Post 404

As promised. The (shamefully) shorter than last night Everything I have read for the past 3 months anal retentive compulsive list thing:


October

1. Spies - Michael Frayn.
2. Time to Come - not very good aged SF in a copy that was crumbling to dust as I read it. I didn't use a bookmark, I just turned the page I was on sideways.
3. The 1972 Annual World's Best SF - ... Jesus wept! if this was the best!... etc.

November

1. Indoctrinaire - Christopher Priest. The first two thirds were weirdly wonderful. The last third was an utter let down
   
2. Hollywood a Go-Go - Monumentally dull cut and paste about the bewildering rise of the Cannon film group. You could almost smell the Cellotape as great chunks of Variety and year end financial reports were glued together. Had the desired effect of sending me to sleep within a pages for a few nights.
3. Why Don't Penguin's Feet Freeze? -
4. The Long Result - John Brunner
5. Possible Tomorrows - a not very Good SF collection
6. The Wind From Nowhere - J G Ballard
7. The Drowned World - J G Ballard
8. The Drought - J G Ballard (That's me Ballarded for a bit.)
   
9. The Alien Ones - Leo Brett (R A Fanthorpe). Not as abysmal as some of his stuff but still incredibly dreadful.
10. The Chrysalids - John Wyndham.
    
11. Seize The Day - Saul Bellow

December

1. Man Plus - Frederick Pohl
2. Starcross - Phillip Reeve. The rather jolly good ripping yard follow up to Larklight. Ripping good fun.

Abandoned for a variety of reason: The Blue-eyed Salaryman - Niall Murtach (Bored the pants off me. Hardly 'Hilarious' Daily Mail). Rock 'N' Roll Babes From Outer Space - Linda Laivin. Great title, fucking awful book, Sean Wright would like it. Also described as 'hilarious' on the back cover. Farewell to Berlin - Christopher Isherwood. Collected Stories of Franz Kafka, The Tactics of Mistake - Gordon R Dickson.

(Phoebe you can come out of the shower now)

Sorry, but it is that time of year again:

So, every movie I have watched in the last three months: The usual mixed bag of crap, real crap, and utter crap with the odd staggering work of genius thrown in for good measure. 159 movies watched this year (one of them in a real cinema!) Did I keep my last year's New Year's Resolution to 'Watch less crap' this year? Did I? Did I fuck! I started the year watching Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD and it went down hill from there.

As an added bonus this time there is also a list of all those movies I abandoned for various reasons, but mostly because they totally stink: (Phoebe, it's okay, it will be over soon.)


October

1. Creature
   - Dire Alien clone with Klaus Kinski, who was obviously a bit short of the readies that week. The Something Unexpected But Inevitable (SUBI) event 15 minutes in: After a seemingly safe landing, the heroes' Space ship crashes through the moon's shallow crust and is buggered beyond repair.
2. Colussus and the Amazon Queen
   - Dear god! (15 minute SUBI: Our hero meets our heroine and discovers his companions have been taken captive by buxom Ponygirl Amazon Women with insane, first series Star Trek hair dos).
3. Danger!! Death Ray
   - (MST3K) One of the more weirdly punctuated titled bad movies I have watched recently. Pretty shit.
4. L'Effrontee (An Impudent Girl)
   - Delightful French awkward adolescence movie. Charlotte Gainsbourg was wonderful. She had to be - she was on screen for 95% of the time. The only wrong notes were the spelling mistakes in the subtitles.
5. The Giant Gila Monster - Public Domain rubbish, a dead cheap, dead crap, monster movie (get it here!) that I have been wanting to tick off my list for a while now. (That's not a real list, Phoebe, it's just an expression - I'm not that sad.)
6. La Belle Noiseuse: Divertimento
   - Well that's two hours of my life I want back. Two hours of watching rich French people telling each other life was unbearable in incomplete sentences. The subtitles for this movie had more ellipses that any other movie I have seen. I am so glad I didn't suffer the four hour version.
7. Little Miss Sunshine - not as good as was expecting given all the good reviews and word of mouth but an agreeable way to spend an hour and a half.
8. Silence of the Hams - I have been told I posses an almost inhuman tolerance for bad movies. This piece of garbage strained it beyond belief. Total and utter crap.
   
9. Repo Man - I love Repo Man.
10. Straight To Hell - Straight to eBay.
    
11. Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter
    -"Igor, go to your room!". What a piece of crap! I now want to see the other half of this 1966 drive in double bill - Billy the Kid versus Dracula.
12. The Amazing Colossal Man
    - (MST3K)
13. The Brothers Grimm
    - I tried so hard to like this movie. I mean really really hard - I failed.

November

1. Amazon Women on The Moon
   - if you ever find yourself in possession of this DVD skip the movie and watch a lovely little deleted scene called The Unknown Soldier.
2. The Wolf Man
   - The 1941 Universal version with Lon Chaney Jr.
3. The Vindicator
   - Canadian 80s SF shite. But even worse than that, DULL Canadian 80s SF shite.
4. Werewolf of London
   - Universal's first (1935) bash at a werewolf movie and not bad at that.
5. Battle of the Worlds
   - Delirious dreadful 1960s Italian SF (another one of those movies that made less sense the second time I saw it).
   
6. Asignment: Outer Space
   - Ditto
7. Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon -
   
8. They Came From beyond Space -
   
9. Bedazzled
   - Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore's 1968 masterpiece
10. Bedazzled
    - The Brendan Fraser and Liz Hurley pointless remake.
11. The Lady From Shanghai
    - Never seen it before. Loved every frame.
12. Gold Diggers of 1933 - I am besotted with Joan Blondell, have been for years. The Forgotten Man number at the climax of this movie gives me the shivers.

December

1. Bride of Frankenstein
   - Universal Studio's greatest movie of the 30s.
2. The 39 Steps - (Hitchcock's version)
3. My Dear Secretary
   - dreadful Kirk Douglas screwball 'comedy'.
4. Strange Days
   - Overlong (thirty minutes of material stretched to two and half hours by throwing a shitload of money at it) this bombed when released. It deserved to.
5. The Quiet Earth
   - What a great little film!
6. 2 Days in Paris
   - which I enjoyed more than it deserved because it was the first time I had seen a real movie in a real movie theatre for about two years.
7. Tron
   - I love Tron. Well, I love it after our hero gets sucked into the computer and the fun really starts the first act - the live action, 'let's dump a lot of exposition and then put ourselves in peril' bit - is a stinker. Saw it for the first time (since seeing it when it first came out) in widescreen. Not squished up, panned and scanned, ropey old video.
   
8. George of the Jungle
   - It's Christmas...
9. Taxi
   - bof!
10. The Big Lebowski
    - I Laughed like a drain.
    

Abandoned for various reasons, but mostly because they REALLY stink:

1. Terror at Red Wolf Something-or-other
   - 1970's girls alone in big scary house crap.
2. The Phantom Creeps
   - 265 minute (12 episode) Bela Lugosi serial edited down to an incomprehensible mess of a 78 minute feature film.
3. Shadow of Chinatown
   - 300 minutes of garbage 1936 Bela Lugosi serial cut down to 65 minutes! Even more incoherently crappy than the last one.
4. Laser Mission
   - Brandon Lee action crap. I lasted 15 minutes after adding Brandon Lee to my 'Dying Young Was A Good Career Move'' list.
5. Equilibrium
   - Christian Bale, Emily Watson - and I turned off after 3 minutes. Some films you can just taste the shit coming from so far off. Set in a future where all emotions are illegal - ie no acting required for at least the first act - it was Fahrenheit 451, with added 1984, and tons of Matrix type ultra-violence slopped over - Balls to that.
6. Werewolf Woman
   - no one expects much from Italian horror movies but this plot free mix of soft-core tits 'n' ass and gory violence bored me stupid. Abandoned after 45 minutes, 7 murders and more on-screen pubic hair than was good for any movie that doesn't involve a hunk coming round to fix the blonde bimbo's washing machine.
   
7. Beast of the Yellow Night
   - Filipino horror movie took too long to go nowhere not very interestingly. I jumped ship after 15 minutes.
8. Piranha
   - I didn't get past the first real edit in the movie. Seriously. The first edit of the film was so inept I left. A record for me. Still didn't stop me being rude about it on the IMDb though.
9. Devil of the Desert Against the Son of Hercules
   - I fell asleep (halfway through the title).
10. Carnosaur
    - I gave up at the point where the traditional 'couple making out in the car about to be attacked by the monster on the loose' - were attacked by a glove puppet of a dinosaur. It looked like they were being savaged by an oven mitt.
    
    

Most bewilderedly trance state inducing movies of the year so far:
UFO: Target Earth, Dünyayi kurtaran adam, The Fury Of The Wolfman.


Tomorrow: Every book I have read for the past 3 months - don't go away now!

Chapter 34

In which our hero suspects he has Middle-class children.

We bought white bread the other day. It was reduced to next to nothing in Tescos. We don't normally buy white bread but this was so cheap it would have been a criminal frivolity not to have bought it. It went on the table last night along with a huge vat of Veg Soup, some of it diced and fried for croutons, the rest of it piled on a plate for dunking. Daisy, who doesn't encounter the stuff that often, and only then out in cafes in the guise of toasties, picked up a slice and looked at it.

She turned it around and looked at the other side.

"Mummy?", she said eventually. "Is this brioche?"


.

I must stop asking myself questions. I really must. Today for example, after cleaning out Merriol's shed I found myself stuffing couple of grubby cushions, filled with those little white polystyrene beanbaggy ball things, into the washing machine. As I pushed them in I heard myself saying, "I wonder what would happen if one of these things burst while it was inside here?"

When will I ever learn? I mean when? Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway) Murphy, Finagle, God, or whoever is in charge of these things let me find out.

The answer to the question is that you end up hoovering the inside of your washing machine. Which is, I think, one of the weirder things I have done this week.

---

Another short scene from the screenplay of my life:


Int. Kitchen - Day.

Merriol has become fed up with being subtle about wanting to get me out of the house for some Christmas-related, secret wrapping reason known only to herself.

Merriol:

Look... Why don't you just go
out for a bit?


Me:

No. It's wet.

Merriol looks out the kitchen window at the sun shining on the surrounding hills from a cloudlessly clear blue sky.

Merriol:

No it isn't!


Me:

Yes it is. Two thirds of the planet
is covered in water - take a running
jump at random and you stand a two
in three chance of drowning. I'm not
going out there - it's dangerous.


Merriol:
I hate you.





.

Boxing Day,

More eating playing with toys, dealing with the debris of yesterday, reading Mr Men books,(currently scoring high on my unreadable bilge scale - especially the new ones, the illustrations for which have none of the innocent, crude felt-penned charm of some of the earlier ones and look like they have been done on an ancient DTP package, cruddy rainbow gradients and all. They really are some of the worst illustrations I have seen in a kids book for quite a while.) and wondering quite why I bought so much cheese. We have a mountain of cheese in the Fridge, Camenbert, Brie, Stilton, Port Salut etc etc. Loads of it. A whole stink of cheese (or whatever the collective noun for cheeses is). I rarely go on cheese buying splurges - mainly because I seem to loose what little willpower I posses when presented with a choice and end up buying great wodges of everything. I always buy tons of the stuff. This time I bought so much of it some of it may actually be ripe by the time I eat it.

Luckily for my sanity Most (if not all) of the links off this site have expired. After my listening to 60 odd versions of Popcorn in one session nearly drove my whole family insane for weeks, maybe it is a good thing that I am not abusing my cheese soaked brain with 40 different versions of Nancy Sinatra's These Boots are Made For Walking...

Wooohoooo!

It's Christmas.

My first coherent thought of the day after "yerwha...whathefuktimeisit?" and "gnugh...whatarethekidsdoingupat-thistimeofthemorning...?" was "Aha! It's Christmas Day. I won't have to listen to the fucking Disney Princesses Christmas Album again for at least another 48 weeks. Hurray!"

The rest of the day was much. I love being a Dad. It's now relatively early in the evening (for me) but I am going to collapse into bed and watch Tron. Best pressy of the day for me? 48 pairs of black socks. All the same. 48 pairs of identical black socks. 96 socks each indistinguishable from any of the others. Sock pairing is a thing of the past! I love my wife.

Christmas is coming (in 18 minutes) and the goose is getting fat (or, in our case, leaking all over the fridge - but at least that means it has finally defrosted).

Here for all our friends and relations is this year's Family Christmas card:



For all our other friends and relations (you know who you are) here is our other Family Christmas card:

He knows when you've been sleeping,
He knows when you're awake,
He knows when you've been good or bad...

...welcome to Grotto 101

Merry Christmas folks!



And here (if you have the patience to dowload it) is the first 89 seconds (some of the opening titles) of the movie I'm not going to make this year - despite the extravagant promises I will be making myself in a week's time. 89 seconds. That's one sixtieth of a feature film. Apart from a few visual gags which probably aren't worth the effort I have no idea where (if ever) I'm going to go with this but I did wake up at 4 am the other night with this stunningly hillarious sequence in my head. I grabbed my bedside notebook and spent the next 20 minutes laboriously storyboarding the whole thing out in minute detail, giggling myself stupid as I did so.
When I looked at it the next morning I couldn't understand any of it. Not a word. Three pages of meaningless squiggles with the odd gnomic phrase written sideways in the margin. I just keeping telling myself Orson Welles had nights like that too.

Wooohoooo!

I got a phone call this morning. It was Tyler. In bed in Portland, He'd just bought for tickets to see the Mighty Boosh live. He'd stayed up till way past his bedtime (his words) to do it as the tickets went on sale, on-line this morning. The show is on Phoebe's Birthday end of November next year.

The show is in Glasgow.

Phoebe and Tyler are coming to stay! Phoebe and Tyler are coming to stay! Woohooo!

...and we're going to see The Boosh!

I need to start sorting out a babysitter...

For some reason I was taken with this bit of an Amazon page I just came across: (you may have to click it to make it a bit bigger in order to read it properly)

This Penguin is Jesus

Hello, much neglected Blog.
Between the Panto, recovering from the Panto (i.e. doing all the housework that had piled up while we were doing it) I haven't had a lot of time to sit and think and have a good old blog. ...and going shopping for a couple of days in the teeming metropolis of Inverness. ...and doing all the housework that piled up while we were away. We stayed overnight in Inverness - something like 36 hours without the kids. Amazing! We did all sorts of grown up things: like eat whole meals without cutting anything up for anybody else, or telling them to stop wriggling or picking their nose. We got to see a movie in a real cinema too! The new revamped Eden Court has two small cinemas in the basement. The choice was between David Cronenberg's latest offering and something else - and since Merriol hates David Cronenberg's movies on principle it wasn't really much of a choice. It was only when we were sat in the seats that I let her into the secret that the movie we were about to watch - had subtitles.

"Man Beaten to Pulp in Cinema by Wife!"

Luckily 2 Days in Paris, didn't have too many subtitles and was a bit funny, and didn't have body parts flying around the screen, big boobed bimbos in space, or anything that looked like it has oozed out of the Cronenberg film playing next door to upset Merriol, so I survived the experience. The film was okay. I enjoyed it more than I would have done if I had watched it at home purely, I suspect, because it was the first movie I had seen in the cinema for two years. On the way back to the B&B we had chips and curry.

Sheer fucking luxury!. I find it hard to grasp that most of the population of the UK would think this was perfectly normal Saturday night thing to do. It felt so exotic, the sort of thiing you do on holiday. To hell with that, it used to be a normal thing for me to do on a Saturday night. Living out here in the boonies you forget the simple pleasures of life: a French movie, followed by a bag of chips and curry sauce as you step over the drunks and pools of vomit on the way home. I miss it. But not that much

Further to my 'fish wearing wigs' post the other day, the counter now tells me if you type 'smell my bum game' into Google.com - this blog is top! It's not only me. Other people need to get out more too. But then again whoever it was lived in Portsmouth former home to Europe's ugliest building so I don't blame them. Hmmm, it transpires that in a fit of madness it has now sadly demolished. We need to keep these things standing as warnings to future generations. I only saw it in the flesh (as it were) once - I've only ever been to Portsmouth once. It truly was an abysmal experience - the shopping centre not the town. Don't remember anything about the town apart from the fact it possesed the ugliest building I have ever seen, and there seemed to be an awful lot of abandoned submarines just lying around.

Fish wearing wigs. In Germany if you type 'Fish wearing wigs' into Google this blog comes first in the rankings. Woohoo! I need to get out more.

Well that's that over with . Ballachulish village panto is done and dusted for at least another year. Though we will never do another matinée. We did two shows on Saturday, one in the afternoon for the kids and those who didn't / couldn't come out late at night, and one in the evening. As the show was some three hours long (even though we trimmed it a bit as we went along for the afternoon show, it was a long hard day) but Jesus! the racket those kids made in the afternoon. It was just impossible.

We're not putting ourselves through that ever again.

The evening show on the other hand went like shit off a shovel. It was just wonderful. I enjoyed every moment of it, as I suspect did everyone else. It was such a pity we live in such a small town. A couple more nights and we would have really started to nail it. I don't think we short changed anybody, everyone who has commented has said they thought it was funnier than the last show two years ago (less plot, more jokes, and genuine comedy underpants this time round) but it would have been nice to do a couple more performances to get some of the timings of the jokes worked out a bit better.

For instance, it was only on the last show I realised that I was standing up wrongly at one point. If, instead of just slowly standing up facing the audience, I stood up with my head bowed and THEN raised my face - the fact that I was suddenly wearing the beard I had donned while supposedly unconscious in a trunk was an awful lot funnier. Things like that are great to work out in front of an audience.

I just like getting the laughs. Getting an audience to laugh at something you have written is just a great feeling.

Merriol (and everyone else) took a brazzilion photos - and I'm nowhere to be seen in any of them because I was always on the stage either out in front of the punters, or pacing and fretting around behind the curtains trying to work out what was going to go wrong next and trying to fix it. The scariest moment of the night for me was waiting on the side of the stage hearing the fanfare that was Lucy's (the princess) cue to enter through the closed main curtains (Another short give-the-guys-a-chance-to-wrestle-scenery scene in front of the Main Curtains). She was on first, had a couple of lines, then I was to enter and the scene was to follow. I heard the fanfare and looked over to where she should have been and saw - only Andy the Stage Manager frantically mouthing and waving down the corridor. Nothing happened. The fanfare sounded again. Still no princess. I rushed over to Andy's side of the stage.
Me: (Shouted whisper) "Where the fuck is she?"
Andy:(Shouted whisper) "She's gone for a pee!"
Me:(Loud shouted whisper)"You Are Fucking Kidding Me!?" (As it happened she hadn't, she had forgotten the scene before was so short and was just in the wrong place, blissfully ignorant of the fact she was supposed to be on stage).

I dive out of the curtain stage right.

"Has anyone seen the Princess? I have been looking all over the palace for her. Hmmmm. maybe she is over there... "

I cross stage and exit behind the curtains again - and rush round to Andy. Still no sign of her!

I step out onto the stage again to keep up my hunting the Princess improv going and wonder how long I can keep this up before people will start to notice that something is going wrong. I'm just about to speak when I hear Andy hiss "She's here!"

Me: (as if noticing audience for the first time) "Ah! I seem to have already looked down this corridor. I shall go back!"

Fanfare

Enter princess.

Well the first performance went pretty well - for a village panto that has had precious little rehearsal and no technical run through. My most anxious moment happened was the moment I realised I had forgotten a Vital Prop. I was under the stage waiting to make my appearance through a trapdoor on the small thrust stage in front of the main curtain. I discovered that I didn't have the prop in plenty of time to get it so I worked my way back towards one of the other two trapdoors under the main stage to get some one to fetch it for me. Just to paint the picture a little more clearly for you here: Ballachulish Village Hall's stage is not good. The under-stage space I am crawling around in is just about high enough to stoop in and is full of junk. To get up through one of the three tiny trapdoors that have been hacked into it over the years with any kind of grace is next to impossible. I realise I cannot use the trapdoor in the wings the usual way of getting under and up out of there without the audience seeing you because last time I had looked there was a pile of props sat on top of it. The only other trapdoor is in the centre of the stage but - as good luck would have it - the scene that is being played is happening in front of the main curtains. (We deliberately write in scenes that can take place in front of the main curtains to give time for the sets to be changed. Closing the curtains between changes and expecting the audience to stare at a couple of big bits of red cloth while trying to puzzle out whether the crashes and thuds and muted swearing that come out from behind them is part of the show or not is just no fun for anyone. So we try to disguise the fact that people are doing frustrated wrestling with scenery by doing short scenes out front to cover the noise.) I was under the stage waiting to join in one of these short scenes so I figured it would be safe to nip up through the trap in the centre of the stage (the one without a pile of stuff on it) and get my prop. Wrong. Someone had misunderstood a cue and had opened the main curtains. My head popped up in the middle of the stage like some demented bewigged gopher. I don't think too many people saw me before I managed to duck down again (I didn't hear a laugh) but I felt pretty bloody stupid. By the time I made it to the trap in the wings the pile of stuff on top of it had been cleared and I managed to get my missing prop in time.

As a technical rehearsal it was great. Pity we had to do it in front of punters but there you go. The audience seemed to enjoy it. Laughed a lot. And at the jokes too.

I got a spam today.

'If your warrior of love is too small, you may lose this war.'

'Warrior of Love'? I'm well used to getting thousands of spam offering to increase the size of my todger but none has ever used such a Victorian turn of phrase before. I'd guess the ISPs of the world's filters are getting pretty good at wheeking out anything with any of the million deliberate misspellings of 'Dick' that used to fill my inbox (ooh err missus!). D!ck, D|ck, Dic|<, etc. The people sending this stuff out are starting to have to resort to even more bizarre synonyms. I look forward to getting Viagra adverts in Latin very soon

Meanwhile the panto lurches towards its opening. We had a dress rehearsal last night which depressed the hell out of me and several other people. Everything took for ever and wasn't funny, nobody knew where or what was going on and we were having to guess where the scenery was supposed to be if it ever gets made. Very like the dress rehearsal last time we did a panto. Tonight was better. We had a fixing of things and worked out many new and interesting ways of shoving small children into tight places.
One bright spot of the evening was me realising - I DIDN'T HAVE TO SING! -The world has been spared my singing for another year - a bastardised unaccompanied semi-spoken version of 'I Remember It Well' from Gigi doesn't count as singing. But I do get to do a sort of Tango with a big hairy bloke in a frock, beaten up by a fourteen year old girl (including a knee in the knackers - oh the comedy), and I get absorb Noel Edmund's superpowers. The things I do for fun.


A joke I came up with today that will NOT be appearing in the next panto:

'Would an anatomically correct Barbie doll have a glitoris?'

I'll get my coat...

Three days till I am on stage and I still don't know my lines. Very little blogging for the foreseeable future.

Last week sometime, some bozo in a government office somewhere in the north of England gave a couple of CDs to a courier who happened to be wandering past his office, and asked him to drop it off at another office somewhere else, "If he happened to be going that way, and it wasn't too much bother, thanks awfully. Bye, - Right. Now back to work. Three down... five letter word starting with M ending with N, middle letter possibly R, meaning less than brilliant in the thinking department... Hmmmm, it's being a bit tricky today...."

The discs never arrived at wherever they were supposed to be going and no one has a scooby where they are. Nobody has a scooby if they were sent to the right place as whoever sent them didn't even bother to send them by any traceable method - or even get a proof that he had even sent them at all. The discs held the names, addresses, dates of birth, and national insurance numbers of millions of people. Anyone who had anything to do with the insanely complex Child Tax Credit Scheme. Mine and Merriol's included. We know this because yesterday we got a letter from the Government's official apologisers (Formerly the Department of Public Cock-up Ameliorations, now outsourced and re-branded as 'Whoops 24') saying: "Gosh, sorry about this but we may have inadvertently lost a copy of all your details and they may be now be possibly in the hands of the Russian Mafia, The Reader's Digest, international paedophile terrorists, or the Little Green Men from Betelgeuse VI. Honestly it's a real mystery, your guess is as good as ours - but don't worry, there's no need to panic, we'll sort it all out - - - somehow." (I'm paraphrasing).

I heard on the news that there were details of something like 25 million names on the missing discs*. If everyone of them gets a letter like we did, that means the Government has just spent some five million quid apologising to us all for handing all our personal details (and those of our kids) to Betelgeusian terrorist perverts (I'm assuming 20p a letter - I hope they negotiated a price discount for bulk. Though it wouldn't surprise me if they managed to forget).

Personally I would have at least tried offering whoever has the bloody things a Million quid, no questions asked, used notes in a plain brown envelope behind a radiator in Victoria Station, before clogging up the postal service. Could have saved millions.








* If they are lost at all, because, as there is no way of knowing what the bozo wrote on the envelope in the first place, the discs may well be sitting in the in-tray of the third deputy under-secretary for the standardisation of fish intestines on one of the smaller Scottish islands for all we know. He'll come back from his fact-finding mission to the Falklands next week, take one look at the staggering pile of paperwork that accumulated in his absence and throw half of it in the bin unopened.