Long time since I blogged. Not that things haven't been happening to me it's just I never seem to get round to writing any of it down. Today all five of us went to the Highland Folk Museum. Which I hadn't been to before. It's a wide open site dotted with reconstructed buildings from the area. The kids loved it. Inside one of the houses, a reconstruction of a crofter's house of some 300 years ago - heather thatched roof, no windows, dirt floor, Holly started playing with a beam of sunlight that was coming through the chimney hole in the centre of the roof. And I had a camera in my hand. It's not the greatest photo in the world but for once in my life I actually took a photo that captured the moment without getting in the moment's way.

Tomorrow: the relentless slog that is every movie I have watched this month while not doing this blog.

And then sometimes you just see pictures in the newspaper that make you go 'ewwww!'

I'm thinking of changing the name of my blog to 'Where Did I Get These Middle-Class Children From?'

Tonight, at tea, Daisy finally stopped prodding, and complaining about, the green goo on the side of her plate long enough to taste it.

"Mmmmmm I like Mushy Peas! At first I thought it was guacamole - but I like it!"

Eurovision

Who I voted for:



and:



How could I not vote for Dita Von Tees strutting her stuff in rubber and three semi-naked Roman centurions in silver Spandex.

As usual the British song was dreadful and someone I didn't vote for won.

(How both these songs came to be number 17 in the running order is something that has me baffled.)

I don't normally do the viral thing but...

It had to happen.

We took Eben to hospital yesterday.  It was nothing important but when he was born a routine check wasn't done - or if it was done the results weren't written down - so yesterday we had to drive all the way across the country to spend five minutes in a dark room with a consultant Radiographer to learn our son has an 'Unremarkable' bladder.

We took the opportunity of being (almost) alone to do some grown-up shopping. My parents had the girls for the day.  So free from the constant attention grabbing of my daughters, I'm standing in Waterstone's holding Eben with one hand, and flipping through some comic books graphic novels with the other when another customer, pushing a baby in a pram, spots my darling boy.  She goes all goey and we engage in the ritual exchanges that all new parents do so well:

Her:
Isn'thelovelyHowoldishe?

Me:
Fourandahalfweeks. 

Her:
Ohhe'ssolittle!

Me:
Don'tlethismotherhearyousaythat.Hewaseightpoundsten.

Then...

Her:
He's lovely. Are you his grandfather?

Me:
(Pause. Blink. Pause)  No... I'm his father...

Her:
Mummblemummbleoops! (Exit right)

Suddenly I don't want to buy a graphic novel comic book any more.  I want to go home*.







*Nice cup of cocoa, pipe, and slippers.

My favourite Joke at the Moment

A man goes to the zoo but it's only got one animal.  A dog.  It's a shitzu.

Happy Star Wars Day!

May the 4th be with you.

Thanks for reminding me, Brian.

23 - I think it's been closed for a while now...
Originally uploaded by Daveybot

Sad little photo from pal Daveybot which gave me an excuse to test the Flickr / Blogger thing I just set up.

Duck! It's Crap Movie Time Again

April

1. The Empire Strikes Back
   - with the kids. And I didn't fall asleep! Not that I had a chance answering questions like: "Star Wars is all about Doctor Who, isn't it, Daddy?"
2. Wavelength
   - forgotten but worthwhile low budget SF film which eschews elaborate special effects and cliché to deliver a nicely acted, well thought out little movie somewhat in the Starman, E.T. line.
3. Atom Age Vampire
   - badly dubbed and edited American 1960 Italian soap operatic pre-mashup mashup of a mad scientist Jekyll and Hyde killing women to extract something from them to make his beloved beautiful again (after she is horribly disfigured during a badly staged car crash.) I've no idea what the original was like but great chunks of this version made no sense whatsoever. At one point our only slightly (but soon to be totally) deranged benevolent scientist is about to perform a vital operation when the lights go out. He descends to the cellar and abuses his dumb devoted, but slightly pissed, henchIgor for letting the generator die. Exit henchIgor whimpering as our scientist (in operating gown) flips a couple of switches. The lights go on in the operating theatre. The patient anaesthetised on the table, osiliscope flickering away, big atomic thing in the corner flashing all its lights. His other assistant, beautiful devoted female scientist (aka victim number one) turns off the hurricane lamp. Back in the cellar the Doc heads for the stairs when he notices water dribbling from the wall. He stops. Looks at it. Picks up a sledgehammer lying nearby and, for no discerable reason whatsoever, spends the next seven shots whacking a bloody big hole in a brick wall and then crawling through it. Cut to nightclub hoochie coochie dancer with feathers on her bum...
   
   
   
   
   

   
   
   
   

   Internal memo from the producer: . Hey Luigi, How's the shoot going? We still don't know how to end the cellar scene so just fill the screen full of tits will you. Ciao.

   
   

   High readings on the bewilderometer for this one. Get your free, legal CrappyQuality copy HERE!
4. X the unknown Movie
   - I watched a movie. I remember watching it. I just have no memory whatsoever of what it was... EDIT: I found it. It wasn't a real movie, it was made for TV so doesn't count. It was crap though.
   
5. Wall E
   - better than I was expecting and some of the visuals were stunning.
6. The 27th Day
   - back to the 1950s SF crap, Yipee! In this one an alien gives seven total strangers, everyday folks from around the world, a weapon of mass destruction. The aliens want to take over the world and have a moral compunction about destroying sentient life - but none about giving the sentient life a means of conveniently wiping itself out. So a promising start (marred only by the typical parading of ignorance of the basics of physics and astronomy so common in movies. Apparently if you move at the speed of light, time stops - everywhere). The abductees are returned to the Earth with the power of its destruction in their hands. Nice set up for a bit of late 50s H-bomb cold war paranoia and moral debate. And there is a bit, and it's not bad; a bit talky and worthy - but it goes totally off the rails right at the end when our wizzoo scientist pulls a plot twist out of his arse and reveals that "all forms of energy fire, electricity, nuclear fission" have a good use as well as an evil use! With an unexplained interpretation of some, hitherto unmentioned, mathematical formuli containing "some symbols I have never seen before" he unleashes the weapons - but in a good way.
   
   The cast swiftly gather round a radio - budgetary shortcomings dictate that a lot of all-out heck and mayhem is delivered via news announcers, rather than being seen on screen -

   
   
   

   "Ladies and gentlemen here it is, The bulletin we have been waiting for. Scientists believe we have been bombarded with invisible rays from outer space. Reports pouring in from all over the globe confirm sudden and unexplainable deaths. All the cases have shown the same symptoms. All heard a high pitched almost supersonic noise, accompanied by acute agony and severe shock - followed by death. I know it's unbelievable! Fantastic! But the rays appear to have killed every person throughout the world known to have been a confirmed enemy of human freedom. Yes! The entire world is united in a spiritual unity unparalleled in its history. There are those who say it can't last but let us pray it does...".

   To which our scientist breathes a heartfelt "Thank God..." (which is the sort of thing you would say after wiping out millions of people after subjecting them to unspeakable agony. Shift the blame. God made me do it.)
   
   The film plays out with a brief coda in which the aliens are invited to come and use all the 'empty' parts of the planet (ie the bits where white people don't live) and the audience ejects popcorn that got lodged up its collective noses during the radio announcers speech. Presumably the aliens' superior technology will be of use burying all the dead evil people lying about too. The end. Probably the only film ever to climax with stock footage of the UN assembly in full session.
7. The Phantom Planet (MST3K)
   - the best dire 1950s Astronaut miniaturised by local atmospheric conditions on a dirigible asteroid movie I have ever watched - twice.
8. Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
   - I'm a sucker for movies with lots of punctuation in their titles, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has three exclamation marks! I mean how fucking cool is that!? and has the added benefit of being stuffed with large breasted women to distract you from the deficiencies of the 'plot' - which is: three large breasted Go-Go dancers kill a hot rodder and kidnap his bikini clad girlfriend. Driving across the desert they arrive at the ranch of a demented old wheelchair-bound, woman-hater and his two sons, one a well muscled simpleton, the other a sensitive soul. After some searching for the old man's hidden loot and some half hearted 'sex' and rape scenes the end of the movie is a Jacobean tragedy with everyone ending up dead - stabbed, or run down by speeding sports cars - apart from the girl friend and the sensitive soul. I've had the poster for this movie on my wall for years. It was good to finally see it - well, maybe not 'good' in the usual sense of the word... Here it is on Google video. The quality of the MP4 version on the 'Download video - iPod/PSP' link is pretty good, much better than the pixilated version on the main screen. The pre-credit sequence is wonderful. Pure cinema.
   
   
   
   The unmistakable smell of female.
   
   
   
9. Return of the Jedi
   
   
   
   

   
   My favourite shot in the Entire Star Wars saga.
   
   
10. Mission Mars
    - Lo budget SF which uses vast amounts of NASA footage in a variety of interesting ways - none of which make a lot of sense. I spent most of the running time watching the lead, Darren McGavin, listening. I like watching people listening in movies. Sometimes when I see a part of a movie on the television and, for whatever reason, the sound is down, I always look out for listening acting. It's easier to do when the sound is down because, duh! obvious!, you don't get distracted by the dialogue. (Another way of not getting distracted by dialogue is when it has become so meaningless that you no longer care or understand what the characters are saying - or why. Happens a lot in the kind of movie I watch. Happened in this one.) Darren McGavin is another of those know the face but not the name actors. 60+ years in the business. He's a great listener. He listened the hell out of this movie.
11. Rocket Attack USA
    - (MST3K) cold war propaganda at its cheapest. The director went on to make such masterpieces as: Fanny Hill Meets Dr. Erotico. Which could end up as contender in my top 100 bad movie titles. The top place at the moment are taken by Rock 'N Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape, followed by Blood of Ghastly Horror (aka Psycho a Go-Go) which I shall be 'enjoying' tomorrow night.
12. Blood of Ghastly Horror
    

    - Oh My God! (as the young people say these days.) I am in a state of shock. An infuckingcredible movie. As far as I can work out, the history behind this patchwork hallucination is that in 1965, director Al Adamson produced and directed a very low budget, jewellery heist gone wrong movie called Psycho A Go-Go which seems to have had a terrific central performance and a plot device stolen from Night of the Hunter, and may have been intended as a comedy. It didn't sell because there were no names in it. Years later the director shot what appeared to be two sets of additional scenes, the first with John Carradine as a misguided scientist who, years before, had implanted a electronic device into a brain dead Nam vet with the inevitable consequence that he became a homicidal hoodlum - Carradine's 'confession' of this act cues great chunks of the 1965 film in flashback. (With me so far?) The homicidal hoodlum returns to the lab (new footage with the same actor) and kills his 'creator' in a laboratory featuring that staple of cheap set design, vast swathes of blackout curtain.
    

    
    The set was so small the operating table
    had to be propped up against a wall.
    

    
    

    The movie now seems to have been called The Man with the Synthetic Brain. When this version flopped, a second set of scenes was shot. In this, a framing device is added with detectives investigating a series of on-screen alley murders committed by a Zombie. Shortly after receiving, through the post, a colleague's head in a box - a shock lessoned slightly by it being heavily flagged up way in advance during the opening credits - they get to deliver these great crap lines:
    

    
    Chief Framing Device Detective:(READING FILE)
    
    Well I'll be a son of a bitch...
    
    
    Second Framing Device Detective:
    
    What is it Lieutenant?
    
    
    Chief Framing Device Detective:
    
    Everyone involved with the Corey case,
    
    with one exception - is dead!
    
    
    Second Framing Device Detective:
    
    What?... Do we know who it is?
    
    
    

    The Chief Framing Device detective stops tipping his chair back out of the frame long enough to fill in his underling on the Corey case and we flashback to the first set of added footage involving John Carridine as the mad scientist (thus neatly making Carradine's flashback that cinematic rarity, a flashback within a flashback). Further (post flashback) investigations lead the detectives to the lair of another mad scientist who turns out to be the father of the poor sap with the brain implant. Vengeful mad daddy has a nice line in vengeful zombie creation of his own (using more 'natural' voodooistic methods). The Director's wife stops by the studio long enough to get strapped to a table and have the second half of the heist movie flashbacked at her by daddy before he injects her with zombie juice. There is a short scene of constipated rampage (one mad scientist, two zombies, and three policemen, confined to a six foot square location - I think the cameraman stood on a chair) and just about everyone ends up dead. The End.
    
    
    Here's the wonderfully OTT trailer:
    
    
    
13. Horror of the Blood Monsters*
    - I'm going to hand over to a poster over on the IMDb for a bit here, I'm still in shock

    Ya gotta love Al Adamson. Only he would (1) take footage from a 20-year-old movie about gorillas in diving helmets ("Robot Monster"), (2) combine it with clips from a 30-year-old movie about elephants with hair mats glued to their sides ("One Million B.C."), (3) throw in parts from a God-knows-how-old Filipino movie about midget cannibals, half man/half lobster monsters and beer-bellied Chinese cavemen with snakes growing out of their shoulders (all of the aforementioned footage being in black and white), (4) spend $11.43 shooting new "connecting" footage (in color, no less) with an apparently--to be charitable--confused John Carradine and a bunch of actors who have trouble remembering their lines (among them a vapid blonde who is so incompetent that all her dialogue is dubbed in by someone else and who doesn't even have the decency to make up for it by getting naked), (5) put it out under at least 10 different titles and (6) try to pass each one off as a new movie. Go, Al!

    
    This is one brilliant movie. It so far beyond bad it comes out the other side again. I am so proud of myself for retaining control of my bladder when we saw the first shot of the spaceship landing.
    
    
    
    
    ..
    
    
    
    
    And here it is preparing to take off.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    A plastic kit model airliner and two pastry cutters! - it's genius!
    
    There is also a brilliant piece of use of stock footage from (I think) The Time Travellers in which the control centre on Earth is represented by an Over the Shoulders wide shot taken from the older movie intercut with two actors (costumed to look like the original actors whose backs we see) against the obligatory, No-Budget blackout curtain. Only after a few moments it becomes painfully obvious the Over the Shoulder shot is not stock footage at all. It's a stock one twenty-fourth of a foot. Its a freeze frame!
    
    Somewhere, during the bewildering intercutting between the tinted Fillipino cavemen endlessly fighting giant bats, lobstermen, and vampires, (sometimes in flashback!), the tinted intrepid explorers almost encountering the tinted stock footage from a couple of dinosaur movies while searching the new planet (ie Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park), and, finally, the colour footage of John Carradine back at the spaceship, talking to the rest of the crew by radio because they couldn't afford to take him on location... we suddenly get a sex scene!
    
    
    
    
    

    Two people, with electrodes strapped to their heads, snogging on a bed while around them lights flash in upturned test tubes and groovy Future Art stands on plinthettes. I was waiting for the voice over:
    

    
    

    Yes! Fucking in the Future will be fun! Modern science has many marvels in store for the married couples of tomorrow. The General Electric Orgasmomometer for instance guarantees satisfaction every time! Even for the most frigid of women! - even on those 'difficult' days!

    
    
    It turns out this scene does have something to do with the movie (or at least as much as any of the others do) when it turns out the man is our old friend from the control room, whose idea of foreplay is to irradiate his bed partner with the 'Dangerous chromatic radiation' our intrepid crew are encountering out in space in order to paste a hasty explanation for all the bizarre tinting of the rest of the movie.
    
    
    
    Did I mention the first five minutes of this thing were a vampire movie, with people getting attacked in the same alley used by the zombie in Blood of Ghastly Horror?
    
    I have another Al Adamson lined up for tomorrow night, but I might watch this one again.
    
    *AKA Blood Creatures from the Prehistoric Planet, Creatures of the Prehistoric Planet, Creatures of the Red Planet, Space Mission to the Lost Planet , Vampire Men of the Lost Planet. etc.
14. Brain of Blood
    - Sadly, an almost coherent Al Adamson movie - still not good, but not a bewildering mess like the last two.

Nerd Alert!

I read in the Sunday papers today (brilliant sorting out Holly's birthday party avoidance tactic* number 47**) that the new Star Trek movie involves all previous Star Trek TV series, movies, novels, comics and bubble-gum cards being an alternate reality. None of it 'really' happened - thus giving the creators a totally new new (ish) slate to write on. Am I the only person in the world for whom this brings back memories of the Man from Atlantis stepping out of the shower and discovering the whole Xth series of Dallas was just Pammy's nasty dream?
I loath Star Trek with a vengeance, partially because of its total self-referential, closed-loopiness which produces pointless, insultingly idiotic drek like Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country but hearing that the new people trying to defibrillate the DOA corpse of the franchise have thrown it all away and started again gives me hope. I look forward to reading what Star Trek fans make of it. If they hate it, I might actually watch it. If they love it, I won't.

Later:
Okay. Nerd Alert over. It's safe to come out now. (Though if someone could convince Warner Brothers to make Tales of The Rangers go away from the B5 universe I would be very grateful.)

Holly is seven tomorrow. It's hard for me to believe that seven years ago, I wasn't a father. It seems a lot longer than that! (Rimshot and canned laughter go here, thank you.)

Most of today was spent preparing for, and having, then clearing up after, her Birthday Party. Holly being 'a big girl now' had definite ideas about what she was going to have at her party. I was given my instructions: "make lots of sushi" (Holly loves sushi) and yesterday she and Merriol bought party food in Oban including; "those little brown sausages that are already cooked." (I would have taken this as a mortal insult, but, having burnt the last load of party sausages to charcoal, I took it as a compliment to my child rearing skills; she has learned something from me, even if it is only 'Don't trust your dad to cook small sausages'.)

Instead of games and all their attendant 'making sure everyone wins something' hassels, we did 'experiments'. Making volcanoes with baking powder, vinegar*** and washing up liquid, blowing up a balloon with baking powder and vinegar, and just plain blowing things up (Aluminium foil in hot water with washing soda = lots of hydrogen. Hydrogen + match = small bang. Un/fortunatly I didn't make the next logical step of filling a Balloon with hydrogen and having a mini-Hindenberg moment in the comfort of my own kitchen. The kids seemed to like it. The foaming messes of the 'volcanoes' went down best.







* - I have a dozen or so kids arriving in less than an hour and I'm still not sure what I'm feeding them.

** Number 48 is writing about number 47.


*** Malt not balsamic. I didn't want to appear too middle class.

Not a lot happened today. I finally got to go shopping - I had to; we've run out of food. Cooking the kids' tea last night consisted of opening three cans from the back of the long term rolling disasters and emergency food cupboard - God knows how long some of that stuff has been in there - and then warming up the contents of one of them. Actually we opened five cans but decided that tinned Guavas weren't supposed to be fizzy - or that colour - so their pudding of tinned fruit salad and evaporated milk went unenhanced.

So - nice day, lots of sunshine, went shopping, saw Dan, came home, spent the next five and a half hours getting my family to go to sleep. It's a quarter to midnight and they are all finally snoring. It's ME time! A quarter to fucking midnight. Whoop de doo... I'm going to bed - and not sleep. Just like I did last night because when I went to bed I did all the thinking I didn't have a chance to do during the day.

Here's the last thing I wrote in my bedside notebook last night:

Note for autobiography: "When in Paris we often went antique hunting on the Rue San Germaine. Once we we fined for shooting a chesterfield out of season."

Today's post is over here.

I can't get used to this.

For the past thirty years years I have been the only male in any house that I have lived in. Since my just after my post student days (and we are talking days not years) I have lived by myself or with women. For the past thirteen years it has been with Merriol for the past seven it has been Merriol, Holly, and Daisy - all female, all 'she's. Now Eben is here there's another male in the house. And it's very disconcerting. Several times a day I think people are talking about me when they're not. They're talking about him.

Since we bought him home my kitchen has been full of people. Every woman of child-bearing age, and older, within a five mile radius has called by, bringing us presents for the baby, little cards to remind us what sex he is, and staying for endless cups of tea and a cuddle of my small, hairy, very orange son and heir. "Hasn't he got a lot of hair?" they all ask, and "Oh he's a bit jaundiced isn't he?" I've been waiting for someone to say he looks like an Orang Outang for days. The jaundice is fading now and he's looking more babylike pink, so they've missed their oportunity.

I've had the same three conversations about the birth of, and relative sizes of, every baby born around here in the last 25 years and explained my shock / horror / bemusement at coping with someone else's tiny willy several hundred times. I'll be glad when we can get back to normal. Whatever that turns out to be.

Sometimes, as I'm automatically making yet another pot of tea for the assembled multidudes*, I hear Merriol say something like: "He did [whatever] this morning..." and for a moment I think "Oh no I didn't! I've never peed on the backs of my knees in my life! (Not that I remember anyway.)" It takes a moment for me to realise she is talking about my son.

After thirty years, it is very disconcerting to suddenly have to share a pronoun with someone else.


*The collective noun for a assembly of American surfers.

I did watch one more movie last month but forgot to add it to last month's list.

Spermula - Yep, you read that right, 'Spermula'.
I have no idea who (or why) the American distributors of this movie took it upon themselves to chop an original French, arty, soft porn movie into small pieces (with a blunt machete by the look of it), cut in several shots from the SF movie Silent Running, from two years earlier, and re-write the dialogue into some of the funniest stuff I have heard for ages. But I'm glad they did.

So instead of beautiful people swanning about the same rented Châteaux they shot every other French porn movie*, fucking each others brains out, and being torridly Gallic with each other over long meals, we get this:

Faced with imminent, unspecified destruction the invisible aetherial inhabitants of the planet Spermula set out to invade Earth "a tiny distant sphere, no more that a gnat's turd in the eye of god" by sending down an advance party in the form of beautiful women who wear couture dresses with necklines that stop at the navel and pout a lot - their master plan? fellate the male population of the world into impotence thus paving the way for the rest of their kind. And it's hilarious.

Part of the fun for me was trying to work out what the original was about. Whatever it was must have been weird enough before the massive re-edit involving as it did: a midget shooting down a model aeroplane with a sawn-off shotgun, a cardinal getting fellated in a swimming pool, vast quantities of rose petals shooting out of someone's bum, shoe licking, transvestites, contortionists etc. etc.

Apparently very hard to find as it has never been released on DVD - hell, it doesn't even turn up in IMDb.com's title search, unless you sneak up on it via one of the actors! - it is downloadable in Glorious CrapyQualityVision (R) from about halfway down this page if you feel so inclined.

Yet Another Short Scene From the Film Script of My Life

INT. KITCHEN. DAY.

The Baldwin family has just watched The Empire Strikes Back. Some of us for the first time.

HOLLY
Mummy, Darth Vader was Luke's dad!


DAISY
That's why they fight a lot.

I'll remember this when Eben is a teenager.

Another Short Scene From the Film Script of My Life

INT. KITCHEN DAY

HOLLY
You know those French fish
with the noses - or are they
 from Spain? The ones you have to give
 to the Queen if you catch them...?


ME
Sturgeon?


HOLLY
Well, if you get one, you have to give
it to the Queen. Drive it down to
 England and give it to her. (PAUSE)
I don't know what she does with them.


ME
Maybe she has a big fish tank.


HOLLY
Or a big cupboard.  Why are you laughing?
 It's not funny. Stop laughing or I'll
go and tell her. You shouldn't
laugh at the queen.

Oh No! I've Dropped My Castanets Down the Toilet!

I just don't get the card thing. I really don't. I suspect it's one of those women's things which, despite 100+ years of Feminism and the blurring of the gender divides, will forever baffle the average man. (And as Merriol will tell you, I'm pretty average in all sorts of ways). Women have been giving each other small pieces of cardboard according to the precepts of ever variable, and highly complex sets of rules since Jane Austen's day - and probably before that.

In Austen's time the cards were fairly small and plain and were part of an incredibly formal etiquette which determined one's standing in the pecking order of Society with a capital S; these days cards are larger, and are given as recognition of some event rather than a mere formal announcement of one's existence. They are often elaborate and expensive, and may well still form part of an incredibly formal system of etiquette; I have no idea. If there is such a system, I'm blissfully ignorant of it. I just know that getting cards seems to make Merriol happy and spending hours making them, happier still.

At the moment the house is full of elaborate and expensive cards saying "It's a Boy!".

It's a boy. This is a fact of which I am well aware, and of which I am constantly reminded by Eben's attempts to pee in my face whenever I change his nappy. It is also a fact that the fact my son is a boy is something we told the people who have given us all these cards. We know he's a boy! Why do people come round to the house, give us a small piece of cardboard in an envelope, then stand by expectantly as we open them, and then look pleased when we look pleased that they have given us a formal statement of something we told them in the first place?

This is as incomprehensible to me as the Japanese Tea Ceremony. At least you get a cuppa at the end of the Tea Ceremony. With the Card Ceremony you get a piece of cardboard which is then stuck up on a wall with Blu-tack to be totally ignored for three weeks. Why?

Here is a run down of the rules Austen's characters worked by. I wish someone would write down for me what's going on now, because I haven't got a clue.

Somehow I seem to have neglected to tell the world this year that, between waiting for Eben to arrive and watching all the crappy movies I have been watching so you don't have to, I have also, from time to time, picked up a book - and read it.

So before Eben takes up what time I have left over from making sure the girls aren't feeling left out and usurped by this small squealing thing called their brother here is what I've read over the last quarter. These may well be the last books I read for a while.

To be more accurate, it's Eben's bottom half that is taking up my time. Merriol is in charge of filling him up (there's a bit of biological determinism going on here) and I'm in charge of making sure he gets emptied and cleaned up. I've never changed a boy baby's nappy before and, well, I'm discovering things are different. First off, when you take their nappies off, girls very rarely pee in your face, or even - spectacularly - over the top of their own heads. When little girls pee it just bubbles up like one of those stupid little 'indoor water features' that clutter up garden centres. With boys it's more like a randomly directed, very small, high-powered water pistol. - The fact that very small children, of both sexes, always wait until a perfectly dry nappy is removed from them before peeing all over the place is just one of those things that generations of parents have had to learn to live with. It's a learning curve and in the case of Eben's pee, a parabola.

Lesson one in how to deal with very small penises was given to me in the hospital by one of the midwives who had had three boys of her own. Apparently you hold the thing down with a finger and wrap it up quick before it gets a chance to move.

Lesson two was given to me by our local midwife when I bumped into her in the coffee shop this afternoon; place something absorbent over the thing as soon as you open the nappy up - I like to think I would have eventually worked this one out for myself before I had too many facefulls - apparently in America you can buy little paper cups to drop over your darling baby son's microtackle to prevent this sort of random wettage (I haven't looked but I hope they are called 'Dicksy Cups'.) I'm experimenting with making little origami hats out of tissue paper.




January

1. Consider Phlebas - Iain M Banks
2. Hostage London - Geoffrey Household. I've only read two Geoffrey Household books. This one and his first: Rogue Male. Both contain what seems to me an extraordinary amount of creeping along hedges and sneaking about in open countryside.
3. Gimlet's Oriental Quest - Capt. WE Johns. Prompted by a thread on Palimpsest, where someone asked, 'Does anyone read Biggles books any more?' I realised I had the next best thing right at my elbow. A 'Gimlet' book by the same author. I read it. It's crap. I can see why they're not read any more. Aside from the expected casual racism: "It was a typically Oriental trick." etc. The story (it's not really a story, more of a chain of events and coincidences that eventually stop) was so thin, and the pace so sluggish that kids these days would see right through it within a few pages.
4. Lightning World - Trebor Thorpe (aka Lionel Fanthorpe). An early typo-ridden work from the master of crap SF. Fanthorpe hadn't fully yet developed his style of combining maximum verbiage with minimal content but the signs are all here. No discernible characters, a clichéd story that only gets going about two chapters from the end and then suddenly stops, and, of course, Fanthorpe's uniquely wonderful air of vagueness.
   
   Quote:

   When they had all descended Tony did a couple of experimental steps. That was another factor in their favour. The gravity was about two thirds earth normal - maybe not much over fifty per cent. He felt light and strong.

5. Ten Bad Dates With De Niro - Ed. Richard T Kelly.
6. Callahan's Crosstime Saloon - Spider Robinson.

February

1. Perry Rhodan 10 - 'The Ghosts of Gol' - I read one book this month. ONE! (I console myself with the fact that it is the shortest month of the year, but even so - ONE?!) And what a piece of shit it was too.

March

1. Magic Hour - Jack Cardiff the cinematographer responsible for so much that was brilliant about Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, The African Queen etc. Highly readable cinema autobiography lite which got really interesting when it got into the technical aspects of things, which it didn't do nearly often enough. I could have done with a lot more of how to make a scene look like it's lit by one candle, when in reality there are fifty lights hanging over the actors head and a lot less of Errol Flynn's drink problem.
2. Riverworld and Other Stories - By Philip Jose Farmer. Prompted by his death (not an obvious marketing move) and the fact that the book was at eye level in my To Be Read pile (I was lying down). I had been wondering for a while why I hadn't read more of his books. I remember now. I don't like them. Even after this short collection of stories I was irritated by his obsession with early morning erections and anal sex. Farmer's first published SF story in 1953 'shocked' the SF world, won him the Hugo Award for "most promising new writer" and is critically recognized as the story that broke the taboo on sex in science fiction. (Slathering BEM perverts drooling over pert nosed, full breasted daughters of venerable professors aside.) Farmer seems to have spent a lot of the rest of his life upping the sexual ante.
3. King of Cannes - Stphen Walker. Since I seem to spend most of my free waking time watching low-no budget movies it makes sense to spend the rest of my limited, not running around after the kids time reading books about low-no budget film making. This one is a cracker - though to be accurate it's a book about the making of a movie about the making of movies. Very, very funny and I suspect, from what I have seen of the real world of no hope film makers, very accurate. I only spotted three people I have met (very briefly) in real life - one turns out to be a multi-millionaire (there's a lot of money in shit films apparently).
4. Money from Holme - Michael Innes - thin little crime novel in which the only crime is the forging, by the original artist, of some already existing paintings. Felt like a short story stretched way beyond its length, or an idea in a notebook that never really went anywhere.
5. The Carpet People - Terry Pratchett. I've been carrying this one round in an inside pocket for weeks now. Finally finished it. Time to find a new, thin, easily losable book for the jacket.
6. The Bat Tattoo - Russell Hoban. Meh. If I hadn't been stuck on a bus with nothing else to read but the labels on my clothing I doubt if I would have bothered finishing it.

Folks, meet Eben Tobias.

A few more photos here.

We're home after two days in hospital (Merriol on a ward and me in a clean and serviceable industrial NHS barracks for long distance reletives and patients) and we're suddenly realising how unprepared we were for all this (ferinstance, as we were leaving to go up to the hospital - over the other side of the country in Inverness again - Merriol had the somewhat obvious idea that it might be a good idea to take some baby clothes with us. As it turned out the bag she grabbed on the way out did contain baby clothes but mostly toys and books. Mind you, I only got the car seat we had remembered we needed out of the attic after her waters had broken.

Hang on Eben, we'll get organised. I promise.