Heads Roll Off (2008 Part 1)

I was going to write a detailed and poignant tale about my Christmas, from the moment I got out of the car in Winchester to be greeted by a pub full of weirdos and none of my friends. I was going to continue with how I went to a different pub after being the only person from my group of friends to do the Christmas Eve tradition 10 years running, and ended up going to The Black Boy where everyone is foppish, young, drunk and beautiful, and how I drank enough red wine to be sick over the edge of the bridge into the weir. Then I was going to humour you with stories of board games and presents and christmas cake, but none of this is very exciting. I'm just going to get this year over and done with. My festivities and calamities which came to a head on Christmas Eve were the culmination of this years driving forces; my hopeless inability to keep in contact with my friends, and my belief that getting drunk alone will somehow combat the pain, are best left in the past.



And whilst we're on the subject of the past, here's a list of my top 20 albums of 2008. Unlike my forthcoming list of my favourite songs of 2008, this list is for albums released this year. Otherwise it would be Little Drummer Boy by Mark Kozelek, easily the album I've listened to most this year.



20 Neil Diamond – Home Before Dark
19 Get Well Soon – Rest Your Weary Head, You Will Get Well Soon
18 Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours
17 The Tallest Man on Earth – Shallow Grave
16 The Magnetic Fields - Distortion
15 Glasvegas - Glasvegas
14 Constantines – Kensington Heights
13 Shearwater - Rook
12 Wild Beasts – Limbo, Panto
11 Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago
10 Kleerup - Kleerup
09 Parts and Labor - Receivers
08 Wilderness – (K)no(W)here
07 The Gaslight Anthem – The ’59 Sound
06 Fuck Buttons – Street Horrrsing
05 Titus Andronicus – The Airing of Grievances
04 Sun Kil Moon - April
03 Studio – Yearbook 2
02 Of Great and Mortal Men – 43 Songs for 43 Presidencies
01 Frightened Rabbit – The Midnight Organ Fight



All predictable stuff. With the exception of maybe 3) which is a collection of remixes and shouldn't really count, 2) which nobody has bothered to listen to despite it's brilliance (although the fact that it doesn't appear to have an 'artist' listed anywhere so I've decided myself to call the project 'Of Great And Mortal Men' might be the problem) and 10) which I think has only been released in Sweden, all of these have appeared on other peoples lists. I could bang on about all of these for pages and pages but I'll pass. Highlights of the year though have been Parts and Labor following up last years #1 with another flawless, if diluted album, an unbelievable return to form for Wilderness, an album at number one which is nothing but pitch-perfect angsty excellence, and Glasvegas, who I haven't just included to aggrivate, it turned out to be a pretty good album after all.



If you care (why do you care), you can see how these translate to the top 100 songs of the year, revealed in the new year.

Good News For People Who Love Bad News

Hello

No, not the Blur reunion. No, not Mark Ronson's list of his 99 favourite musical recording acts of all time. No, not the fact that I think my mouth is going to internally collapse like a bouncy castle at the end of a kids birthday party. No, the fact that for the first time since, what, late August? I'm going to ressurect this silly useless thing, because someone called Anonymous, who can't even spell the word anonymous, said to. That's it. Exciting.

So, coming soon: a review of the year, my top 100 songs of 2008 based on order of enjoyment, a possible aesthetical re-theme so this page looks less like pages from teletext. I might even put some more photographs up. But not today. No, not today.

bullets might give you black eyes

Wrapped Up in Books

I've had it with this whole dreaming thing. Last night I dreamed I fell in love with a girl with brown hair, an attic bedroom and a Penguin Classics bedspread. Then I woke up and was annoyed that I was awake. I'm aware that talking about your dreams is about as boring as it gets so I'll pass up this opportunity, but this isn't the first one of these. The more interpretations of perfection my dreams are going to screen for me on a nightly basis, the most annoyed I get when I wake up, and the less likely I'm going to compromise. The thing about all of these dreams are that they're too close to reality. Like, in most of these dreams at some point I have the exact discussion I'd probably have in my own kitchen with my housemate.

"No seriously, she had a Penguin Classics bedspread"
"That's ridiculous, that's the sort of thing that's too perfect"
"I know, that's what I said, I mean, that's the sort of thing you dream of when you're dreaming up perfect situations"

So basically, my life has got so consumingly dull that I've started to dream about dreams about dreams. It's not particularly fun either, it's not like a David Lynch movie when you can drink a cup of coffee and eat some shortbread and the most part dissected by Twin Peaks nerds on websites who wrote about Mulholland Drive for their dissertation. Not me, I wrote about Lost Highway, except it wasn't for a dissertation, it was an essay on Non-verbal communication and I got a good mark for it. But my point is, dreams within dreams within dreams don't make good dreams, and definitely don't make good dream anecdotes.

The two saddest things you can see, I think, on a normal walk somewhere are mountains of post on the doormats of closed shops and lost cat signs. One represents lost friends, the other represents lost dreams. There's a couple of shops around here that have changed owners several times over the year. One's a takeaway, which has had different names, different people behind the counter. One time, I forget the name, the owner had pulled out all the stops, had exciting posters and menus, and cooked all the food himself, and talked to you about the events of the day, almost miniature stand-up routines like local radio presenters do when they're going through the daily rags on their morning shows. He was great, but of course I only ever went there once, and now it's gone. Probably, as soon as the new takeaway opens, I'll go to that one once, and never again. I guess once-and-never-again people like me must make life hell for these people, it probably makes them think it's going to be that all the time, and then it's not, and these people never come back, so maybe there's something desperately wrong with their food. It's not my fault I moved house, or that the takeaway was in completely the wrong place, or that during that period of 2005, I wasn't really into the whole buying takeaways things because my disposable income only covered alcohol. But it still gives me twinges of sadness in my heart to see these vacant shops with piles and piles of post building up on the doorstep, post that was probably the first thing they picked up in the morning, or when they were doing their day-to-day routine, the postman would pop his head around the door and they'd have a brief chat. The saddest part is that not only is their business gone forever, but they can't even bring themselves to visit the shop and collect their mail. It's almost like people who can't face their lovers or relatives graves in the cemetery because it's too goddamn much.

Lost cat signs just make me very unhappy. I get significantly more emotionally affected by lost cat signs in plastic wallets stapled to telegraph poles than I do by hearing about the mass slaughter of human beings in any given country or town. This is because cats don't deserve to be lost. All humans in my opinion, have the potential to destroy and manipulate and create untold evil towards another, and the only thing that stops people is the lack of opportunity, and I just can't get excited about them anymore.

What is exciting though, is ten pin bowling on the Nintento Wii. Our house has managed to borrow one of these consoles whilst one of my housemates ladyfriends is kayaking in Iceland or hunting eskimo in Alaska or whatever to fuck people researching Bruce Parry's Tribe do when they're out of the country, so we've ended up with the Wii rather than her take it to a cattery or whatever. I'd safely assumed that like the Playstation 3 or the Xbox 360, I was going to take a back seat from this era of videogaming like I did with the last one. I'd only just got excited again by the idea of driving fire engines off bridges on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas again but now there's this ridiculous motion-sensitive ten pin bowling thing. It's almost impossibly easy, but takes most of the fun out of ten pin bowling, Namely:

1. Ten pin bowling costs too much, so you have to pretend to be a lot, lot more excited about the game than you would be if it was free
2. In a ten-bowls game, it usually takes until bowl 6 for you to settle on which ball is the 'right number' for you, even though there's not really much difference between them
3. Horrible shoes which have to be sprayed with industrial-strength odour stuff before they're given back. I once asked to have my own shoes sprayed with this.
4. In the olden days when only my mums hairdresser friend Sue had Sky, bowling alleys were the only place to watch MTV
5. You don't get the option to fuck about with the little portable metal 'slope' for people too useless to even hold a bowling ball, playing at home.

Why the Wii is better:
1. You can eat doritos from a saucepan whilst you play
2. The pain in neatly transferred from your finger socket joints to your wrist, which is much less panful when you have to pick things up the next day
3. I don't get fucking spares all the time. The last proper game of bowling I played, I got 9 on the first bowl, and then 1 on the other, for the entire game. I actually texted 8-2-ASK to see if I was the first and maybe only person to ever get this score. No reply.
4. You can talk on the house phone to your parents about how you had a dream about a girl with a Penguin Classics bedspread whilst simultaneously scoring two successive strikes, and this somehow makes you look better than if you weren't on the phone, even though you only really need one hand.
5. I've managed to make a cartoon Wii character thingy who looks just like me, or me if I'd been drawn by Brian Lee O' Malley. Basically me, if I was good looking, played sports, and was a slacker in Toronto.
6. You can walk three steps into your bedroom and listen to Dance Away by Roxy Music any time you like.
7. You don't have to share your own toilet with patrons of Lazer Quest.

Can you even get Penguin Classics bedspreads?

Anyway, this is a photograph I took of a petrol station in Cardiff on a Friday night. It's very Edward Hopper.

Burn

Hello
I should have done something exciting and edgy today. Like going to see "teen film of the decade" (uncredited source; this is what the advert said, but I suspiciously can't find the quote online anywhere) Wild Child, starring whatshername from Aquamarine, that walking haircut from Stormbreaker, and for some reason, Nick Frost. Starring Roberts as some sort of EVIL Malibu teenage socialite who gets banished to boarding school in mega-strict England (because obviously English people don't know how to have fun) only she causes havoc everywhere she goes, and starts all the parties, but ultimately we get a happy compromise of stiff upper lipped English snobs having a gay old time, and crazy US bitch gets a dose of normality, and learns how to do sums or something. I should have gone to see this, I really should. Instead, I did some historically dull activities, which I would say I won't bore you with, but then I don't know who you are, or why you're reading, so maybe this is fascinating for you.

I bought a new CD writer from PC World because I'm sick to the back teeth AND sick to death of burning cds in the weedy little tray that pokes in and out of my laptop like the worlds limpest Swiss Army knife. I'm not expert on these things, but this external CD writer is massive. It's like, bigger than a bible. It's almost the same size as a hardback cope of Ken Follett's A World Without End, and just about as heavy, too. Which makes me wonder what the little burner inside my laptop and located just underneath the Caps Lock and ASDFG keys thing it's doing. No wonder it broke. Although apparently not, as the album I send my dad in the post along with a copy of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo made managed to work OK. To be on the safe side, I walked up to PC World to buy a new one. I've never been in PC World before, but boy are they nothing like the adverts. Admittedly, I went to PC World in Cardiff, and like most things in South Wales, you're guaranteed to get more pathetic version of what might be brilliant elsewhere, but even taking this rule of thumb into account, PC World was a shocker. For the wealth of technology available in, store, I would have though they could have at the very least, created holographic staff with extensive artificial intelligence who actually knew where anything was, and without acne that looked like it was going to erupt any minute. Secondly, it's wonderful that they divided the store into "PC" and "Laptop" halves, but what I was looking for (an external drive for a laptop) wasn't on either, when it should surely have been with Laptop accessories, but it wasn't, it was with a bunch of other CD drives, all of which were labelled in such a high technical register the only words I understood were "CD and DVD", the rest might as well have been written in Klingon. I had to ask for help off one member of staff, who served a pleasant dose of bullshit that the drive I had in my hands was exactly what I was looking for, and then when I got to the "tech desk" where the lady informed me this drive I had was an internal drive for a PC, not a laptop, and that the one I really wanted was fifteen pounds more expensive (of course!). The tech desk was quite interesting, because there was a little room where people with big thick glasses were dismantling laptops. I couldn't help but think it was somewhere like this that Gary Glitter got rumbled. He'd have paid £114 to have his laptop fixed on site too.

I took time to have a look around Newport Road, since it's not every day you get to walk around in the pissing rain amongst an avenue of vile oblong concrete and stainless steel megastructures all ten times the size of the QE2 and infinitely less exotic or relaxing. They're all there: Comet, PC World, Pets at Home, Maplins, some stupid place whose logo was a big R in a circle, a big fuck off blue structure called WHAT! that used to have a high street version, at least three carpet showrooms, and all your other favourites. There's also a drive-thru KFC, a drive-thru McDonald's and a drive-thru Burger King. These as far as I can remember, are the only drive-thru's I've ever really seen close up. They're a massive disappointment, although I get the feeling that the Newport Road industrial estate, which is basically built either side of one long road which stretches beyond the horizon into a scribble of overpasses and junctions about two miles out of town, is modelled slightly on the entrance road to American towns, they've not quite nailed the true horror of these commercial landing strips quite enough. The McDonald's was having a refit when I went past, although they'd kept the drive-thru open, which I thought was rather sad, but not as sad as the thought that the only reason they did that was because they know people are too lazy to try and navigate six lanes of traffic to go to the Burger King on the other side of the road. There was also a Do It All, which became Focus in fuck-knows-when. There was a plaque just outside the entrance commemorating the store opening in 1982. The store was shut, the only sign of life or any kind of wood or plastic was a skateboard ramp that had been built in the car park. I thought for a moment about all the hopes and dreams that took place on that day in 1982, and how this massive structure was now standing stagnant like the Titanic, sunk in a wild sea of grey retail gloom on the outskirts of Cardiff. I carried on. By this time the rain couldn't be described as anything less than ridiculous. I was amused though, by the number of mobile burger vans that had set up in the car parks of the stores. WHAT!, Allied Carpets, The stupid shop with the big R in a circle; even the Quik Save car park had a burger van and Quik Save closed in early 2006. Running one of these burger and hot dog vans must be the worst job in the world. I guess it's like running a worn-out old dog of a pub in a backwater suburb, where you deal exclusively with regulars and nothing but regulars. Here it's builders and nothing but builders. What a job.

When I returned home, I did some rearranging, which including moving all of my DVDs out my bedroom and into the lounge. I cunningly disguised this as a "share and share alike" motif, where my housemates are now entitled to borrow any of my DVDs at will, but really it was an excuse to free up some space in my room. The space previously taken up by the DVD shelving is now taken up by three perfectly neat stacks of books. I still need to sort out space somehow for both these, and a rogue collection of CDs that I've amassed and have no sensible place for which I've then stacked on top of them. I'm praying I won't need to get to any of these books in the near future because I've stacked them like a cross between Jenga and Kerplunk and if they fall over, then there's nowhere for them to go but to fall all over me.. The CD burner works fine though. I made myself two mixes today, to listen to as I pottered around making and doing things. The idea of making a mix CD, putting it in my crappy CD player on the window sill, and playing it was an alien concept last week, but now it's back with me, like a familiar itch or an old friend I'd taken for granted. I wish I wish I had some other people to make mixes for. Requests please.

Up To My Neck in You

Today I'm commemorating it being exactly 365 days since I last fell out of love. The past year has been a mess of scattershot memories, utter tedium, hearts that hate, splendid isolation and fear and loathing in Mahwah, NJ. Pretty much all of it has been soundtracked by Mark Kozelek for want of anything more cheerful. Here are some highlights.

Mistress (Piano Version) (Red House Painters)
I need someone much more mysterious
June 2006, August 2007
Red House Painters I
And so it goes...

New Jersey (Red House Painters)
You're not as good as your mum but you're as good as dead
September
Red House Painters I
Moss Bross Staff Room

Have You Forgotten? (New Version) (Red House Painters)
When we were kids, we hated things our parents did
October
Vanilla Sky OST
I shouldn't have bothered.

Take Me Out (Red House Painters)
If only you could take me out, instead of back in to a relationship I don't understand
November
Red House Painters I
No Use For Old Friends, closing number.

Carry Me Ohio (Sun Kil Moon)
Sorry for never going by your door
November
Ghosts of the Great Highway
Early mornings, familiar roads.

Gentle Moon ( Sun Kil Moon)
But if love was like stone / then yours was mine through to my bones
December
Ghosts of the Great Highway
Juke box.

Glenn Tipton (Sun Kil Moon)
I buried my first victim when I was 19
December
Ghosts of the Great Highway
Stephanie

Up To My Neck In You (Mark Kozelek)
Up to my neck in misery for most of my life / I've been a fool...
January
What's Next to the Moon
Cineworld unlimited card, building sites and cranes

Bad Boy Boogie (Mark Kozelek)
On the day I was born, the rain came down
January
What's Next to the Moon
Manchester

Down Colorful Hill (Red House Painters)
Prayers prayers prayers for success
January
Down Colorful Hill
Manchester Zodiac

Lights of Magdala (Mark Kozelek and Hannah Marcus)
If heaven were a lady, don't you know you'd been the one
February
Don't Let the Bastards Get You Down: A Tribute to Kris Kristofferson
In a park by a lake, a camera

Shadows (Red House Painters)
You ain't saying nothing, that I don't already know

February
Ocean Beach
Everywhere everywhere everywhere everywhere

Cruiser (Mark Kozelek)
Slipping letters under my door / candy wrappers round my floor
February
Little Drummer Boy
Shopping for oranges

Follow You, Follow Me (Red House Painters)
Just one single tear in each passing year
March
Shanti Project
Genesis!

Tonight The Sky (Sun Kil Moon)
She fell into his sweet strong kiss / she made her perfect gardens in this?
March
April
Hello excited stranger, I'm yet to receive my copy of April in the mail.

Michigan / Fly Away (Red House Painters)
I don't need a purpose to plan within / I just need to feel your pulse again
Live Track, The Blind Pig, Ann Arbor 2001)
March
All of her dreams have gone soft and cloudy, all of her dreams have gone dry.

Lost Verses (Sun Kil Moon)
I came up from the ocean / evaporates sea salt water / a mist above the skyling / I haunt the streets of San Francisco
April
April
Dinnertime and the train home.

Katy Song (Red House Painters)
I know tomorrow you will be somewhere in London / Living with someone
June
Red House Painters I
As covered on youtube.

Void (Red House Painters)
And I know that I have picked the most perfect sunflower yet
July
Old Ramon
For windows.

Lost Coastlines

I'd as good as written off Okkervil River after last years damp squib, The Stage Names, and their live show I saw at Cardiff Barfly, where they honked out an hour and fifteen minutes of tuneless dirge, and tried to polish off a dreadful performance by doing a crowd singalong of Westfall, both made for dreadful 2007 for one of the bands on the cusp of being one of my all-time favourites. Likewise, Jens Lekman, whom I didn't get to see live, but managed to squeeze out an atypically and depressingly awful album last year which went pretty much against every reason I liked the guy in the first place. But these things can't be helped. I'm long past the naivety of expecting my favourite bands to consistently deliver. But although I'll probably never forgive Okkervil River for being total shit last December, I'm reconsidering The Stage Names. Well actually, I'm not, it's still not very good, but next month, they're releasing The Stand-Ins, which is either an accompanying album, or an appendix to the former album. Either way it explores similar themes and ideas that were brought up in The Stage Names, and the artwork even sits underneath the previous albums to make a complete picture. It's like Guns and Roses waiting a year inbetween the two Use Your Illusions instead of releasing them on the same day. Except The Stand Ins is more of a mini album, with three pointless instrumentals making up the full XI. And you know what, every single one of those eight tracks shits on the best bits of The Stage Names, massively. In Lost Coastlines, and the ridiculously titled Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed On The Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1978, they have twoof the best songs in their entire canon. In a way, I like the fact that what are clearly the best songs from this recording session all ended up on this album, rather than poorly diffused across the two volumes like a pungent odour. But despite this, they've been entirely overshadowed by Shearwater anyway, so I'm not why I'm really concerned with readdressing the situation.

I spent a few hours today in Pontypridd, for no real reason other than that I had to leave the house, and it didn't look like too shoddy a day. It did rain eventually, but it was such a not-as-bad-as-it-has-been day, that when I got home, I went onto the street and cleaned the outside of my window with windolene, and then opened the window and blasted blue collar indie rock into Rhymney Street. But Ponypridd was alright. I decided to go exploring more than I had done before. Previous visits with Anna involved looking at the down and very little else. The first time I went I only looked at the University of Glamorgan campus which was built on the side of a mountain and basically made me study twenty times for my A levels so I didn't have to go to university there. The person giving us a campus tour genuinely told us that he'd "only been to town (Pontypridd High Street) once, and (didn't) have any plans to go back there any time soon). He was a third year. The only times I'd been to Pontypridd in more recent years were on Sundays with Lisa when there were no buses out to Llantrisant, so we had to get the 132 at ten past seven in the morning, and then sit around at Pontypridd bus station for forty minutes either playing cards, or pop punk top trumps, or seeing who could skid further on the rain-soaked drain cover just inside the railway station. Then we'd get picked up by Abby and drink coffee in her garden, before being driven to work. It used to take nearly 3 1/2 hours to get to work. I don't miss that at all. Nor do I miss having a reason to go to Pontypridd, because it's not a particularly amazing place, and it hasn't really changed much since the very first time I went there. There's still a hill that I wouldn't ever dream of climbing because I know what's at the top (a boring university with an eerie Jim James thing going on where nobody ever leaves the campus) and a pokey little high street. Today was of little exception because the first shop I went into was a charity shop, and I had to pretend to look at books for an absolute age, because a drunk man who had no qualms with drinking Carling at just past midday in a charity shop, rifled through all the videos no less than three times. I didn'y dare ask him to move, but I had to wait because there were CDs I really wanted to buy. The rest of the town can fuck off, the only major difference was that the big stupid pointless joke shop wasn't there any more. It always amused me how such a big joke shop could ever thrive in a town where the only thing anyone does for fun is choke pigeons on the bandstand, and you can't package any of that in a Smiffy bag and hang it up next to the saucy nurse costumes. Alas, it's all gone now, it was replaced by some nondescript shit that had only filled half the building.

What I did like, though, was the side of Pontypridd I didn't even know existed, the park. The park was very pleasant, and walking around under the criss-cross shades of the avenues of trees and looking at the waterlogged crazy golf and the suspiciously clean looking swimming pool (which had done that thing a lot of open air swimming places do, which is to paint the bottom of the pool an obscene shade of turquoise which is so blinding it affects your retina to not even see dead twigs and Quaver packets when they're probably right there. The bandstand was closed to the public, because there was some sort of filming going on. I couldn't figure out what, and I did spend longer than I should have done milling around with my hands in my pockets waiting for something to happen. I watched a man who looked like Mackenzie Crook sweep some water off a path with a broom, but there were no cameras trained on him, so unless he's doing menial handywork because nobody went and saw Three and Out, I don't think the water sweeper was in the film. I wasn't really expectinh Russell Crowe or Viggo Mortenson to jump out and start pounding their chests on Pontypridd bandstand, not least when the surrounding area had been set up to look like a crappy little summer fete with coconut shys and hooplas. It was all very Sylvanian Families. I went home after that.

Post Script. I think from the comment below I didn't really express my point very well: The Stand-Ins is a GREAT album, and everything that I felt that the Stage Names lacked; imagination, a fantastic concept, memorable hooks and melodies, and a sense of the epic.

Game Shows Touch Our Lives

"Ladies and gentlemen, in the audience tonight, Academy Award winning actor, Ralph Feinnes"

Earlier on today I watched Quiz Show, the really rather excellent period piece with Ralph Feinnes and John Turturro. I'm surprised I haven't got round to watching it before, since it was almost to the last second, a perfect hybrid of All The Presidents Men and Network, two of my favourite films. The quiz show in the program though, was pretty shoddy. It was called 21, and was a familiar format, but not one I'd ever come across before, simply because I think quite a few American format quiz shows didn't really cross the Atlantic, and plus it was very very simplistic, with rolling "applause" signs, a hilarious parody of corporate advertising, and a really ordinary systematic set of questioning. It did, though, continue the general theme of last week which I spent in the staff room at work idly reminiscing about the quiz shows of my youth. People seemed surprised at my ridiculously retentive knowledge of some of these, possibly with the suggestion that somehow I wasted my youth. This I can't deny, but at the same time, I have memories all through the childhood and teens of doing the things most people remember; going to parties, shoplifting, sitting around in the park, going to friends houses to watch 15 certificate movies like Demolition Man, and so on. In fact, I remember doing all those things more times than I recall ever wanting to. I also spent a lot of time in large DIY stores like B+Q, Texas, and Do It All. An awful lot of time. So much time, that I don't intend to go to any of them ever again, and it's just as well I can't drive, because these big breezeblock, drafty cubes of DIY misery are far from anywhere I'm intending to go for the rest of my life, and because they're all in out-of-town Sim City industry hell-holes, I can probably use the excuse that I can't. I'll buy my paint from elsewhere. Probably an art shop. I hope I never have to paint anything, really.
But back to quiz shows. David has suggested that I could feasibly write to some people and ask if they need a rough guide / essential guide / pocket guide to quiz shows. I'm actually considering this, but since I can't remember the name of who he said, or whether he was being serious, I probably won't bother. But it's an idea, and if his friend can get a book about Dario Argento, whom nobody really cares about apart from a nanopercentage of horror movie film geeks, buck toothed weirdo women, and Quentin Tarantino. Anyway, I could talk in great length about any game show, right down to some contestants names and scores, but I don't have time, and anyway, I'm not getting paid for this, and I could get paid for that, so that can wait. Here though, is what you would probably find in the back page, the quick-read guide to British game shows.

All Clued Up - bizarre word-guessing game similar to Wheel of Fortune, presented by (I think) Michael Aspel, and it involved a giant keyboard
Bob's Your Uncle - I can't remember much about this, apart from that I think the prize involved winning shit for your wedding, and involved jumping in a swimming pool
Bullseye - Oft-parodied working man's social club darts-themed quiz.
Catchword - BBC2 Who-can-come-up-with-the-longest-word program to rival countdown, which was invariable won by anyone who could spell floccinaucinihilpilidication.
Celebrity Squares - Trashy British version of Hollywood Squares with people like Leslie Joseph and Roger De Courcey and Nookie Bear.
Chainletters - Fun word-puzzle game in which you had to change letters of words to make new ones: CAKE - RAKE - RARE - MARE - MARK etc
Crosswits - Classy semi-intellectual crossword-themed quiz game with Tom O Connor.
Fifteen to One - One of the best: Set design straight born from Foucault, William G Stewart as torture master, with offensive buzzer sounds and flippant rudeness.
Full Wing - Rubbish golf-themed Saturday night drivel with Jimmy Tarbuck
The Krypton Factor - Intelligence and ability-based quasi-intellectual challenge show with Gordon Burns suggesting that anyone who completed an army assault course is somehow like Superman
Lucky Numbers - Unwatchable Bingo-themed shit with Shane Ritchie sponsored by The Sun
Play Your Cards Right - Craptacular
Raise The Roof - Crap short-lived megaquiz in which contestants could win a house in Florida. Hosted by Bob Holness, these seemed to involve more video footage of the house than of anything resembling a quiz.
Take Your Pick. Classic 'open the box' show given cheesy tabloid makeover with Des O Connor.
Turnabout - Daytime quiz which involved answering word puzzles and making computer generated spheres change colour, a bit like a more elaborate naughts and crosses.
Through the Keyhole - Another oft-parodied celebrity show with David Frost and Lloyd Grossman trying to see who could look more out of place on such a show
University Challenge - Rendered fairly useless after the Young Ones parody, this intellectually alienating quiz has hit a new stride with Jeremy Paxman's new insolent approach.
You Bet! - Either with Forsythe or Matthew Kelly from what I remember. This was THE show for rewarding utterly useless talents, like memorising the cast of the Bill by their ears, or the country of origin of stamps from what they taste like.

There are of course, hundreds of others, but in researching, the above, I've discovered this website:http://www.ukgameshows.com, which pretty much renders my continuation useless, and the utterly ridiculous person who runs this website would evidently make a better candidate to write the aforementioned book than me. Unless there's a market for someone who can drop in anecdotes about suffering severe migraines eating a cheeseburger and watching The Main Event, a bizarre and rubbish living-room based family show hosted by Chris Tarrant. Maybe I'll just skip straight to doing in-depth essays trying to explain the concepts of most 21st Century quiz shows and ignore the classics. With the exception of The Weakest Link, Deal or No Deal, and inexplicably, Eggheads, most 21st Century shows have bombed. People just don't like seeing other people win money these days, and I guess advertisers can't drum up the cash because nobody at home is watching. It's sad, because two of the best game shows I've ever seen were short lived ones from the last five years or so: Traitor, and Didn't They Do Well? Traitor was a weird cross between an amateur dramatics improv show, an episode of Big Brother where the contestants all went insane and were convinced there's a total bullshitter in the midst, and an alcoholics anonymous meeting where someone suddenly notices they can smell gin. It was televised slanging matches, all neatly compered by Tony "Daily Sport" Livesly. It was compelling and lasted about a week. Didn't They Do Well? as the title suggests, was hosted by Bruce Forsythe, and was a great concept, because the only concept was that it didn't have one, and was a Frankenstein's monster of a quiz where instead of asking questions, Bruce played clips on a big screen from other game shows, ranging from easy shit like Family Fortunes or some kids stuff, through to the big money questions from University Challenge and Mastermind. It was a great concept, and it was what brought Bruce back to the BBC, his natural environment away from the News of the World scratchcards, illuminated dolly girls and rabid pisshead audience members acting like they were in Jumpin' Jacks rather than a respectable TV studio.

The only new-new show I've seen recently since I don't watch much TV was called Battle of the Brains. Hosted by some clown I'd never even noticed and whom talked too much, I couldn't gather much from the concept apart from that it was basically Eggheads, only without the eggheads themselves. Which meant neutrals can't be bothered to root for either team, whereas you always hope the eggheads lose, or that the show has been cancelled because one of them died. BBC2 have also had the scheduling idiocy to put it on directly before Eggheads as well, meaning you're basically watching the same program twice in a row. Here's hoping the mentalists in Holland or Scandinavia who devise all these concepts have their thinking hats on, and are happy to let us steal their ideas.

Back and Forth

There's a lorry outside my house that's picking up a skip or loading the recycling bags or something similar, and it's taking a long time doing what it's supposed to be doing. The noise that it makes when it either picks up or drops whatever it is that it's either picking up or dropping, is exactly the same noise as our letterbox makes when a parcel, letter or pizza delivery pamphlet makes when they drop onto the front door mat. Because I've got my bedroom window open in a failed attempt to welcome the summer into my bedroom and to usher out the wine and fag smoke from last nights 'Dorm Party' (me and Chris Rock's 'Never Scared' up all night) into the street, then the distance the sound traveling is identical to the distance from the front door, through my bedroom door. Normally I don't care, because I don't receive much post, except parcels of review copies of crap like the new Offspring album or the just-above-average She and Him album, sent to me by Playlouder, and occasionally I get to open the Liberal Democrat propaganda addressed to 'Occupier' or if I'm feeling particularly majesterial, to whom it may concern.
But at the moment I'm actually waiting for a new hard drive to come through the door. Since I only know what size the drive is in terms of how many crappy mp3 files and Microsoft notepad files I can't motivate myself to delete I can shove on there, and not how physically large it is. This is the first thing I've bought off the internet that hasn't been a standard size. A CD, like The Dismemberment Plan one I'm expecting to arrive any day now, is always CD sized, a DVD is DVD sized, a Sun Kil Moon t shirt, although far too big, is still just about the size of a t shit. The problem with buying things like hard drives or similar off Amazon is that although probably somewhere down in the small print, probably in a box of text you have to click and drag for the white text to show up, they give you the weights and measures. Like most people, I figure that because I've already committed myself to cretinous laziness by not getting on the bus and going to PC world, I might as well continue the trend and not look at anything except the price. This hard drive could be the size of half a house brick, which I'm expecting, or it could be the size of a kettle, or a toaster, or a badge maker. I have no idea, they didn't print a picture on the search page of a human hand holding the drive, so I'm lost. At least in the Argos catalogue, if you're buying a set of swings or a paddling pool, you get a picture of the first child of summer pranking about on, in, or under it. If you're buying a board game, you often get some close ups of a ritalin-ruined toddler with a gormless expression that tells you JUST how fun the board game is. I miss those pictures. They should put them on packets of twiglets, to remind you how much fun twiglets are. I guess the internet doesn't have the resources to have pictures of people standing in front of, or holding every object in the world, so more fool me if the drive won't fit through the letterbox and is so heavy I can't even put it on my load-bearing desk.
I went to the cinema yesterday and saw something funny. No, not The X Files: I Want to Believe, that shit wasn't funny at all. I did see a group of teenagers running their mouths off on the escalator telling anyone who cared to listen that "Cineworld ain't got no respect" and "You don't wanna come to this cinema, it's shit" and "fuck this place, don't go to Cineworld, they don't let you have fun", which alerted my curiosity. One of the problems with always listening to headphones when I'm out and about, is that when base-level incidents of mild amusement involving conflict with other people arise, it's really hard to get involved with eavesdropping without looking obvious. As the groups of teenagers were descending the moving staircase and being apprehended by a heavy duty guard by the revolving doors, I had a quick scan up the line of people waiting at the box office. Everyone, without exception, was trying to subtly eavesdrop on the incident in the corner of the room. Everyone. Not even, the inarticulate degenerate couple who go the cinema because they have nothing to say to each other, and then spend twenty minutes deciding what to see (10 minutes gawping at the pretty pictures outside, ten minutes trying to remember what pretty picture corresponded to what title, inside). Not even the quartet of acne-crusted teens in Lost t shirts going to see Batman for the fifth time. Especially not them, I think they were excited to be seeing a real live scuffle that didn't either involve them, or someone who can fire laser beams from their elbows or turn themselves invisible. The scuffle was minimal, but I was far away enough to get away with taking my headphones off, pretending that it was because I was nearing the box office, rather than just wanted to hear a bunch of scally teens getting mouthy in a cinema foyer. I think the general gist of the scenario was that the group were either shouting, or talking, or generally being awful in one of the screens, and had been forcibly removed by a member of security. I think their defence was that they were having fun. Since when was "it's fun" ever been a defence against anything? . I'm sure Harold Shipman found giving old ladies lethal injections fun as well. The only excuse poorer than "it's fun" is "I was bored". I didn't get to hear the extent of their cries because they were ushered out of the cinema before any more of their suggestions to other people not to come in could fall on any more deaf ears. The queue of eavesdroppers averted their attention back to thumbing through their Unlimited newsletter or drooling "so what are we seeing again" to each other, simultaneously, because they're got a psychic connection because they're so in love. I think as soon as they realised the scuffle wasn't going to be resolved with gouging and bloodshed, they had to resign themselves that the film was going to have to be their primary anecdote tonight,

On the subject of eavesdropping though, it did remind me of an incident I saw on Saturday Evening. I was at The Big Weekend, which is an annual horror show where everything shit about life in South Wales all conglomerated into a seething, sweating mass, drinks and lot and makes life hell for everyone else. It's a breeding ground for seediness and dirtiness and every unpleasantry under the sun. Three-legged rabid spongefuckers with backwards fingers and green teeth who live underneath rocks of sea slime in the caves of the Welsh Valleys. even they make their only trip to civilised society for the Big Weekend. I took a detour through the fairground which they crowbar into the roads surrounding the museum like vomit through a sluice gate, because fairground rides make good photographs, especially when it's dark, and patrons are drunk and queasy. The camera battery ran out almost instantly, leaving me stranded in the fairground with no reason to be there. I did see a fight though, and the strategy for listening in on this required more acting skills than in the cinema. If anyone of the people involved in this drunken near-brawl saw my obvious attempt to slow down and take off my headphones so I can really, truly enjoy the sight of someone with a fake diamond earring getting a good lamping on a Saturday Night. My solution was simple. I decided quickly and for no reason, that I really wanted to take a photograph of exactly what was next to where this scuffle was taking place. Obviously knowing my camera was out of battery ,I took it out of my bag and tried to take a photo, giving me a reason to stop, and I could then see what was going on out of the corner of my eye. Then, because the camera wouldn't turn on, I had to take the headphones off to listen to it, and look intently at why it wasn't working. I found myself doing this impulsively. Why do people take their headphones off to do things that don't require silence to do. It's like when my dad used to turn the car stereo down because he thought he could smell gas. It worked, I had a good listen, saw that it wasn't going to end in bloodshed, it was just some petty shit, obviously about a girl, and carried on home before I got killed.

In This City

Here's what happens when I can't think of anything to say for myself for a while; the obligatory media round up. It's all I ever talk about with my friends whenever we catch up, so maybe this will eradicate even those fun-sized pockets of conversation.

Music: I take back wholeheartedly what I said about the Jonas Brothers. I actually can't believe they've covered no less than TWO Busted songs; Year 3000 and What I Go To School For. They've even given them a weedy Disney Channel makeover, taking away all the thickly-veiled innuendo (taking away the words "ass" and inexplicably replacing "Michael Jackson" with "even outsold Kelly Clarkson" as if any of her songs has remotely troubled the stratospheric sales of Thriller). Annoying, because Busted never troubled any teenagers outside of the British Isles, Yankee Doodle Donny and his teenage slagwagons will lap it all up, and if illegibly spelt Youtube comments merit anything these days, they will also think that Billy Boy Jonas wrote the bloody things, rather than a record company hack dabbling with genius. Changing Busted lyrics is like dabbling with the core existence of teenagers. Not pretty. What is pretty though, is the new recommends features on Last FM, which has kindly nudged me in the back and persuaded me to investigate Swedish electropop again. I was tempted to give up after hearing so many rave reviews of Lykke Li's album I thought I'd implode, and then didn't like it, but Andreas Kleerup's album, and his lending of one of his songs to the ridiculous new Cyndi Lauper album has reset the balance, and I can step up to the table and show my hand: Familjen, Gentle Touch, Juvelen, Le Sport, Lo-Fi-Fnk, Pacfic! and Zeigest are all completely brilliant, even though a lot of it just sounds like rejigged versions of Knife songs. Added to the fact that Yearbook 2 by Studio is fast becoming one of my favourite albums of the year, despite it all being remixed, and I've pretty much settled that my summer heatwave soundtracking will be performed by plugged-in-Swedes for the second year running. There's more of the Scandinavian influence below.
Not that it's all pop punk and roses; I've also added a few more of the 2008 speciality (epic indie rock with no edit feature) to my year's favourites, including the power-chord excellence of Miasmal Smoke and the Yellow Bellied Freaks by Wintersleep, who were knocked off the shortlist for the Canadian equivalent of the Mercury Music Prize, and better yet, a little song called Mysterious Skin by a little band called Orphans and Vandals, which reminds me a little of Jack and the Tindersticks, as well as pretentious indie post rock circa 1999, although the singer sounds like Johnny Borrell breathing through his nose and ears, but it's essentially a perfectly pretentious spoke-sung tale of journeying to France, lost memories and bad sex. It's better than that sounds. I've also got no idea who Iglu and Hartly even are, or what the hell they think they're doing, but In This City is looking like a beast and all.

Films: I've now seen The Dark Knight twice, making it the first film I've seen twice in the cinema since, well since forever. I actually can't think of the last film I saw twice in the cinema except maybe Saw, but that was back in 2004 and mostly regrettable, especially because I paid both times. I did enjoy Batman, but I can't help that I enjoyed it twice as much because I thought Batman Begins sucked big old monolithic ass, and didn't have especially high expectations for this one. But rather than being like that mismatch of failed ideas, I though The Dark Knight was great, although it was essentially an even longer version of Heat with silly costumes. Even more exciting was The Mist, which came from nowhere and knocked me sideways, and is about as superior as a B movie could ever hope to be, it's really quite something, right down to the ending, which somehow manages to turn an essentially silly Stephen King adaptation that's not entire dissimilar to previous King atrocity Maximum Overdrive, into a morbidly depressing thought-piece, and ended with almost nobody going home happy. If anyone can show me a horror movie better constructed that that one, then let's all hear about it. I though Hancock was silly and shit, and Journey to the Centre of the Earth was just utterly ridiculous, not least for the fact it tried to present Jules Vernes original novel as a factual text. Often I look out of the windows upstairs at work and look across at all the cranes and builders and busy worker ants acting out Richard Scarry books across on the building site, and I wonder what the world is coming to, building shit everywhere, but then I think that in 2008 it's possible to go and see one dumb action adventure starring Brendan Fraser at the cinema, and see a trailer for another dumb action adventure starring Brendan Fraser at the same cinema beforehand, then I think maybe everything's going to be alright. Such as it turned out in Wall-E, which is like taking an Etch-a-Sketch to your own misery. Any building up of woe or angst you feel you might have bubbling under your surface waiting to jump out of your throat and try and make conversation with someone, hop on down to watch Wall-E and you'll find yourself jibbering for a few days. It'll come back no problem, but for at least a few hours after watching Wall-E, you'll realise nothing can really be that bad. It did fill my heart a little bit though, when I realised that robots with no discerned brain can fall in love with beautiful stranger robots with no bran, despite not being able to speak more than three words between them. Maybe there's where I'm going wrong; too many words, and not enough robot dancing. I can see what they see in Peter Crouch Now. I also had the fortune to finally watch one of the Lord of the Rings films, over sixty years after everyone else did. Whilst it was obviously a good yarn, I found my main two thoughts about The Fellowship of the Ring being how they got away with it being a PG when there's decapitations and big tentacles and all sorts of nonsense, and how ridiculous the concept was that I had to change discs in the middle of the film. It reminded me of having to put in Disc 5 of Monkey Island, because that was the one with all the animated sequences in,

Television. The only TV I've watched in the last few weeks was half an episode of Richard and Judy, where they had a desperately humourless berk in the studio showing Richard and "Judy" (who for that night's episode, was inexplicably Emma Bunton) boring clips of babies on Youtube. It was horrific, but it was still better than leaving the room and looking up pictures of babies myself on Youtube. I don't find babies even remotely funny. Then they showed a clip from QI was was infinitely better than anything and was an incredibly stupid thing to do before introducing a guest. It's like introducing your friend who can do keepy-uppy for ten kicks by showing them extended highlights of the 1970 Brazil World Cup Squad. The guest, whose name I luckily forget, was someone who'd written a book about trvia, and was so unutterably dull that Richard and "Judy" had to resort to showing voxpop clips of buffoons of Brighton Beach telling us there own (mostly fabricated) trivia. One plank's "trivia" was some shit about deep sea diving and penguins that was so off-the-scale for not being trivial, I'm surprised the cameraman even let him walk away, let alone stuck him in the show.

Books. As usual, I've fifteen on the go that I've got no hope of finishing, but even if I don't finish the Alex Cox, Matt Ridley or Tonya Hurley books that are propping my door open I know I'll finish The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson tonight or tomorrow. It's simply incredible, a quasi-political thriller meets twee "locked room" crime mystery, only I love it not just just because it's set in Sweden, but because it's MASSIVE and this is only the first book, and has a rotating cast of ridiculous characters, and can range from heart-wrenching scenes of aging businessmen weeping over the missing links in their family tree, to newspaper stories about people being killed and having parakeets shoved up their vaginas. It's had ridiculous comparisons to War and Peace, which I can't fathom and explanation for except for it being quite long, but I think comparing Larsson to Tolstoy is ever so slightly over-egging the pudding. Not least because I can't ever see myself investigating War and Peace in the near future, even if it was set in Sweden and was about twee electropop.
Love: Oh, too much to talk about.

Sex is Boring

I bought a book in a charity shop in Porthcawl last week called The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. One of my favourite things about being surrounded by books are that you always have the freedom to get yourself interested in things you're not interested, purely by the benefit of something being well written. This year as I've no doubt repeated and repeated and repeated like a stuck stuck record, I've immersed myself in Daily Mail sport anthologies, the horrors of the holocaust, 18th century murder mysteries, Brian Clough and now this, a lengthy analysis of evolution and the necessity of sex in this process, the hows and whys of why chosing partners for sex. All fascinating stuff, especially since I'm not in any way interested in genetics, chromasomes or evolution in any way whatsoever. But it's a well written book, that doesn't assume I was even in Mr Sharmas biology class where supposedly I learned the difference between meiosis and mitosis but I don't remember that class at all. I remember seeing posters up in the science labs at school which explained the difference, but I don't remember actually ever being taught it myself. 'Meiosis and Mitosis' sounds like it could be a pretentious metal band though. But yeah, it's a fine book, that doesn't assume I've got the intellect of a plum grape, but at the same time explains evolutionary genetics in pig English just in case I do. One of the best £1 coins I've ever spent, especially because I got a Dave Eggers book I'm never going to read thrown in free.

But I have spent my walks to and from work since trying to apply Ridley's ideas of mating and the choosing of sexual partners to my own tepid gene pool of South Wales, and most of it rings true. The survival of the fittest theory, which is all running like a greasy-smooth prick and works fine. Ridley argues that acquired intelligence doesn't play much of a part in the choosing of mates, which is also true, but humans are regularly lead to disbelieve that being witty and able to outsmart another is a great predatory tactic. Not so, as any internet message board or group of adolescents bantering about Star Wars will ultimately testify, wit just isn't sexy anymore. Take two of the last centurys greatest wits, Oscar Wilde and to a lesser extent, Stephen Fry. No evolution there. At least they've had the decency to mix up a cocktail of madness, homosexuality, celibacy and/or death to help the witticisms go down. No, fabricated intelligence resulted in nothing for either person here other than acquring the common sense not to impregnant anyone. The other thoery, that the survival of the fittest, adding hilarious inverted commas either side of fittest to make a statement about how shallow and empty the world is, is also true. But as Ridley has in a vague sort of way explained, and I'll use the analogy of the film The Hottie and the Nottie, that it's a perfectly natural to want to have moronic, exposive sex with Paris Hilton rather than her toe-faced corn-encrusted toad friend. Although I used to think this was merely because people found it more excusable to be a morally slack ho-bag with attractive people because, you know, it doesn't count if they're good looking, but not any more. I think it's because people want to have children with attractive people so they can force their children into modelling at an early age and scrounge off their Hollywood earnings without having to work hard themselves. Similarly rich people. Identical twins where one is a doctor, and the other repairs bicycles, nine out of ten people would end up with the doctor after ten minutes of conversation, because they're lazy. Even if the two stood up and doctor revealed themselves as a totally sexist bigot, a serial cheater who likes Scouting For Girls, they'd still win. It's more survival of the laziest. Attractive people think they have it easy, and in many cases they're right. Not always though, but attractive people definitely have it laziest.

Similar interests, in the grand scheme of things are drivel. I've touched on this before, but seriously, all similar interests do is fill up voids of silence. The reason mushrooms produce asexually and don't give a hoot about who with is because they don't have in rely depth conversations about Fun House and read Lord of the Rings to get through the day. We're the only species in the world who could ever allow something as trivial what radio station their partners car is tuned into dictate whether to add another generation to their family tree. It's only one thing, but I've known people to have not persued relationships any further because their boyfriend slurped his drink once, or because, well, it was just a bit of fun. No other animal gets bothered by casual sex, which is of course, the real issue here. Because mating doesn't necessarily have to result in procreation, it means the selection process can be freestyled however you want. The mating ritual is like a combination of tricks on a trampoline, eventually resulting in a triple somersualt of coming off the pill, and hey presto, the next generation. Basically, as Matt Ridley explains using the title of the book, sex and evolution is all ridiculous, because ultimately, all the adaptations a species makes and supposedly enhances, is eventually going to ruin us all. Admittedly human beings haven't got much in the way of predators right now except each other, but like an opponent in a chess game or a football match, the more obvious the tactics we eploit, the more likely it is that one day evolution will catch up with us and end the human race. And as I walked home along Windsor Place and saw awkward couples with nothing to say to each other except how nice each other looks pouring into bars to talk about work and drink away the days until one of them cheats, and I remember how easy and natural and it is to want to be there, and I start to think that day can't some soon enough.

Mysterious Skin

I have precious little else to do on a Saturday night apart from finish this delicious bottle of Australian wine (£2.99) and hammer my laptop keys. One of my housemates has done that thing where my washing has finished drying in the dryer and has put all my clothes on my bed, which I'm enormously grateful for because it saves me the bother of moving it there myself, however now I'm so enormously lazy that I've sat down on the bed next to them but I really just cannot bring myself to stand up next to the bed and perform the 5 minute task of putting them in my wardrobe. There are so many other menial things like that I could, and probably should do right now, like moving the copy of The Stuff of Thought off my window sill because you can see it from the street outside, and it probably looks like I've deliberately left it there to impress people who walk past. "Wow, clearly that person is an amazing guy because he reads books about linguistics, and he bought it from Borders too because he hasn't taken the 'half price' sticker off". I'm not sure if advertising Borders through your bedroom window is a cool thing to do or not, but I've noticed someone across the street from me has dumped one of our carrier bags in their window, so maybe it is. I'm not going to pull a James Stewart and stare out of my window through a crack in the curtains to see who they are. They might be the weirdo who buys hi fi magazines on a Saturday. There are so many other things to do; here's to anyone who can come up with an idea of what to do with the Mark Kozelek and Red House Painters Cds I amassed during the first three months of this year, which I've dedicated a special 'pile' but not found a solution as to where to store them separately, since I'm out of CD rack space, and out of space to put in another CD rack.
I also need to buy a new mobile phone and/or a sim card, as I lost my mobile phone about three weeks ago, but I'm tempted to resist doing this until I actually need to, although I'm quite contented knowing that I don't have one and don't need to use one. I can probably count the number of people I've spoken to on my phone to people other than my parents in the last six months on one hand. The only time I bought phone credit between February and June, I spent £8.60 on calling the Virgin Media crisis line to moan that they still hadn't reconnected our broadband. The other £1.40 I'm presuming I pissed away when drunk because I don't remember. I think the days of laying in bed having lengthy conversations at 12p a statement, with or without x's are a thing of the past now. I hope nobody important, like The Queen or the producers of Big Brother, or that Welsh poetry competition have tried to phone me. Still, for the time being I can put away the disappointment of hearing the double-bleep and rushing to my phone to find out who's been thinking of me, only to find it's a typographical nudge from Vodafone to hoik me up another rung on the pay package ladder. There is a simplistic warming of the heart knowing that hearing two beeps from a phone proves that someone, somewhere who knows your phone number has at least thought about you for a minute or so, sometimes longer if they've spelt the words correctly, but as time has lagged and the oceans of time between contact has waned to the point of irrelevance, it's not something I'm missing all that much. But tonight, I'm not really in the mood for sitting and staring, but if I had my phone, I guess all I would have done is sat and stared at that instead, waiting to be invited to change my life somewhere.
Births, Marriages and Deaths. In the last year, I've met people that I've seen and talked to on a regular basis who are getting married, or having a baby. This isn't interesting for anyone who doesn't really know the people involved so I'll spare the details, but in a way I've enjoyed in a small way the knowledge that these events are happening. I've been to about four or five funerals in the past few years, and absolutely zero weddings; I don't really know of anyone who's even got married, apart from the one last year Mark was best man at, but that was someone I didn't know. I'm aware of long-forgotten fairytale people who have had children but they're so far off the contact radar I don't even know what country they live in, but this is my first baby. Still not outnumbering the funerals, so here's hoping everyone else I know gets pregnant and indulges shotgun weddings. Providing none of them happen to me any time fast. I don't particularly want to snuff it knowing Marcus was the last person I shared intimacy with, in the car park of TGI Fridays. I don't really plan on getting married any time soon obviously, and I need to bring new life into the world about as much as I need to bring my socks into another person's isolation chamber.

This is picture of me:

What does a bunny rabbit do? Hop. What does an axe do? Chop. What do you do when you see a green light?

Highly Suspicious

Today The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction. This, I'm excited about, and I don't honest think at any point in my life I'd ever though I'd get excited about a book prize of any description. Such is the way life panned out for me, I'm in the book trade, all be it on one of the lower rungs in that my life basically revolves around flogging copies of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher to Daily Mail readers. But book prizes are different to film awards like The Oscars, when you've either seen all the films, or (with the exception of the documentary shorts and other pointless drivel) know what they're about anyway, so you're always rooting for the one you like most, or with music awards where you've heard all the nominees far too much already and are obliged to disagree and find fault even if your own band wins because it's all such a farce and all The Man anyway. No, book prizes are interesting above those because they're baffling and weird.

The Samuel Johnson Prize is an international, but British based prize awarded to what's regarded by the panel (Rosie Boycott and some other hacks) as being the best Non Fiction book of the last year (May 2007 - May 2008). First baffling point is that more than quite a few non fiction books get published a year, even working in a book store that mainly appeals to mainstreams tastes, I can see we get somewhere in the region of 10-15 new non fiction titles in each delivery. Nobody could ever dream to read all of them, especially since the average history hardback are mega-reads you can't even pick up with one hand, so picking the best is really the case of rooting through best seller charts, well received press reviews, and people swanking over gourmet dinners telling you what they're chewing over on the tube. Hardly fair, and also explains why the shortlist for the prize are comprised of precisely the above. Patrick French's biography of Booker winner VS Naipaul may have sold fuck all copies, but was reviewed to buggery. Tim Butcher's Blood River was a Richard and Judy book club book, and thus in the public eye for the past seven months. The others were all bigged up by the broadsheets. So although almost all the books are by all accounts interesting, I doubt many people have actually bothered to read them though, so at least having their names bandied around a bit more than upon publication might perform some tricks.

However, and this is rare for me, especially with the fiction prizes like the Booker and the Orange awards, I'd actually read one of the books. I'd actually read one-and-a-half, but found The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross too much and never got past chapter three in the time I had it. So by default, I found myself rooting for a book tonight, and was excited it won. I read The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale in April, about two weeks after it got published and received the inaugeral and often kiss-of-death accolade of History Book of the Month at work, but it sounded promising, a country house murder mystery yarn, complete with bonkers family and chin-stroking master detective summoned to solve the crime and sod off back to London. Very Cluedo, with a bit of 19th century true crime thrown in too. I read it on the train journey to and from Winchester when I went home for dad's 60th birthday. The Road Hill House, where the murder takes place in the book, is in Trowbridge, which is on the train route from Cardiff to London, and I found myself at the end of each chapter or paragraph gazing wistfully out of the window to look at the largely unchanged countryside to see which side of the train the house might have been resting on. I didn't even know if the house was still built, but it was a fantastic book to read hurtling through the Somerset and Wiltshire countryside. It is an extremely well-written book, that pitches itself the middle ground between true crime thriller, and historical melodrama based on life in the 1860s, neither of which have much appeal to me on their own, but together, they're lethal. Obviously then at my dad's birthday celebrations in between scoffing schloer and sausage rolls, I told pretty much everyone there to read the book, and even paraded it around at one point to ensure everyone remembered the fake sepia-tinged beige cover and investigate at a later date. I'm pretty sure they didn't, but the intent was there, and although the Samuel Johnson Prize is hardly The Brit Awards or Andy Murray, I hope if any of them hear Kate Summerscale's name on the Today show or wherever, they'll remember my good intentions and the brief speck on the radar of my life, when I was a literary critic.

Impossible

The first thing I found upon arriving back from the Gower was a pamphlet advertising new conservatories and bay windows for our terraced house in the centre of Cardiff. I know that rules aren't extraordinarily stuck to by people trying to flog their wares on a door-to-door basis, but now it just seems like the laws of common sense and good business knowledge just don't apply to people anymore. Evidently the conservatory sellers aren't doing their homework I'd like to find a single garden on this stretch of road, if not this entire region, that has enough space for an entire new room to put in their garden. We just about have enough space to fit a barbecue, and even then it's a struggle to fit people around it to tend to it, eat the food, and tip a wine bottle at a 45 degree angle. No conservatory, thank you. No bay windows either, we've only got one main window on the ground floor of our house, and it's mine, and I don't need any more attention drawn to my house more than I already to, with a CD rack and 3 toy giraffes already sat there. I did have a shoe in the window, but that's long gone.

A conservatory would have been lovely on The Gower Peninsular mind, as in just two nights, a lifetime of reminders why I hate camping. This weekend, which for me was Friday and Saturday, although for others was Thursday as well, and for the majority of lazy deadbeats, just the Saturday. This was probably the most organised camping trip I've been on, not least because I was with a group of dad-minded people who think ahead and bring six barbecues, a fold-up table, a windbreak and a million and five methods of wiring mp3 players up to speaker systems to flatten nearby tents with sound waves. Despite this, I left the campsite situated right on the coast in Nathan's car with the same desire to return to comfort and bed and shower and socks and Seinfeld as I have on any incident where I'd damaged myself irreversibly, psychologically and mentally, at the Reading Festival in 2000 or 2001, or the time we camped in Penmon in North Wales, where even though I didn't drink anything all weekend, I somehow returned home from the 7 hour car journey feeling like I'd been wallowing in a pigs trough of alcohol for the previous 48 hours. Which is why I fell asleep almost the second I returned and have just woken up wondering what's going on. I did organise myself this time around, and took a spare duvet, and a sleeping bag, and a pillow, and all sorts of things, yet I was still as uncomfortable as it gets when I bedded down for the night. At least I didn't have to share my tent with anyone. There's a certain culture that takes over on camping trips, where due to the combination of advanced intimacy created by sleeping right next to people you probably wouldn't if it was, say, a house party or a Thursday, and the forced familiarity created by spending more than an hour in the company of people you know too well and/or don't know at all. In-jokes spread like wild fire, minute pockets of humour, usually at the expense of others - made up nicknames related to things which are good for a yuck but 10/10 times you have to have been there, and people who don't know each other in the slightest engage in ridiculous banter which suggests they're going to be friends forever, right up until the cars are started on the way home and that's the end of that. I go through hundreds of different conflicting feelings whenever I go on these sorts of trips, which I attempt to resolve by wandering around aimlessly on my own away from the group, forging a new vision of myself, and then returning to the group only to get bored and walk off again. I think it's because the surroundings lend themselves well to studying the beauty and general prettiness of the world. Down on the beach at Hills End, there's a causeway you can't see, a few rocks and headlands that you can see, and a huge, vast expanse of ocean that you definitely can see, and does cheerily predictably romantic things like reflect the surface of the moon, and wash up jellyfish. Although it's perfectly feasible to admire the postcard-quality scenery and gentle moon from the social-binge-combat zone of a group of friends with wine and Dire Straits nothing beats half an hour of aimless wandering and staring at sundown. This might be my favourite thing to do in the world, and I guess it's sad in a way, that my favourite thing to do in the whole world can't be shared with anybody, but it makes me thankful for having even just a few friends and people just to sit in a circle with, because it's a treat to take 30 minutes out and count shooting stars. Then you can return, thankful that it's not your entire life just yet.

It might be because I'm just an insecure idiot, a safe assumption and an excuse I fall back on regularly to explain any of my random and potentially obnoxious antics. Elongated socialising stints are not my best suit when I find it impossible to start conversations and live life on the cusp of an invite-only utopia, but at festivals, and weekends away, unless they're secure units of just myself and one other person, or two, then I find them strangely more isolating and terrifying then otherwise. It's a strange paradox, but if my main memories of various trips are staring out to sea from the cliff edges of Anglesey, or getting windswept, soaked, and stared at on the beaches of Camber Sands, then I know I've got out of the weekend what I wanted. If I made any friends for life, then that's a bonus.

I don't want to feel like it's the end of a summer

Lamb and the Lion

I had a good time today listening to the George Lamb show. It's not often you'll hear me say that - like 99% of the rest of listeners to 6 Music, I find listening to his wide-boy thicko approach to radio presenting frankly unlistenable, and for a radio show dependent on it's listeners knowing their onions, and having a two-way correspondence of music adoration and the spirit of sharing, having an offensively ignorant buffoon running one of the flagship lunchtime shoes, his hiring at the end of last year is a weird and unpleasant experience. I didn't hear the whole show, simply because I just can't do it, but I found out when I got home from Maplins and Wilkinson, that Lamb had Stephin Merritt in the studio playing a couple of songs, and an interview. The results were incredible.


All Lamb's interviews are conducted in exactly the same way: The musician or band in question sit in a room adjacent, one presumes, to his normal studio. A one-on-one interaction occurs and is recorded for our amusement. Due to his general lack of knowledge of who he's talking to or what day it is, Lamb obviously reads questions off a hastily cobbled-together set of crib sheets, that aren't so much a biography as a set of pathetic DIY did-you-know? trivia, which Lamb basically reads from, instead of engaging the performer in question. Today's was undoubtedly one of the best. Stephin Merritt, who is pretty renowned for his wit as dry as a desert and bleakly romantic and deadpan nature was the perfect nemesis for this inane banter. The best thing about the interview was just how quickly Merritt twigged that Lamb was a blathering idiot, and almost by the second question, he was down to single word responses, by question five he was shooting quick-fire smart-alec responses. "You released 69 Love songs, it was a triple CD" - "it still is" and then a preposterous talk about going to hang out in a record store in London "what now?" - Merritt. It was excruciating, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out during the course of the 5 minute epic of awkwardness, where my sympathy should lean. On the one hand, I've been an admirer of Stephin Merritt, and 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields is pretty much unsurpassed as a classic album, so it was unpleasant hearing him trying to turn up, talk about music, and then perform two of his songs, only to be subjected to 'yoof' radio. But on the other hand, it was unbearable, buttock-clenching listening to a interview car crash in full top-spin, with pretty much every word coming out of Lamb's mouth being a through-the-fingers moment. It was like an indie rock edition of Knowing Me, Knowing You. I had pangs of sympathy for George Lamb, again not something I'll say often, but he was no match for the snarling, wild fire wit of Merritt, he couldn't have been more out of his depth if he was a baby in a sack of snakes
At one point they were discussing one of the instruments that Merritt plays, the bouzouki, which of course was met with a predictable gag from Lamb about bazookas, and then after he drooled "what's that then" Merritt told him it was an 8 string instrument with a gourd", Lamb uttered the immortal "how do you play it, do you blow on it?". This was followed by a glorious miscommunication in which Lamb mistook Merritt's answer of "carry-on" (regarding an instrument size) for a irritated utterance "oh, carry on!" and then
hen came a hopeless non-conversation in which Lamb jabbered on about people on housing estates, and how Merritt should show a little love for his music mentor, in which the two parties involved couldn't have understood each other less. "What, like Throbbing Gristle?' was the point at which both parties gave up. But any confusion over where my sympathy was lying was washed away with the rain after the interview finished, where Lamb and his gathering of yes-men, slobbering dogs who sit around him in the studio like a professional WKD advert, all decided Merritt was a wanker, and admitted they were trying really hard not to laugh in his face, which is, I think, about as offensive, rude and pathetic as humanity gets. But the joke was obviously on Lamb, because this ten minute snapshot of the decline of media presenting in Britain, did nothing except highlight his own ineptitude, slack approach to interviewing, and God Bless Stephin Merritt, who not only endured, and outwitted on an enormous magnitude, he also performed two songs solo, with just a ukulele, as he does on stage, beautifully and impeccably, even though his voice is so deep now you can probably hear it through the ground in the next city. He did The Nun's Litany, off Distortion, which was great because he doesn't sing that on the album, and The Book of Love, which I think is the closest The Magnetic Field have had to popular recognition, and that's only because Peter Gabriel covered it on the soundtrack to Shall We Dance. Someone should make a film of this meeting of minds, though. It worked for Frost/Nixon, this is just a slightly more quirky encounter.


It's still raining. If only weather weren't such a lazy metaphor for mood, otherwise I'd write a paragraph here about the different in the weather between Winchester and Cardiff. I'm going camping on the Gower tomorrow until Sunday. Lucky I'm not scared of drowning.