It's Christmas (Once Again)

Now, don't get me wrong, I like Christmas as much as the next guy. Providing the next guy is a self-loathing atheist who wonders if he's a complete selfish hypocrite for celebrating Christmas (see last years Christmas Eve blog). But it doesn't feel like Christmas yet.

I don't know why. We had snow a couple of weeks ago. Proper blizzardy snow that turned to ice and hung around for days afterward. It's gone fairly mild now. That, coupled with the fact that the days are shorter than they've ever seemed to be (yeah, I'm aware that today is the winter solstice, but I'm talking about in the grand scheme of things; it's dark by about half three now - it was never that dark when I was a kid).

I've spent the morning writing out Christmas cards and wrapping presents and it still doesn't feel like Christmas (to add insult to injury, I've been listening to Christmas songs on 4Music, including all three versions of 'Do They Know It's Christmas' which should put me in a Christmassy mood at least).

So why? Well, I've been pondering the last year a lot this month. That's traditional, isn't it, you come up to a New Year, you reflect on where this year has taken you. And in my case, it's been overall a pretty bad year.

Pretty Good Year

You see, because although there was that six weeks or so or pure bliss when I was with Debra, the rest of the year has been unremittingly awful. I've had the Barley Mow Moving Debacle and the whole resultant fallout from that, my hideous relationship with Anne and the fallout from that and since Debra dumped me (unceremoniously by text, what is it with women dumping me by text?) I've just been plodding along with very little to keep me going. I'm going to be honest with you here; since Debra dumped me, my thoughts have been erring towards suicide again and nothing that has happened since has given me any pause to reconsider. Every girl (four or five of them) who I've contacted or been contacted by have either stopped emailing after a couple of times or have been so sporadic and such hard work that I have to stop and ask myself if it's worth the trouble (and that's before I go into the dozens of girls I've sent messages to who never even deigned to reply). The thing with Debra was that it was never hard work. If anything, everything came too easily between us. We clicked, very quickly on a very deep level. We understood each other on a sheer emotional basis. But then she dumps me. Either she never saw that in me or it was purely a one sided thing. I don't know.

But I think that might be the reason why Christmas is weighing so heavily on me this year. When we were going out, I thought that everything was falling into place and I did start thinking about what I was going to do for her for Christmas. I even went online to find out how much it would be to take her to London for a weekend break to see Les Miserables, her favourite musical. There was the expectation that we would be together at Christmas and for me at least, with my hapless record at relationships, it would have been my first Christmas with someone. (The same applies to New Year, I was fully expecting me and Debra to be sharing a New Year's kiss come midnight on the 31st.) As it is, I'll be spending it alone again. Yeah, alone. You see, although my mam will be there and Terry, and our Clare and Richie, I'll be alone. Florence and Terry will be off doing there own thing, Clare and Richie will come over, have lunch, hang around for a bit and then go off and do their own thing. I'll be left alone. I'll most likely spend the vast majority of the day in my bedroom, watching DVD's. Which is how I spend most of my days off anyway. So where's the specialness?

I'll be fucked if I know.

To be honest with you, I'm more looking forward to Christmas Eve again. This year our continuum, celebrating (well, the Inner Circle are anyway) something like twelve years of solid friendship. Emma and Haz will be have been seeing each other for ten years on Boxing Day. An entire decade. My longest relationship didn't even make it to the six week mark. I've had longer holidays.

But it's nice to see everyone again. And it's nice to just be able to chill out and get drunk. Sometimes, when I'm out like that, I can just forget myself.

"What A Rush!"

Some movies and TV shows and books and songs you have an opinion of and then later on, years sometimes, you go back to them and find your opinion has been completely changed. Other times you find that your opinion was perfectly sound the first time.

For instance; I never really loved TNG the first time round. Sure, I liked it. Some of it was even great. But mostly it was just incredibly beige. Worf's Klingon politics arc was dull, Picard wasn't a match for Captain Kirk and Wesley Crusher was just an annoyingly precocious little knob. Now? Picard is a far better captain than Kirk ever was (but Kirk is a much better character, perversely) - I found myself catching the end of The Wounded the other day, the fourth season TNG episode that introduced the Cardassians, one of the few new races TNG introduced that went on to bigger and better things (you can count the other on the fingers of one hand; the Bajorans, the Borg, Q). The plot goes thusly; a Starfleet captain has gone rogue, blowing up Cardassian ships here there and everywhere. Picard is assigned to go and track him down and stop him. The rogue captain, Maxwell, claims that the Cardassians are building up arms in violation of treaty. Nevertheless, Picard brings him in, ending Maxwell's career. So far so simple. But the end of the episode has one of the most audacious twists ever and casts a much darker light on Picard than you ever could with Kirk: Maxwell was right; the Cardassians are violating the treaty. But Picard just did his job (Kirk would have done the 'right' thing, Starfleet be damned). And the Klingon political storyline? It's brilliant; Ron Moore, who was responsible for most of those episodes, is quite possibly the best writer TNG had. And Wesley? Well, yeah, he's still an annoying knob (and brings up a whole load of questions about how hard it is to get into Starfleet Academy? I mean, the little fucker's a genius and he fails the entrance exam!).

But what I want to talk about today is Stargate and its spin-off, Stargate SG-1. Because, in an attempt to cheer myself up (see above) I've been watching copious amounts of SG-1. In fact in the past three weeks I've watched the best part of three seasons of it and I'm not planning on stopping anytime soon (well, I'm waiting for the last DVD of Season 5 to be delivered as we speak as Ib ought a copy second hand ages ago and when I finally get round to watching it, it has the wrong DVD in, so I have to buy another copy off Amazon, luckily for me someone was selling a second hand copy for less than two quid including P&P) as it is quite frankly brilliant.

It's the longest running American SF show, it started in 1997, just as Babylon 5 was wrapping up and it was bought by Channel 4 and promoted in much the ame way. I remember coming home from university and getting in just as it started because it was on at six in the evening. I remember having cable at the house in Gateshead and watching Season 5 and 6 which were being repeated on Sky 1 at ten in the morning; at the time I was working at Global and never started before 5 in the afternoon, I was going to bed late, setting my alarm for Stargate and watching it first thing in the morning.

But I never loved it. It was a solid also-ran. It never had the passion that Farscape did. In fact, I have not yet seen anything beyond the end of that season 6 that I saw living in Gateshead. I bought the DVD's when I could pick them up cheap and pretty soon arrived at an almost full collection more by accident than design. But I never loved it. It was just one of those shows that I liked and would buy if there wasn't something more important (a Star Trek box set, a Doctor Who DVD, whatever). I made a concerted effort to own all of the Farscape DVD's; SG-1 slowly built up. It wasn't until they announced that Season 10 would be the last that I started thinking I should perhaps make an effort to both buy them and watch them. The fact that I had also completed my Star Trek collection had little to do with it.

But it is brilliant. The first couple of seasons are fairly shaky, but then very few shows can say they hit the ground running (Farscape didn't find its feet until the second half of the first season, TNG took till the third season - only the original Trek, in my opinion, hit the ground running). By the third season, however, it has become something so wonderful and - amazingly - real (which is a masterful achievement when the main premise of your show is about a bunch of people going to other planets through a wormhole). It has perhaps one of the fairest and most authentic representations of the military in the genre (a fact no doubt helped by the massive assistance the US Air Force supplies). The four main characters have clearly defined roles and agendas.

I don't know how much of this has come out of watching episodes in huge chunks of six and eight - enjoying it like that brings out a lot of the subtle themes and arcs that might otherwise be lost, like Daniel's uncomfortable position of being a pacifist with a gun and Sam's dichotomy of being equal parts soldier and scientist - but it works.

The Stargate movie however, is an entirely different story. I was never overly keen on it when I first saw it (and it's something of a sobering thought to think that next year will be it's 15th anniversary year, which also applies to Generations - god I feel old). I thought it was a moderately enjoyable action movie, the most memorable thing about it being Kurt Russell's gravity defying buzz-cut. And, in addition to my marathon-esque viewing of SG-1, I purchased myself a copy of the movie on Blu-Ray. And why the hell not? (Annoyingly, it doesn't have some of the extras from the standard DVD release on it, a crime that the Terminator 2 and Total Recall Blu-Rays are also guilty of). And my opinion of it hasn't changed. It's still a moderately enjoyable action movie. It does have a star turn (at least in the first half) by James Spader (completely overshadowed by what Michael Shanks does in the TV series, much like what Richard Dean Anderson does to the unfortunately coiffured Kurt Russell) and some enjoyable action sequences. But by and large it's been completely outshone by the TV series. In fact, one of the most enjoyable things you can do with the movie is spot what they changed for the TV series. It does have a great comedy decapitation though.

Peace Out.

The Long Walk

We Have A Lot To Talk About

Yes. We do, for once. I've been avoiding you all, truth to tell.

You see, there was this girl. Yes. A girl. It always comes back down to that, doesn't it. I mentioned that lass from Match who I was having a date with way back in September. Well, the date (we went to Boldon pictures, had a few drinks - well, I did, she was driving and then went to see The Dark Knight, even better the third time round) went extremely well. Halfway through the film, I rested a hand on her leg, she looked at me and smiled. A little later I kissed her. We kissed when we came out of the pictures. She drove me home. came in for a coffee. We kissed some more. I told her my mother was in bed and sort of invited myself round to hers there and then. We went. We had much fun. We spent the next day in bed together with a brief outing to her mother's house to pick up some stuff and had an hour at the beach. She brings me home that evening. I ask her to be my girlfriend (well, in fact, I tell her there's a question I want to ask her but I don't know how to ask it without sounding like a five year old in the playground, she tells me to ask it anyway, I do) and she says yes.

So the next five weeks are blissful. Seriously. I can't remember ever being that happy. We spend loads of time together, watch our favourite movies, have lots of sex and generally have a good time. Florence goes down Terry's for a week so I invite her over for a night, we go to the pub for a meal and sleep together in my mother's bed, which was mega weird, but my bed's only a single. She comes to the quiz, meets all my friends, everyone gets on amazingly well.

So. What goes wrong?

Well, you can imagine that I'd find some way to fuck it up and maybe I do, maybe I don't. You see, I do tell her that I love her, but she doesn't have an immediate reaction to it as Alison did. We even talk about it a little about it. But just over a week later, she still dumps me. She likes me, yes, she says, just not in the right way. She then goes on to say that maybe she hasn't had enough time to get over her last relationship.

Fuck.

She said she still wanted to be friends with me, but that she'd leave it up to me. As the dumpee I apparently have the right to choose the course of our subsequent relationship. So we've been out for a few drinks in Sunderland, tres awkward and I've tried to arrange a couple of outings with her but we've had clashing things. I would have been out with her last Saturday, but at the last minute Emma decided to change her birthday hootenanny from Friday to Saturday and Debra wasn't available on Friday.So I tried to sort something out for yesterday, but she had a family thing apparently. So I'm really reluctant to text her again because I don't want to come across like the stalker ex.

But for that short period of time, she really did make me happy. It's funny, for so long I've been depressed that I'd actually forgotten what it was like to be truly happy. But now she's gone I'm in a worse place than what I was before I met her, because, as a great man once said, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but fuck me it hurts.

So now I'm back on Match. My subscription runs out on Christmas Eve, and so far there's only one potential possibility on the horizon but I honestly don't know how it'll turn out. Everything seemed to be so easy with Debra... with anyone else it's so much hard work.

Peace out.

Oh, England - My Lionheart!

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.

You Can't Go Home Again...

Except you can. it's all too easy. It's just never the same as it used to be, which is maybe the point they were trying to make.

Home Alone Again, Naturally

So, yeah, I'm back home now. Have been for the past three weeks, although the whole charade with the flat is still ongoing. I actually moved out on the 13th of August (although due to certain circumstances, I'd been staying at my mother's since the Sunday beforehand) and it went fairly smoothly, despite pissing down with rain and Clare having a hangover. I was supposed to get checked out on the 29th, although the letting agents claim it was the 28th and they weren't very happy when I wasn't there. They tried to ring me, but because of circumstances I'll get to in a minute, I have a new phone number and obviously they don't have it. So, when she came out again on Wednesday, she was really pissy with me, picking holes in everything (complaining about little spots of blu tac still on the walls for fuck's sake) and trying to blame me for some cigarette burns on the carpet which were there when I moved in. Now, you and I both know that a certain couple lived in that flat before I moved in. However, this cow from the letting agents was claiming that I was the first person to move in there since it had all been done out. I tried explaining it to her about six times but she blatantly wasn't paying any attention and didn't until I refused to pay for a new carpet, at which point she got all huffy and asked me why they hadn't been through the agency, if indeed they did actually exist. She obviously thought I was making it all it up (as if - I could come up with a better story than that if I was trying to wangle out of something). But she phoned the office and Mills House and everything seems to have been cleared up. I'd gone for my break at work by the time she came back in (she'd been showing a couple round the flat - good luck to them) and only mentioned getting the carpets cleaned, which was fair enough really. Florence had warned me about that. Andrea - who'd shown someone round the flat with me the previous Friday - had complained about the carpets as well, and didn't seem too convinced when I told her that it was because when me and Richie were moving the stuff, it was pissing down with rain and all muddy. She probably thinks that i live like a pig.

I'm sick of my life at the moment.

Which brings me to my love life. Or lack thereof. So that woman I was seeing. The older one. The nutter. Yes, she turned out to be even more psychotic than I imagined. A couple of weeks ago, after she'd handed in her notice at work, she started sending me texts claiming that Shaun had told her that I'd forced myself upon someone. Now, I don't know if this means that I've raped someone or attempted it or what, but Shaun denies it. He told her about this lass I was seeing off the internet, he says, but according to Andrea he was horrified that Anne had said what she had. But Anne had told Andrea as well (and asked her not to say anything to Shaun until she had left work). In one text she told me that someone else knew, and then in a further text she claimed that apparently there had been this whole discussion in the shop about it. Then, at half twelve one night after I've moved back home, I get a text from her asking me if the police have been in touch yet.

Naturally, I shit myself. Because, at the end of the day, even though I have done nothing wrong, she could have easily gone to the police and reported some imaginary crime. She's just cracked enough to do it. So I phone the police and report her harrassing texts. This is on the Friday morning. They eventually come to see me on the Tuesday night (they had called on Monday but I had been at work), by which time I've had a further two texts from her, one saying that I know, deep down, why the police are coming to talk to me and another saying that she won't contact the police, but if they come to talk to her, she'll speak to them (she signs off the text with 'whatever you have done, Mark, leave me out of it!!!' which is funny because A) I have not done anything and B) She was the one who started this whole mess in the first place) . Then I get another text, this one in big shouty capital letters asked me if she should dispose of 'what I have belonging to you' so she can make a 'clean break from u'. Which again, is funny, because she doesn't have anything of mine. It's also quite scary though, because she's obviously cracked.

So I change my number. Florence has a spare sim crad upstairs off when she got her last phone, so I take that one. When the police come round, I put the old sim card in just to see if she's still texting me and there's a message telling me how she starts her new job in September and all this bollocks and a voicemail which sounds like she rang when she was drunk, saying that she's probably the last person I want to hear from (damn straight - I'd rather get a phone call from my dad), that she's sorry how everything turned out and that she just wanted me to know what people have been saying about me. I haven't checked it since, and have no real desire to. She's obviously not right in the head, or trying to provoke me into some sort of action, whether that's to try and get back with her or to try and drive a wedge between everyone at work, I don't know. I'm just glad she's out of my life.

And A? Well, we went out again on the following Wednesday from my last post. We went to The Biscuit Factory in Newcastle. It's an art gallery for those of you who aren't cultured. Again, we had a nice time. So we went out to the pub, just me and A, minus the kid, on Sunday night. Just to Houghton. And, once again, we had a nice time. There was a bit of kissing and so forth and when she texted me once she'd got home, it was to say she'd had a lovely time and that she'd see me soon. I texted back saying I'd had a lovely time as well and did she fancy going to the pictures one day/night the following week.

And then, nothing. Not a single text. So I move house on the Wednesday. I text her once I've got my shifts for the next week, telling her what days I'm off if she fancies going out. Again, nothing. So that's a bust then.

But one thing niggles at me. When we first emailed each other, she said that her match.com was up for renewal at the end of the month and that, as she hadn't had much luck, she wasn't going to renew it. But she's still on there, and still active. You see, the site shows you how active members are. It'll say something like "Active within 3 weeks" or something like that, and yesterday, emailing this other lass (so there is still a glimmer of hope after all) A's picture cropped up with an "Active within 24 hours" label beneath it. So what seems to have happened is that she's gone out on a couple of dates with me, decided that I'm not for her, and instead of just telling me like a decent person, she's just ignored me.

And so we come to my unified field theory of relationships:

Men are dicks; women are insane.

I thank you.

He Was The Best Of Us!

So, The Dark Knight. I went to see it again yesterday. With moving house and everything, I haven't had a day to myself in what seem like ages. I haven't been to the pictures since the advance screening of Hellboy (and I was only able to go to that because I went with Clare and Richie and they gave me a lift home - the film didn't start until 9pm and there was no way I could have got a bus home). So I went yesterday with the best of intentions. I was going to see The Mummy (still playing despite my worries) Wall-E (open since the middle of July and I still haven't seen it, more to do with the fact that I din't want to sit through it with a bunch of screaming kids) and Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The trouble is, Star Wars didn't start until six. Then I got sidetracked in Sunderland and so missed the 1pm showing of Wall-E. I got there for two and didn't fancy hanging around for an hour, so went to see The Dark Knight again, with the intention of coming out of there at 5, going to get something to eat and then going to see Star Wars. So I goes to see Batman (still the best film of the year, the best superhero movie of all time) and although Heath Ledger is fantastic in it, it's a shame he died because that tragedy overshadows Aaron Eckhart, providing a virtuoso performance as Harvey Dent, embodying the heart and soul of the movie, an emotional core around which the forces of chaos (the Joker) and order (Bats) revolve.

So then I come out, go and grab a bite to eat and because she's up for the weekend, give Gilli a quick ring. Soon, plans are made to go to the pub and have a few drinks while she provides an intelligent and insightful critique of Traumaville, the notes for which I'll definitely put into operation when I get round to rewriting it. So Star Wars, ironically the film I wanted to see most when I planned on going to the pictures, got put on the backburner. But how often do I get to see Gilli?

And it's still on on Sunday, so if there's buses running I'll go out and see it then, cos I'm down London to see Blades, Will and AmyJo on Tuesday/Wednesday, and then the rest of my week off will be devoted to writing (I have three Doctor Who stories to finish) and catching up on my TV. And, with any luck, I'llbe going out for a date with that other lass off match.com that I've been emailing...

Peace out.

This Is How It Goes

Okay. So me and this woman split up. Again, that's the long and short of it. She was supposed to come down on Friday night and instead I got a text dumping me. Which, in hindsight, is no bad thing, because I was starting to wonder where this relationship could actually go. You know, as I approach my thirties (and it is with some trepidation that I note that in just over six months I am going to be 28) I am starting to think about the future a lot. You know, settling down, maybe having kids - adult shit - and I had got myself thinking about what we could have, and there wasn't any of that. I couldn't even see us living together. Which was a big problem. A log term one as well, but still a big problem, one which would only get worse in time. So, by getting dumped, my decision has been made for me. So whoppee. Not that it hasn't left me annoyed, mainly due to the fact that this is the second time I've been dumped by text - doesn't anyone have manners anymore?

But, sadly, the story does not end there. Because she kept on texting me. Repeatedly. Sometimes in the middle of the night. I got a text on Tuesday night at two o'clock in the morning. She's made a mistake, she says. She wants to get back together. I recall what I told her when we first started seeing each other; I don't like people who play games with me. I've been headfucked enough in my life. I gave her another chance after that first time, when she'd stopped texting me and didn't come down even when she said she would. And she wants me to give her a further chance? After what she did?

Sorry, but no.

On a lighter front, I've been experiencing the peculiar delights of internet dating. You see, I joined this website, paid my cash and for about a month I never got a single reply. Until I showed Andrea the picture I had on the site. She said I looked like a nutter, took another picture and, the day after I was dumped, went online, winked at a few girls and, would you believe it, actually got a response!

So, I arranged to meet this girl - 26 years old, so a more realistic prospect than my last two relationships - and we did, we had coffee and went down the park with her twenty month old baby girl and I had a great time. I really did. I was dreading it at first, and there were a few awkward silences, but yes, a great time, and she said she enjoyed herself as well. And so I think we're going out next Wednesday as well. So... yeah, it feels good. I hate to admit it, but the mental health nurse might have been right, that what I needed to do was get out there and interact with people my own age, with similar interests. A good, healthy relationship, that's what I need. We'll see how it goes.

And I'm moving back home in eleven days. Again, it feels good, but also a little weird. I bought myself a travelcard in preparation (plus I was out with A on Wednesday, am going to an advance preview of Hellboy on Tuesday, will probably be out with A again next Wednesday so don't want to spend all my money on day bus tickets) and it's strange thinking I can just go out whenever I feel like it again. If I wanted, I could nip down Chester for an hour and not have to think, oh, hang on, I've gt to spend all this money on bus fare, it's not worth it just for an hour.

It'll be an adjustment, moving back to my mam's. It'll be strange having to get a bus to work again, but that's something I'm lookig forward to, because since I moved here, I've barely read any books because I only really used to read on the bus. So hopefully, once I'm back spending an hour or so of every day on a bus, I'll get through some serious bookage. Particularly Revelation Space, which I seem to have been reading for months. It's a cracking book, but it's very long.

It feels like it did when I moved out in February; like the end of an era, but a transitional phase which I just want to get over and done with. Mam's coming across tomorrow to take a few boxes over home, but at the minute, I just feel unsettled, because I'm anticipating the big change, yet I've still got time to wait...

Peace out.

"Where Do We Go (From Here)"

Now, I could rhapsodise on the true brilliance of The Dark Knight, but I haven't really had time to process it all yet. I may have to go back and see it again next week, just to appreciate the whole thing (I did the same with Prince Caspian a few weeks back and found I enjoyed it so much more the second time round). Let's just say right now that it's the film of the year.

So, complete change of tack, let's talk about me.

Yeah. My favourite subect.

So, I'm seeing this woman. Lot older than me. Slightly older than even Alison was. And we work together, which is so fucking awkward it is unbelievable. Because we met up and we shagged. That's the long and the short of it, she came round my house and we immediately got stuck into each other and then nothing. I asked her round a couple of times and she said no. Then she said she'd come round on the Wednesday night. But on Tuesday night, I got this weird text from her about me and my flatmate and how she didn't want to get in between us bickering, which is something we've never really done because the dopey fucker is never here - he much prefers the comfort of his mother's house. And then she didn't come round on Wednesday. I texted her and got no reply. Then I texted her on Friday and still got nothing. So here am I thinking that I'm somehow the most incompetent lover ever and God knows what else. Fuck, I'm paranoid enough without shit like this going down. And so at work on Saturday, a 9 hour shift when there's just the two of us in the shop, well, I don't exactly ignore her, but I'm not overly chatty with her. We walk up the cut and as we sya goodbye, I get the impression that she wants me to invite her in. But I don't, because I'm hurting. She's practically spent theentire week rejecting or ignoring me, so I think, "Fuck it," and I say goodnight, I'll see you on Tuesday, which is our next shift together. She walks off looking pissed. Later on that night, I get a text asking me why I'm giving her the cold shoulder. I reply, telling her the truth, that I feel she's been ignoring me. So she texts back and then through mutual agreement she comes round and we talk, get through a lot of the bullshit that was building up around us and I think, great, things are going to work out. Except they haven't. She was supposed to come round on Wednesday night, but she called it off, because she got invited out for a meal by one of her son's. Fair enough, says I. At least she told me about it. So we agree she's coming round tonight. Except she's not here yet. I texted her about ten minutes ago asking her if she's coming round and she hasn't replied yet. Fuck it.

So we come to the big crux of the issue: Why can't I get involved with someone who is even slightly normal?

Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.

So, instead of a nice evening in with a gorgeous woman and some wine I'm sitting here by myself, contemplating that last third of a tub of Ben & Jerry's ice cream in the freezer, watching Freaky Friday (the Jamie Lee/Lohan iteration, back from when Lindsay Lohan actually seemed like a promising actress and the alky/druggy slut that she was to become the second she turned eighteen was but a blip on the horizon - as Disney family films go, it's one of the better ones) and wondering what the fuck I'm going to do tomorrow when I go into work tomorrow and she's there and we have to spend 9 long hours together.

Christ. Take my advice, never get involved with anyone you work with. It's not worth the hassle.

So. Jamie Lee in a thong. It's not as horrific a prospect as it sounds. Despite her age, she's still quite shaggable. Admittedly, she's not anywhere near the height of her powers like she was in Trading Places or Perfect (one of the worst movies ever made but she looks so hot in it), but thongs in a Disney film? It's just on the interesting side of perverse, kinda like Daryl Hannah in Splash. But I might just watch something a little more... well, something with a little more oomph. I'm pissed off and in need of a movie with action and stuff getting blowed up. It's that sort of night.

Peace out.

Wanted: Dead Or Alive, But Preferably Alive

A Trip To The Arcade And The Unfortunate Incident Of The Pepsi Can

Now, I'm not a squeamish person by nature. I watched Robocop 2 at a very impressionable age and you know the scene where Cain has been killed and his brain and spinal cord are in a jar? My dad walks in at this point and, showing pretty much the only piece of fatherly concern he will ever show asks me if I should be watching this. Bear in mind he was the one who rented the video for me. If memory serves, and it usually does given my almost autistic knack for date retention, I would have been ten.

But go forward a few years and I get Terminator 2 for my thirteenth birthday. It sits on the shelf for a few weeks before I watch it. Why? It's not uncommon now for me to have movies and TV shows on DVD for months if not years before I finally get round to watching them. But I have thousands of DVD's now. Back then I maybe had twenty videos. And I didn't have a video in my room. The simple fact of the matter is that I was scared.

What?

Yes, I was scared. I was faintly traumatised by the sex scene in the first Terminator film and I imagined that T2 might be even more traumatic (there's a pseudo-rape scene in John Boorman's Excalibur that shook me so badly that it's only been since university that I've actually been able to sit and watch the film without suffering from palpitations - but in that case, I was expecting a nice jolly film about King Arthur and the Lady in the Lake, the adverts for it on Channel 4 didn't mention anything about sex). But I watched it eventually and loved it. Except for one bit.

It's at the shopping mall, near the start of the film. The two Terminators have just met, converging on little Eddie Furlong and they're out the back of some arcade, your generic corridor. And there's this bloke there, telling them that it's for staff only or some such shit. And then the Terminators just open fire on each other. The T-1000 kills this poor guy who was just standing there. I remember it vividly, because he's holding a can of Pepsi and that gets a few bullets through it as well. And this scene really freaked me out. Honestly. I'm thirteen years old and sitting there getting really worked up by the fact that this guy, who, let's face it was just some lame-ass arcade worker, probably some student looking for a bit of extra cash, has been killed.

And the worst thing? No one even mentions him. As far as I can remember, even when the cops come to see Sarah at the nuthouse and tell her that Arnold has gone on the rampage again, they don't say, "Oh, and he killed this poor schmuck." He's not even a footnote in the history of Skynet.

If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It

And so, yeah, that disturbed me. A couple of years later and there was I watching Total Recall, that classic Arnold film (yes, him again, you really can't be a fan of sf cinema and not be at least passingly intimate with the Governer of California's resume - The Terminator, Total Recall, The 6th Day, True Lies, The Running Man, Predator - he's in half of the classic SF movies of the eighties and nineties, and some of the duffers as well). And there's a scene when the mighty Michael Ironside is chasing the big lug. They catch him on an escaltor and just open fire. Fair enough, they are bad guys. But the bloke in front of Arnie cops the brunt of it. Here's another poor schmuck, this one just out doing a bit of shopping and what does he get? A chestful of bullets. To make matters worse, Arnie uses the poor fucker as a human shield (alright, the dude is dead by this point, but come on, have some fucking respect). And again, this disturbs me. I start having visions of going to the Metro Centre and getting gunned down simply because I'm between the bad guy and the good guy.

So why doesit bother me so much? I mean, I can quite happily watch movies like You Only Live Twice where hundred of people get gunned down, poisoned, and generally made dead. Or Kill Bill, where Uma Thurman chops people up in a frenzy of limb-detaching action.

The main difference is, I think, that those examples I have cited above are all about people taking action. It's one thing for a soldier - even a goodie - to be gunned down (I've never felt much sympathy for Donald Sutherland at the end of The Dirty Dozen, f'rinstance) but it's an entirely different thing for an innocent person, one who is entirely peripheral to the plot to have the same punishment meted out to them.

What If I Told You Bullets Didn't Fly Straight?
(Spoilers For Wanted)

And it's this empathy on my part which mars the otherwise very entertaining film, Wanted. Based on Mark "God" Millar's comic (I refuse to pander to the intellectual's use of the phrase 'graphic novel' - it's a fucking comic and that is something to be celebrated) and directed by the Russian dude who made Night Watch and Day Watch (an example of two DVD's in my collection that I have owned for months and still havent got round to watching yet), it's the story of a dick who works in an office who suddenly finds out that he's actually a superhero. Not only that, but his dad was a superhero who worked for a bunch of assassins and he has just been killed. So it's a story of revenge. Only his dad isn't dead, the bunch of assassins have hired him to kill his dad because he's the best assassin ever and his son is the only person he won't kill.

So far so good. It's a fairly standard plot (although I have to admit that I didn't see the plot twist about Wesley's dad being the one he's been sent to kill coming) but told with a great deal of visual panache and style. You can forgive a movie a lot when it looks this good, and since it's not too shabby to start off with, well, we're easily into 4 star territory.

But one scene sticks in my craw. Between them, Wesley, Wesley's dad and Angelina Jolie manage to derail a train. And not a freight train or a nearly empty train, but a packed to the gills passenger train. And pretty much everyone on the train dies, apart from our hero. There's a couple of scenes which make it clear that most of the other people have died in the crash. A nd it leaves a bitter aftertaste in your mouth. Sure, it's a film about an assassin, you expect people to bite the bullet (literally in some cases) but such wholesale slaughter, and such unnecessary slaughter sits ill with the tone of the film. It reminds me of something Martin Campbell said on the GoldenEye commentary, that it was alright for Bond to crush cars and stuff when he was in the tank, as long as you saw the people were alright afterwards.

If the deaths of all those people had a dramatic point at its foundation, then I might be able to get away with it. As it is, it's an annoying moral niggle (and yes, before you say anything, I know none of it's real and no one actually died, but they went to the effort of showing us all the people on the train and then killing them purely to provide an admittedly spectacular set-piece) that will annoy me and will continue to annoy me even after I have bought the Blu-ray, because, after all, it's fifteen years since T2 and that poor schmoe in the corridor still tugs at my heartstrings.

Peace out.

Knock Knock, Who's Here

So, Season 4 of Doctor Who. I've gone on record before how much of a Who fan I am. It's probably even more important to me than Trek or Bond or pretty much anything else. I've spent a lot of time over the past seven years writing fan fiction for various incarnations of the Timelord website (address to your right) and am currently engaged in what we at the site are calling Season 5. You see, following the end of Season 1 (that is Season 1 of Nu-Who, the one with Ecclescakes in, not the Billy Hartnell years) we did our own series called Season 2: New Gallifrey which was masterminded by a member of our group. The notion was that we would do a thirteen episode series in much the same format as the actual TV series, so there would be a rough arc over the course of the season (in our case, it was the resurrection of Gallifrey). It worked well enough; I contributed episodes 2 and 3 (the snappily titled "2046" and "The Architecture Of Morality", still one of my all time fave titles I'e ever come up with). So we did another season, still starring Eccles, because one of the conceits of our series was that he didn't regenerate at the end of "The Parting Of The Ways" and it was in fact this plot point that I seized upon when I myself masterminded Season 3: The Fray. I supposed that the Doctor's continued survival had such a detrimental effect on the multiverse that the entire thing was falling apart. I ended up writing five of the thirteen installments for this one, although that was not really the plan. What happened was that my season opener (as with the TV series, which has always had RTD writing the first episode and then the finale, the 'mastermind' behind each season has done the same, although we don't generally bother with the episodes RTD would write in between so we give more spots to other writers) got a little too big. My average story for the site is about 8000-10000 words long. "State Of Flux", Episode 1 f The Fray was something like 30000 words. A little bit more effort and it could have been a novel. And my two-part season finale, "A Shrine To Futility" and "The Wellspring Of Regret" both bottomed out at about 15000 words each. So "State Of Flux" was cut down into three seperate parts and formed the 'feature length' opening story and took up the first three episodes. I still think my work on The Fray, which saw the death of Rose Tyler, the Doctor's regeneration (we decided to keep Tennant, but saddle him with a slightly more composed, less manic persona) and the intoduction of Heather Jones, a companio I created, as well as the return of Robbie Bainbridge, a companion I had originally envisaged for my series of 5th Doctor stories and a new version of the Master from a parallel universe (this was of course long before the TV series resurrected the Master, interestingly, James, who created New Gallifrey had a Master in his finale for "New Gallifrey" who was, like the John Simm version for the telly, resurrected to fight in the Time War). Then we did "Shadows In Time", for which I contributed the middle 'returning monsters' two parter which saw the return of the Sontarans and the Rutan, "Storm Front" and "Foul Moon". They werea hard slog to write - I actually thought that I might have written Doctor Who out of my system with The Fray. But then immediately afterward, I came up with the idea for a further season which would see New Gallifrey engaged in a civil war. The idea got changed around massively until it became a story about the Cybermen invading New Gallifrey and I somehow ended up masterminding it with one of the other members of the site, who wrote the opener and finale and I took three episodes in the middle, a two parter ("Blood & Steel" and "Tempus Fugitives") which sees the actual invasion of Gallifrey and which I'm writing now and "Broken Kingdom" which... well, that one's a bit fuzzy at the minute. And already I've concocted Season 6: Rapture Of The Daleks (TBC) which will see the death of Heather. I'm writing a big three part finale fo this one and leaving the opener for James to handle, seeing as how the idea to do a Dalek arc was his idea. I might just destry New Gallifrey while I am at it.

The reason I'm going through all this is to point out the divergent route we've taken from normal TV continuity. Essentially, we started with what was in Season 1 and then, using that as our foundation, built up something that's entirely different. Sure, we've had our similarities. The TV show brought back Sarah Jane, we brought back Romana and Susan. My whole outline for The Fray shares a certain level of DNA with the story that is on telly now, dealing with the breakdown of the barriers between universes (the main difference is that I used it as a plot McGuffin and RTD used it so he could get Billie Piper back) but by and large, we've gone down a much more complex and mature route, most likely due to the fact that we aren't broadcast on national telly on a Saturday evening and our audience is composed largely of confirmed Doctor Who fans.

But Season 4 of the tv show has, interesting, been possibly the most child-friendly seaso so far. Sure, we've had the darkness of some stories like 'Planet Of The Ood' and Steven Moffat, despite a shaky first part to his two parter managed to pull of his usual genius, but the overall feeling for the season has been daft runaround. Even the Pompeii episode didn't hit as hard as it could have. And coming off the blinding run of stories since "42" (with particular mention for the darkest TV Who has ever really gotten with the Master trilogy) it's a bit of a let down. The Christmas special was all well and good - we like a daft runaround at Christmas, so we get high concept, the Titanic, Kylie and big shonky effects sequences. You don't want to challenge the viewer too much whe they're soporific after the turkey. At the time, I reckoned "Voyage Of The Damned" was the best Christmas special so far, but, like a lot of Hollywood blockbusters, they lose an awful lot on the second time around (conversely, "The Runaway Bride" has grown in my estimation - I really didn't think much of it after the first viewing).

So, while it's true that since Moffat's two parter the series has regained it's footing (and it's no easy task, given that the remaining scripts have all been by RTD, a variable writer at best - "Aliens Of London/World War 3" is possibly the worst episode of Nu-Who so far while episodes like "Turn Back", "Utopia" and "Gridlock" show that despite all his flaws, and there are many, he can still produce some of the best Doctor Who since Hinchcliffe's day) even if the finale so far has the feeling of scoffing an entire cheesecake in one sitting, one smothered in cream and strawberries - it's damn tasty while you're eating it but once it's finished, you start to feel a little queasy because it was so bloody rich.

Of course, there's always a danger in judging a story before you've seen the end, especially with RTD - "The Parting Of The Ways", peculiarly beloved of fans, is a damp squib after "Bad Wolf" and the ending of "Last Of The Time Lords" is - subtly telegraphed or not - an abomination (I'm talking here about the Doctor's miraculous rejuvenation, which belongs in fantasy like Peter Pan, not rational science fiction, rather than the quite brilliant death of the Master and Martha's coming to term with who she is). RTD has a habit of copping out ("The Parting Of The Ways" obliterates much of the Earth, only for it never to be remarked upon again, "Doomsday" features a huge all ut war between the Cybermen and the Daleks in present day London only for it to be dismissed as hallucinogens in the water or something. The existence of aliens is still not confirmed, despite the events of "World War 3", "The Christmas Invasion", "Voyage Of The Damned", "Army Of Ghosts/Doomsday", "Smith & Jones" and "Partners In Crime", just to name a few examples off the top of my head. The Master trilogy has a big huge reset button built into it - as soon as we see the Paradox Machine we know that's what it's there for - and the only thing that stops it becoming a huge waste of time, akin to the Doctor falling out of the shower and proclaiming to Martha that it was all a dream is that our principal characters remember it and are changed by the experience, meaning that it still has some emotional weight). So "Journey's End", due to be broadcast next Saturday, will doubtless paper over the cracks and everyne will conviniently forget that Earth was once zapped halfway across the universe, invaded by Daleks and generally put through the wringer.

Does it matter?

In the long term, yes, yes it does. In the long term it's essentially shock tactic storytelling, pretending to blow things up and kill people just to make an impact. In the short term, well, it makes for exciting TV, doesn't it?

Peace out.

The Rise And Fall Of The Unbreakable Man

Warning:
Contains spoilers for Unbreakable, The Sixth Sense, The Happening, The Empire Strikes Back and Swimming Pool.
Plus, some dodgy opinions regarding Zooey Deschanel

For many, The Sixth Sense is a truly great film. It's a tightly woven masterpiece where everything hangs together like silk bedsheets. The twist - that Bruce Willis is actually a ghost for much of the film is clearly signposted for the keen-eyed viewer. Like all good twists, it reshapes the movie before your eyes without deconstructing it. It makes you want to go back and revisit it with the knowledge of what the twist is so you can soak up all the clues.

For myself, I twigged to the twist about halfway through the film. It's when Brucie goes to visit his wife at dinner. He sits down in the restaurant, but the chair has already been pulled out some ay. He doesn't touch it when he sist down (obviously his arse makes contact, but he doesn't actually handle it). It's a little bit of an odd thing and the first time watching The Sixth Sense, it jumped ut at me. Of course, it helped that I knew there wasa twist and was actively looking for it. Had I not known abut it, like the twist at the end of Charlotte Rampling/Ludivene Sagnier starrer Swimming Pool, that Sagnier is actually some sort of spectral echo of Charles Dance's lover from the early eighties, it would have been even more devastating.

However, The Sixth Sense, a hugely elaborate piece of celluloid sleight of hand that it was, was a huge success. But then Shyamalan fell into a trap. He became The Twist Man. Unbreakbale ended with the revelation that Samuel L Jackson's Mr Glass was Brucie's nemesis and that he had engineered dozens of accidents purely to find the Unbreakable Man. It remains Shyamalan's best film, and the most original superhero movie ever made. At its heart it never forgets about the human element, always a strong factor in any Shyamalan film. It's not really about saving the world, it's about two people who have forgotten how to communicate.

Signs, however, is where it all falls apart. Like The Happening, his latest offering, Signs is all about the invasion of the everyday. In The Happening, it's malevolent plants, in Signs it's amore prosaic alien invasion. For some reason it's a movie which is inexplicably popular with the mainstream crowd. For them, this is probably how an alien invasion would occur. And I will admit to being impressed by it when I was in the pictures. However, it's one of those movies that, as soon as the lights come up, you start to question elements of the film. Unlike The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, it falls apart in the analysis. They find a way of defeating the aliens and don't immediately broadcast it? They have an extremely violent reaction to water but are harvesting humans who are something like eighty percent water?

Of course, it's perhaps not so much about the logistics of an alien invasion as it is Shyamalan's comment on the all powerful nature of God (or a movie director). But even that metaphor is delivered in such a ham fisted manner that it would shame a sixth form student. Everything is laid out in such signposted terms (no pun intended) that a five year old child with learning difficulties would understand it. Unfortunately Signs had a 12 rating.

In fact, Signs so upset me that I still haven't been able to watch The Village all the way through (my patience wears thin at around the forty minute mark, by which point pretty much nothing has happened - in his first films Shyamalan's mannered and elegiac pacing was a virtue, a glorious antidote to the overpumped plotting and relentless pace of most other movies, now it just seems dull) and although I do own a copy of The Lady In The Water, I can't work up the interest to watch it, not even with the ever-delightful Bryce Dallas Howard as the eponymous Lady.

But I went to see The Happening at the pictures. It's one of the benefits of having an Unlimited card; I can go and see pretty much anything I like and if it's dross it doesn't really matter because it's not like I have spent six and a half quid on a ticket to see it. Of course, the two main reasons I went to see it were A) Nobody seemed to have a bloody clue what it was about; the best theory I could come up with from watching the trailer was that it was some kind of Jericho-esque movie about the end of the world and a whole bunc of characters being stranded somewhere. And B) Zooey Deschanel was in it. Not only is she absolutely gorgeous and possessor of the most amazing eyes you will ever see, but she's also a truly talented actress. Now that Maggie Gyllenhaal is spoken for in the DC Comics world, can I suggest Zooey as a replacement for Lois Lane?

So I goes to see it. It's about plants producing a gas which makes people kill themselves. Alright. Fair enough. I'm a science fiction/fantasy fan. I can buy that. It's a bit of a stretch to have people kill themselves in such a controlled manner (one early, brilliant, scene has people just walking off the edge of a building - this I can dig, but then we have people slitting their wrists, or a cop shooting himself in the head, then someone else picks up the gun and shoots themselves in the head and so on - it's a little too much to believe that this gas which makes people go crazy would also allow them to act in such a premeditated manner).

There's a lot made of mobile phones going off (this is a big thing in the trailer, hence my theory of end of the worldness). But it's never explained. In fact, during the film, mobiles work when it's convinient for them to work. So, Luigi off of Super Mario Bros. can't contact his wife, necessitating a trip to Princeton, but once he's there, a woman can contact her daughter just long enough for Marky Mark to find out that everyone's dead.

Yes. Everyone. Even though he's only spoken to one girl, who is inside her house, he concludes that 'everyone' in Princeton is dead. And it's not a small place. In fact, according to some sources, Princeton has a population somewhere approaching 30,000. Has she gone and knocked on all the doors? Or is Shyamalan engaging in cheap info-dump tactics so that Marky Mark will know that Luigi is dead?

It's the latter of course. This is one of those movies where the world outside the frame doesn't exist (apart from those moments of pure amatuerishness where a boom mike bobs about in shot, once for at least five long seconds). It's exactly the opposite school of film-making to something like Star Wars or Lord Of The Rings where the world building (a massively underrated factor in creating a believable world that is not our own) suggests that what we are seeing is just a teeny weeny fraction of what is out there.

And the ending. Endings are difficult, especially to apocalyptic stories. Here, Shyamalan wipes out most of the East Coast in a laboured metaphor relating somehow to environmental issues (it's ironic that a movie that is so concerned with the environment and the threat mankind poses to nature should spend so much of its running time in green fields) and yet, at the end (after of course the gas has simply disapated, leaving our heroes alive, a deus ex machine of the worst kind, one that is both undramatic and blatantly telegraphed) 'three months later' as the caption informs us, everything is back to normal.

As if.

Seven years after the events of 9/11, an event that is probably one of the sources of The Happening's genesis (the first 'attack' is centered around Central Park in New York and is initially reported as a terrorist attack, something that brings to mind the WTC with a bitter taste in the mouth), we're still feeling the aftershocks. Surely something of the nature of The Happening (and just a quick word about the inanity of that title, it's so vague as to be absolutely pointless - it wouldn't be so bad if it was used in an ironic sense, like Jospeh Heller's superlative novel Something Happened, but you know, I suspect that Shyamalan doesn't have a sense of humour, the one moment of comedy in the entire movie - Marky Mark having a conversation with a tree before realising that it is in fact plastic, is tellingly his best best of acting in the movie, and we all know he can act, Boogie Nights taught us that, it's just that he needs a great director to coax the performance out of him and Shyamalan isn't that) in which millions of people surely died (the first incident occurs in New York City, home to about, ooh, ten million people on an off day) the entire country would be devastated, both socially and economically. But that doesn't quite fit in with the story that Shyamalan wants to tell, which, at it's rather illshaped heart is the maturation of Mark Mark and the triumph of the family unit, even if the aforementioned unit is thirty-three percent adopted daughter. So there's a happy ending. It's like ending a romantic comedy with the two lovers finally getting together and admitting that they are made for each other and then having one of them jump in front of a train. Except not as dramatic.

Peace out.

A Whole New World

It's a strange world out there. From fetishes about eyeball licking to the career of Billy Ocean, there's something for everyone. And so it doesn't come as much of a surprise that pretty much any man you care to ask who will be honest about it will admit to fancying a cartoon character at some point. Most lads' first crush is a cartoon character.

I'll be ridiculously honest here and admit that I still kinda fancy some cartoon characters. We've moved on from She-Ra, Princess Of Power and Ariel the Little Mermaid and we're now on Lois Griffin from Family Guy, Hayley from American Dad and Cortana from the Halo games.

Actually, that one is even more disturbing because she's not even human(ish). It's like that episode of Star Trek: Voyager, Ashs To Ashes when a supposedly dead crew member comes back to the ship having been transformed into an alien. And as an alien she's a babe (I think it's something to do with the contact lens they have her wearing) but as the Doctor helps her revert to her human appearance, she gets less and less appealing. There's something about alien babes, which is kinda like fancying cartoon characters because there's an added air of artifice. So, step up Trance from Andromeda, Chiana from Farscape and Illyria off of Angel (stretching the definition of alien, being that she's actually a God, but the principle remains) and that's leaving off those alien babes who are superficially human like Deanna Troi and Seven of Nine and Aeryn Sun.

The question is why?

It's not a question I feel comfortable with answering because I can only speak for myself and it's a can of worms (issues of the fact that they aren't real and therefore pose no actual threat of hurting/abandoning me and my whole obsession with adventures in the male gaze starting with my first crush being She-Ra, therefore every woman will be compared to something that is blatantly unrealistic leading to something approaching a Mother Complex but wearing golden armour and carrying an enchanted sword (Good God, now we're on to phallic symbols, next I'll be talking about how Castle Grayskull, which is the Sorceresses bastion of power is a vagina dentata and that Skeletor (literally a walking bone) is constantly trying to penetrate it) and then we get into whole tracts of psychoanalysis dealing with my reluctance to deal with the real world - I'm a writer for fuck's sake, avoiding reality is something I do on a day by day basis - which is really a subject I should be saving up for my trip to counselling next week). So let's just leave it at that and I'll say that as soon as I hit puberty, I transferred my allegiance to a combination of Kimberly, the Pink Ranger from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Clarissa from Clarissa Explains It All (and then later Sabrina when Melissa Joan Hart became legal and started wearing ridiculously shirt skirts) and Clare Buckfield in 2.4 Children.

Peace out.

Kong - A New Breed Of Terror

The 1976 John Guillerman King Kong. It's a bit shit isn't it? I mean, yes, it's one of the last glorious gasps of the 'man in a monster suit' genre, and there are some brilliant bits when he goes on the rampage in the Big Apple, and yes, Jessica Lange was extremely fit back in the day. And Rene Auberjonois is always good value for money.

But it's still bobbins. Whoever thought Jeff Bridges was leading man material (he's a good actor, but his is the domain of character roles, he's too low key to be a star) was nuts.

Oh yes. That would be Dino de Laurentiis, wouldn't it, responsible for, among others, Conan, Barbarella, Flash Gordon, Red Dragon and dozens of other films of highly variable quality. Always after the big bucks was Dino.

And King Kong Lives, despite a brief appearance by Linda Hamilton's boobs, is even worse. I hired the video out of the store way back when it first came out and for years was convinced that I had somehow made it up because I could never find it again. The same thing with The Garbage Pail Kids, which I still haven't managed to track down a copy of.

Which brings me, in a somewhat roundabout way, to the subject of this blog: Forgotten movies.

Not movies which have gotten lost n the mists of time, but those half-remembered movies from when you're a kid which stick with you. For me the list includes Howard The Duck (a fifteen year quest to track down a copy of that film), Supergirl (a strange one because it's got none of the weird shit in it tha most of the other films in this list have, but it never seemed to be on telly and you couldn't get a video of it for love nor money), Jaws 3-D, Brides Of Dracula, King Kong Lives, Child's Play (traumatised me as a kid that one, I now own a copy but haven't quite got up the nerve to sit down and watch it - 21 years after seeing it, forced to watch it by my sister, I still remember the nightmares I had about Chucky, and the scene from Damien - The Omen 2 where that woman gets er eyes pecked out by the Devil in the form of a crow and then wanders right in front of an articulated lorry, which is strange because I remember watching all three Omen movies with her and now, watching them as an adult, there's much more disturbing stuff in them than that - the death of the nanny ("It's all for you, Damien!"), the kid who gets trapped under the ice and for some reason the whole scene where Gregory Peck digs up Damien's real mother and finds a jackal skeleton disturbs me immensely). It's mainly stuff that I probably shouldn't have been watching at that young and impressionable age.

There was a video shop in the next village over (we weren't posh enough to have a video shop, hell, we didn't even have a proper newsagents until a few years ago) and because the guy who ran the shop knew me and he knew my dad, he tended to let me get out what I wanted. Sounds awful now I know, but my mam used to send me round the shop for her tabs and they would sell me them. My sister bought her own first tabs by saying they were for our mam. But it was a more innocent age. I suspect that if I had tried to rent out Nine and a Half Weeks or something he would have had something to say. But I wasn't interested in sexy movies. In fact, I got a little nervous when they came on. I was watching The Terminator with my gran and the sex scene came on. I got a little nervous - you don't want to look too interested in case they notice you getting excited, but you don't want to make your apparent disinterest too obvious. Needless to say, when Kyle Reese kicked the bucket, I was over the moon, because it meant that there wouldn't be any more awkward sex scenes. Of course, my gran was a very strange woman. When I was ten, shortly before she died, I went over to her house. She was watching Fatal Attraction and bade me to come and sit down with her while she watched it. That's another movie that's stuck in my mind, and put me off Glenn Close for life.

My Gran was always the first port of call for movies in my life. My mother never really took me to the pictures (in fact, I can only remember two occasions - Superman 4: The Quest For Peace and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret Of The Ooze, the latter of which I had won free tickets for and I can only remember her ever mentioned going to the pictures another two times - for Top Gun and Grease) but my gran would always take me. She would always fall asleep halfway through the film, but she took me. We would go to the Cannon in Sunderland, or the Empire Theatre, which has a small screening room and would tend to show slightly older films. After her death, I only remember going to see Jurassic Park at the Cannon. It closed down shortly afterward, stood derelict for the longest time then reopened while I was at university as a nightclub. Not that I've ever been in. Even when I was in the depths of my degree I still went out in Newcastle.I can't remember a single occasion when I actually have gone out drinking in Sunderland. Sure, I've had a few quiet drinks in the pubs round there (The Transporter, now sadly changed hands and name, The Royalty, Chesters, the Manor Quay) but Sunderland as a night out has never quite appealed. The Empire doesn't show movies anymore, at least, not that I'm aware of.

My first experience of a modern multiplex was when my sister took me to see GoldenEye at the Warner Village in Newcastle (a complex which no longer exists, they knocked it down some years ago to make student accomodation). I'd skived off school for the day, with my mother's persmission amazingly enough. It was the beginning of December and our Clare took me out to Newcastle Christmas shopping. I bought some Doctor Who books in Forbidden Planet - this was at the very beginning of my love affair with that shop. We argued and Clare almost didn't take me. But take me she did - our Clare has always had a very high tolerance for my idiocy - and I was amazed. The Cannon had two screens, obviously the bare minimum that it could have to qualify as a multiplex. The Warner Village had twelve. It was an eye opening experience, let me tell you. But that wasn't the big shock. The big shock for me was the fact that there were only around seven people in the screen with us. Now I was used to packed houses. I didn't believe that they could justify screening a film for this few people, but screen it they did (and I have subsequently been to screening with even less people in attendance, including when I went to see Shrooms and I was the only one in the theatre) and so my affair with modern cinema began.

And in a way my childhood ended then. Before GoldenEye, movies at the cinema were a transient, special treat, with the advent of my pilgrimage to the Warner Village, they became something that I could do whenever I want to. I was the master of my cinematic destiny, and I haven't looked back since.

Peace out.

You Can't Get There From Here

WARNING - CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR
"INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL"
AND ALSO, GRATUITOUS USE OF THE PHRASE
"THE EIGHTIES WERE THE GREATEST ERA OF FILM EVER"

Indiana Jones - or, as the adult, grown up version has him, Henry Jones, Jnr - is back. It's been nineteen years since we last saw him, at least properly. In the long hiatus, we've had the TV series but it was like a Stepford version of Indy, bereft of the thrills and matinee joys that made the original trilogy so damn entertaining.

Nineteen years. It's a long time, especially considering that Harrison Ford was not a young man even when they did Raiders Of The Lost Ark. It's also strange when you consider that Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade is very much a final act. It even has them riding off into the sunset at the end, father and son reconciled, evil defeated. So, while it's always nice to catch up with an old friend, sometimes it's better to leave the memories where they belong. Some fires should not be rekindled.

In the nineteen years since Henry Jones and Henry Jones, Jnr rode off into the sunset movies have changed immeasurably. CGI has risen swiftly, gone from its brash youth like a bull in a china shop to being a valuable tool in skilled hands. Superstars have burned brightly and then faded just as fast (and speaking of which, isn't it sad that all three of Indy's girls - Karen Allen, Kate Capshaw and the divine Alison Doody - seem to have faded into obscurity following their adventure). The global political scene has changed; the Cold War has finished, new enemies have emerged...

So Indiana Jones is a relic of a bygone age. And cleverly, they play with that notion in the film itself. It's nineteen years after the events of The Last Crusade. Indy is still teaching, but Marcus Brody has passed away, as has Henry Jones, Snr. There is a lot made of Indy's war record - apparently he worked for the Secret Service during the war - but at heart he's the same man, although older and crankier and he has the same zeal for archeology. And bringing Indy's dislocation into sharp focus, we have that young rising star, Shia LeBeouf, as a young greaser, looking exactly like Marlon Brando in The Wild One when we first see him.

The plot plays almost like a replay of The Temple Of Doom, but with better villains (the gorgeous and talented Cate Blanchett) but with the Roswell aliens/Erich von Daniken progenitors/The Mysterious Cities of Gold as the plot McGuffin instead of some borderline offensive Hindu mythology. It's a glorious hodge-podge of a dozen or so ideas that almost - but not quite - fits together perfectly.

It's probably no secret now that Mutt is Indy's son. Hell, it was no secret before the film came out. The rumour mill had been going full tilt and it would have been a surprise if Mutt hadn't been Indy's son. It's one element of the script that seems a little shoe-horned in. Sean Connery's role in The Last Crusade was thematically relevent and expertly woven into the plot. Mutt just seems to be there to fill in the youth demographic. One surprise is Ray Winstone's character. We all knew he would betray Indy (this is one area where the film differs from Temple - that film is the only one where he is not betrayed by a friend) but then he comes out as a double agent. It's a brilliant move and is only trumped later on when he reveals he was lying and actually has betrayed him after all.

Despite all of this, Indy IV is very much a film out of time. It tries to recapture the glories of the 80's action movie, because as we all know, the eighties were the greatest era of film ever, especially for fantasy films. And running along the spine of the 80's were the Indiana Jones films. Raiders was there in 1981 at the start and The Last Crusade made its bow in 1989, sandwiched in between them are some of the greatest fantasy films ever - Labyrinth, Star Trek 2, American Werewolf, Supergirl, Gremlins, The Fly, Terminator, Aliens, Blade Runner - it's the birth of modern fantasy movies.

Simce then we've had the rapid maturation of the science fiction movie followed by a rediscovery of its innocence with the rise of the superhero movie. Film has become aware of itself. In a very real sense, film has eaten itself. So much of film these days is post-modern, not in the breaking of the fourth wall sense, but in the sense that most movies are aware of their place, chock full of references to past efforts. It's a movement that gave Quentin Tarantino his entire career (even Jackie Brown is built on seventies blaxploitation). Indy IV doesn't do this.

And maybe that's a good thing.

It's kind of like a throwback. It wouldn't work for every film. Hell, it wouldn't work for many films. Indy gets away with it because of its heritage and the fact that despite his occasional misfires - naming no names but Hook, The Lost World, Amistad - Steven Speilberg is perhaps the greatest director of all time (and coming from a hardcore Scorsese fan, that's a funny thing to say) and if anyone can pull it off, it's the 'Berg.

So, four out of five for Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, losing points for a slightly pointless McGuffin (the previous three films were all about saving the world, Indy IV doesn't have anything like that focus) and for Cate Blanchett's slightly wandering Russian accent and the fact that she wears overalls throughout the entire film and doesn't get into anything more... alluring, like Alison Doody in Last Crusade.

Advide to George Lucas though: Let the franchise lie. It's a happy exercise in nostalgia, but like Star Wars and James Bond, it's time to let it rest or to reinvent it into something new and exciting. But with Indy, I'm not sure that would work, and if it did, it probably wouldn't be the Indiana Jones we know and love. In a way, Indy IV is like a love letter to the 80's (and it's ironic that a fil which is so rooted in thirties chapter serials and fifties B movies - no doubt an Indy film set during the forties would draw upon war movies and film noir - is so adoring towards the eighties). And that is a thing of beauty.

Peace out.

Questing For Peace

Okay. Superman.

In a way, he's the ultimate personification of the American Dream. He's the definitive alien immigrant. And I love him.

It's a long seated love, mainly rooted in the Christopher Reeve movies rather than the comics, because growing up as a kid in the north of England, the only place that I went to regularly that sold comics was the chemists in the Galleries at Washington. It wasn't until I was fifteen that I started frequenting Forbidden Planet, and even then, the whole history of comic books seemed to be far too complicated to just dive right in. It's a hobby that requires a lot of time, effort and most importantly, money. I briefly tried to get into the whole comic book nerd scene, but I was spending about fifty quid a month just to try and keep up with the core DC titles (those relating to Batman and Superman) and even then I felt like I was missing out of a whole load of stuff. So mostly my comic book love comes from graphic novels, where you can be sure you're getting the whole story and there's no worry that you're going to go to the comic shop and find out they've sold out of Part 5 of a six part story. It's not a bad way of going about things. You still get the quality stories (Watchmen, The Death Of Superman, A Death In The Family) without all the stress. So I'm laying my cards on the table here because whereas I would call myself a fan, I'm not hardcore.

So let us tal about why Superman is the greatest hero alive.

When I was a kid, I preferred Batman. Seriously. I mean, Superman was all well and good, but he was invulnerable, whereas Batman was dangerous and real and he could be hurt. And Tim Burton's Batman is a great movie.

So what happened? Well, when I was a kid, I thought that the best Star Wars movie was Return Of The Jedi. Now, I think it's The Empire Strikes Back. But by that rationale, my favourite Star Trek movie (The Wrath Of Khan in case you didn't know) would have changed as well, and it hasn't, and Blade Runner has been my faourite film since I was fourteen (the same age I was when I as espousing the opinion that Jedi was the best Star Wars film). I think a lot of it does have to do with growing up though. What you think is cool when you're a kid is not necessarily what you think is cool when you're grown up, and vice versa. If you'd told my eight year old self that in twenty years he'd not only own several Elton John albums but also actually enjoy listening to them and advocate him to his friends he'd have laughed in your face and then probably run off to listen to Kylie Minogue (again, some things never change, Kylie still rocks) or that he'd still love Mary Poppins and ET and Choose Your Own Adventure books and he wouldn't believe you. So, opinions about some things change and some things stay the same.

Somewhere in between Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (a tiny screening room at the Sunderland Empire, one of only two times my mother took me to the cinema, summer 1987) and Superman Returns (Gateshead UCI, probably by myself aged 25, summer 2006) Superman became my hero. Batman Begins (and like it or not, Batman's legacy was far more ruined by Batman and Robin than Superman's ever was by The Quest For Peace) had come out the previous year and was loved by me but in that nineteen year gap I had read The Death Of Superman (and watched and enjoyed four years of Lois and Clark and also a whole bunch of Smallville, which remains one of the most peculiarly paced of modern TV shows).

The Death Of Superman, originally published in 1993, at about the same period of time that Batman was getting his back broken, leading to one of the biggest shake ups in DC comics history (well, post Crisis on Infinite Earths history), is one of my favourite graphic novels of all time and certainly my favourite graphic novel with a hero like Superman at its core (the others, like Watchmen are limited series, as opposed to part of a serial comic). It was that book which allowed me to finally understand just what Superman is all about.

Not to cheapen Batman, but he does what he does because he feels he has to. He's driven to fight injustice by the murder of his parents. He is, in a sense, a psychopath himself, because he has these deep rooted psychological drives. Superman does what he does because he can. What he does, no one else can so he feels he has a duty. He has an obligation to serve and protect.

This duty is at the core of The Death Of Superman. It features the villain Doomsday, a raging, animalistic creature of mysterious origins. In the first issue he appears out of nowhere and immediately goes about trashing the place. The Justice League try and stop him and get collectively trounced. The entire Justice League. Some of them are hurt, badly. So Supes comes in and, after a long fight, manages to defeat Doomsday, but only at the cost of his own life. He gives so much to protect Metropolis (and Lois in partcular) that he dies. He sacrifices himself to save the city. And he does this without a second thought. . He doesn't even think about anything else. He only thinks to try and stop Doomsday, by any means necessary.

There's a moment in Superman Returns which perfectly captures this sense. It's near the start of the film and the bi action set piece with the plane. It's hurtling towards Earth, promising certain death for all those aboard (which, incidentallhy includes Lois). He grabs hold of a wing, but it comes loose, sending Supes reeling. As soons as he gets his equilibrium back, he's flying back down towards the plane as fast as he can. Naturally, this involves flying in a straight line. Unfortunately, that path is slightly occupied by the wing that's come loose. No matter, Supes just steels himself and flies straight through it.

It's a completely throaway moment, and if you want to be a pedant about it, we know he's Superman, a rogue airplane wing isn't going to bother him. But it's a moment in which you know that Bryan Singer knows and care about Superman. There's a lot wrong with Superman Returns (a lopsided dramatic structure, Kate Bosworth's complete lack of charisma, the whole Son of Superman subplot - which might become problematic if the Richard Donner cut of Superman 2, which has Supes erase his love affair with Lois by turning time back, a la the first movie as opposed to the original version with its 'magic kiss' becomes the default version, which isn't as unlikely as it sounds, given that the HD release contains only the Donner cut, with the theatrical release relegated to the bog standard DVD - and Frank Langella's phoned in performance as Perry White) but its heart is in the right place. If Singer stays on board, and can get over his relentless hero worship of the original Donner film, the franchise is in safe hands. They've already made moves in the right direction, promising a more villain led plot and the recasting of Katie Holmes' soporific Rachel from Batman Begins with the sublime Maggie Gyllenhaal for The Dark Knight is an indicator that they (that is, DC and Warners) are not afraid to admit to their mistakes and get rid of cast members that didn't gel.

Peace out.

"Why Don't You (Fuck Off And Leave Me Alone?)"

Let us talk, you and I, a little while. Let us talk about depression. Actually, no, let us talk about one of the root causes of my depression: Loneliness.

At time of writing, I am twenty seven years old. I live with a friend, although he's not here much. We've lived in the flat for coming up for three months now. Before that, I lived with my mother, and we never crossed paths much either. We both worked full time and we each had our things that we liked to do. So it's fair to say I spend a lot of time on my own. It sometimes strikes me as odd how much time other people spend with their friends. Ashley, for instance, that most famous non-girlfriend of recent times (she thinks I'm too old for her) seems to be hanging out with her friends all the time. Even when I was at school, I never hung out with my friends that much. Blades came over for tea once a week, we usually had a night out once a week and then every so often we would have a party at someone's (usually Gilli's or Emma's) house. I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times we all went out as a group of friends to the pictures or whatever (me and Blades alone went a few more times) and I can't really remember us just hanging out outside of school. How did I therefore spend my time? Well, I must have spent a lot of it writing, altough I can't remember coming in from school and sitting down to write. I remember spending most of my study leave for my GCSE's writing the first draft of 'The Trouble With Girls'. That was when I first had my electric typewriter. I still have the draft lying around somewhere, seventy some pages crammed full of tiny type. I hadn't at that point learned about double spacing or even leaving acceptable margins. It was more an exercise in getting as many words down on each page.

I did spend a lot of time watching movies. I know when me and Sarah were going out I was at the height of my film buff phase - I was all about Scorsese and Coppola. It's from this period of my life that movies like Taxi Driver and Short Cuts stem from. It's also from this period that my first bout of depression stems from.

While me and Sarah were going out, I was writing the original screenplay that eventually formed the basis for my novel 'Various Artists'. At its heart, it is a novel about trying to find yourself and maybe finding that the person you're interested in isn't the best person for you. It's about suffocating relationships. It's also probably the funniest thing I've written, but even then it ends with a suicide. Gordy, having been dumped by Sophie, finds that he can't cope without her and in a bout of madness, ends his own life. And this is the novel I was writing when I was going out with Sarah. If you want to get analystical about it, the Mary-Sue of the novel for me is Will, who goes out on his first date, enters into a relationship and then kinda freaks out and feels like it's not for him. That was me and Sarah. I had my first date with Sarah and we go and see There's Something About Mary. Will goes and sees Star Wars at the old revival theatre. Stuff happens. It's probablynot exaggerating the point to say I had my sexual awakening in that cinema (the cinema, incidentally, the old Warner Village, is no longer there). I'd only first kissed a girl a few weeks previously. Sarah and I had known each other for a little under a week, we'd met on the Monday and she'd asked me out on the Friday, although our 'date' had been established as far back as Tuesday. We'd first kissed, a hot, passionate, groping kiss (a kiss that led Louise Russell to comment that it was disgusting) on the Friday. I recall that I asked her if, now that we were going out, I could kiss her.

She liked me. A lot. She would probably deny it now but she really liked me. For my part, I really wanted to like her back. And I did like her. But at heart, I was a horny seventeen year old boy and I let my hormones get the better of me. The main point I always look back on when considering our break up (which is something I do far more than I should for an event that's now almost ten years gone) the main reason we broke up was because she said 'I love you,' and I couldn't say it back. At the time I wasn't sure if I did love her. All I knew is that I was in love with someone, unfortunately for Sarah and for me, it wasn't her.

No, there was another girl, one who shall remain nameless, but a girl who I was in love with. I told her so at the New Year's party following mine and sarah's break-up. She shot me down. I was drunk. I might have said some stupid things. I can't remember. I can't even remember how she shot me down. I can't imagine she was cruel about it. But it did lead to a bout of suicidal depression that lasted for thebest part of six months. I had already been on the brink following my break up with Sarah (and my subsequent rejection by a girl who I got off with at a party at Gilli's but who then avoided me), but following New Year, I was convinced that I was incapable of love. So there I was, heading towards my A-Levels at a rate of knots with no clue as to what I was going to do with my life and I was questioning my entire reason for living. Because what is the point of livng if you're never going to make a connection with anyone?

Love is a mutual dependence that two people share. It's an emotional connection that overrides any sort of rational thought. And as they say, no man is an island. Because what do men (or women) do when left to stew in their own juices? Well, I don't know for sure, and I'm pretty confident that it'll be different for everyone but I'm willing to bet that going nuts is high on the list. It's the reason why you see so many old people with cats, because, deep down, everyone's shit-scared of being lonely. There comes a point when you'll reach out and grab hold of anyone or anything you can just so you're not alone.

So how did I get here? Okay. Deep breath. After me and sarah split up, I went to university, had a completely miserable first year as my parents split up, fell in love with a girl named Isabella, asked her out the beginning of my second year, found out she had a boyfriend and then spent most of the second year depressed, buoyedonly by my friendship with Neil and Sue, two of the lecturers at uni. He's a huge Doctor Who fan, so we got along well. Most of my third year was spent in a blissful limbo, neither majorly happy or sad. I had a brief crush on a girl named Kat in one of my practical modules but I doubt she was even aware I existed. All through my time at university I never really connected with anyone. Sure, I'm still friends with John-Paul and Neil on Facebook, but Gilli and Blades are still really close friends with people they went to university with. Maybe it's a side-effect of moving away to go to university, but again, like at 6th Form, I spent much of my time at university by myself. At this point I was fairly sure that I was a solitary person by nature and that I was forever destined to be alone.

Now, that's a pretty sweeping statement for a twenty one year old to make, but even now, six years down the line, it's still holding true.

In my final year at uni, I started working at Global, developed several crushes on both staff and customers, none of which came to anything. I then started working at Mills and, within a few months of Andrea starting, she'd set me up with Alison. Irony is something I appreciate, and so I can laugh (bitterly, true, but still laugh) at the fact that me and Alison split up because I told her that I loved her. Did I? That's a question I don't know the answer to. I know why I said it. I said it because I had spent so long alone (before meeting Alison, it had been three and a half years since I had even kissed anyone, let alone had anything approaching a relationship) that I wanter her desperately. I wanted to be with her. I wanted not to be alone anymore. And she ran away. She didn't even have the common decency to dump me to my face. She sent a text, while I was on holiday (those bonus points just keeping mounting up - not only did she dump me, but she did it by text AND I was on holiday at the time, so she managed to spoil that as well, for good measure - I broke my tooth the following day and haven't been back down to Oxford since...). So me, Blades, Amy and Amy's boyfriend Ali ended up getting shitfaced (well, I got shitfaced - I can't remember how drunk the others were) and bemaoning my shitty life. Amy espoused the opinion that if she was going to do something like that, then she wasn't worth being with. Now, with the benefit of a year and some change of hindsight, I can agree, especially given that although the reason she gave for splitting up with me was that she thought I wanted something serious and she didn't in the June, not three months after we had broken up she was engaged and moving in with someone whoshe barely even knew. The thing of it is, I'm probably best off out of it. Coming to know the kind of person she is while unafflicted with my feelings for her... well, let's just say that it never would have worked out.

But it does leave me on my own again. It's something that's come to the forefront very strongly these past few weeks. I don't know what it is, whether it's the fact that I haven't been to the pub in the past couple of months on a Tuesday night or what, but I feel so very alone and every attempt I make to try and get out there is met with failure. I repeatedly try and make a date with Ashley and she just as repeatedly rebuffs me, I ask Bryony if she fancies going to see a movie and she's got a previous engagement, Clare and Richie always seem to be at work or off doing their own thing (and to be perfectly honest, I'm sick of being the third wheel in their relationship) and Emma and Haz are so set in their own routine that anything that isn't work or sleep has to be negotiated within an inch of its life and I'm sick of having to make appointments to see people who claim to be my friends. I want to be able just to give people a ring and hang out. That's not too much to ask, is it?

I'm really getting too old for this shit.