Mother London
So I've just got back from another trip to London, having seen Blades and Amy, but unforunately missing Bill and Will (Will was out to work before I stirred on Wednesday morning, unusually for me). It was quite a nice trip, bookended with two horrendous coach journies. You see, I tried to be clever with regard to going to London and got the night coach down. It left Newcastle at a quarter past one in the morning. So far so good. It would arrive at London early on; half seven to be precise and so give me the full day in the city. The last time I went down for the one night, I didn't get there till half three so the day was almost done by the time I arrived, heavy bag in tow.
So, a good plan, you might think. Think again. For a start, Go Ahead Northern don't really have any concept of night buses. So I had to get a bus to Chester at half ten (the last direct bus from mine to Newcastle leaves just before seven) and then wait for an hour to get a bus to the town, which still gets me there a full hour before the coach is due to leave. And when the coach finally arrives (slightly late, I have to add) it is absolutely crammed with people. So I get stuck next to this bloke who smells a bit funny and who cannot sit still. In fact, he's so restless, he's constantly rummaging about in his bag. Which would be fine, but his bag is in the overhead compartment so he has to lean over me to get at it. Which he does. Repeatedly.
And on the way home two girls sink a bottle of vodka, proceed to sing very loudly and get very abusive and accused the entire coach of being racist. One of the girls' fathers had apparently warned her that people outside of London were very racist because there weren't any people who weren't white outside of the M25 - as a bloke on the bus said, yeah, there aren't any black people in Sheffield or Leeds. So, the driver repeatedly asked them to be quiet or they would be thrown off the coachg. They wouldn't and so were, the police ended up being called and they got removed from the bus. But we were still laid over in Sheffield for the best part of an hour and a half, so it was nearly an hour later than scheduled when we got to Sunderland, because we didn't stop for a break. Other than that, the ride home was quite pleasant, I finished off the book I was reading, read a Doctor Who novel, started on Michael Jan Friedman's relaunch of the Next Generation range following Nemesis; Death In Winter. I am about sixty pages from the end of that now, and enjoying it immensely.
My time in London itself was fairly and blissfully uneventful. Me and Blades wandered round town for the day, visited, Fantasy Centre on Holloway Road, Forbidden Planet on Shaftesbury Avenue and generally just took things easy. Then we met Amy for drinks and food and her significant other, Ali, came along after he'd finished his game of squash that he'd gone to straight from work. We had come cocktails then a couple of glasses of wine. Talked for a bit, mainly about books and movies, but also some stuff about writing, and Amy convinced me that I was right in thinking that I need to focus on one specific avenue of literature - I just don't have the time to do everything I've ever wanted - and that maybe I should try my hand at science fiction after all. So I have decided to make a concerted effort and have actually started on the first in the Jericho trilogy, which is part of the Blood & Shadow chronology, but which is set something like halfway between the Turning Tides/Conrad Hart books (Christ, he needs a new name) and the Takashamar War. I think it's a good move.I know enough of the universe that I don't have to keep on inventing new things every few pages and it's still distant enough that it doesn't necessarily have to have an impact on Richard Swan's story. It's also a much less institutional story than the Centre novels or the Swan books; Captain James McHogue is a cargo hauler who just gets involved in the bigger picture through circumstance, so he's really outside of the #Empire and thusly able to comment on it.
I Have A Bad Feeling About This...
And so I did. After three weeks of trying to get to the pictures to see Star Wars: The Clone Wars, I finally managed to see it by dragging myself out of bed on Sunday morning and going to a matinee at the godawful time of eleven o'clock.And you know what? I really enjoyed it. It's nowhere on the same page as Empire (or even Sith really) but it is recognisably Star Wars and a lot of fun. Even the new Jedi character, Ashoka, who could so easily have becomne another Jake Lloyd era Anakin, is just the right side of spunky. SFX gave it four stars. SciFiNow gave it one star. I'm more inclined to go with SFX. After all, Van Helsing is a one star movie. Star Wars: The Clone Wars is, if not brilliant, than certainly an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours.
The same of which could be said of The Mummy - Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor. It's not going to change the world, or even necessarily be remembered a few years down the line, but, by and large, it's a good movie. Maria Bello is no Rachel Weisz, but about halfway through the movie, you kind of accept that and take her as, if not an entirely new character, then at least a kind of James Bondian replacement. They even cheekily acknowledge it in her first scene, much like George Lazenby's first scene in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The one niggle I have with it is the movie's peculiar chronology. Something like twenty three years have passed since the events of the first Mummy - as evidenced by Rick and Evie's son Alex now being a twenty year old collage drop out, but no effort has been made to age Brendan Fraser or John Hannah (and apparently, one of the reasons Rachel Weisz turned down the role was that she flat out refused to play a woman who had a twenty year old son. As she is exactly ten years older than me (making her thirty seven now and twenty eight at the time of the original Mummy) to even play her actual age in Dragon Emperor, she was have had to have been playing a sixteen year old in the first film, which she is blatantly not. So, while it is an example of an actress having a strop, maybe, in this case, she was entirely justified.
Peace out.
