Snowdon't.

After this long, grey crawl out of winter, the seasons gave us just a hint of what sunshine and clear skies does for a man's soul. Looking at that felt-tip blue crack in the sky, I turn to my flatmate and say 'Hey. I've still got some holiday to use up. Why don't we do something for our birthdays, which are conveniently only a week apart.' Already my mind is racing along azure coastlines, places where a man can bare his forearms, consume a soft drink outside, go without a jacket; worlds far away from skies the colour of old wet socks. 


'Yes,' says my flatmate. 'Let's go to Wales.'

To be precise - Let's go up Snowdon. This is my flatmate's ambition for the year. She wants to see in her birthday up a mountain. And despite the total lack of deck-shoe action I'm likely to get in, I can sort of see the attraction. A Buchan-esque adventure in the wilderness, with Kendal Mint Cake, Duffle Coats and dreams of Avalonia. I agree, and get on with the borrowing of the anorak from the parents.

And so off we set, rucksacks packed, on the trains and buses that make up the nine hour journey to Llanberis. For the record, I am an excellent travelling companion, with a fantastic sense of direction and highly sophisticated organisational skills. Any journey with me is as smooth as a samurai sword through a silk handkerchief. I think of the experience as 'precision relaxation', and I'm sure my flatmate will back me up on this one. 

At the B&B our hosts look at us like we are idiots. They recommend we go back to civilisation and watch the new Star Trek movie. Good start. 

Still, up with the sun, or a little bit after it, or...no...wait...there is no sun. Okay. Up for the Full English, toast and jam. I feel confident about today. I like the elements. I like a bit of bluster. Only liking one kind of weather is the same as only liking one kind of cheese. A barren life. Why grow a beard at all, if not to bash it against the great outdoors?

Boots on. Coat on. Hood up. Snickers Flapjack in the bag. LET'S DO THIS.  

09.15 - The guidebook says 'start out with your back to the station' so we walk to the station in the type of rain you get in Jurassic Park. Only at the station do we realise that can mean ANY FUCKING DIRECTION. I can be in bed and have my back to the station. I can be in Valencia and have my back to the station. 

09.30 We find the mountain path. It's still raining. So much. This is supposed to be the easiest path and already I feel like I am trying to walk up the side of a well. 

09.45 The relentless wall of rain has shrunk my Uniqlo jeans. I think Taylor Momsen would struggle to fit into them. I walk like a Geisha girl, unable to take proper steps thanks to the denim wrestlers attacking my legs.

10.00 My jeans are now so soaked, that each and every step wrings out water from my crotch like I'm pouring away old tea. The rain lets up for a bit. Or rather it freezes into hail and goes off in our faces like Dick Cheney's shotgun. 

10.30 This is new. The water in my boots now gushes upwards along my calves in little fountains with each step. It's a sort of trouser bidet. I'm glad I can still feel things down there.

10.40 I can't feel anything down there. 

Lost track of time. I get a swimming proficiency badge to sew on to my jumper.

Everything in my pockets is now drenched. I check to see if contents of bag are still dry so stop under a bridge and have a rummage. Flatmate points out I've put my bag down in a stream. 

FML.

Hands have swollen up like pig dicks.

Wearing a cagoule over my duffle coat means I'm as big as a fucking sail and I bluster about like a NASA parachute as God does his level best to blow me off a ridge to my broken end. I consider crawling the next bit.

The path in front of us, the only thing I've been able to see through the scuba mask I've made out of my hood and glasses, turns into rapids. Up ahead there is a building all boarded up and enough fog to blanket Maine. Saruman's voice echoes in the rocks. Perhaps we should have taken the mines of Moria instead.

This boarded up building turns out to be the half-way mark. The trains aren't running today because they'll just fall off the top. It's too much. I tell the flatmate I want to soldier on ahead - perhaps treat her to a birthday helicopter ride once I've collapsed. She quite sensibly concludes that, as we are the only two people up on this godforsaken rock, we are likely to end up part of a statistic, maybe a sad story in the Metro, before any helicopter ever makes it up here.

On deciding to abandon it and head home, a wave of euphoria washes over me. I feel almost okay. 

A minute later my knee craps out. It just gives up, and any attempt to put weight on it sends the whole leg spasming in protest and pain. I resort to a straight-leg limp like Herr Flick from Allo Allo. The river path thing ahead is a mix of knives sticking out of the ground and perfectly smooth, slippy suicide blocks. I adopt the pose of a sixties bobby trying to keep Beatlemania away from a hotel door. 

I am going to die on this hill.

I'm going to drown on a mountain. Why can't I drown in the Adriatic? Or off the coat of Sardinia? Why is it I have to drown so many meters above sea-level, in Wales?

Eventually my pathetic, suburban baby-self gives up and I start muttering to myself in the guise of Edouarde, a much more rugged cliche of a Frenchman who I firmly believe can get off this mountain. He's not going to cry just because his knee feels like a snake bit it and then hit it with a pool cue. He's going to sing and laugh and keep fucking walking until he gets a fucking beer. 

My flatmate is about sixty yards ahead of me, so my mental breakdown is fairly discreet at present. 

At long last houses appear. It's joyous. Although for a brief moment I think we are lost and worry I might die in a cul-de-sac which I find even more objectionable than up a mountain. Perhaps I should head back to the rocks and die there, quickly and get it over with. But look! There is a pub. We are saved. 

And as soon as we are sat down with our halves of real ale and the Trivial Pursuit board is unboxed...the sun comes out. 

Fuck you, sun. 

Happy Birthday Flatmate. 

I am never leaving my flat ever again. 

This is a sad, sad song. Anyone know what sad is? Sad is like this.

At the end of Bromley High Street is a comic shop. My first comic shop. Time Trek. And behind the counter, twenty years ago, is a guy named Tony.

If we ever knew his surname, we never used it. He was Tony Time Trek. A round guy, round head, a sort of beard. I couldn't tell you how old he was. Under thirty, maybe. Younger than I am now, I guess. Says a lot about how kids nowadays must see me; indeterminate ancient. Maybe he was only 22. I don't know.

He was a good guy, Tony. I'm talking about him like he's dead. I don't think he is. Hope not. He was a good guy. Took a lot of bullshit from us kids. Didn't seem to care. Gave a bit back every now and then, but most of the time he saw the fun in it. Maybe he just thought we were all dorks and wasn't going to break a sweat over it. I remember him as smiling a lot, but maybe he was just laughing to himself as a bunch of know-it-all autistic kids came to talk to him about X-Force like that was all that mattered. Maybe he was smirking - this is my job, kids. I get paid for this. YOU guys actually want to be here.

Sometimes he could be in a pissy mood too. And sometimes he was dumb enough to let on he was in a pissy mood, and we'd be all, like. 'Ooooooh. Tony's on his period.' Because we were jerks and twelve.

So Tony was in this shop, selling us copies of CyberForce and WildC.A.Ts and Savage Dragon. Selling us the different components of some big X-Men crossover, where Cable and his evil twin fight on the Moon. Tony sold us comics and talked about comics and we really liked him for that. There was another guy who also worked there, but he left and started this other comic shop behind a car park at the other end of the High Street. He sold his entire collection to start the shop. It went bust. That guy was really humourless. I can't even remember his name. Can't remember what his shop was called either. He was no Tony Time Trek.

Anyway. The main reason I look back on Tony so fondly was that he'd make tapes for me. He found out I was big into Faith No More and Alice in Chains and so was he. So he'd do me tapes of their stuff. B-Sides. The albums I didn't have. He did me a copy of Facelift, he did me a copy of the Judgement Night Soundtrack. He taped me the best songs off Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. He did me a copy of Mad Season's Above. I couldn't really tape him anything in return. I drew him a superhero - The Commando.

Eventually I bought CDs of most of those records. Replaced the tapes and put them in a box. For the albums that were longer than 45 minutes, I actually got to hear whatever wasn't cut short by C90 run-times. New solos revealed themselves. New songs. It was like Tony was still giving gifts.

If you've ever met me, you'll know Faith No More are a big, tattoo-on-my-back, deal to me. I never tire of them. I sort of wish I did. So I could bury their stuff and come back to it in years and be thrilled and love it in earnest, but I can't. I've made it all too familiar. Late last year, I realised there was a track I'd accidentally not loaded onto my iPod - the all too brilliant 'Cowboy Song'. It had been overlooked for years. So I went ahead and listened to it a hundred times or more between then and now. Just to ruin that delight. To make sure it wasn't a forgotten song. It no longer lived in the past. I wore it out as fast as I could.

Maybe I had this in mind. There came a point in my music buying life, after a mix of experience and information, where I didn't have to look backwards anymore. I don't rummage in a record shop in Berwick Street to find out what album a band had actually released. I could find that all out now, all buttons and instant reveals. Now I just wait for the new. 'When's the new My Bloody Valentine?' I demand. 'When will the next Best Coast come out?' Back then, we didn't seem to even know for sure how far back a band went. You just looked at the bit of card that said 'Sonic Youth' on it, and lit up if there was something you'd never heard of behind it.

I miss that blindness.

Maybe I had this in mind, I said. Maybe I knew this indulgence was coming. So I buried something. I held something back. 'You'll need a bit of mystery when you get older. You'll need to rediscover.'

So I never bought Faith No More's first album.

Sure, I had a copy on tape. Tony Time Trek made it for me, twenty years ago. But I can't have listened to it in at least ten. It's buried. And after a while I liked that it was buried. Maybe one day I'll buy it and listen to it and something will be unlocked. All that wonder and joy that I burned out will come back. I'll do some butter-advert cliche and take a deep breath of the first track and open my eyes and be twelve years old for a few minutes, in my German Army Coat with band names painted on the back. In my greasy fringe. In my room under a poster of Cindy Crawford and another of Tia Carrere.

I bought it off Amazon last week. Listening to it now. I record my thoughts for each track. It turns out to be a bit sad. I haven't forgotten it as well as I'd hoped. It's not some time trek into childhood. It's a bunch of songs. Songs I enjoy, but a bunch of songs, no less. It's music for my journey to work tomorrow. That's about as far as the voyage goes. Only the last three songs give me any sort of window to look through. Here's what I wrote down.

1. We Care A Lot
Different lyrics. Something about Madonna. I remember this pretty good. Hard not to when they put it on another album and play it live all the time.

2. The Jungle
This one sort of scared me as a kid. Weird vocal effects. At the time, I didn't really get Chuck Mosley. He sings like he's ill. He's as far from Mike Patton as you can get. Mike sings like he's R Kelly. Chuck sings like he woke up in a bin behind a hospital.

3. Mark Bowen
They play this live too. Haven't had a chance to forget it.

4. Jim
It's some sort of classical guitar instrumental. Like, baroque, or something. It has nothing to do with the rest of the album. Had totally forgotten this. It brings back no memories, though.

5. Why Do You Bother
This one is great as well. More of this sludgy post-punk stuff. Weird how Faith No More were a sort of New Wave band once.

6. Greed
Found I could sing along to this one. Sort of. Sounds a bit like Altered Image, but broken and blobby.

7. Pills for Breakfast
Another instrumental. This might be my favourite on the album. It's just rhythm and Jim Martin making noise. I miss Jim Martin. The guy grows pumpkins now. He doesn't even make records or anything. He's a farmer. I saw him on something recently where he was reminiscing about Cliff Burton. Jim Martin looks like Rob Huebel, but really old.

8. As The Worm Turns
Fantastic. Flashback to a field trip to the North to look at Cotton Mills and the Industrial Revolution. My first ever visit to Manchester. I go to the Vinyl Exchange. I buy albums by Wool. I buy a Faith No More T-Shirt with a guy's eye in a hole. Paul Canova thinks the hole might be the nut that holds the wheels to a skateboard. Not knowing what this hole is lends the t-shirt a certain mystical quality. Like there's an interpretation that escapes us.

9. Arabian Disco
I remember being on the 358 bus. I think of the bits of my Saturdays when I'd have to go home. I'd separate from the rest of my gang. I'd lose the safety in numbers. Headphones on. Head down. Hope that some kid in a Spliffy Jacket didn't notice me. This one's kinda triumphant sounding. Given where it is on the album, I must be near the end of my bus journey. Maybe I feel triumphant because no-one has picked a fight with me today.

10. New Beginnings
Makes me think of Matthew Crosby. Specifically him, and none of my other friends. I think it's because the lyrics are the clearest on this and they are stupid. Chuck Mosley has woken up as a three year old and complains about it. Matthew must have liked this one for that reason. For its absurdity. Already I feel sad because I know it's the end of this album.



And that's the end of it. I don't want to listen to it again just yet. I don't want to over-do it. I put on Spotify and listen to someone else's playlist. It's an End of the Road playlist. The music is disposable. I forget it instantly. I wonder who I'll really go wild for when I'm there. Maybe no-one. Dinosaur Jr if they play 'Feel the Pain'. I'll enjoy it all, and cheer plenty, but will any of it pick me up and put me someplace else? I kinda doubt it.

Anyway, who cares?

What's up with what's going down?

It's the Sunday morning of the August Bank Holiday and I'm sat in bed, reading William Boyd.

Exactly.

I'm thinking about the day ahead. My plans for the day are little more than helping with the Sunday Roast, where I'll serve up some Pork Royals I picked up from the Hampstead Butcher. After that, I'm very much looking forward to watching Brideshead Revisited later that night on BBC2, perhaps with a glass of red and a bit of cheese.

And it's all so very middle class. So very middle-aged. Maybe deliberately so. And being as prone to self obsession as I am, I have to ponder it a while; wonder how I got here and why. Wonder if I've turned into my parents, or the enemy, or just how I've always wanted to be, or if I've not changed at all. 

There was a time when going to the pub was all about 'Will I get ID'd at the door? Will the girls from Newstead Wood be there?' Nowadays it's more a case of 'They get their meat from the Ginger Pig. The service was better the last time I came.'

I even thought the music I had on that morning might be some sort of defence, but 'Brighten the Corners' is as old now as Phil Collins' 'Hello, I Must Be Going!' was then. It's probably no less middle-aged than my artisan sausages and period dramas.

It's no great surprise I'm here, I suppose; the product of a fairly straight-forward suburban upbringing. And it's hardly a crisis to find myself living comfortably in North West London, putting on the Classic FM Hall of Fame hour, or Life's Rich Pageant, while I pick my trousers for the day, before the stroll to the station and a head-phoned journey to Elstree. I work on telly shows. I shop at Waitrose. I have a rapport with my barber.

And I'm not alone, I'm sure. A glance at the pages of Esquire seem to suggest that there's something aspirational, on-trend even, about the pace of life I'm mocking up for myself. They like beards, eating at places that serve on bits of old driftwood instead of plates. They like blazers and pocket squares, Hayley Atwell, where to find the best bread in Budapest. But then I imagine the only person younger that works on that magazine is some lad they send out to Pret. The editorial staff are probably all versions of me. The youthful and subversive don't even need magazines anymore; anything that lasts long enough to make it into print is for us old dad-faces. They hashtag and move on, whereas I have the quintessentially middle-aged annual subscription. It's a magazine made by my more monied peers, for a community of red-jeaned wankers like myself. 

Then I look at the television. There isn't a drama commissioned these days that doesn't feature some sort of waistcoated aristocrat, or some repressed lover in a tweed coat on a bicycle. Everyone I know right now is tweeting about a cake-making show. This cosy, nostalgic demand is prevalent. 

And I'm really past the point where I should worry about these things, and just embrace how much I'd like to just watch a Poirot and maybe take a walk in the park.

The weekend following my Sunday of sausages and Matthew Goode's flawless form, I went to a Stag Do. It was a different sort of nostalgia on this one - rather than hankering for the all the pre-war stylings of Agatha Christie or whatever Benedict Cumberbatch is in, this one seemed to be one last hurrah for a Teenage Me. A friend of mine from Secondary School is about to marry himself off, and some of us who grew up with him decided it would be fitting to get pissed on cheap whatevers from the Offy and make-up some sort of sports day in the park behind Bromley library -  much as we would half-a-lifetime ago. Happy just to be drunk and outside, we mucked about with balls and carpet rolls and running about and fighting, and then we threw meat on a fire and listened to the Wiseguys and then went to the pub and chatted to girls before their boyfriends territorially cupped their asses and lead them away. Needlessly so, as I'd already found out another classmate of mine had actually been her teacher at some point, and all my youthful vigour was squashed from me by her landlord father's firm handshake. Still, there was something gloriously retro about being there and 'Oh my god, I've been talking to this gorgeous girl for about twenty minutes now,' as the shot glasses get handed to me. Later the groom would fall head first into a television set and, as he held frozen peas to his head, we all talked about notches on the bed post, suicide, and top-five favourites. It might have been 1997, were it not for us all filming it on iPhones.

The Teenage Me resurrected at that Stag Do might have sniffed at some of my Bank Holiday choices. As I teen I read more sci-fi, thinking more of the future, than the safe history found in a wartime novel recommended by Richard and Judy. He definitely wouldn't have put Classic FM on when the CD finished. But other than that, he probably wanted to take it easy, enjoy a nice roast and at least watch a movie (more likely to be Predator 2 than anything involving Catholic Guilt and Marital Happiness in the run up to the First World War.) Sure, Teenage Me would have also liked to have gone to a gig, danced at a club, drank with his friends and pined after girls, but I did all of that only three days ago. Heck, on that night out they even played L7's 'Pretend We're Dead' - a song Teenage Me crowd-surfed to at his first ever gig. I suppose, in time, we'll all get a bit too old for it, but we're not there yet. More importantly, I will be in good company when I get there. The kids might see me as a fogey, but my friends will still hopefully see me as a (distinguished, handsome, accomplished) friend, and we'll still want to dance with each other and swap stories and want to try some of this pie, it's delicious. This Sunday just gone, I walked to breakfast with my friend El, and we passed the latest puppies from Freshers' Week, waiting for the bus. They might have had smooth skin and flat stomachs, but to them Dave Grohl is that guy from the Foo Fighters. I'd much rather be as I am now, much more settled, much more together and with a haircut that actually suits me, than go back to being a fucked-up, angsty young'un, just for the sake of longer nights out and more single girls. 

Anyway. Being the tame old granddad I am, I've waffled on for long enough. I'll try and get angry about something for the next blog, so it isn't quite so boring. In the meantime, I'm going to go and watch Parade's End on the iPlayer and eat a bit more of this Rococo Christmas Pudding dark chocolate.

Teenage Me, this one is for you. x

"I admire its purity."

This one’s going to be spoiler heavy, but you know who’s the real spoiler around here? Ridley Scott. Ha. Yeah. Have it.

Prometheus.

Here’s the thing. Terror, fear - a lot of it is about the unknown. H.P. Lovecraft had that one sewn up. Ignorance is bliss, sure. But something that’s just on the fringes of understanding, something with a lot of blanks –  that’s where fear is found. It’s not a rule without exceptions. You can know a lot about a thing and still find it scary, but for the most part – not understanding a thing lends itself to fear. It renders us like children. Vulnerable and incomplete.

No. I can’t kick off with such sixth-form profundity. ‘Vulnerable and incomplete?’ Ignore that.

I’m going to bitch about two things here. One of them is just about the bizarre story logic I sat through today, or yesterday, or whenever I watched Prometheus. The other ... it’s a gripe I have about origins and mystery and *sigh* I’ll probably bore myself with it, so good luck to you.

So Ridley, going back to what I just said about the unknown, I’m going to direct you to a flawless example of the sort of thing I mean. Which, it just so happens, YOU MADE about thirty-five years ago.

ALIEN. Starts with these guys in outer-space. They get this signal. They go and investigate. They find a ship, crashed, unlike anything they’ve ever seen before. It would be first contact, were it not for the fact the pilot (if you can call it that) is dead. This great, old, giant – advanced far beyond our heroes – is long dead. Something killed it.

You see it starts with questions. What’s this signal? What’s this ship? What killed this guy? It doesn’t start with us seeing a giant have something to do with creating life on a lifeless planet, before cutting to some guys going ‘Gee, I wonder if these giants had something to do with life on these planets.’ If you put me one step-ahead of your protagonists in the first five minutes, you invite the chance that I might get bored of them taking an hour to catch up.

ALIEN then goes on to introduce the absolute worst monster you’d ever seen before. Both in its nightmarish design, and the disturbing way it deals with its victims. Space Monsters used to eat people, sometimes enslave them. This guy rapes them. Violates them. It’s hideous. It scares people. The thing looks brilliant too, but we don’t even need to see all of it to get the message. Glimpses of the long, domed head, the jaws within jaws, this great spine-like tail, bathed in black. What was it I was slapping you in the face with earlier? Fear of the unknown? Fear of the unseen? Well here you go. Alien. Textbook.

Ridley, don’t you see? You, Dan O’Bannon and HR Giger – you made something brilliantly effective. It’s iconic. It endures. Congratulations guys. Cinema history. And, wait for it, IT DOESN’T NEED EXPLAINING.

It doesn’t need an origin. Brilliant machine, the human imagination. Here’s a thing I learned the hard way – take this bit of dialogue:

            “A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi knights. He betrayed and murdered your father. Now the Jedi are all but extinct. Vader was seduced by the dark side of the Force.”

Hope you don’t mind me roping George Lucas into all this. The above bit of dialogue inspires way more in the listener than the full story could accomplish. And I’m a massive prequel trilogy apologist, clinging on to Pod-Races and the terrific art direction when everyone else tries to bring up Jar Jar and...I’ll have to stop there. But even I concede that the seed sown in my head by Obi Wan in that hut on Tatooine was better than anything anyone could make – even George Lucas of thirty years ago. Because that bit of the story was mine. I imagine what went before. I interact with the film. It asks something of me – ‘Picture this: Before the dark times, before the Empire.’ All I ever really needed to know about Darth Vader was what he did in those three movies. He’s defined by his actions, just like the rest of us. We never needed to see the war with the machines in The Terminator, because the compelling part is what the Terminator does. Go look at Jaws or Leatherface. As antagonists they work because of what they do; here and now. If you ever wanted an origin for Leatherface, then you’ve missed the point. Go smash in your head with a hammer.

I confess, this is a bit of a tantrum for me. I’ll dress it up in narrative theory and the like, but it’s still a tantrum. I never wanted to know what the Space Jockey did. The whole point was that it was dead. It died serving the narrative, it died fuelling my imagination. I WANTED TO WONDER, RIDLEY.

Before I’d even seen ALIEN, a twelve-year-old me spent some WHSmith vouchers on a book by HR Giger; a glossy, delicious production diary from the bugnuts Swiss surrealist at the heart of the film’s creature design. It’s beautiful. And in that book there's a hint of this idea about the space ship being a bomber, the eggs being biological weapons. Where was it going? What was it for? Maybe the eggs weren’t there to begin with, and something new is laying them? (I won’t bother much with the conflicting life-cycles of ALIEN and ALIENS, except to say I prefer the one in ALIEN – that the creature cocoons people into eggs, rather than rely on a Queen to lay them. Because it’s much more horrifying.) In short, I’ve had time to think about Space Jockeys as engineers and Aliens as artificial designs... and I’ve also had time to think about my own stuff. That ALIEN gives you two aliens. And one of them is dead. In all the universe, mankind has only ever come into contact with one other species and it was already dead. That tells you everything you need to know about the ALIEN. It’s as black and deadly as space. It could have wiped out everything thing else out there for all we know. Raped the lot. Planet after planet of bugs. Last stop, Earth. The thing is I DON’T KNOW. I’m just wondering. It’s great.

But today I know the Space Jockey is a big man in a hat. The Alien is something he sort of made, his experiment. All that wonder snuffed out.

It’s odd. Because part of the message of the film is to say ‘If you understand god, you disarm him. You render him mundane.’ And then the film goes and disarms its own legacy. In a really cack-handed fashion, to be perfectly frank.

And, nit-picking now, the monsters are so tediously generic. The tentacle Big Bad looking much the same as that one that bothers Frodo for a bit outside the Mines of Moria. Thanks to decades of Wildlife Channels – we’re all a bit desensitised to familiar looking monsters. HR Giger was lighting in a bottle, I guess, but surely there’s some other loon out there scrawling monsters on a cell wall...? Give us nightmares, Ridley. Not the sort of thing Aragorn could chop up half-way through a family movie.

Oh, I’m so fed up with the whole thing. It looks so promising – such good photography. It’s got such a lovely look to it. All that ‘Earth from the Air’ wonder at the start. How that imagery get spunked on such a disappointing story? Characters we really couldn’t give a shit about. Thin sketches of personalities in space-suits. And why can’t they just be British and not pretend ‘Yee-haw’ Americans? It’s the future. British people can go into Space. Not sure where Rafe Spall and Idris Elba were meant to be from, but I reckon Hackney accents will still exist in 2090-whenever. I can believe that.

And why take us all the way into space, to then spend the rest of the movie travelling backwards and forwards along ONE ROAD. Can’t you just park the space-ship a bit closer? Don’t any of these scientists want to look at THE OTHER TEMPLE/PYRAMID THINGS? Man, I am tired after that flight. You seen one space-head temple, you seen ‘em all.

And then everyone behaves so stupidly. For example - Rafe Spall and Sean Harris – despite being hooked up to a giant map THEY MADE, can’t find their way out of a tunnel. When THE MAP THEY MADE tells them there might be a life-form in the temple with them, they run away. Okay? Let’s recap - their motivation: run away from the life-form. Next scene. Thinking he’s safe, Rafe Spall suddenly finds a life-form. And goes to pet it. Even though the thing is acting like a fucking cobra, the biologist goes over to tap it on the head. The life-form. Y’know, the sort of thing he went to this room to hide from. It’s hard for me to care that you’ve been fucked in the mouth by a deadly space cockfish when you’ve been such a massive idiot, Rafe.

From that point onwards, consequence, cause-and-effect, logic, the lot – it all seems to go out of the air-lock. I’m going to struggle to list it all. Logan Marshall-Green gets a bit ill, so he’s burned to death after some pointless back-and-forthing to the temple. Again. A short while later a zombie turns up, and none of the quarantine anxiety we’d only just seen is upheld. His mates come out and give him a hug. I worry I’m sounding pedantic here, when to me, it just seems like a fundamental failure of story-telling. Don’t set up one rule to serve one beat, and then throw it out when it becomes too much of an obstacle only a few scenes later. Noomi Rapace gives birth to a fucking squid about ten minutes after her boyfriend dies and no-one cares. No-one talks about it. It becomes a sign-posted booby-trap to be paid-off later, but only when it’s absolutely obvious to everyone in the whole world. Even people watching Moonrise Kingdom in the next screen, know this squid thing will come back when we really need it. Because any idiot, let alone A SCIENTIST, would do something about the squid baby right away. Even if it’s just take a photo of it and post it on Yahoo – ‘Anyone know what this is? Just cut it out of my barren womb.’ You can’t expect an audience to just forget about a Squid Baby. That’s not turning expectation on its head, that’s going ‘Look! Goodyear Blimp!’ and hoping the audience forget your massive device-thing until you need it. Which they won’t. Because it’s a Squid Baby.

Gah. This fucking thing. Please. You guys. They put a lot of money in your pockets for this. Get some flash cards and stick them on the wall – plot it out. In just about every scene from Logan Marshall-Green’s death onwards there’s some flaw of logic, or lazy story-telling. And thanks to the marketing, I already know the good ship Prometheus will crash into the horse-shoe Alien ship thing. I saw it in the trailer. And I don’t care. I’m glad you are dead, Idris Elba, because you were the worst captain in the history of everything ever. I wouldn’t go to the Asda with you, let alone space. All of your crew are dead. You can’t even look at a map without two of your guys having their faces melted and sexed by space-dicks.

Listen, I understand you can’t always stick to absolute logic in a movie - suspension of disbelief and all that. If they closed the beach in Jaws, there’d be no movie. But there are ways around it. Take Guy Pearce. He’d like to go to space and see the space-man, because the space-man might be able to cheat death. Except any advisor worth his payroll would just go ‘Let’s keep you in stasis, sir. If we find anything, we’ll bring it back. Study it. You’ll be the first to know.’ So why not make up a reason to put him in space that stands up to scrutiny? ‘I want to know there’s life out there before I die.’ Wow. That was simple. Still gets Guy Pearce into space. Doesn’t seem as stupid as saying ‘I don’t want to die, so I’ll do this thing will almost certainly kill me. Who’s for some tea?’

And what of the title? What of the pay-off to these ambitions? Does Guy Pearce end up living forever, but the sad victim of some horrible space experiment, oh the irony? No. He gets punched in the head and falls over and dies. Then the Big Hat Man goes ‘Now that’s what I call a Close Encounter! Wooo!’  

I think the Ridley of today would have had Edward James Olmos say ‘Too bad you are a robot. A robot that kills robots for a living. Good luck with that.’

And... and...and. Oh I give up. You know it’s very easy to criticise a thing, and very hard to create. Except I’m trying to create. All day I’m trying to create and what I would give for a chance to make big sci-fi like Ridley could have done here. In the day job I come up with ideas that go through a fairly rigorous series of drafts and edits to make sure it stands to reason, and there’s always a bunch of people out there watching it who aren’t happy with it. But If I’ve done my job right, I can defend my decisions against any criticism – or I can accept that I was wrong. So you can understand why all the fist-shaking at this one, yeah? Fist-shaking at the things that I thought were obvious, being pissed all over by guys who will have a job straight after this one. And a house. Obvious stuff like basic fucking structure and logic. Cause and effect. Wah wah wah.

You know what I’m getting at. A good movie will have mysteries, sure, ambiguity - it should make you want to ask questions. The only question Prometheus gets from me is ‘What the fuck?’

Signing off.

And you don't stop.

I tend to go on about Phoenix '96 as a musical coming of age. It was a lot of things, a milestone in the rites of passage for Ed Bear. First festival. First pedestal girl. First experiments. First time I ever played Twister using coloured pieces of garbage. First time I ever bought sunglasses with yellow lenses. But what I always harp on about was this one afternoon when Matthew Crosby and I accidentally saw The Prodigy, and my mind was opened to a world outside of rock. So powerful was this epiphany, this transition from 'Man, Rock is AWESOME and dance music is BALLS' to 'What are my feet doing, and my hands? The beat has me. I'm in outer space.' that years later I won £20 from my friend James because I knew, of course I knew, exactly what The Prodigy delivered on that fateful evening. It was a musical rebirth. The Wonder Years voice-over says 'And we were never the same again.'

Except that's bullshit. Or at least it's only half true. It's a better story than the one I'm about to relate. Truth is by the time I'd got to Phoenix '96 I'd already had my mind opened and blown, years before. So much groundwork had already been done.

And it starts in an MVC on Orpington High Street.

It's my birthday and someone, it might be Matthew Crosby again, or it might be my friend Alaric, has taken me to MVC to pick out what I want as a present. Given how unceremonious this is, I think it's Alaric doing the buying. I think Matthew might have gone in for wrapping paper and some semblance of surprise, over just standing in a shop until I hand him something, and seconds later giving it back, in a plastic bag. MVC, I should probably point out, stands for Music and Video Club, and was like a Sam Goody's but if you had a store-card records were, like, £2 cheaper. Here in 2012 I feel like I need to footnote these things. We're going to get onto VHS in a second. Brace yourself.

We've gone there after school. And I walk round for a long time with a copy of 'Bug' by Dinosaur Jr. in my hands. I had heard Freak Scene on some sort of compilation and thought (and still do) that this is one of the best. songs. ever and I must get the record that goes with it. But I'm stalling. Something tells me I'll buy it and listen to it and like it, but it just won't feel very birthday. Me just handing something I would have bought with my own money, to someone else to buy with theirs. See, I like it when birthdays take me places I wouldn't normally have gone. A tiny bit of the unexpected would be good.

But nothing quite grabs me. I think about a Mudhoney record, but we're in the same ball-park there - it's Grunge. It's safe. Maybe I should just be grateful I'm getting a record for free and just get on with WAIT. WAIT. I don't have Dinosaur Jr. in my hands. I have a VHS. Three fake-seventies cops on the front, strutting down the street, aviators and ties. Big bold yellowy-orange letters above their heads.

I'm telling y'all it's Sabotage.

I'm not sure I've even seen the video. I've never seen it on MTV. I've heard of it, sure; kids at school talking, screengrabs in NME. As far as I'm concerned The Beastie Boys aren't far off a novelty act. 'Fight for Your Right' is just a silly goof-off record. My uncle tells me the Beastie Boys made people vandalise cars. I can't really tell if these guys are jerks or not.

And yet I've got this video in my hands. There's something cinematic about it. Stylish. I worry I'm making a mistake and consult with Matthew. 'Is it cool if I get this? Is this a cool thing? I can't tell.' Matthew wants me to go for it, of course he does, it's not his birthday present. It's Alaric's money. Makes no difference to him. But what if it sucks? I'll have to wait another year before I get something cool ever again. Fret. Fret. Fret. Fuck it.

It's bought now. No turning back.

No turning back, indeed.

It's an hour of perfection. Words are going to fail me now. I've written the next bit a few times and deleted again and again. Where do I start? I can't sum it up. But there I am seeing style and talent and fun and swagger and attitude and my eyes are wide like a baby with car keys. Look how fucking fun their world is. This is not Alice in Chains, down in a hole on their angry chair. This is three guys from NYC having the fucking best time. The BEST time.

My flatmate looks back on photos of me from back then and goes on about me dressing like an old man. Well all that Charity Shop slacks and chinos and vintage menswear was me trying to get it on like the Beasties. Those guys make jumping about in golf pants look like the best thing ever. Who wouldn't want to dress like that?

I used to have a big check Donkey Jacket that I hated, until I saw Sure Shot. In fact, right now I want to go find it.

I could go on. It was profound (yes, I know, dear reader. Everything is profound to the Ed Bear.) But I'll limit myself. Show restraint.

HOLY SHIT HOW AWESOME IS THE BASS INTRO TO GRATITUDE?

I had to get Check Your Head. This was back when I still considered myself a bassist. On the VHS, maybe second track in, we go to the studio and see MCA, shot in B&W, working this delicious riff on an upright bass, before we segue-way into a vicious live version of Gratitude. I needed this song on my stereo, in my pocket so I could take it wherever I went. Sadly, Check Your Head's version of Gratitude doesn't have all that noodling about before - it just goes straight to fuzzy bass. But that is the only sad thing about Check Your Head, my favourite of all the Beastie LPs.

What a gift. 20 tracks. 53 minutes and 42 seconds to educate and entertain you with. I used to do my paper-round to it, and to this day, 'Live at PJ's' makes me think of that final stretch before I could turn my bike downhill and get to school. I used to play it on the tape-deck in Design and I remember the spliffy kids appreciating how funky the opening to 'Stand Together' was. Yes dudes. I also know cool. Didn't see that coming, did you?

From there we got Licence to Ill and the experience was complete. Blistering hip hop, a bit of punk, and sweet funk - I mean, these cats are geniuseses. Listen, man. Listen at what they can do.

Man, it felt like an age until 'Hello Nasty' came out. Check Your Head, Licence to Ill and, Paul's Boutique got many, many plays and then I went off and discovered Public Enemy, and DJ Shadow happened, and we had this sweet, sweet mix-tape called 'Shoot tha Pump' going around. And I'd been to Phoenix '96.

I'll be honest - I felt a little let down by Nasty International. There was less of the 70's groove of Head/Ill. It was a bit more pop than I was expecting, and some tracks - Song for the Man - were instant skips. I'm a fickle teenager still, remember. But now the Beasties were on tour, and I got to go see them at a Reading, and also at Brixton Academy. From the Reading, I remember a bit of a beef with The Prodigy, funnily enough. The Prodge were saying how the Beasties had asked them not to play 'Smack my Bitch Up' and they said fuck it. They do what they want. The crowd cheer. Then the B-Boys came on and said where they come from smacking a bitch up just isn't cool. The crowd cheer. Townies don't have principles, you fools. They just want to hear 'Intergalactic' and do robot arms. Let's go already.

At Brixton it was an event. The Invisibl Skratch Piklz, the X-Men (or X-Ecutioners, if you must) and Money Mark in support. The Beasties - pure energy. Tireless showmen. Good people. I think all of Bromley came with me to that one. Since I picked up that video, Alaric had transformed from pudgy outsider to retro heartthrob. Alaric was into vinyl. The Beastie Boys had changed the world. We all danced. I was dressed like an old man. I felt so very fucking young.

Yeah. There wasn't much of a narrative to this post. I could go on and do the next few albums. I saved 'The Mix-Up' for my first trip to New York and that was worth it. Of everything post-Licence, Mix-Up is probably my favourite - just because I feel like that groovy instrumental stuff is as much a part of the Beastie sound as the rhyme-routines. I could go on about my love of Grand Royal magazine and my misery over Paul Canova losing my issue 2. I could say other little fiddly things. I guess I was just thinking I owed The Beastie Boys a big thanks and I went off somewhere cosy and nostalgic as a result.




Yesterday was sad news. Really, really sad news.

Adam Yauch aka MCA. 1964-2012

x

The Valley of the Iron God.

Click image to embiggen.

Hey. I said I’d draw Conan next, but I got really itchy to finish a drawing in a single weekend, so I picked up this (which I’d started last year.) Since about the summer, I’ve been doing various commissions for my friends which all involved pretty girls as robot-fighting ninjas, cat-faced socialites and soon-to-be-married lovelies. So I took Friday and Saturday and Sunday as a chance to do a manly doodle all of my own to offset all that. Looking back through my Flickr, I’m unhappy with just about everything I’ve drawn ever, but for now at least, I’m happy with this one. Bit of a deliberate riff on Herge, and with the Iron God, I’ve tried to tip my hat to Moebius as well. The giants of Gallic Comic Bookery.

Captain Bear, as you probably know, first appeared here:



Somehow, this is all part of the Skullcopica (http://monsterworkcomicbooks.blogspot.com/) universe, for anyone who cares.

I should probably do my End of Year, yeah?

His Face Was Absurdly Handsome

I should warn you now, the formatting on this thing is almost as bad as my prose.

Bandwagon. What's the internet for, if not for chiming in, late-to-the-party, and having a dig at something everyone loves?

Many (New) Moons ago, I did my very best to describe the Twilight movie to my darling friend Niki, and finally hit upon it's genius. I'd marvelled at just how uneventful it was while I watched it, a little confused as to what made it such a phenomenon. It was a dull, cold film about a girl who does a little sick in her mouth every time she speaks. She falls in love with a vampire and angst ensues. But then, in the Story Office the next day, as I relayed what happened, it (Breaking) dawned upon me: Twilight is fucking insane. It's held together by the greyest and slowest and wettest of threads, but - as made clear by all the WTFs above Niki's head - it's still batshit. I was smitten.

So I read up. I read the myriad miserable interviews with Robert Pattinson (who had descended so deep into self-parody that the fake Twitter I set up for him was forever bested any time someone from Vanity Fair asked him anything.) I read frankly brilliant blogs on the books. I read Aziz Ansari liveblogging as he watched the movie... I read and read and then chuckled and said 'Fursplode!' a lot and it was all rather cute and unbecoming of a bearded man.

I didn't read the actual books though.

Mainly because whenever I found them in a charity shop, I felt far too self-conscious to take them to the counter. What if someone saw, and didn't pick up on my oh-so-knowing, condescending bullshit? It could be the crucial disqualifier. 'He was hott and his denim sleeves were rolled up, but then he bought the Stephenie Meyer book, so I went out with an Indie Guitarist instead.'

BUT! In new job, with new office and new friends fate decided to lend me ALL FOUR...FIVE?...BOOKS.

So. After all that preamble. Beginning today. Tonight......The Saga Begins.

TWILIGHT
By Stephenie Meyer.

PREFACE

Like an episode of Alias - we get the hook in. Somewhere, sometime, someone comes face to face with the man who might kill her. And is really calm and not really all that bothered about it.

'I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly at me.'

As well as pleasant looks, the hunter also 'saunters'. We find out that the narrator is - pretty sure it's Bella - is dying to save someone else. Or something. Might be dying. But not fussed about it.

CHAPTER 1: FIRST SIGHT.

It begins. This is Bella. She's moving from Arizona to Forks, this really rainy place in, like, Washington State. It's a big deal. First paragraph, we get the sad juxtaposition of what she's wearing now - her favourite shirt, all eyelet lace and sleeveless sleeves - and what she'll have to wear when she lands. A Parka. God.

Not sure why she's moving. Her mum, Renee, tells her she doesn't have to go. Her mum looks just like her 'except with short hair and laughter lines.' She's also irratic and harebrained and Bella worries how she will fend for herself. Then Bella's reassured: there's food in the fridge back home. I'm a little worried for Renee. That food in the fridge won't last forever. After that the poor woman might resort to cracking open birdfeeders and dustbins along neighbouring porches. Why are you leaving her, Bella? No idea. She's on the plane. The mum is as good as dead.

In Forks lives Bella's dad, Charlie Swan of the Forks Sherriff's Police Squad. I feel kinda sorry for Charlie. Bella gives a bit of thought to him, but she's got bigger issues: her winter wardrobe. Most of her Arizona clothes are 'too permeable for Washington'. She's been forced to buy wet-weather clothes. And OMG, they totally fit in the trunk of the truck without any problems. Way too few clothes going on. This is bad news.

Still, Charlie's done a nice thing and bought her a truck, off some Billy dude they knew when she used to go fishing. Bella's all 'Ooh, a car,' but doesn't really want to think about Charlie's old pal; she 'does a good job of blocking painful, unnecessary things' from her memory. Leads me to wonder what Billy got up to on them trips. Maybe he just looked old and ugly. Bella probably hated that.

Turns out the car Charlie bought is, like, a hundred years old. But Bella's not one 'to look a free truck in the mouth, or engine'. She's also not one to phrase that line so it actually works. Bella also lets us know she's like her dad in that she doesn't like expressing her emotions out loud. Probably a good thing, as when she finally sees the truck Charlie's bought her, she gets all excited and imagines it at the scenes of accidents, 'paint unscratched, surrounded by the pieces of the foreign car it had destroyed.' Best keep that one to yourself, I don't think Charlie will be much happy with 'Thanks dad, I totally plan to kill Renault drivers with this beast.'

After picturing the car carnage, Bella's mood sours. It took only one trip to get all her luggage upstairs. Ugh! Srsly? And that's without servants. That's just her carrying her bags and her parka and all that shit. Worse yet, she has to share her bathroom with her father, something she doesn't want to dwell on. I can't tell if this is because Bella has no idea what it's like to live in the same building as another person (she later calls it 'the communal bathroom'), or poor Charlie has something really wrong going on inside him. Still, 'one of the best things about Charlie is he doesn't hover.' So until Charlie Swan gets his jetpack, Bella will still forgive him.

So Bella's home. In Forks. She gets into her bedroom, unpacks. Bella's glad to be alone and doesn't have to fake smile anymore. She has a little cry, but doesn't go on a 'real crying jag' because she's too busy. Big cry she saves until bedtime. Like, she actually plans that.

Bella starts thinking about school tomorrow and is worried, because she doesn't have a tan. Being ivory skinned and slender, she anticipates the other pupils will single her out as a freak. Yup. Bella is most definitely a girl. When she finally gets to school, she seems bummed out that there aren't metal detectors on the doors, like the last place she went. I can't tell if she's unhappy because the locals can be trusted, or because she thinks hillbillies will wander the corridors with axes and revolvers. What kind of dump is this? Back in Arizona the kids had Porsches and Mercedeses. In the car lot at her new school, there's a shiny Volvo. A VOLVO, ffs.

Turns out her skin fits in. Everyone is pale. Although Bella manages to flush 'tomato red' at one point. Tomato red. Her face was the colour of - what - Spider-Man's mask? Maybe Bella is right about being a freak, if she routinely turns into Fire-Engine Face.

So Bella finds school boring because she's read all the books on the entire curriculum and these backwards country kids haven't. She meets a guy called Eric - 'a gangly boy with skin problems (worse than turning the colour of ketchup?) and hair as black as an oil slick.' He's nice to her, but being from the country, Eric doesn't understand sarcasm. Bella is exasperated. This is hell on earth. Bella smiles at him. 'Vaguely'.

Other people are nice to Bella, and she doesn't even bother remembering their names. She goes on and on about how forgettable they are. There's a girl - short, curly hair. Turns out her name is Jessica - so she's the Anna Kendrick part in the movie. The forgettable girl.

Anyway. This is the whole 'First Sight' bit coming up. Bella follows Jennifer or Jessica or whatever this boring-ass bitch is called to the lunch hall. And that's when she first sees them.

There's five of them. Not eating. Not talking. Also, crucially, not looking at her 'unlike most of the other students.' They don't look anything alike, apparently. There's three boys and two girls. Of the boys there are:

Big guy - like, weightlifter big. Dark and Curly hair.
Tall and lean but muscular also. (So, that's alike.) Honey blonde hair.
Lanky, less bulky. Boyish. Bronze hair.

And of the girls, there are:
Tall and statuesque, like a swimsuit model. Golden hair.
Thin - 'in the extreme' - small features. Cropped, black hair.

All of them are pale. Paler than all the pale people in the book so far. They have bruised eyes and angular features. Their noses are 'straight, perfect, angular'. It's obvs that these are the vampires. So who ever went round biting has a thing for noses? Or does being a vampire do something to your nose? Like, you expect the thing with the teeth, but actually, the nose gets pointy too. All of them are 'devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful.' America's Next Top Vampire.

The boyish one - EDWARD CULLEN - swoon - locks eyes with Bella for an instant, and then tears up a bagel with his fingers. Also, his 'mouth moves very quickly', his 'perfect lips barely opening.' It isn't clear if he's eating. What the fuck is he doing? This can't be attractive.

Jessica explains they are all the adopted kids of the young and handsome Dr. Cullen. Bella reflects that there are two 'Jessica's in her history class back home. What sort of boring, unoriginal nice person has just latched on to Bella? This is the worst school ever. Couldn't Jessica have had the decency to chop her name into something catchy, like Bella did? Yeah, Essica.

Bella checks out Edward. It turns out Essica has hit on Edward and been shot down, the sour grapes-eating loser. Bella bites her lip to hide her smile, but Edward doesn't look at her again. He gets out of the lunch hall pretty sharpish. But that's okay, because when Bella gets to her science class, there he is. SAT NEXT TO THE ONLY EMPTY SEAT. OMG. Bella shuffles over to him, but Edward goes 'rigid' (ummm. What?) and looks at her with 'an expression of hostility and fury'. Bella trips over, for, like, the third time. When she sits next to him, Edward averts his face, 'like he'd smelled something bad.' Bella checks - she smells like strawberries. What is this guy on?

Bella's already learned all this science shit already. Fucking shiny Volvo simpletons. Edward sits all lesson with a clenched fist, until the bell goes and he fluidly fucks off in an instant.'

He was so mean. It wasn't fair."

After class, a guy called Mike, with the spikes, is nice to Bella. But he lets slip that Edward has never been that shitty to anyone before. He must really, really hate strawberries. Mike doesn't hate strawberries. 'If I was lucky enough to sit by you, I would have talked to you.' Mike? Are you still here? I zoned out. I'm Bella and I'm used to nice and admiring types. Yawn. Next. Whatever.

Bella goes off to some office next and - I don't believe it - Edward is there too. He's noisly banging on about changing his science class because he absolutely can't go to that same class ever again. Edward's got his back to Bella, but he must haved got a whiff of that Strawberry scent, because he stiffens again and then exits post-haste. Bella gets one last glimpse of him - "He was absurdly handsome, with piercing, hate-filled eyes," and then he's gone.

We end the chapter with Bella in her gift truck mouth horse thing, fighting back the tears.

*sob*

So that's Chapter One. Poor Bella. Uprooted, and now having to deal with someone who didn't instantly like her and start following her around. Join us at some point for maybe another chapter of this. Weeks from now. Maybe.

x

Trigger's Broom.

I’ll try and be brief. I certainly won’t go for ninety minutes, plus extra time, injury time, penalties. Plus a half-hour of charmless punditry on either end, and one in the middle when you break for jaffa cakes.

Sport.

I feel like I’m missing out.
I feel like I’m missing one obvious clue, one synapse firing puzzle-piece. The same way I can look at trees, hills, the platypus and the baby sloth and not see the guiding hand of some big man in a chair in the sky, I can look at Sky Sports and not see whatever it is that makes my brother get so cross when someone loses to somewhere. I can’t see whatever it is that makes my mum cheer and clap when the chap in the white with the headband misses the thing and it hits the bit.

I can see the joy in participating. I used to love the odd game of seven-a-side I’d play on a Sunday with those lads from HMV. I wasn’t much good, but there was exercise, endorphins, a sense of achievement and the satisfaction of being much bigger and much more solid than a few Filipino kids. The satisfaction of feeling like something out of a Robert E. Howard story as I smashed them against the boards and trod their calves under the plastic blades of my Umbros. The struggle and the triumph was something I actively took part in. I didn’t just pick a point on a map and call it ‘us’ and ‘we’ and watch from the corner of the pub. I strapped on my shin pads and went out and did all I could for myself and the five other lads chosen by a guy who lost a coin toss.

What I can’t understand, AT ALL, is how this sort of thing makes anyone feel anything:
Somewhere You’ve Never Lived: 2 – Bunch of People From All Over The Place: 5

Unless you:
1. Own the bunch of people.
2. One, or all of them are your offspring
3. You put money on one of these squads to win.
4. Shrapnel is lodged in your brain.

I get caught up on the paradox. What are you supporting, when it’s had 17 new heads and 14 new handles? I can just about see how watching it play out might be entertaining. What I absolutely can’t fathom is how a text message that says “Gunners 2-0 down’ could stir any kind of reaction out from even the most manic of minds. How does reading a paper, or a scoreboard, without any experience of the battle that delivered those numbers do anything to you? I know it does. I’ve seen it countless times: the dismay or delight as digits display. I don’t get it.

I get the Panini Sticker Album bit. That was ace. Totally understand that bit.

When I went to Primary School in Tooting we played football in the playground, but no one ever mentioned Football Clubs. I don’t think I knew anyone who supported anyone. It was just a game we played, and to me the idea that anyone watched grown-ups play the same game on the telly or in stadiums never entered my head. It would be like SKY having a channel that was just people playing Hide n’ Seek, or Forty-Forty. When I turned up in Orpington, I felt uprooted, and wanted to fit in. Richard McKnight asked me which team I supported, and when I told him I didn’t know, he told me I supported Liverpool. So I did. He also told me to show Alison Shepherd my willy. So I did. Football was a much bigger deal out in BR6 – the school played it on mud, in proper sessions, with adult supervision and rules and whistles and special outfits and stuff. The Cubs did too. I’d play in parks. There were leagues. The results of the games were recorded and people remembered how well they did.

I wasn’t really much good. Chicken or the egg on whether that’s because I preferred indoorsy, escapist things like drawing or writing or watching movies or playing video games or reading comics, or I drifted to all those things because I wasn’t good at sport. Then I ended up in a Secondary School where they didn’t even play Football. They played Rugby, which was even worse because you can’t even enjoy playing it, let alone watching it. Great, savage inhumans with heads like car batteries wrapped in plasticine ramming into each other for a strange pellet that can’t travel forwards. It’s a nightmarish contest of mutants and mud. I wouldn’t want to be stuck in a scrum with their trunk-like faces pressed into me, nor would I want to endorse the exploitation of such disfigured blobs from a stadium seat. Their desperate, accusing eyes squinting out from crevasses in their bulbous, bony blocks: ‘Why am you make me play?’

I’m being a snob, of course. Which is an important part of why sport doesn’t sit well with me. A lot of it is championed by people I did not, or would not have liked at school. Brash, cocksure, moronic jocks, or braying, privileged, moronic poshos. The personalities in professional sport seem (at a glance, I’ll admit) to be a mix of dull or bastard, much like 90% of people I didn’t want to know when I wore a blazer with a badge on it.

I’m being a bit unfair and narrow-minded. And rightly so, as this is my soapbox. I’m only really thinking of Football when I write this. The Premier League, to be precise. A stereotype of a lad with a pink tie and large knot in it being caught out with a really rather rank prostitute. I turn my nose up at that sort of thing. Especially when their Abbey Clancy or equivalent stands by them as if it was part-and-parcel of their love-life. In Italy, things might be different – a more exciting class of game, with players that dress well and have style and other things that I tend to value over tactical thinking and athleticism. Although I imagine they still have the affairs.

So what of the other options? Golf has Ian Fleming and Sean Connery in its corner, and has a certain throwback, side-parting and slacks quality. Nevertheless, it’s an absolute bore to watch. I once worked for a sports broadcaster. Of a lunchtime, Golf commentators would use the VT machines in the office to practice their narration, before heading into the suites to commit to recording. I’d sit through blobby soundbites like:

“In the approaching gloom, Nick Faldo’s accuracy...”
Cue pause as man in Rupert Bear trousers knocks a Slazenger away from a wall of fog.
“...shone like a beacon.”

And while I can see myself enjoying the outdoors in preppy menswear (though perhaps not in the pringle and patterned garb ) I don’t imagine I can actually play it. It does rather seem like there’s a lot to judge and process before each swing. A shame all the precision in the world can’t make it the least bit spectacular.

I think Cricket follows on from this. I like the idea of something so old fashioned - images of picnics and gentlemen and Kent - but television translates it to a quiet, uneventful game that seems to happen miles and miles into the centre of an ocean of short grass. Tiny white figures bowling and batting in gargantuan amphitheatres, occasionally giving up a cheer as something is caught and, over in an adjacent time zone, a polite applause goes out from the stadium seats. I think I also dislike the way ‘hero’ was bandied about after England won the Ashes, as though bringing a tiny trophy to our shores was akin to storming the beach at Normandy. Honours all round for a bunch of people who managed to do their jobs without fucking up. Oh, Bravo. And I’m not going to play it either, as for the most part that means launching a leather missile at dogwalkers, pushchairs and joggers, until someone is killed.

Athletics. Well, there’s a certain purity to the accomplishments involved in athletics. Individual skill, strength, agility, ability. A person is the fastest, throws the furthest, leaps the highest, and there’s very little disputing the prowess involved. That said the curmudgeon in me can’t stomach all that feel-good, unifying, common-man claptrap that has proceeded the Olympics for the last million months. London will not be transformed into some utopia of inspired, kindly, community-minded Joe Publics. Instead the London Underground will become a network of concrete arteries, boiling with fat and grim, oily waste. Bodies will wash up on the South Bank, wrapped in bootleg T-shirts. They’ll take the torch and burn down more furniture stores in Croydon.

Motor-racing. International Playboys in glamorous cities, dealing with life or death instincts at 200 miles an hour? Or a sooty, repetitive, indistinct contest where ugly, identical can-opener cars orbit a twisty bit of road for what seems like all of every Sunday ever? I really, really want to like motor-racing...but no.

Tennis. Ah, well, Tennis. It’s preppy. Although I’m picturing more scenes from The Royal Tennenbaums then I am real-life figures from Tennis lore. And it’s gladiatorial. I like that. Except it’s just as difficult to root for a man you don’t know as it is a town you don’t live in. I’m not going to blindly follow a player because he’s English, because he may well be an idiot, or a prick and I’m not in the habit of cheering either on. Surely personality matters more than passports? For once I recognise what’s so thrilling about the sport, but without anyone to champion, it just doesn’t hold my attention. I’d still much rather use that time to draw, or watch Hayley Atwell from the tree outside her house.

But it does rather leave me without some things that I really do love. First of all; event television. I like the talking point, ‘Did you see?’ as a concept, but in practice I’m almost always out of luck. For some months now I’ve been without broadband and rarely got home in time to watch anything. I have missed out on both ‘The Hour’ and ‘Torchwood’ where I know I would have had at least one person to go ‘Did you see...?’ with, and had that sense of the shared enjoyment I miss. Furthermore, I’m as likely to enjoy The Apprentice as I am a genuine Job Interview with an angry grey bollock, so no office banter for me there, either.

The other thing is - being in a gang. I think that’s the best way I can explain it. I’ve always wanted to be part of a defined gang. In the last few years, like a child, I have given name (and membership cards) to two groups of friends of mine, for reasons I don’t fully understand. Instead of going to the cinema with X and Y, ‘The Dead Fish’ assembled. Where one might see a bunch of old school friends and their girlfriends out to dinner, I saw ‘The Feast of Empires Club’ convening. It’s probably all rather needy and smothering, but I relish the thought of belonging to something more than a ragtag handful of people who have one another’s phone numbers. I’ve never been on holiday with a group of friends – no cottage, or villa or chalet shared, and now I’m of an age where my peers are all settling down, I can’t see it ever happening. Of course, sport doesn’t really give you this, or when it does, it’s a pack of inbreds throwing garden furniture about in Bareclona. Nevertheless, sport provides a badge, a shared experience, drama – between friends. I think that’s the bit I covet. I think it would be good to think in terms of ‘we’ and ‘us’ every once in a while.

Though there’s the Soap Awards, I guess.

Wait, Rose.

I am not quick-witted.

Do I get to say I’m deadpan, considered, dry? I might just be slow. The cogs turning. The one good joke landing, rather than crashing, just before the moment’s completely gone. Being a writer’s one of the ways to compensate, I suppose. I have the freedom to edit and refine. (Not that this blog ever shows much evidence of that.) But real life? It’s not so much ‘staircase wit’ as stuck in the lift during a power-cut.

There’s no punchline to this.

I’m in Waitrose, the John Barnes one, North Finchley. A rapping footballer; honoured by a supermarket. The layout’s strange. There’s no natural start point. There’s alcoves. Like a Cluedo board, with Cava and Halloumi instead of lead pipes and daggers. I’m doubling back on myself trying to determine which aisle will have dried figs (Cut a camembert in half, like a burger bun. Press the figs into the lower half and then restore the top.) – I’d thought Nuts and Snacks, then tried Fresh Fruit and Veg and...well, it’s not important. I don’t want to spoil the adventure for you. So, figs found, I make my way towards bread. Professor Plum is there with the scones. As I pass the aisle with the hummus, a girl – arms full of party snacks – loses a bag of crisps. They topple off the tower she’s struggling with. It takes her a moment while she thinks what to do about it. The staff are doing some sort of stock-take so when she looks around for help, everyone’s facing the shelves, little scanners accounting for all the crème fraiche. While she’s had this little awkward process (what’s happened – what to do about it – who can help?) I’ve had the time to think about what to do. I pick up the crisps and cautiously, waiting for some kind of permission, deliver them back to their cradle.


‘Listen, do you want me to grab you a basket?’


She looks at mine, like the concept is new to her. To be fair, I’m swinging it just to make sure she matches ‘basket’ the word, to ‘basket’ the object. Rose, I’ll call her Rose. Rose gives it a thought and then declines. She can make it. I don’t press the issue. I’m conscious this could all be quite patronising. It’s meant as good will. So I bid her good luck and I go and look at cordials. Eventually I head to the check out. Pay. Go.


Outside I see Rose again. I have my iPod on now, but I saw her in good time so I’ve managed to get a smile going. Smiles take a while. With no exaggerating, I can tell you a vending machine will dispense your selection before I’ve managed to tug the sides of my mouth up. The can of Sprite, the Biscuit and Raisin Yorkie that is my smile is present. Rose is goofy, blushing. I can tell she’s saying thank you, despite John Williams and Ewoks and the Battle of Endor going off in my ear. I’m saying ‘You’re welcome,’ – though without turning off my music, I can’t really hear it. I’ve probably said it with that yoghurt-thick pronunciation you get from the deaf. Unexpectedly she says something back. Synapses firing, signal’s sent. I hadn’t anticipated this. What do I do? I tug one half of the London Symphony Orchestra out the side of my head.


“I’m sorry?”


“I got a basket in the end.”


She’s almost as bashful as I am. I want to say “Clever girl,” to this, but she might not know I’m quoting Jurassic Park. She might think that’s just me being facetious. Or she might think I’m quoting Jurassic Park and wonder what the fuck it’s got to do with baskets and crisps. So I quickly change it to -


“Clever thinking.”


- which probably still sounds patronising, but without the Spielberg.


I just wasn’t ready. I was thinking about other stuff. Thinking about high concept movies. What’s my Jaws? My Die Hard? My story so simple but effective it becomes the sales pitch for other stories. Turns out it’s derivative shit; Duel meets Assault on Precinct 13. Judgement Night with a Range Rover. No subtext or sophistication. I’m sending it to the Recycle Bin in my brain while Rose tells me she got the basket.

In not being prepared, I haven’t changed the program: Walk to the bus-stop. So as I say “Clever thinking,” my feet keep carrying me. I turn, civil enough to face her as I speak and smile. But I’m walking sideways. This crab-like jerk who can’t stop and say hello. Mister Importantpants off to his next meeting. Eventually I pirouette to stop myself walking backwards, but I don’t know how this is any less idiotic. ‘Sorry, lady. Can’t talk to you, but I will give you a twirl.’ Demented catwalk-turn over, I steer myself down a side-street to the C11 stop and eventually I’m home and I watch that Largo Winch movie and eat French cheese.

What should I have done? ‘My name’s Ed, by the way,’ works in a script because the next line is ‘Rose,’ or ‘Pleased to meet you,’ or a dozen variations. It’s not ‘So?’ or silence. It’s not ‘Let’s not get carried away. You didn’t catch me and the helicopter as we fell from the roof of the Daily Planet. You picked up my pan-fried Bacon and Cheddar.’


I could have asked her a question, it was on my mind anyway – do I buy Tiptree Orange Marmalade, because it’s the brand my Dad buys? Or do I buy Frank Cooper’s Vintage Oxford, because it’s the brand James Bond takes with his toast? It could well have resulted in awkward, goofy Rose just as unprepared. Fumbling, bungling, falling off the ground, roles reversed. Or she could have wondered what kind of idiot lets Ian Fleming choose his breakfast. Perhaps the best outcome was just ‘Nice man picked up my crisps,’ without any Sliding Doors analysis.

Quick-witted. Clearly I don’t live in the moment. I live in the past – hence the thousand words on someone dropping their shopping. Should it be something I work at overcoming? I don’t play Indie Guitar and I can’t drain a radiator, so I can’t just rely on the chicks to flock to me. I must make the most of the moment. The spontaneity and awareness so when opportunity knocks, I’m there to offer it a basket, an introduction.

“So...ummm...”

Back then long time ago, when grass was green.

Well now.
London, innit. I’m back. Me old China.

Ta ra Liverpool, but this was a call I had to answer. You see, I’ve landed a rather boffo writing job, and it’ll probably do for me to be back in the sooty bosom of the city. Back on the streets, soaking up the dirt, the hardship, the struggle and then wringing it out into my new writing gig, on the most quintessentially Laandaan of telly shows.

But just because I’m going to work and walking round sets with a massive, idiotic grin on my face, doesn’t mean that I don’t still love you and miss you, Liverpool.

I remember when first we met. In the summer. I stepped off the train at Lime Street, where you greeted me with a statue of Ken Dodd. ‘What? The Beatles? Don’t be soft, kid,’ you winked, only to later hitch up your skirt and remind me about the airport, the museums, the bus tours, the plaques, the clubs, the street festival, the walks... ‘We’ve got a statue of Billy Fury down by the river.’

You might have had your hair teased up and your nails done, but that first walk past the dreaded karaoke pubs hinted that you were a dirty bird at heart. Oh, you could be very clean and pristine when you wanted, in your new Liverpool One duds – with your multiplex and hotels and avenues of shops all glass and steel, but there was always a back-alley charm to you. Bold Street, home to Resurrection and my shopgirl crushes (Josh Homme - ‘I Wanna Make it Wit Chu’ playing when I walk in. Has to be a sign, right?). Home to Tabac, all red leather and breakfast. Home to Mattas, where the shopkeeper has the best voice; a rumbling Ringo variation so deep it’s on the Richter scale, and the walls are decked in sauce and spice. Home to Oxfam, where someone kept donating Lawrence Blocks to keep my bookshelves healthy and the girl at the counter wore a hat and was too young for me. There was Leaf, late to the party. We had toast and tea together. Before my van took me back to London, I saw one of the Leaf girls in Tescos. We came to the self-service checkout at the same time. I said she could go first, I insist, but she said she got there a second after me. I should have said that I wanted her to go first so I could stay in Liverpool a minute longer. But I didn’t. I bought two chicken wraps and a 7up and left. Round the corner there was FACT, where we sat on couches and watched fillums together. And tucked behind all that was Alma de Cuba – the outlandish church/cocktail bar/carnival only you could have pulled off. There was the Zanzibar, packed with subterranean sounds, Heebie Jeebies, with its love-sofa, its squashed patrons, its inevitable fights and glass-smashing, its wagers won. The Masque, where Ten Bands Ten Minutes was a first kiss of cover-versions. There was New Year at Le Bateau. There was The Kazimier, a secret door to a Ridley Scott deco-box, all dry ice and cider.

And what of World’s Apart? My local comic book shop. They told me the issue of X-Men I’d bought looked like a porno and THIS IS NOT A LIBRARY. They treated me mean, it kept me keen.

Then, after I’d gotten to know you better, you showed your softer side, your summer dress. Lark Lane. The Moon & Pea. I could stop and join friends for a breakfast, then pop across the street for a honeycomb ice-cream to take to the park. Dear, sweet, Sefton Park. Even in rain you were pretty, but in sun you were gorgeous. I’m sorry I didn’t spend more time with you. I hoped we’d move in together – that I’d trade my town-house for something woodier, with beams and old doors. I hoped we’d go steady, but we were just a fling. Maybe it’s better that way.

In London I think they call The Asda just plain old ‘Asda’. Tesco’s ends in ‘Oh’, and I don’t think they even have a Home and Bargains. Maybe it’s ‘The Waitrose’ here. It all feels so confusing.

You might have kicked up some gale-force tantrums, shaking the windows, turning my umbrella inside out, howling away all night – but when you calmed down you had such a bright apology. For the price of a magazine and a bottle of pop, I could take the train to Crosby, Formby or Southport. Blue skies and horizons. Not some purple-grey sheet pulled over a sea of buildings. In the evenings you’d impress me with oranges and pinks and streaks of inky blue. The rain would roll in off the Mersey for twenty minutes at a time. It all ended up in Manchester anyway.

And then there were the people. The talent. You introduced me to people who have changed my life. People so rare and wonderful. Should I name and shame them? I won’t, because we’ll be here all day. They know who they are. Some were local; they had that music in their voices, that vibrancy, that innate ability to entertain. Some had found themselves there, much like I had, from all corners of the globe. Some were from The Wirral. They were writers, cartoonists, musicians, designers, teachers, actors. They were stylish, generous, witty, kind, sexy, fun. You let me shake hands with The Revenge Tragedies, Friday’s Ghost, Hillary and the Democrats, Married to the Sea, Novice Mathematic, Hot Club de Paris, Hannah Peel, Thomas J. Speight, The Bottletop Millionaires, Theresa Stern. Musicians might continually thwart my romantic ambitions, but they more than compensate for it with such excellence. I beamed from the audience.

And with a bit of a cake, a bashed piñata and some retro heckles my party was over, and I’m back in London. Like Mad Max at the end of Beyond Thunderdome I let the children fly away to Tomorrow-morrow Land in their plane (or drive to a cottage in the Lakes), while I wander towards the horizon with some spears slung across my back and one shoulder pad.



London. This is where I stop with all this twee storytelling and get my flick-knife out.

I might have said at the top that I’m back here on good terms. I couldn’t have wished for a better reason to come home, so don’t cry for me. I’ve got one of the best toy boxes on telly to play with. And maybe this time around I’ll see a different side to that harsh, aloof and trendy girl that I don’t normally get on with. We’ll meet on a train home and forget why we fell out in the first place. Second chances, pedestal girls and all that.


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