Bonekickers

This may be the wrong place to recommend a TV programme, and I have to confess that I've only watched one out of the first three episodes, but I have to mention this piece of truly awful dross for (at least) two reasons.

The whole sorry enterprise is about a quartet of unconventional, wisecracking, maverick archaeologists who shout a lot and have adventures, and if your instinctive response to that is to make sure the safety's off and there's a round in the chamber, then you're pretty much on the right track. It's the same gut reaction as that early encounter with the sado-masochistic albino assassin monk in the Dan Brown thing. You expect the worst, and that's precisely what you get.

Anyway, here's why you should still watch it. Firstly, Bonekickers is, quite possibly, the most laughably dreadful "drama series" the BBC has ever commissioned, and should be required viewing for anyone contemplating writing a screenplay, in terms of "under no circumstances do it ANYTHING like this unless you want to be laughed at".

We're talking serious bad here; plot lines, dialogue, characterisation, casting, lighting, editing, special effects, background music - all completely atrocious. If Bonekickers isn't in the "Dire Warning" section of every film studies course in the country within a couple of years, then I'm not a bald, portly Irishman with a bad attitude. And I am.

Secondly, while I'm not often a supporter of the "so bad it's almost good" school, d'you know, it almost is. After flinching and rubbing my eyes in disbelief a few times during the first five minutes I started to snort and giggle quietly to myself, a response I maintained for the rest of the show. I shall be watching the rest of the series, because, having found a programme that can make me laugh out loud after spending all day writing press releases about plasterboard I'm not going to turn my back on it.

On a scale of one to ten, Bonekickers is off the scale. In both directions.

The Hill District

We’re off for a week’s holiday in the Lake District. For the benefit of my one regular American visitor (and here I’m using “regular” in the sense of “reasonably frequent” rather than “average”, because Bob’s from Iowa, and who the hell knows what’s average for Iowa?) I should explain that the Lake District is a district in England where there are a lot of lakes.

And hills. It could quite justifiably be called the Hill District. But it isn’t, so let’s not waste any more time on that one. What most people do when on holiday in the Lake District is climb the hills and look down at the lakes, unless they can’t be bothered, in which case they sit by the lakes and look up at the hills.

Of course, if you actually live and work in the Lake District it’s likely that you ignore the hills and lakes and just complain that it rains all the time, which it does. Hence the lakes. And the clever name.

Anyway, it’s a place I love. If you can handle slightly demanding hill walking (the kind of walking where you might have to use your hands occasionally – the guidebooks call it a “scramble”) it’s quiet and still, and the air tastes like spring water, and there’s nowhere on the planet I’d rather be.

Back In The Swamp

It seems that the only time I post anything on here these days is to apologise for not posting anything on here, and now I’m doing it again. But today’s a little different.

It’s exactly a year ago today that I gave up my job as a corporate lickspittle and decided to wander the earth having adventures. Like Caine from Kung Fu, but a bit chubbier and a lot less Chinese. To date I'm still in Surrey, which is perhaps not that impressive, although Redhill is certainly the sort of place where you can have adventures. Just not the kind you'd want.

It’s been an oddly fragmented twelve months, and I’m still not making a living out of writing or music as I’d hoped, but I’ve been back to college and gained a formal journalism qualification. I’ve had news stories, reviews and feature articles published in several papers and magazines. I’ve interviewed music journalists, trauma victims, comedians, and the Climate Change Director of Greenpeace in Europe, which is pretty grown-up by my standards.

I’ve discovered that, to my surprise, I’m better at writing news than features, and better at both of those things than subbing, which, as a natural pedant, I thought I’d be good at. I also procrastinate like crazy unless faced with a deadline.

My mother died in December, which is something I’m still getting used to. I’m shamelessly trying to figure out how to get an article out of the event. She’d be proud of me for that. I’m also, as a result, an Irish landlord – like most Irish landlords, of course, I live in England.

Even though I’m determined to make a living out of creative stuff, at the back of my mind I’ve always thought, if the worst came to the worst, I could go back into a finance role. Last week I offered to help someone with an Excel spreadsheet. Spreadsheets were my life for fifteen years, up until I left Nortel Networks last year, and I consider myself an expert. I tried to explain how to do this advanced thing. I couldn’t remember.

So that’s it. Once your gills have gone you can never go back in the swamp.

God Only Knows

I’ve spent some time in the company of Christians recently, and, although they’re pretty annoying they’re probably less likely to try to murder you than the other annoying people in Redhill who aren’t Christians.

By and large they seem to be nice people, as long as you ignore the fact that they’re all a bit nuts.

Now, I’m an agnostic. That’s not me being wishy-washy, it’s just an admission that there’s a lot of stuff I don’t understand. If I contemplate the mysteries of the Universe I just don’t understand how stuff works.

The Christians I’ve met seem to understand how stuff works, at least to their own satisfaction. Up to a point.

Then I ask why God fucks us around so much. “Ah, say the Christians. You wouldn’t understand.”

So that’s why I’ve decided to just not understand on my own and cut out the not understanding bit that involves God.

Blowing Goats

It’s just been announced that the Royal Navy has stopped using goats in decompression experiments, which will come as a surprise to those who didn’t know they’d been doing it in the first place. Which was pretty much everybody, I should think.

In a press release which encourages the response “WHAT??!!”, or, indeed, “NO!!”, it’s claimed that goats were chosen because “their skulls are a similar shape to those of humans”. Now those are goats I don’t want to see. In fact, I don’t even want to think about them. My dreams are weird enough already.

It wasn’t all bad news for the animals. “They were never placed under water and they were not alone. Other goats were in there too," a defence official said yesterday, in a badly misjudged attempt at sounding reassuring.

Apparently the hapless creatures suffered brain damage, amongst other unpleasant effects. Presumably the difficulty in assessing whether a British sailor had suffered brain damage or not was the major barrier to using humans in the experiments.

For some reason they’ve stopped selling chipmunks in the pet shop across the road from where I live. I have a strange fixation with chipmunks – they’re quite cute, but they have an odd reptilian slitheriness which I find repellent but oddly hypnotic.

They're like squirrels. But worse. I used to go and stare at them until I began to feel worried and then go home, which was interesting. I miss them.

But there’s a lot more weird stuff out there to capture my imagination. “It is the first new species of giant elephant shrew to be discovered in more than 126 years" says Galen Rathbun of the California Academy of Sciences, referring to his latest discovery, and I, for one, will not be taking the time to argue with him.

It’s in Tanzania, which means I’m unlike to get a look at a real one, but at least the BBC have photographs.

Watch Them Burn...

Our family carbon footprint is probably that of an overfed yeti with Himalayan toe-bloat and we don’t yet run one of those hybrid cars which are made out of wattle and run on lentils or something, but Sooz and I do our best when it comes to recycling.

The local council pick up garden refuse, paper and cans every week. I’m constantly embarrassed by the number of beer cans. “Good party?” ask our neighbours. “Uhh, yes. Yes, party, right. Ahem.” I mutter, looking shifty.

I’ve taken to holding back the empty dog food tins so that I can put them in a layer on top of the Budweiser empties, but as the neighbourhood knows that we have only a terrier small enough to use a cat flap, it’s pretty obvious that I’m hiding something.

Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that, while the council collect the cans, we have to take glass and plastic bottles to the recycling centre ourselves.

Glass is okay. I don’t have a problem with glass, apart from the tiny broken shards that sometimes creep into the box and lacerate my best bass-playing finger when I’m not paying attention.

Wine bottles are great. They’re a reminder of gentle, drunken evenings with friends. Their very greenness is pleasing to the eye, particularly when the sun’s shining through them. And when you force them through the rubber grommetty things there’s a gorgeous suspended moment and then a satisfying crash. "I love the sound of breaking glass", as Nick Lowe once put it. And who doesn’t?



It’s the plastic bottles I can’t abide. There’s something fat and smug and insolent and yet insubstantial about them. They bounce out of the crate because they’ve been stacked too high, and anyway you should know better than to try to stack them because they don’t weigh anything.

They make an irritating flubbery bonking sound as they hit the floor, and you want to kill them by stamping but you don’t because it will do no good and that makes you insane with rage.

One day I’m going to follow them all the way to the place where they recycle them in the hope that I can watch them burn.

Multiple

According to The Daily Mail, Britney Spears may have multiple personalities. Which comes a surprise to those of us who thought she didn't even have one.

Troubled Times

These are troubled times for people of my demographic/socio-economic group/IQ level. The coked-up lunatics responsible – if that’s the word – for commissioning TV shows continue to plumb the depths by encouraging us to gorge on human suffering in all its forms.

Actually “human suffering” is a misnomer, because the hollow-eyed, publicity-starved freaks on reality shows don’t really feel pain like the rest of us. They use the gallons of endorphins they produce at the thought of getting their horrid, gurning faces on the box for five minutes to deaden the sensation of having their genitalia torn off by carnivorous wombats, or whatever piece of humiliation the producers come up with.

Celebrity Rehab is not the worst, or even the latest of these shows, just the last one I’ve heard of. I don’t care about the “people” on this show any more than the rest of them, but, fuck me, how can you make, or watch, a programme about somebody going cold turkey, live on TV?

I don’t necessarily subscribe to the “slippery slope” theory, but surely Cancer Kid's Chemo Camp can only be weeks away from hitting our screens. I know I don’t have to watch this stuff, and I don’t, but I know it’s out there. It’s like a colourless, odourless gas seeping out of the TV and rotting my very soul, in the same way that finding my daughter’s copy of Heat magazine under a pile of newspapers in the living-room explains why I’ve had a vague feeling of guilt, shame and nausea for the last few days.

Anyway, I reckon the next reality show will be called Cure My Obese Leprous Baby Or We Blind The Puppy, You Smack-Head Celebrity Plastic Surgeon On An Island.

Or something.

I So Knew It

I told you they were tricky little bastards.

But chipmunks would be worse if they weren't all behind bars.

Wet Ninja

I’m off to my homeland on Monday for a few days, and so I’ve been checking the news sites to see what kind of appalling mayhem the inbred halfwits of Northern Ireland have been dishing out to each other over the last week or so. Nothing much, but...

A team of fire-fighters was attacked by a moron who hadn’t stopped to wonder if a samurai sword was a match for a fully-functional fire hose. It wasn’t, of course, so they just sluiced him into submission. Strangely satisfying, that story.

More later…

The McWord

In a bid to change the public perception of employment prospects with the company, McDonald’s has collected almost 105,000 signatures on a petition, which has now been submitted to the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The fast-food giant has long been unhappy with the negative implications of the OED’s definition of “McJob” – the dictionary calls it “an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector.”

In an attempt to combat this, and to raise the morale of the nation’s burger-flippers, the company enlisted the support of the broadcaster Sir David Frost, 35 MPs and former Confederation of British Industry chairman Sir Digby - now Lord - Jones, in trying to persuade the OED and other UK dictionary houses “to change the current definition of McJob to better reflect the reality of service sector jobs.”

The OED has yet to comment. At the launch of the petition a spokeswoman for the dictionary said “We monitor changes in the language and reflect these in our definitions according to the evidence we find.”

McDonald’s may have a point. Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine dubbed the Golden Arches “the best place to work in hospitality”, and on its website the company has
launched its own retaliatory “McProspects” campaign, with a list of benefits and the slogan “Not bad for a McJob”.

It could be argued that McDonald’s have only themselves to blame – the company first registered the term McJobs as a trademark in 1984 as the name and image for the training of handicapped people as restaurant employees. The trademark lapsed, but the word re-surfaced in The Washington Post in 1986 and entered common usage in the US following a mention as a description of a “low pay, low prestige, low benefit, no future” job in Donald Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X.

McJob first appeared in the UK in the online version of the OED in 2001, but it was its appearance in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary – in 2003 – which seems to have first truly irked McDonalds.

The company considered legal action when the McWord first appeared in the US, but apparently was advised that it didn’t have a case. McDonald’s is notoriously lacking in a sense of humour and has an appetite for litigation when it comes to what it sees as slurs on its business.

Famously, in 1994, it sued two Greenpeace activists, who had distributed a pamphlet criticising the company, in what became the UK’s longest ever libel trial. The case was instantly and inevitably tagged “McLibel”, and went on for two and a half years, becoming the longest trial of any kind in British legal history.

Lasers In The Jungle Somewhere

From Flight magazine:

"Boeing moved closer earlier this month to realizing a seven-year goal to demonstrate a high-powered laser as a weapon aboard a Lockheed Martin C-130H.

“Next year, we will fire the laser at ground targets, demonstrating the military utility of this transformational directed energy weapon,” Scott Fancher, VP and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems, said in a statement."


So that’s just marvellous. As if the US can’t do enough damage with conventional ordnance, by the middle of next year we’ll all be in Bond-villain fantasy-land. Brown people the world over will live in constant terror of the next death-ray strike, while Dubyah slouches around inside his hollowed-out volcano with that dopey coked-up smirk plastered across his little monkey face.

I know that having your family barbecued by a laser isn’t really any worse than having a bunch of high-explosive come down your chimney, but somehow it feels worse. Until the advent of that ultra-low-frequency-sound weapon they’ve been talking about for the past fifty years – the one that makes you poo your pants and then shatters your pelvis, ribcage and skull (in that order, so you get to enjoy it) – then I reckon the super-laser’s about as bad as it gets.

The Southern Marsupial Mole (itjari-itjari)

Ok, it's been a long time, and under those circumstances I always seem to end up obsessing about animals...


Here’s a quote from a website:

“The marsupial mole is found in the central deserts of southern Northern Territory, northern and east-central Western Australia and western South Australia.”

So that’s clear, then.

In terms of their continued survival, man is not a real problem for the mole these days, although apparently there are some issues with “soil compaction caused by stock movement and vehicles”. In other words, they sometimes get trampled on or run over and squashed. It must be disheartening for the moles to realise that they’re going to end up as road kill even if they stay underground.

In the past things were different; there are records of thousands of mole pelts being traded between 1900 and 1920 in deals struck between Aboriginals and European cameleers which, no doubt, followed the traditional pattern of such deals - the Europeans got the moleskins and a few hundred thousand acres of ancestral lands and the Aboriginals in return each got two pairs of cheap calico trousers and smallpox.

As burrowers go, the moles are not particularly hard-core, tunnelling only 10cm below the surface and coming up to have a look around fairly frequently. Well, not a look around, exactly, as their eyes are vestigial and they have no optic nerves. Presumably they have just enough time to sniff the air for a split-second with their small, slit-like nostrils before being torn limb from limb by the foxes, dingos and cats which they don’t hear creeping up on them because of their lack of external ears.

A further dubious evolutionary development is that the marsupial mole’s pouch faces backwards, to prevent it scooping up sand and bringing the animal to a shuddering and undignified halt. Whether or not this rear-facing arrangement also results in the mole leaving a trail of little tiny pink mole babies, jettisoned and squealing, in its wake when at full throttle is anybody’s guess, but it would make perfect sense to me if it did. (It would explain the “endangered” sticker, that’s for sure.)

There are photographs of these things, and, trust me, they aren’t pretty. It’s always reassuring that creatures whose noses are “horny shields” and whose hands have become “scoops equipped with spade-like claws” tend to be on the small side, rather than there being the possibility that some hellish creature the size of a small rhinoceros is going to gouge its way up through the patio and join you in the hot tub.

Mutual Interests

It’s always interesting to return to my homeland, which regular visitors to this site might possibly remember I regard with a mixture of amusement, horror and disbelief. Ninety percent of the population are bad-tempered, slow-witted hicks and the other ten percent are Eastern European immigrants who failed to do their homework properly and are frantically trying to earn the money for a ticket out of the place.

Anyway, on a light-hearted note I thought you'd be interested to know that the Belfast Telegraph has a "lonely hearts" page which is divided into three sections: "Men Seeking Women", "Women Seeking Men", and "Mutual Interests", where gays have to mix it with pot-holers, model railway enthusiasts and socially inept men with beards who work in I.T. and want to get together at weekends to re-enact the Battle of Naseby.

However, as we're talking about Northern Ireland here I suppose we should just be grateful that there isn’t a section labelled "Homos".

On a more encouraging note, on a visit to the village where I grew up I noticed that someone had taken the time to alter the sign for LESSANS ROAD so that it read LESBIANS ROAD, so there might be some hot action going on out in the sticks.

Creating A Monster

Well, once again it’s been over a month since I posted anything on here, and I’m a little ashamed. Not abject, but a little disappointed with myself. In some ways it would be worse if my readership extended further than a cynical curmudgeon from Iowa, a pert-breasted nymphet trapped in the body of a portly Welsh accountant and a very small lady writer with a bad attitude, but they are loyal, if infrequent, visitors and I really should make more of an effort.

I’ve just spent a week in Ireland, trying to persuade my mother to allow a measure of helpful technology into her life. She’s eighty-seven, and physically a little frail, although she still lives alone and manages to do her own housework. On this visit I noticed there were a lot of cobwebs on the ceilings, but I reckon that’s bound to happen if you’re both short-sighted and four-foot ten in height. Mentally, she’s still in pretty good shape. She repeats herself a lot, and forgets things, but then I’ve been like that myself since I was thirty.

My mother is also becoming a bit deaf. “DO YOU KNOW, DAVID,” she bellows “I DON’T THINK MY HEARING’S AS GOOD AS IT WAS.”

“Well”, I say, “at your age you have to exp-“

“WHAT DO YOU THINK? DO YOU THINK MY HEARINGS NOT AS GOOD AS IT WAS?” she roars, not realising that I’ve said anything.

“NO! I THINK YOU’RE RIGHT!” I shriek.

“Oh.” She says quietly, looking crestfallen, and I have a sudden surge of sadness at the ageing process and the way it will ultimately turn us all into creatures who are figures of fun at best, and, at worst, a bloody nuisance to our families. (Our friends, of course, will still love us as they’ll be just as deaf, daft, drugged and incontinent as we are, so make sure you keep in touch.)

I had a long list of things to do, or rather to persuade my mother to do, but after a day or two I realised none of it was going to happen. Old people don’t like change, especially those, like my mother, who come from a background where money was always tight. They don’t like splashing out on luxury items like living-room windows which keep the draughts out, washing machines that work properly, and TV sets which don’t have to be slapped firmly on the right-hand-side every ten minutes to rid the screen of scrolling horizontal lines.

So I gave up on everything except for the mobile phone I’d bought her for Christmas, which my daughter had spent a full day teaching her to use, and which, inevitably, had been back in its box since December 28th.

It took five days. Five days of being shouted at and shouting back. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to try to explain something slowly, calmly and gently at the volume you’d use to stop a stray dog from crapping on your lawn, but let me tell you, it’s exhausting. Because mobiles look a little like TV remotes it took a full day to persuade my mother not to hold the phone out in front of her, pointed vaguely towards the corner of the room.

“NO! HOLD IT TO YOUR EAR! NO! WITH THE SIDE WITH THE BUTTONS ON IT TOWARDS YOUR EAR! NOW SAY SOMETHING! I DON’T CARE WHAT! TRY “HELLO”, FOR FUCK’S SAKE! NO, DON’T CRY, I’M SORRY, I’M SORRY!”

Actually it wasn’t that bad. Well, it was, but I didn’t swear and she didn’t cry. And it worked so well that while I was in the airport waiting for my flight home my mother used her mobile to call me four times. Once while I was checking in, once while I was having a pee, once while I was, at the insistence of the security staff, removing my belt and shoes, and once while I was sitting in the bar trying to relax. But that’s what always happens with mobiles, and I was proud of her.

But I think I may have created a monster.

Cook 'Em Slowly

According to the TV news, Dublin’s council estates are over-run by dangerous breeds of dog with irresponsible owners. Following ten dog attacks on people this year, Dublin City Council has issued a notice to its tenants, threatening them with eviction from their houses if they don’t get rid of their dogs.

Interviewed, the owners of these inbred hell-hounds claim that they love their dogs because of their sweet nature, which is about as accurate and honest as a gun nut claiming to love his Glock because of the colour.

“He’s so good with the children,” they bleat, gazing mistily at the slavering red-eyed wolverine frothing at their feet. Presumably what they mean is that the beast swallows toddlers in one gulp rather than messing the place up by leaving stray arms and ears all over the carpet.

“He’s like one of the family,” they whine, which is perfectly believable, as right now their children are outside in the street mutilating a tramp prior to setting him on fire and then eating him alive.

The dog lobby, and I have to say I'm slightly depressed that such a thing exists, puts forward the opinion that “it’s not the dogs, it’s the owners who are the problem.” Interesting, the parallel with the gun lobby. (“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”)

Well, actually, bad, stupid, aggressive people with guns kill people, and people like that should no more be allowed to roam the streets armed with an irascible pit bull terrier than they should be allowed access to firearms.

They may be an argument for keeping big, tough dogs in certain circumstances, such as if you live in a remote cottage in a corner of Ireland under constant threat of attack by starving bears or rabid badgers or something. Keeping a brace or more of testosterone-fuelled rottweilers in a two-bedroom apartment on the seventh floor of a Dublin tower block is a liitle harder to justify.

I know it’s the owners who are the problem, but people are more difficult to get rid of than animals, even in Ireland. I also know that “it’s not the dogs’ fault”, which is somehow supposed to make you fell less stressed about the fact that your babies have just been dragged from their pram and eaten.

The Koreans have the right idea about dogs. Keep them in the pound for a while to let them soften up. They’ll still be a little tough, but, hell, cook ‘em slowly.

Creak Slam Yak Squeal Chortle Guffaw Bellow

One thing is certain about Irish hotels; they’re not havens of peace and quiet. Unless you’re prepared to do a lot of painstaking research and / or spend a lot of money I wouldn’t advise staying in any Irish hotel on a Friday or Saturday night unless you’re prepared to sit up drinking until two in the morning. That’s what everyone else will be doing, and there will be no concessions to the feeble lightweights who want to get to sleep by midnight.

If you should decide to stay somewhere like Dublin’s Temple Bar, which is the epicentre of the city’s tourist area, you’ve only yourself to blame if your sleep is disturbed by the sounds of merriment and projectile vomiting, but heading out into the sticks may not prove much better.

In Ireland, country hotels are often hubs of the local entertainment scene (there’s nowhere else to go, for a start.) They’re always open to non-residents, and make most of their money from people using the bars and restaurant and attending weddings and discos – the wellbeing of those trying to get some sleep upstairs is not a priority.

The Old Inn at Crawfordsburn has a few notions of grandeur, making much of its 1614 origins – the brochure hints coyly at those who have stayed there. (“Highwaymen and presidents, Russian tsars and rock stars…” Yeah, yeah, very clever, I see what you did there.)

After a couple of disturbed nights I re-checked the publicity handout in the room, and to give them their due, at no point does the brochure use the word “quiet”, which is fortunate, because if the material had even hinted at tranquility I would have rolled up the leaflet very tightly and inserted it in the manager.

The brochure does mention “the picturesque village of Crawfordsburn”, and the place is attractive enough, I suppose. What they don’t mention is that the inn itself is right on the village’s main street, an after-hours rat-run which links the seaside resort of Bangor with the A2, which leads to Belfast. The traffic is constant, and even at three a.m. on Sunday morning there were still cars revving past our bedroom window at the rate of two or three a minute.

Our room turned out not to be, thankfully, directly over the bar or the function room where a wedding reception was taking place, but it was above the lobby and front door of the hotel. So, when the bar closed at around two a.m. the bunch of drunks moved first to the lobby (yak yak squeal chortle bellow), then out of the front door to the street right outside our window. (Creak. Slam. Creak. Slam. Creak slam creak slam creak slam creak slam creak slam. Yak yak squeal squeal chortle guffaw bellow.)

Much more yakking and squealing ensued, until the taxis arrived. (Vroom vroom slam squeal etc, etc.) Cabs continued to pull up, slam their doors and roar off for at least an hour. Then it went quiet. For five minutes.

Then the people staying in the hotel who’d been partying in Bangor or Belfast came back. By cab. (Vroom slam. Yak yak squeal guffaw. Creak. Slam.) They stumbled around the hotel for a while, trying their keys in at least twenty-five of the hotel’s thirty-two rooms before finding the right ones. They were, thank God, too drunk to have noisily enthusiastic sex, which would, I think, have been the last straw.

At around three thirty the remaining members of the hotel staff, waiting for their taxis home, moved to the lobby to have a boisterous and good-humoured discussion about their day. (Yak guffaw etc.)

At this point I finally lost my temper, put on a shirt, jeans, inserted one contact lens in the interest of speed and economy and padded, barefoot and enraged, down the stairs to the lobby. Due to exhaustion I was actually quite polite, but the staff members reacted with shock and contrition, and I was somewhat mollified, although I somehow felt that you shouldn’t have to have it explained to you that shouting at each other in a hotel lobby at four a.m. is not a civilised way to behave.

Ow

I've been on holiday in Ireland, of which more later. Maybe. In the meantime there's one thing I've learnt which I will pass on to you. Fifty-four is the wrong age to try surfing for the first time. Ow. OW.

LOTR - Goblins On Stilts

Lord Of The Rings, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, June 26th

Critical opinion seems divided on whether this is a hugely expensive piece of poo or just good fun. I'm not a big Tolkien fan so I went along without too many reservations apart from worrying about having enough legroom and whether I'd be able to get enough drink during the interval to cope with another ninety minutes of goblins on stilts.

As it turns out I'd put it in the "good fun" category. The sets are incredible, although as I'm of a nervous disposition the rising / falling / rotating stage made me a bit uneasy. Mark my words, that thing'll have sombody's leg off before the end of the run. Or hop.

There are lots of interesting lighting effects and clever trompe l'oeil stuff going on all the way through, and the Orcs are pretty scary, especially when they run up and down the aisles growling at everybody.

The cast is solid enough, with only the actor playing the Elvish king delivering a performance made of old ham sliced thick, and if there aren't any really memorable songs, by the same token there aren't any moments that had me thinking of faking a seizure so that I could be stretchered out.

Judging by the availability of cut-price tickets (I paid a fiver for a seat in the third row of the stalls) the public aren't exactly rushing to see the show, so you should be able to get a bargain. At that price it's a good night out, although two glasses of wine cost £10.40, a bit of a shock if, like me, you know that if you’re prepared to haggle in Urdu you can get five bottles of wine for that kind of money at the Vidhi Convenience Store on the Brighton Road.

(You also have to be prepared for your teeth to go black, but so far that’s always worn off after a while, as has the blindness.)

Anyway, back to the show. If you're a real Tolkien buff you'll probably hate it. If not, then it's an experience worth having.
But take a hip flask.