Sixteen Days (Part 1)

27.06.08 So after the best part of ten and a half months and six days, I finally woke up this morning realising I was on holiday for the first time in forever. In true keeping with events of this magnitude, it was wanking it down and so was born the first of sixteen days, wasted for the first six hours cowering from the rain and mild humid breeze inside my house in Cardiff. This wasn't all unproductive, God no. I listened to a program on Radio 4 which was essentially the broadcast radio equivalent of Points of View, only hosted by someone I didn't recognise called Roger, and didn't involve any actual real complaints or views; it was more a forum on lunch time radio for pedants and other breeds of oaf to leave evidence of their pedantry and oafishness. From today’s edition, one of the people who phone in was a victim of her own paranoia and idiocy - complaining that news broadcasters say things like "900 people die in a ferry accident" and then don't specify where this incident is taking place, only to reveal five seconds later "in the Philippines where there's a tonking great cyclone destroying the entire island colony". The callers argument was that "people are going to get panicky and worry about all their friends that might be on ferries, traveling, and be totally in the dark, only to find out a minute later it doesn't affect their friends". I mean seriously. Another person complained about the Radio 4 adaptation of a book, which was so offensive, they refused to listen past episode two. Appropriate clip was played, in which I couldn't find anything wrong apart from that it sounded a bit dull. Apparently the problem was in the pronunciation of a couple of works. Pedantry drawn from geekiness is no reason to complain. But then, they did have half an hour to fill, and the media lawyer from BBC Radio can only drivel on about the legality of reporting war for so long.

I did the washing up, which was a necessary evil, but it meant I could listen to one of my staple washing up albums. I actually haven't taken the Bon Iver album out of the kitchen since I bought it two months ago because it lends itself so nicely to scraping dead ketchup and brine from the inner rim ofa bowl and staring at puddles in the garden. Other albums that have sat on the shelf next to the stereo in the kitchen since February when I realized I enjoyed washing up, include Old Ramon by the Red House Painters, CD1 of a Simon and Garfunkle Best Of, the one with Leaves That Are Green on, and Hats by the Blue Nile. All good kitchen albums. I can actually see myself in a few years listening back to this Bon Iver album (should it ever leave the room) and it reminding me of the time I filled the sink with too much hot water and scalded my hand trying to pull the plug out. Such happy times.

It cleared up around half two so I wandered purposefully into town to watch Teeth at the cinema. Anyone who's been following the slow and steady tide of hype surrounding this ridiculous concept shocker will know that essentially, it's a nonsense horror movie about a girl with teeth in her vagina which chomps off any hand or penis which dares to test it's treacherous waters. Except it's not. I'm not sure now what I was expecting; either a both-barrels firing barrage of crass humour and knob jokes with a garnish of splatter, or a pretentious metaphorical diatribe about the sanctity of virginity and that actually gnashing faff's was just a visual representation for feminist values. Luckily it was neither of these. It was more like a cross between a Todd Solondz coming of age mess, and say, The Thing. The gore hungry should be satisfied with some blood-soaked yodeling teenage boys clutching their half-chewed genitalia whilst various creatures munch on the other, and although the whole thing isn't intentionally a metaphor - yes, she does have piranhas in her pants, there is some credible feminist undertones - all the men who get their comeuppance are in one way or another lust-fuelled asshole who deserves everything they get. The ending sees the girl appreciating the power she has, and using it as a weapon against any ill-mannered male (which seems to be just about every single person in the movie). Girl rules, hooray. Teeth is, interestingly, directed by Mitchell Litchenstein, who is "wham!" pop artist Roy Litchenstein's son, so it's good that making money from nonsense runs in the family. The other fun thing about this movie is that the guy who played agoraphobic nutjob Harold Smith in Twin Peaks, plays the girls father. Ultimately,it's a lot better than "that movie where the girls vagina eats things".

I am now in Winchester, after a massively uneventful road trip with my father. We stopped at the usual services, one with a Marks and Spencer, Burger King and WHSmith, chewable toothbrushes in the toilet, and a few posters of over-personalization which as good as give you the manages mobile phone number and home address for you to go and molest his wife and steal his washing. It's a very poor example of the motorway services, which I find an integral part of the British Landscape, and with a whiff of nostalgia about them; aside from the Leigh services (today’s example) I don't think I've ever stopped at motorway services without it being a gap-filler or time waster during some epic road trip. It's like changing trains on an epic train journey, except you can stop for as long as you want, get back on the same train, and don't have to look at adverts for Halifax at Bristol Temple Meads. The rest of the journey was spent listening to a CD I'd made for the journey. Dad seemed impressed with Fleet Foxes ("I think they got the coveted 5 stars in Mojo") Wintersleep ("who's this?") and Steve Earle ("this is in an advert for cider isn't it?) and Billy Bragg ("Ah, Billy Bragg?"). Not bad, given he usually doesn't say anything at all about the music playing. I was annoyed to find that Steve Earle has loaned his version of 'Galway Girl' to advertise Magners, it doesn't seem right somehow. He's probably completely wrong anyway. I've spent the last hour or so watching The Hits, because they're doing a run down of the top 100 selling dance songs of the 21st century. I've been watching since #25 and they still haven't played the heartbreaking and ingenious video for Another Chance by Roger Sanchez, which is not only the best dance song of the 21st century, but one of the best music videos full stop. I'm really hoping they didn't play it during the 5 minutes I was fishing pickled onions of the jar with a fork, in the kitchen. They're now on Hung Up By Madonna, which is a good song, but not a dance song, and I really don't think Another Chance outsold this for one second. Looks like it did crop in those 5 minutes. Another Chance came out in the summer of 2001, I remember it being number around the time we all went to see Belle and Sebastian in Bournemouth, and Alex cut his feet on barnacles and we had to ask Stuart Murdoch if they had any towels. I haven't put returning to Bournemouth on my list of things to do this week I'm in Winchester, and I'm not going to either. Did that last year, and it's really not worth it.

This the tracklisting for the CD

01 Get Well Soon * Born Slippy (Nuxx)

02 The Hold Steady – Constructive Summer

03 Wild Beasts * The Devil’s Crayon

04 Galaxie 500 * Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste

05 Sharon Shannon and Steve Earle * Galway Girl

06 Glasvegas * Geraldine

07 The Dodos * God?

08 The Imagined Village Band * Hard Times of Old England Retold

09 The Blue Nile * Headlights on the Parade

10 Neon Neon * I Told Her on Alderaan

11 Wintersleep * Miasmal Smoke and the Yellow Bellied Freaks

12 Mates of State * My Only Offer

13 The Acorn * Oh Napoleon

14 Canadians * The North Side of Summer

15 Wolf Parade * Soldier’s Grin

16 Fleet Foxes * Your Protector

The one reassuring thing about Winchester is the local news. Although it's a rarity to actually feature anything happening in Winchester itself, Meridian Tonight's news is a totally different world to the main national news. When I arrived, my mum was watching the 10 o' Clock news, which was all about how Robert Mugabe is going to destroy the entire world, and how a loaf of bread is going to cost £45 and how North Korea are pretending to destroy their nuclear reserves to we all forget about them. Straight after, the top story on Meridian Tonight was that a shop that sold wedding dresses closed down. Whoop-de-doo, this barely measures 0.1 on the Richter Scale of newsworth events, but due to slow happenings, presumably in the rest of the region, this became big news, with a preposterous Jeremy Vine style interview with her in a posh hotel (one step away from the Gerry Adams helium voice and the silhouette backdrop) and then a load of hideous brides-to-be with teeth sticking out their chins and their voluptuous pig mothers in tow moaning a bit more about their fucking dresses, failing to account for the fact that delaying their wedding might just have saved them a divorce. Item two concerned an entire warehouse full of illegal Chinese Immigrants running wild on the streets of Alton, a miniscule non-event of a town North of Winchester. This feature managed to crowbar in a pathetic and very obvious advertising puff for the book printers next door. Lovely.