And woke up several hours later unable to move my neck, with the DVD starting over again.

How is it I can stay riveted to incoherent tosh about Belgian kick-boxing aliens and fat Japanese men in rubber suits belting the crap out of each other while standing on a model of Tokyo but anything of any quality sends me into a drooling stupor? I've gone wrong. I need my critical faculties rebooting.

So now it is 2 am. I have just spent 2 hours drawing a loaf of bread for a cartoon that isn't that funny anyway. At least it won't go stale.







*obviously the original, not the remake. The remake was crap.


.

It's My Turn On The Ghoolie Thomas!

It was Daisy's birthday last week but we had a little party for her on Sunday. Some of her friends from playgroup and mums came round. The morning was spent frantically tidying the house and preparing food.

Daisy decided that, as we were having a party, we needed some party decorations.

So she carefully and diligently spent half an hour -

- taping an octopus keyring to the front of a drawer.

I am in constant awe of my kids. I spend hours fiddling with 'jokes' for my cartoon blog and other laborious attempts at humour which may or may not find their way into people's ears and eyes, and just when I think I have come up with something I am really happy with - like this over on the Toon Blog - Holly or daisy will do something so utterly surreal it makes my head hurt.

Just like the Tax Office:

Eight identical letter received from the tax office on one day.
Four for me. Four for Merriol.

The piece of paper on top of the left hand pile is actually an other half-formed, quickly-scribbled joke which may, or may not, find its way into people's ears and eyes.

It reads:

"And the Three Kings came unto Jesus.
But Luke had a Full House and scooped the pot."

Can't work out how to turn that into a cartoon, or how to work it into the Panto. I just may have to drag it kicking and screaming into a blog entry someday.

But not today.




Meanwhile could I point your bookmarking fingers at http://www.the-junk-monkey.com/ which is the address of my metablog. An easier and faster way to get to the Cartoon, Merriol's, and a couple of other worthy blogs (including Phoebe's). It's rough at the moment but works (a beta-meta-blog?). I will improve on it when time allows. (A better-beta-meta-blog?)

I forgot how long it takes to get anywhere around here in the tourist season so, despite having set off in good time to get to the Fort, we are a good fifteen minutes past the time of the kid's appointment with the dentist as we arrive in the nearest car park.

I'm not in a good mood having spent the last 15 minutes swearing silently at the tourist bus and camper van doing a steady 35 mph along a road I usually zip along at 60ish. Actually it got quite fascinating watching the camper van brake at the corners. I don't know what he was up to but he consistently braked (broke?) very late at every bend - quite often at the point that I would normally be starting to accelerate out of it.

We arrived at the car park. Drove into the space right next to the ticket machine (Score! 15 seconds saved!) and found I had no money... I searched the car and found a quid and some other coins in the guddle bucket in front of the gear stick reserved for old sweet wrappers and CDs. Hurrah! Saved.

Notice on the ticket machine.

£1.50 for one hour or part thereof. £20 fine for non-possession of ticket.

Bugger! Damn! and Blast!

So I'm standing there with £1.27 pence in my hand and I find myself asking Holly if she has any money. And the sweetheart looks! She's five years old and on the off chance she has a few coins in her pocket she starts to look. She has no concept of money AT ALL - other than it's round and the Tooth Fairy seems to think it's worth teeth. I don't think I have loved her so much as I loved her in that instant. Needless to say she didn't have anything. So I ended up scribbling a note and shoving it under the windscreen:

Late for Dentist. No cash. I'll get change and buy ticket when back! Promise!

The dentisting was done in minutes and on the way back, standing in front of an ATM, I discovered I didn't have my cash card with me.

Dear Highland Council
IOU £1.50

Next time. I promise.

Happy Birthday Daisy!

Daisy was three today.

To celebrate, Merriol came home from work to have lunch with us and help Daisy open her presents - or at least be there while they were opened. Holly was more than eager to get in there and start ripping off wrappings. This is the first time Merriol has been home for lunch for ages. Shortly before she arrived back from work Fraser from over the road arrived waving his laptop, desperate to get an Excel spreadsheet printed. This was turning into a bit of a saga as his laptop has Vista and doesn't recognise his printer - and I couldn't get his machine to save the spreadsheet into a format my pooter would recognise to enable me to print it off on the printer here.
Merriol is the village Excel goddess. Fraser, a builder by trade, is damn good at putting in showers.
Two hours later Fraser has his documents, we have a working shower, and I understand how agents feel when they put a deal together.

No news today from the Lakeland Product Query Team. I am disappointed and worried. Disappointed they haven't got back to me and worried that, from his secret underground bunker, Ernst Stavro Lakeland has dispatched a team of highly trained Lakeland Ninjas to deal with me. They are probably sitting in a large cardboard box waiting for the carrier to pick them up at this very minute.

Mister Plastics has responded (after a nudge) to my pedantic email the other day asking if a Lakeland Plastic product really was 'Completely chemical-free' as advertised in one of their catalogues:

Dear Mr Baldwin

Thank you for your email, and I am sorry we did not get back to you earlier. The Ant Stoppa Tape is chemical free.

As always, if there's anything else we can help you with, please do let us know. You can email us at net.shop@lakeland.co.uk or call our friendly customer services team on 015394 88100. We're available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and will be happy to help.

Kind regard

I reply:

Hello,

Thank you for your reply, it was very fast. You say in your mail
The Ant Stoppa is 'chemical free' not 'completely chemical-free'.

Could you confirm it is 'completely chemical-free' as it says in
the catalogue?

Liam Baldwin

Their turn:

Dear Liam

Thank you for your reply.

I can confirm that ,according to all the information we have here ,the Ant Stoppa Tape has no chemicals in it at all. It works as the basis of being a double sided adhesive tape and as the ants cross it they will stick to the glue.

I trust this helps and as always, if there's anything else we can help you with, please blah blah blah...
Kind regards,

Blah Blah
Customer Services

NO chemicals at all?

Hello,

Again, thanks for your quick reply. Nice to know the system works - I wonder what happened to my first mail?

I find it extraordinary that you say "Ant Stoppa Tape has no chemicals in it at all". As I understand physics, every material thing in the universe is made of chemicals of one sort of another.

There must be some chemicals in this stuff - unless, of course, you are selling an empty box.

ARE you selling an empty box?

Liam

This evening I got this:

Dear Liam

Thank you for taking the time to get in touch with us about the Ant Stoppa Tape.

I've passed your email on to our Product Query team. They'll be in touch with you shortly with more information.

Presumably the Lakeland Product Query team (now there's an idea for a TV series) will go and open a few boxes and find out.

I will keep you informed.

This week's TV pick

Tuesday Channel 5 11.45 pm - LPQ: Miami
Lakeland Product Query Team spin off series. Flashy camera work and dramatic music, as week by week a mixed bag of actors who couldn't get jobs on Torchwood get to the bottom of Tupperware related mysteries.


.

Occasionally, when I'm bored, I play a game called Inventing Confusing or Pointless Metaphors and Similes To be Used in The Staggering Work of Genius Novel I Am Determined To Write - One Day (But Not Soon). Today's winner was:

Pissing up a one way street.

I have no idea what it means - though I would guess it depends on which end of the street you are standing at the time - but it made me laugh.

But then again I think THIS is funny. No, wait, I'll go better than that I'll say it is very funny. It has to be the funniest thing I have heard in ages. I literally cried with laughter when I heard it.
You don't need (though it helps) to know it comes from an LP called The Two Pete's - Live At The Ever New Montague Arms recorded in 1981. The Two Pete's (sic) comprised "a blind keyboard player with more synths than Rick Wakeman and a drummer with a kit matched in scale only by his beard." This is their assault on 1970's standard Macarthur Park seguing into the ever brilliant Popcorn for a bit. I love both bits of music. They are both pieces of near indestructible kitsch; no matter what you do to them they come out the other side just as perky and clean as when they went in. These guys bash the hell out of them...

Shopping

I was pushing Daisy around Aldi on Saturday, she was sat in the little seat in the back of the trolley and I was doing someone else's shopping for them, when a rather attractive young lady waved a friendly little wave to my beautiful, blonde, nearly 3 year old, daughter.
Daisy immediately went into hyper-shy mode, trying not to look at the woman while hiding behind me, and failing to do either thing very well.
This is NOT like my daughter at all. She is usually the most gregarious and friendly of children.
"Are you going to wave back, Daisy? Are you going to wave back at the nice lady?"

No. She wasn't.

I smiled at the rather attractive young lady (who, on closer inspection,turned out to be to be very attractive) and pulled that 'Hey-ho, she's two - Kids eh? - Sorry about that.' expression that comes so naturally to me these days. Round the corner (by the crisps) I asked Daisy why she hadn't waved back.
"I didn't know the lady's name" she said reluctantly. I thought for a moment. Ok, fair enough. Some of Holly's Stranger Danger schooling wearing off in the right way. I gave her a little hug
"But it's okay, Daisy; I'm with you. It's all right to say hello if Mummy or Daddy are with you." Round the next corner we bump into the Very Attractive Young Lady - and her, boyfriend and her parents (?) again.
"Hello again." I said. "She says she didn't wave back because she didn't know your name."
"That's okay," says the Very Attractive Young Lady. She smiles at Daisy. "My name is Jamilla, can you say that? Jamilla."
Daisy goes into Hyper-shy mode cubed, says nothing and clings onto me. There is no way she is going to say or do anything other than look extremely cute.
I make my pathetic. 'Sorry, she just gets like this sometimes' face.
"Daisy, are you going to say 'Hello' to the lady? Going to say 'hello'? No? Oh well, never mind. Next time. Sorry about this, she gets a bit shy sometimes. Come on Daisy, let's go and see what's in the fridge over there. Bye. Going to wave bye-bye? No? Well, bye, nice to have met you."
And off we all went in our separate directions.

The thing here is that Jamilla, apart from being VERY attractive*, is also probably, outside of the television, the first black person Daisy has ever seen.

That is one of the drawbacks for me of living in such a small rural community. Nearly everyone here is white - or, more accurately, various shades of grubby pink. There is only one non-Caucasian child at the village school and my woofelly Liberal brain was wobbling all over the place when Daisy got all self-concious and shy and staring. What should I do? What was I supposed to say? "Hi, sorry my daughter is staring at you but she's never seen a black person before."? Maybe not... I don't think so.

What I did was what all good, woolly liberals have done since time immemorial when faced with potentially embarrassing behaviour from their children. I changed the subject and pointed at the first thing I noticed in the opposite direction, no matter how banal, and tried to sound enthusiastic.

"Look Daisy! Feta cheese in olive oil!"

*"I'm a married spud, I'm a married spud..."

.

No news yet from Mr Plastics as to his 'Completely chemical-free' product. I will give them till Monday before I annoy them again. (This will be dead pure 100% displacement behaviour to avoid ringing the mighty and feared Tax office to enquire why their on-line Tax assessment form thinks I owe them EXACTLY the same amount of money they have already refunded me this year because I didn't earn enough money to pay any tax. I only bit the bullet and filled my return in now - instead of waiting till 20 minutes before the deadline as I usually do - because Merriol was threatening my testicles with heavy pointed objects if I didn't. Apparently it has something to do with the Insanely Complicated Family Tax Refund thing. They need to know how much money I don't earn last year before they can decide how much money not to give us next year.)

Part of the money I didn't earn last year is going to have to buy a new shower tomorrow. The old one has been getting weirder and weirder and would only go properly for a couple of 5 minutes before you had to lean out of the shower and turn the sink cold tap on and off rapidly till the low pressure water light came back on and the water started heating again. Alternatively you could turn the cold tap in the bath on and off. Turning the tap in the sink meant fighting with the clingy plastic shower curtain and leaving your arse sticking under the still running shower getting slowly chilled. Twiddling the bath taps meant having vast quantities of cold water plunge your feet into hypothermia. (Leaning over to avoid getting them splashed was at best ungainly, at worst dangerous in a slippery bath, and either way left your arse sticking under the still running shower getting slowly chilled). I preferred the sink method.
Yesterday one of our Couchsurfing visitors nearly had a breakdown trying to get the thing to work.
Today I found the manual, tracked down the one consumer serviceable part inside the thing, and serviced it - only to kill the shower stone dead.

Off to Oban tomorrow to buy plumbing bits.

Meanwhile, my apologies for any useful links I may have temporarily lost as I fiddle with the appearance of the blog. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. Though given my history of servicing things today, don't hold your breath... Cheer yourself up with the weakest pun I think I have ever come up with over on tonight's entry on my cartoon blog.

Today's No Shit, Sherlock! Award for pointless guff on the side of packaging goes to Lidl's Maxitrat Non-Bio washing machine tablets. The side of the box announces the product is:

• Suitable for baby skin
• Easy to dispense

and, more importantly:

• Soluble

Just in case you thought it was one of those washing powders that didn't dissolve in water and just sits there in a big solid lump in the bottom of your washing machine.

In a fit of anal retentive pedantry I emailed Lakeland Plastics today .

Dear Mr Lakeland Plastics,
I have your current (Summer 07) catalogue in front of me and I am fascinated by your description of The Ant Stoppa tape (item number 9581). It is described as 'Completely chemical-free'.
Is this really the case? Does this product really contain no chemicals at all?

I will let you know if they reply. But what a stroke of genius. 'Completely Chemical-free'. You could advertise anything as being "Totally Chemical-free", promise you'll send it in "Totally Chemical-free" packaging, take punters' money, and then not send them anything at all. 100% profit (minus advertising), no capitol outlay, and it would be 100% legal!

It's even better than my dehydrated water idea.

...

This evening the latest of Merriol's Couchsurfers arrived.
Initially when Merriol signed up to this thing I was, at best, sceptical about the idea, and at worst hostile. But after three sets of visitors I am rapidly changing my mind (and especially after Lisa and Uwe, the two Germans who left this morning after staying with us for two days, cooked a meal for us last night). I like getting cooked for.

The latest arrivals are a couple of young female French schoolteachers hiking around some of the hillier bits of Scotland for a couple of weeks. They turned up late in the afternoon having travelled up from Glasgow, after (not) sleeping in an airport the night before. As Merriol put the kids to bed, I cooked the tea, and they grabbed a quick shower. It is INCREDIBLY intimidating cooking for French people. I'm not a good cook. I don't do Grown Up proper cooking and here I was trying to feed two total strangers from the country with the proudest culinary heritage on the planet and I had no idea what they liked, if they had any cultural / religious / ethical prohibitions - and nothing in the fridge. I did my number one, emergency, Get Out of Jail Free Card cooking thing. A pile of plain warmed tortillas and lots of bits of anything and everything I could quickly throw together all in individual, help yourself to what you want bowls. Everyone takes what they like and nobody ends up trying to rearrange stuff they couldn't eat, even if you paid them, into as unobtrusive a pile as possible.

"Well, they didn't eat much of the shrimp and parsnip curry did they?"

It's flat pack, self-assembly food. Knife, fork, and one of those dinky little Ikea allen keys on each place setting.

And the winner of this week's No Shit Sherlock Award for pointless guff on packaging goes to whoever it was at Whitworth's who looked at a very small 'snack sized' packet of dried pineapple and thought "I know, I'll add the words: "Ideal for snacking" to the back."
Sadly this was probably the most innovative and creative thing this anonymous Dilbertian executive did all week.

£80,000 plus per annum (with stock options) well spent I'd say.


.

Ignore

This

Knowing My Place In The Pecking Order Around Here

Yesterday Holly asked me what a 'Headmaster' was. I told her and then she wanted to know what 'head' meant, so I explained that it meant a boss person - someone who was in charge. I then jokingly (foolishly) asked both my kids who the head of our household was. As one they both said: "Mummy!"

Today after breakfast...

Me:
Holly, have you finished with your Rice
Crispies, or shall I put them in the duck food?

Holly
No, I've finished with them. Put them in the
duck food - or you could eat them.

Thanks Holly.

Some macho, territorial, pissing in the corners type activity coming up soon - as soon as I've got on top of the laundry and tidied things up a bit - and got the wife's tea on so it's hot when she gets in from the pub.

Phoebe, this is Stalag Luft Morag.




And here is one of the teddies that my kids keep held there



I think they were trying to make it a dress and it didn't fit - but they might just want me to think that.




.

Sorry to do this to you again but it's end of the quarter, info-dumping, backup my What I've Watched For The Past Three Month's time again, and what a fine crop of crap I have been watching too:

April

1. The Norman Rockwell Code - Funny little parody of Dan Brown's thing. See it here.
2. Gremloids - silly low-budget Star Wars spoofoid, that makes me laugh.
3. Death Race 2000 - I finally got to see it! I've been trying to get to see this movie for about 20 years on and off. Dated but it still has it's moments.
4. Alien Contamination - Gory cheapo Italian Alien rip-off with an interesting solution to the famous and perennial Bad Italian Movie Dubbing Problem - gas masks.
5. How To Get Ahead in Advertising - Hmmmmmm my internal jury is still out.
6. Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell - (MST3K) - oh I am so overwhelmed with indifference.
7. Blue Velvet- Five Stars! I just love the weird unearthly quality of Lynch's movies. They are like semi lucid dreams - bad dreams but dreams.
8. Memoirs of an Invisible Man - brain dead mediocrity from John Carpenter that kept my eyes occupied as I kept the sofa warm. (24 hours later the true horror of what I had done hit me. I had watched an ENTIRE Chevy Chase movie.... and laughed.) then going from the rediculous to the sublime the next night I watched:
9. Cyrano de Bergerac - The 1990 version with Gérard Depardieu. I was hooked from the opening shot and I was in tears by the end. A magnificent movie. Why did it take me so long to get round to watching it? Why don't I speak French? FIVE STAR PLUS! and then some. Next night, wanting to avoid any disappointment, I watched:
10. Good Against Evil - a total Turd of a Rosemary's Baby / Exorcist clone TV pilot. I kid you not. A 1977 TV pilot about a lone wanderer and his priest sidekick/mentor seeking, week after week, his one true love who an evil sect have groomed since her birth to be the bride of the devil Astaroth. I can just see the light bulb going on over the producer's head "The Exorcist: The TV Series? How can it fail?!" It did.
11. Alien Zone - A 1978 portmanteaux 'Horror' film made in Oklahoma. However bad that sounds to you the reality was worse.

May

1. Dünyayi kurtaran adam (AKA The Turkish Star Wars) - My god! I am watching this movie in instalments. There is only so much of it I can take at one sitting. It is insane. Imagine, if you can, a Science Fiction Bollywood Kung-fu film with great chunks of Star Wars sliced in seemingly at random and the subtitles written in pure Borat. It is incomprehensible and hilarious in equal measure. The Star Wars footage was spliced in from an anamorphic print (all squashed up and needing to be projected through a special lens to make it widescreen) while the Turkish bits were shot in academy format (more squareish). Result? The Death Star looks more like the Death Egg. Huge fun. Watch it on line free here.
2. Eraserhead - I get at last! This must be the fourth time I've seen this movie and I finally get it! It's a comedy!
3. Space Mutiny - (MST3K) A good week for really bad movies made in exotic locations using bits of far better movies in an attempt to make themselves look more expensive. First Turkey, now South Africa. If I tell you that the 'better movie' in this case was Battlestar Galactica you will get an idea how truly bad this was. The MST3K version is here if you want.
4. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? - (MST3K) I've been finding a lot of Mystery Science Theatre 3000s on the web at the moment (At this point I should like to say "Woohoo! Google Video Rocks!" - but I'm a middle aged Brit and it would sound wrong so I'm not going to.)
5. Robot Holocaust - (MST3K) Dire, stand in a line, and deliver barely intelligible, barely memorised lines, crap 80s SF directed by someone who went on to greater things - directing porn movies.
6. Godzilla Vs Megalon - (MST3K) Sweaty Japanese guys in rubber suits thump each other a lot
7. The Robot Vs. The Aztec Mummy - (MST3K) This counts as three movies! A 1958 Mexican threequell, the first 2/3rds of which consisted of the first two movies in the series rehashed in stonkingly clumsy flashback, which culminates in a hilariously stupid fight between the Aztec Mummy and a radioactive robot with no knees that looked like it came out of a Crash Corrigan serial. Why do I watch this stuff - i mean why?
8. Future War - (MST3K) Belgian kick-boxer from outer space teams up with novice ex-hooker nun to defeat pursuing alien android overlords and their variably-sized trained killers dinosaurs. God, it must have looked so good on paper...
9. The Space Children - (MST3K) Better than not very good, low budget, cold war, aliens saving us from all out thermo-nuclear heck movie.
10. Operation Double 007 aka Operation Kid Brother aka Secret Agent 00 aka OK Connery - (MST3K) an Italian 1967 James Bond knock-off / spoof and the screen début of the great, and tragically neglected Neil Connery, brother of Sean Connery, who thanks to an amazing bit of casting, plays the brother of the world's most famous secret agent, a lip-reading, plastic surgeon with oriental hypno-powers, by the name of Dr Neil Connery. How I laughed.
11. The Man Who Would Be King - More Connery - blessed synchronicity. Loved this film for years. Cracking acting and effortless direction.
12. Alphaville aka Dick Tracy on Mars, or Tarzan vs. IBM - Laugh out loud, part Noir pastiche, part incomprehensible existential European SF by Jean-Luc Goddard.
13. Rocketship X-M -
14. The Independent - as a break from the cheesy low budget movies - a very funny little movie about a cheesy low budget movie director. I so want to see Twelve Angry Men And a Baby.
15. Bedknobs and Broomsticks -
    
16. Rocketship X-M - (MST3K) I have watched two different versions of this very dull movie in the last two days. I suspect I will shortly need medical help. (I mean, apart from anything else, I find it slightly scary that I OWN two different versions of this very dull movie.)
17. The Day The Earth Froze - (MST3K) 1959 Finnish Wagnerian weirdness. One Finnish movie a year is enough.
18. The Fury Of The Wolfman - bewilderingly bad 1964 Spanish werewolf movie.
19. The Projected Man - (MST3K) Dull British clone of The Fly.
20. Prince of Space - (MST3K) Yet another serial rendered down to a movie length mess - this is the fourth I have seen this year. It is not a form that lends itself to any kind of appreciation as it has no redeeming qualities what so ever.
21. The Nightmare Never Ends - Total 70s horror shit, but with three Directors on the credits and two DPs why did I expect anything else?

June

1. The Lost Continent - Cheap Lost World knock off containing footage lifted from (Dear god! Noooooo!) Rocketship X-M
2. Lady Ice -Dull Thomas Crown wannabee that seemed to be have been made by filming Donald Sutherland on holiday.
3. Counterblast - 1948 British 'thriller'.
4. The Hound of The Baskervilles - Hammer films, l love 'em, total tosh but great tosh.
5. The Phantom Planet - dreadful early 60s SF
6. The Bride of the Monster - Ed Wood Jr's second greatest bad film with some truly inspired weird acting moments from Bela Lugosi.
7. Rancho Notorious - Great title! Fritz Lang, Marline Deitrich. and Cowboys. Odd.
8. Dark City - gorgous comic book nonsence. If you ever watch it keep the sound down until the watch shows 12, as it has one of those dreadful tacked on pre-credit narrations that fuck up the whole mystery before it starts.
9. The Dresser - Tom Courtney. What a brilliant performance and this is one of the reasons I don't watch good films. I was was an emotional wreck at the end of this movie. I have to stop watching films about long unexpressed love. I've seen two recently, Cyrano and this, and I was snivelling wreck at the end of both of them. Hanky jobs both times. I'm going back to watching androids fighting; cheap 60s SF movies don't make me feel life an emotional dishrag at the end.

Then Princess Upside-down Margaret Gave The Chair-lift Polish to Queen Gerald...

Today Merriol dragged me to a wet and muddy field infested with midges to partake in the Torlundy Festival, a local Glastonbury wannabee that didn't have any of the things that would make Glastonbury at all bearable as an experience. In fact it had fuck all exept a lot of people camping and several empty tents with ear bleedingly loud techno tosh pumping out of them. Inside a beer tent a line of ranting poets battled against the background noise to witter on about 'Long Nights of the Soul' and other bilge. But mostly it was camping. Lots of camping. I hate camping. I mean HATE camping. Really really hate it. 'Camping' is one of the seven circles of hell. Festivals are camping with lots of noise, and drunks, and stoners falling on you, and picking fights with each other ( and you ) and saving the planet by driving all over it in converted fume belching old ambulances and cutting down trees to have fires.
Fuck that.
Luckily we weren't planning on staying overnight, because the mood of rebellious "I-fucking-hate-this-and-I-want-to-go-home-NOW!" that oozed out my every pore would have bought down even the most hardened hedonistic reveller.
Tonight, I think I have just lost two hours work on the thing I am writing. I keep getting a Save error when I try to close which means I may have lost it all. I don't know. I don't want to look.
This has not been one of the better days of my life.