It's only words

Apart from continued nausea, I am feeling pretty bright; I have a new TENS machine as the wires in the old one were knackered. The new gadget is a Flip-Tens (right) which means that all the controls are protected and I don't nudge the nobs and give myself electric shocks. And when closed up it actually looks a little bit like an iPod. The shop I bought this from on-line is excellent, the most inexpensive I have found so far for electrodes etc and the guy really helped me out with what I was looking for, so highly recommended. For those who don't know what TENS is here is an explanation in rhyme.

I have also started on my new pain-killer regime. I was worried that they were going to knock me out completely, but in fact so far they're only making me a little high. Unfortunately, they're not keeping me going through the night just yet, but I know I'm on a lowish dose and have room to manoeuvre with that. Thing is just now I am a damnsite more comfortable than I have been lately - I didn't realise how had it had become and how miserable I was getting with it.

Manoeuvre is the one word that I cannot spell. I had to go find the correct spelling for it there. I cannot fix this in my head. O E U. O E U.

On the subject of words, yesterday I was editing (or perhaps rewriting) some work about the Social and Medical Models of Disability and I managed to produce this fantastic sentence which I simply must share. The piece spoke about how the Medical Model judges disabled people according to degrees of 'normality' and...

"Because such an approach judges a person’s quality of life according to their comparative resemblance to a hypothetical standard, it is bound to see disability as a wholly negative thing, a curse to be eliminated, a cause of suffering to be relieved or an obstacle to be overcome. "

It just arrived on the page like this and to be perfectly honest, I cannot find a more concise way of saying what I want to say. Does that make sense at all?

Music To Watch Patients By

Yesterday I went to the doctors. Our practice covers the entire population of the town and is in a large modern building. They play music in the waiting room, usually inoffensive pap – “The Pan-pipers of the Eastern Andes play… Songs from The Musicals.” type stuff. It was mid afternoon on a weekday and my fellow patients were mostly elderly or exhausted-looking mothers with children, everyone slumped and looking miserable, some dribbling a little in the heat.

And suddenly they’re playing Manamana (a.k.a Phenomenon) by the Muppets!

Nobody responds. Nobody looks up. I had been beginning to drift off before that point and wondered whether it was just me with the Muppets playing inside my head.

Then Manamana finished and on came The Theme from Hawaii 5-O. You know the one. Still everybody sat slumped, gradually sliding off their chairs at a rate of an inch every minute or so such that you thought they were moving but you couldn’t be quite sure.

A boy who looked about eleven or twelve, attending with his mother got up to have a cigarette outside. His mother complied with this, agreeing to knock on the window if they were called in. The kid then stood smoking right outside the open doors so we all got to inhale anyway.

The local muscle-man came in and sat right next to me. I have never spoken to the chap but you can’t help but notice him around. He is really extremely muscular, like Vin Diesel or someone - way too much for my tastes - but he always wears skin-tight jeans and t-shirts tucked into them, the fabric stretching across his chest such that you can see his nipples. I imagine it is very hard work looking like that and good luck to him, but when the guy plants himself next you to, you don’t really know where to look. Fortunately I was then called in.

Doctor put me onto a yet stronger lot of painkillers and I requested to see a physiotherapist, just to talk about ways in which I might be able to keep my muscles working without making them worse. The doctor called me “Young Lady” which amused me. I guess he was a bit worried about the state I had been in last week. He asked me whether the dizziness had improved and I had to tell him that dizziness is par for the course.

When I came out into the waiting room they were playing The Theme From Shaft and still no signs of life from my fellow patients. I do wonder sometimes whether there is a zombie plague taking over the world and most people have already sucumbed.

The Curious Incident of the Seagull In The Daytime

Or The Seagull Has Landed.

You develop a complicated relationship to seagulls when you live on the coast. The seagulls in Whitby are a cause for great annoyance. They are most hated by the drivers and the goths. Anybody who has a car knows what it is like to get guano off the paintwork – our friend H’s car which we use was once brown but is currently a kind of mottled beige such is the amount of poop on the roof. The goths get it the worse perhaps; black velvet, daubed with white seagull plop - well, you can imagine. I guess the nuns up at the convent must have similar troubles but you never hear them swear about it.

And the gulls are cheeky. If you leave food anywhere that they can get to it, even if it means entering an open window, they will. If you leave leftovers of your Chinese meal from the Good Luck takeaway in a rubbish bag outside, they will eviscerate it, leaving a mess of noodles, like entrails, all over the yard.

However, they have their advantages. Like they attack the tourists.Bram Stoker,Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell (Dickens as well but Dickens visited everywhere). You have the philosophical/ historical set who come here because this is the birthplace of English literature (Caedmon, the first person to write poems in English), Roman Christianity in England and Lucky Ducks. Then you have the railway people and the Austrailians come to visit the home of Captain Cook. You have the people who are into Jet jewellery and early photography. There’s the goths for Whitby Gothic Weekend and then there’s the beardy sandal-wearers at Folk Week and the new Abbeygael Festival. All of these people are very welcome here.

But mostly you get the scally day-trippers from Teeside. Not everyone from Teeside or indeed every day-tripper is the same of course, but there is a certain type. This type keep their custom exclusive to those shops which they have branches of in their native towns, i.e Woolworths and the cheap shoe-shops, thus contributing little or no money to the local population. Their children seem at first undisciplined, but then you see them being subject to corporal punishment in public places.

And strangely enough it is always these people who get attacked by the gulls. We all get shat on, but these folks sit there eating their fish’n’chips and getting gradually drunk on some sickly fizzy concoction they have purchased in two litre bottles from the Co-op, teasing the gulls by pretending to throw their chips but then not letting go and bursting out into slack-jawed laughter. Then they complain to the local council when some great hefty herring gull swoops down and pinches their dinner.

Anyway, on the whole locals live side-by-side with the gulls and you don’t notice them anymore. When you’re on the phone, the landlubbers on the other end comment on the noise they make although you don't hear them. People staying over have their sleep disturbed by them but you wouldn't even know you were there.

Until someone tries to hurt them.

We went to York today and when we came back there was a seagull sat in our yard. Seagulls do venture into our yard, but there’s not a lot of space and they certainly don’t stay in our yard when there are people about. And they don’t then hide behind the dustbin as opposed to flying away when you approach them.

Our seagull could not fly away, but he wasn’t obviously injured and there were no feathers about. Suddenly we were filled with suspicion and rage. There are three possible explanations of how our (now beloved) seagull came to harm;

We keep finding BB gun pellets in the yard. Has someone been shooting at the seagulls? Almost certainly. Did they actually hit the seagull? Perhaps.

Our landlords use the flat above ours as a holiday flat, perhaps five weekends in the year. They have roses up there and they put slug pellets down on our steps this weekend. It just so happens that all the slugs live directly opposite our flat and today there were about two dozen shrivelled slugs outside our flat. Could poisoned slugs harm the birds that digest them?

Are the seagulls themselves being poisoned?It is hard to kill animals as big as seagulls with poison without endangering other animals. So they get sick. A few years ago a mass culling exercise resulted in 'drunken' seagulls flying headlong into buildings and people, causing a greater hazard and nuisance than they ever were before.

Whatever happened, the chances are that foul play was involved.

Most conflicts between man and nature are entirely man-made. The reason seagulls are pests is because people feed the seagulls or leave their kitchen windows wide open with plates of food on display. Reduce their food source and their numbers reduce. Simple.

On a positive note, we phoned the local RSPCA for advice, convinced that they would have no interest in a mere seagull but a lady did come out and rescue it (tiny woman picked this rotten great gull up in one hand and gave it her other hand to peck on). So hopefully our seagull will live happily ever after.

Propaganda

The news coverage of the attacks in London is just getting silly and so am I...

Public Information On The Terrorist Threat.

London maintains her stiff upper lip this morning after the good old British Bobby thwarts terrorist attacks on the London Transport System. Those Islamic Extremists have picked the wrong city to terrorise. Here, it is business as usual: those plucky Londoners are having none of it.

Suicide bombers? Maybe two weeks ago, but this week they were Mild-Concussion Bombers. This red-faced would-be martyr hands himself over to an obliging officer. There’ll be no seventy-two virgins for this cheeky chappy in his police cell tonight. By jingo, there aren’t seventy-two virgins to be found within the Borough of Hackney.

So, you may ask, what is Islam? And what has Mr Mohammed got against the London Underground?

Well Islam is a jolly decent religion which is rather like the Church of England except without Her Majesty The Queen in charge. Mr and Mrs Mohammed may not participate in the raffle at the Church fete, but Mr Mohammed plays a mean left-field for the local cricket team. We have nothing to fear from him.

Unfortunately, some young followers of Islam not only reject the raffle, but the warm and watery beer which made Great Britain great and indeed the very game of cricket itself. Without the understanding of a googly or a ferret, these unruly hotheads are without wholesome use for their boyish energies and are ripe for the plucking when those dastardly extremists come scrumping for martyrs in our back yard.

What about the International Situation?

In recent years, The British Armed Forces have leant a hand to Johnny Foreigner when he has got himself in a pickle. Some caddish Islamic types have the rather girlish idea that Johnny Foreigner should be allowed to get himself out of any pickle he has had the foolishness to get himself into without our help.

You may well laugh at this. Or if you are a woman reading your husband’s newspaper, you may say, “But what is wrong with allowing autonomy to developing countries, so long as they are supported by the international community and allowed to trade freely and fairly with everyone?” To this we have a simple rebuttal: Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. If you can’t understand the rules of cricket, then it is most unlikely that you should comprehend the workings of International Politics.

So is the International Situation in some way related to the atrocities in London in recent weeks? Of course not! It is nothing but lilly-livered nancy-talk to suggest that the actions of the British Government, either at home or abroad, could have any undesirable consequences for the British people.

What can you do to stop the terrorists?

When using public transport, try singing the national anthem, Rule Britannia and Land of Hope And Glory. Your fellow commuters are bound to join in. Roused by this patriotic display, not only will you have eliminated any nervousness on the bus or tube train, you shall also have greatly lessened the resolve of any of those rascal terrorists within the proximity.

Keep an eye out for for suspicious people or anything out of the ordinary. Are the trains running on time? Something must be up. Has anybody made eye-contact with you? Observe if any of your fellow passengers stand up in order to let the frail, crippled or pregnant take their seat (not including when standing for the national anthem of course).

Tommy Terrorist may be a master of disguise, but he is no match for little Timothy (above left), who runs straight home to tell his father what he has seen.

Most of all in this War On Terror, we need make as much tea as our kettles can muster. This not only helps keep our spirits high and our upper lip stiff but in an emergency, tea doubles up as a handy antiseptic (when diluted with neat alcohol), an effective analgesic (when mixed with morphine hydrochloride), and a local anaesthetic (when applied to an open wound in combination with cocaine).

So brew up Britain and chin up London! In our great history, we have faced and defeated foes such as Bonapart, Hitler and... Philip II of Spain. A handful of ideological Yorkshiremen are no match for us.

Music To Write Novels By

I seem to be listening to the same three albums all the time when I am writing just now. This isn’t terribly representative of the music I love, but these are three albums among the music I love, which it is actually possible to listen to at the same time as writing.

This music helps me concentrate. If I write in silence, my mind tends to drift onto others things like checking my e-mail, reading the news or messageboards. The moment I change windows, I am likely to become thoroughly distracted. The music gives me a place where my mind can wander to and from without embarking on some other project.

1.Suzanne Vega – Suzanne Vega

And I tried so hard to resist
When you held me in your handsome fist
And reminded me of the night we kissed
And of why I should be leaving

I think Suzanne Vega is one of the best lyricists of all time. She ought to have been bigger than Dylan but she is a woman whose peak was in the nineteen-eighties. Plus her voice is so soft that it sometimes trickles over you without registering. She is a mistress of poetry, knowing when to stick rigidly to rules and when to bend and break them, how to express the message of a song succinctly, hidden amongst the flowers. And she writes a jolly good tune as well. It’s all very beautiful.

2.Tea For The Tillerman – Cat Stevens

How can I tell you that I love you? I love you
But I can’t think of right words to say
I long to tell you that I’m always thinking of you
I’m always thinking of you, but my words just blow away.

How many times have I mentioned this album on my blog? How many times have I discussed the matter of whether it is this or Teaser and the Firecat which is the best Cat Stevens album? At the moment I am firmly in the Tillerman camp. I don’t need to justify this - if you haven’t got this album, buy it now. You need it. Everybody does.

3.Astral Weeks – Van Morrison

Then we sat on our own star and dreamed of the way that we were and the way that we weren’t meant to be
Then we sat on our own star and dreamed of the way that I was for you and the way that you were for me.

I heard that when Jonathon Franzen wrote The Corrections this was the only album he listened to the whole time. This would be quite a recommendation if I actually believed it to be true – it’s a good book, some of the prose is rich bordering indulgent but it often pays off. Anyway, Van Morrison. He wails a lot but with feeling. His lyrics vary from being highly poetic to profoundly banal, but he always sounds like he means every word from the bottom of his heart. Astral Weeks is a bit like one long song, but if it is, I’m not really sure what the heck it is about.

.............................

In other news, Damon will be pleased to know that I watched Oragazmo, the other film by the South Park boys which he mentioned after I saw Team America. Orgazmo is about a young Mormon who winds up being offered a job to star in an adult movie as super-hero Orgazmo. It was bad, really bad, but I did laugh a lot. Lots of visual humour involving sex toys and martial arts which might be pivotal, I don’t know. Our conclusion was that you had to be ever so slightly drunk to get the most out of it, but if you were (as we were) it was great. Another candidate for my list of Best Bad Movies.

Oh and I rarely do these things, "What fruit are you?" or "What sort of underpants are you?" but spotted this one on Kezzykat's blog and had to have a go;


Which File Extension are You?

I don't know what to make of that.

Review: War of the Worlds

On Tuesday evening, having watched 28 Days Later in the morning, I went to the cinema to watch War of the Worlds. The plot from the novel by H G Wells follows the story of one man whilst the world is invaded and the human race are enslaved by aliens. Steven Spielberg’s particular take on the tale moves from Victorian London to the modern-day US and has downbeat divorcee dock-worker Ray (Tom Cruise) looking after his children for the weekend when suddenly New York experiences some odd weather conditions.

We realise something is afoot when an alien tripod craft bursts out of the ground and starts vaporising people and buildings. Ray takes the only working car for miles around and heads off for Boston to return his children to their mother.

It’s going to be hard to review this without spoilers, but many people are already familiar with the story the book, other films and perhaps best of all, the Jeff Wayne album. However, if you don’t want to know anything about what happens beyond the above synopsis, turn away from your screen now…

War of the Worlds failed for me on a number of levels, so I shall start with the plus side. The effects were superb and the design – of the aliens and their craft – was absolutely first class. Even the aliens wandered about on three legs. And it is a powerful story; the original alien invasion story, whereby the Earth is attacked by something which it is beyond our means to defend ourselves against.

But…

Okay, first of all, I struggled to sympathise with anyone. Ray came across as being a truly inadequate father – not just the bumbling yet conscientious American man in charge of children standard; he was aggressive and neglectful and when the shit started to go down he was unable to cope with his children’s distress. The best acting came from Dakota Fanning – a young actor who keeps popping up everywhere as a little girl in peril (her best part being in Man on Fire) – as Ray’s daughter, Rachel. However, Spielberg exploited her wide-eyed cuteness to the point of exhaustion, with every other shot being of her terrified face. Plus her character wasn’t entirely solid; her moments of extreme stoicism and childish hysteria were sandwiched a little too close together for my liking.

Ray also had an older son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) who was more effective as a parent-figure for Rachel, but promptly decided to leave his father and sister for reasons not entirely clear, but it meant that he and Ray could have an emotional father-son man-to-man, “Let me grow up, Dad.” – “No son, I can’t let you go.” – “But Dad you have to!” – “Yeah, all right I guess, you’re a man now and I respect your decision to run towards the aliens which are incinerating everything in their path.” (this wasn’t the actual dialogue, but it was close).

Robbie did get engulfed in the fireball – a proper impressive fireball – but he still managed to make it to Boston for the final scene with no explanation, not even “Well, just as all those military vehicles I was surrounded by exploded, I happened to fall down a deep hole, at the bottom of which was a pile of pillows, a collection of fire-retardant blankets and a ladder. So I wasn’t hurt in the fall, the blankets protected me from the initial fireball and then I was able to use a ladder to get out.” Nothing.

Meanwhile, Ray and Rachel find refuge with a former ambulance driver called Harlan Oglivy (Tim Robbins). A character called Oglivy exists in the book – he is an astronomer and the one that says, “The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one.” (or words to that effect). He is supposed to be a little crazy, but in the film he was just plain creepy. You didn’t know why – he seemed to ramble a lot and say very contradictory things. You really didn’t know what the guy was after and most especially you have no idea why Ray decides to kill him, having blindfolded Rachel and left her singing a lullaby from Mary Poppins.

How this got a 12A certificate I really don’t know. No nudity and no swearing? It was two hours of pretty much unrelenting death and destruction. When people weren’t being vaporised they were having the blood sucked out of them or being burnt, crushed or drowned. However, unlike in the horror film I saw earlier that day here there was no let up and thus very little suspense. Like a painting with no balance of light and shade. After the first half hour of being assaulted by all this, on top of the fact that I couldn’t feel invested in any of the characters, I just felt numb and a little bored.

However, the fact that this was The War of The Worlds carried us along to the end. The end of story is that the aliens die because their systems can’t cope with commonplace bacteria. This is by nature a bit of an anti-climax, but could have been dramatic enough. Instead it seemed like a cop-out; like they'd run out of time and energy and wanted to tie up all the strings before bedtime.

I have only listed about half the faults this movie had but you’re probably bored already. I sound like I really hated it and I didn’t. I suppose I am so critical of it because (a) I paid good money to go see it, (b) it’s Steven Spielberg, (c) it’s a jolly good story; it ought to have been good. But overall, it was disappointing. Definitely a “missed opportunity” if not actually a “pile of pants.”

Review: 28 Days Later

I actually started to review Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, but I couldn’t get my words together so I thought I would try something a little less intelligent…

Tuesday was a day for apocalyptic horror. Well, it was a Tuesday. In the morning I watched 28 Days Later, a British made film directed by Danny Boyle (Transpotting chappy) about a young man who wakes up from a coma to find that the world has been overrun by a virus called Rage, spread by fluid transfer, which turns its victims within a matter of seconds into brainless yet murderous creatures. Our chap wanders the empty streets of London, meets some fellow survivors before trundling off to the North in search of some soldiers who are transmitting the only remaining radio signal. However, the soldiers’ idea of protection isn’t necessarily what the survivors expected…

I’m not a great horror fan, mostly because I find it most horror films (a) not very scary (b) very annoying. If I watch a horror movie, I want to be frightened. Personally, I find this helpful. In the same way some people hire ‘weepy’ movies so they can have a good cry in a controlled and socially acceptable way, I want to be frightened for a short while so that the world is a less frightening place. If I didn’t ever get scared through the books and films, I would probably become afraid of crime, terrorism, Avian flu, meteors and the like – and not having any predetermined narrative conclusion, these things could keep me awake all night. Horror films never follow me into the real world.

But if I am subjected to loads of violence, gore and other disturbing imagery and not actually frightened, then I am left feeling really annoyed or even offended. I am not in the least squeamish, but I am human and I do need some emotional payback for being exposed to distressing material. Violence is okay within entertainment, as part of a narrative, but violence is not okay as entertainment; not even in the context of when in Rome.

Another somewhat contradictory parameter is that it can’t be too believable. Everything has to be believable within a context, but that context has to be ever so slightly fantastic. The monsters can’t be the sort of monsters that I could read about in the news, for example. 28 days later worked well in this respect; I didn’t believe that such a virus could be produced let alone successfully spread, but I did buy the human drama it produced.

28 Days Later also had loads of violence, gore and other disturbing imagery but it was very frightening. It was well-paced such that you never felt easy, but you weren’t left on the edge of your seat so long that you fell off and broke the spell. The horror did change in nature as the film went on, which is something other people have complained about, but I thought this worked pretty well to bring the whole thing to a climax; ultimately human minds are far scarier than mindless zombies.

Once or twice the script seemed to lack cohesion and there was one inexplicable narrative turn involving ball gowns I don’t know why they left in. At the end of the day it was a science-fiction horror movie with its fair share of anomalies and irrational behaviour and Chekov certainly wasn’t on the credits. But the acting was superb, the music (as always with Danny Boyle) was great and I was carried along from start to finish.

At last the British are getting film-making right (I apologise on behalf of my motherland for every Romantic Comedy that we’ve reeled out in the last decade. I just hope that this Renaissance of British Horror doesn’t leave the likes of such actors as Hugh Grant behind – I’m sure he could play a socially-awkward upper-middle-class ape-creature or something).

But don’t watch it if you faint at the sight of blood or Christopher Eccleston.