Putting The Re-Boot In

Skeleton Crew

Contains Spoilers for Friday The 13th

Here's the thing. As you might have guessed from a few of my previius blogs, I am A) A huge fan of horror films and B) The owner of hundreds of DVDs, a great majority of which I haven't got round to watching yet. Hell, I've got a Marilyn Monroe box set I bought about seven years ago that I haven't even opened yet. Mainly it's a time issue, but a lot of it has to do with mood. As in, what film/TV show am I in the mood for tonight.

So that's part of the reason the Rob Zombie remake/reboot/rimagining/re-whatever they're calling it these days has been sat on my shelf for - ooh - years now. I bought it even before it came out over here. I jumped the gun and got the Region 1 DVD. And yet it's still. Just. Sitting. There. It mocks me sometimes in the middle of the night. But I made the mistake of soaking up all the reviews which sad that it was a bad film. And that was most of them. I don't recall a single positive review (and now Zombie's making a sequel, but they made a sequel to the Steve Martin starring Pink Panther so that's not a sign of quality as it once was). You know, don't get me wrong, sometimes a bad review actually encourages me to go and see it. Not that I'm a sadomasochist or anything, but I'm a great champion of the underdog. That's why in my DVD collection today I own films like Tank Girl, The Phantom and the entire run of Enterprise (more on which later).

But where I stumbled with Halloween was all the reviews made a big thing about how the film explores who Myers is. And that's wrong. That's a method born out of hundreds of trashy goth romances. It doesn't enrich the character; it destroys him. Michael Myers is the Boogeyman. He cannot be killed, he cannot be reasoned with and he absolutely will not stop until you are dead (that's actually the Terminator there, but both him and Michael Myers come from the same stock). You flesh him out, give him a background, give him motivation, then it's just another nutter with a knife on the loose.

That's why the Blair Witch was so scary; you never saw anything, you never understood anything, it just happened. As soon as you get a guy in a big rubber costume running around it's simply not real anymore. And so you have Michael Myers explained away and he stops being a force of evil and he's just a guy in a dodgy mask.

Another film with a man in a dodgy mask is Friday the 13th, the remake of which I have seen. I wasn't sure about going to see it but I'm sorta not-quite seeing someone at the minute and I knew she's like to go and see it. And it's good. It essentially compresses the first three movies down into one (the first movie comes off the worst, given that it's three minutes of the credit sequence and the second movie becomes a half hour prologue to the main bulk of the story, starring Sam Winchester off of Supernatural.

This compression is by no means a bad thing, given that the first three Friday films, as I've already discussed here, have much the same plot.

It's an enjoyable hack and slash movie, with acres of completely gratuitous nudity (all female, as if you couldn't guess, although nothing as rampant as one of the main cast of My Bloody Valentine runing around starkers for about ten minutes) and some wonderfully gruesome deaths. It isn't in any way revolutionary. It doesn't take any liberties with Jason's heritage.

Well, apart from one thing. In the original movies, Jason just kills. He doesn't take prisoners. Yet here, he takes Sam Winchester's sister hostage and holds her in his little underground den for about six weeks. Of course, when Winchester Jnr turns up, if she's dead then Winchester has to get his revenge. If she's not dead then... actually, there we come to the problem. The movie tries to gloss over it by having Clay's sister take a locket that belonged to Mrs Voorhees (a wonderful if crininally underused Nana Visitor, a long way from DS9's Major Kira) and that's the reason why Jason doesn't kill her, but why would he then slap her in chains in his little dungeon?

It's a niggle, a small one admittedly, but one which edges this film into Texas Chainsaw territory (and I'm sure I hardly have to remind you that producer Michael Bay and director Marcus Nispel previously teamed up on the Texas Chainsaw regurgitation, the only highlight of which was seeing Jessica Beil bloosom), and while Friday might borrow liberally from other horror franchises (it is in effect Halloween with a bigger knife and a rural locale).

But overall, a good film. So, have a plucked up the gumption to subject myself to Zombie's Halloween yet? Not quite.

The screens these days are so flooded with reboots and sequels and what-have-you (probably the best film of 2007, Transformers and this years GI Joe (which has potential to be one of the worst film of all time, even if it does have the mighty Ecclescakes as shiny slaphead Destro and the fantactically grizzled Dennis Quaid as Hawk, were both inspired by toys for fuck's sake). A couple of years ago Stardust made an impact simply because it was based on a book and the last actual-honest-to-God original movie I can remember seeing an enjoying thoroughly was Juno. The big films I'm looking forward to this year are:
1) Watchmen - Graphic Novel adaptation
2) Star Trek - Long awaited reboot of a sixties TV show
3) Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince - Movie 6 in a long running series of adapatations of the novels by JK Rowling.

It's a harsh world out there, one in which the executives obviously think that having a hook, a pre-established presence to lock on to. This is the only explanation for the glut of remakes that we're currently wading through. I can only hope it stops before someone decides to remake Nightmare On Elm Street.

Oh. Too late.

Faith Of The Heart

You know, a lot of Star Trek fan hate the theme tune for Enterprise. It's true. They're so indoctrinated into what a Trek theme should be (bombastic, orchestral, full of rising crescendoes and strings) that a soft rock ballad sits ill with them.

Am I one of them?

Well, yes and no. I don't think it's a particularly good theme song, but I applaud the decision to do something a little different. If only that philosophy had continued on over into the show itself.

I've recently been reading a book in the BFI TV series about Star Trek, by Ina Rae Hark. She starts out with a lot of good stuff on the original series, TNG and especially DS9, then trails off when it comes to Voyager and has clearly exhausted herself by the time she comes round to discussing Enterprise. And it's really not her fault, because there's very little to talk about concerning Enterprise. Despite the alleged efforts of Berman and Braga, it's a very vacuous show. It doesn't even have the strong backbone of characters that saved Voyager (even if those characters only accounted for a third of the cast). Archer is a dullard, continuing on Trek's seeming obsession with giving characters obscure hobbies. In this case water polo.

Water polo. Fucking water polo? This is a series which, it was claimed, would get back to basics and make the characters more like us than the idealised versions from the 24th century. And what sport do they make the captain a fan of? American football? Hockey? Hell, by this point I would even accept basketball. But water polo? I mean, do you even know anybody who likes water polo let alone watches matches religiously?

Hark also points out that each of the writers of TNG who went on to DS9 and Voyager all had their own little niches - Ron Moore would do the big military stuff, Joe Menosky would handle the relationship things - and by the time of Enterprise, most of them had moved on, leaving Enterprise with a writing staff composed of two very old hands - Berman and Braga, who took writing credits on well over half the first season) and a bunch of newbies. It's telling that when they get people in who do know Trek, as when the Reeves-Stevenses are hired for the fourth season, the quality of the storytelling improves dramatically.

Enterprise's biggest flaw is that it is dull. And I'm halfway through watching Season 2 of it now. Unlike Stargate, where I was enjoying myself so much I was binging and watching a dozen or so episodes a day, I can barely watch two episodes of Enterprise back to back. They suck my will to live. And I'm speaking as a hardcore dyed in the wool Trekkie here. It's painful to see the Trek name get dragged through the mud by a show which obviously only survived as long as it did because of the network it was on and the fact that it was stamped with the brand. Had it been around instead on TNG in the late eighties, Trek would have been dead long before now.

Except it's not dead, is it? We have the movie to look foward to. Another reboot. But hopefully one that will return us to what made Trek great in the first place (and it's worth pointing out that the Trek movies still haven't surpassed Wrath Of Khan, a movie which is now twenty seven years old). And it's worth hoping that this movie brings us into the present, because modern Trek has always been a product of the eighties; like it or like it not, those first formative years of TNG established a great deal, some of which was very much a product of the time (the presence of a counsellor, the overwhelming biege-ness of it all, Picard's proclivity to call meetings while the Enterprise is under attack) and some of which was sound judgement (the Federation-Klingon alliance, the Romulans).

Peace out.

Saturday The 14th

Here we are again...

The New Blood

Okay, before I get into this whole self-loathing and talking about how shit my life is, let me just regale you with a brief tale of tradition. You see, it's Saturday the 14th today, which means that it was Friday the 13th yesterday (and in one of the least imaginative marketing ploys ever, the new Friday The 13th remake opened yesterday, creating a rather amusing situation where the two Winchester brothers off of TV's Supernatural both have a horror film out at the same time, Jared Padlecki (or whatever his name is) stars in the aforementioned return of Jason Voorhees, while Jensen Ackles (what? did the producers of Supernatural look for the two people with the silliest name available?) stars in remake of 80's slasher My Bloody Valentine - this time in 3-D! but only in selected cinemas). And while I could talk about the paucity of good horror films- when was the last time I saw a new horror film that wasn't a remake or a reimagining or a sequel... er... well, I did quite enjoy Shrooms, how does that float your boat? - I'm not in the mood. The horror genre is changing, half the books in the horror section are actually 'urban fantasy' which is basically a posh term for stories about having a vampire boyfriend. And it's always a boyfriend, because these stories are all written by women. Horror, friends and neighbours, has been defanged. It would be easy to lay the blame at the feet of Laurell K Hamilton, whose Anita Blake series, started way back in 1993, seems to be the taproot of this whole movement, although you could point out that Buffy and Angel have a hand in it as well. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing (well, it the case of Twilight it is very obviously a bad thing) but it has neutered horror - not many of the writers of these kinds of series' (and they are all series, Anita Blake runs to sixteen books now with another one due in the summer, Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan books, despite only being five years old, are almost at double figures) are as good as Joss Whedon and Marti Noxon and Jane Espenson and all those other people who made Buffy and Angel what they were. Too often they forget the horror and lay of the romance so thickly that what they are writing is essentially Mill & Boon but instead of the wealthy industrialist of whatever, you have a dark and mysterious vampire.

Big fucking whoop - it's anathema to what vampires used to be. Sure, there's sexual frisson in Dracula and most of Hammer's output would be rendered moot if it were not for the allure of Christopher Lee and Ingrid Pitt. But there was also an ever-present danger. Vampires kill people; it's what they need to do to survive. Joss Whedon and Co never forgot that; it's no shocker that Season 2 of Buffy, in which Angel reverts to evil and turns on Buffy - because Whedon knew that if there was no danger there then Angel might as well have just been a Care Bear with fangs. And if anyone can tell me who said that originally, you win a cookie.

Sorry, got a little digressed there. Where were we? Oh yes: Tradition. You see, every Friday the 13th, if possible, I watch a Friday The 13th film. It's kind of a similar tradition to the one where I watch a Halloween film every Halloween. And there's eleven of them, so it's quite a batch to pick from, although many don't offer much to differentiate between them.

Friday The 13th has always been an unloved middle child of the slasher crowd. Less artsy than both Halloween, which preceeded it by two years and whose success is likely the impetus for the production of that first Friday and Nightmare On Elm Street, which came four years later (the same year as Friday The 13th Part 4 - The Final Chapter hit the big screen). It's often seen as a cynical cheap exploitation film, which it is at it's heart. Forget about the whole subversion of Psycho present in the first film, where Mrs Voorhees has completely flipped her lid and has adopted the personality of her (as she sees him) vengeful son Jason (the flipside in Psycho is obviously Norman adopting his mother's personality - both ultimately caused by extreme guilt), that doesn't even last till the end of the final act; it's a bare bones stalk and slash (or club or axe or whatever happenes to by handy. There's nothing even remotely supernatural here, not even an I-shot-him-and-he-somehow-got-up-and-walked-away moment like at the end of Halloween. Mrs Voorhees is dead - her body and head quite decisively have a falling out, that's to an axe.

It's a mildly entertaining film, one which ticks all the necessary boxes and, unsurprisingly, it did the business. So a sequel followed. Then another, and another, ad nauseum. By the end of the eighties there were eight Jason films (and let's not make any bones about it, by then they were Jason films - any pretence towards the audience rooting for a series of increasingly inept horny teenagers was abandoned by the time of Friday The 13th Part 8 - Jason Takes Manhattan) compared with five Nightmare films and five Halloweens. Not that many of them were any good.

Part 2 is a virtual re-run of the first film, only this time starring Jason (although he doesn't obtain the hockey mask till Part 3, in this film he adopts the Elephant Man look). Part 3 does exactly the same thing, just in slightly less bloody fashion and with a dose of ill-advised 3-D (like the few other 3-D films of this period, especially Jaws 3-D and Amityville 3-D - isn't it handy that so many franchises reached their third point just in time for this brief resurgance of people looking like dicks wearing their multicoloured specs? - the 3-D doesn't really work all that well). Part 4 attempts to do something different and is probably the best of the sequels by presenting us with a main character - pre-pubescent Corey Feldman - who is a lot different to the usual horny teenagers (which isn't to say that this film lacks in the horny teenager department) and who actually kills Jason. Feldman's character, Tommy Jarvis, is one we follow through the next two films, A New Beginning and Jason Lives!. A New Beginning attempts to be just that, it is Jason-less, aside from a dream sequences at the beginning. It focuses on a now grown up Tommy (and yes, the timeline of these films is so decompressed it's worse than Jaws, there's a five year gap between the first two film and at least ten years between 4 and 5, despite the fact that the films were, at this point, being churned out at the rate of one per year) and a copycat Jason killer, sadly not taking up any of the hints at the end of 4 that Tommy himself might actually have flipped his lid (in a similar way, Halloween 4 - made later kids - kills off Michael only to have his neice assume the mantle only for it all to be retconned in Halloween 5). The hardcore horror fans got Jason back for Part 6 and it is really here that Jason assumes the role of invincible zombie. Parts 6-8 are generally unremarkable (save for the fact that Part 7 - The New Blood, stars Kane Hodder as Jason for the first time - it's a role he will play up until Jason X and which he has been very vocal about and a great spokesperson for the films, in much the same way that Robert Englund became Freddy to an extent, so too Hodder became Jason and he got justifably aggreived when they recast him for Freddy Vs Jason and the remake) and end in a confusing psuedo-mystical mish-mash where Jason is washed away with toxic waste that floods Manhattan's sewer system every night (?) and becomes a young boy again (?) and then fades into nothingness (?). It's the sort of thing that only makes sense after a crateful of sambuca or during a meeting of executive producers and a pissed off writer. J

Jason Goes To Hell - The Final Friday (and at this point I'd just like to make note of the fact that several slasher franchies have used the word 'Final' in their titles, Friday The 13th is the only franchise to have done so twice and they lied both times) marks a change of tack. For the first time, Jason is truly a supernatural creature, a black smooshy blob capable of possessing people (?). It's a movie which no-one really likes, and certain rights issues notwithstanding, there's a Friday The 13th box set available with contains Parts 1-8. You're not missing much is you don't shell out for a seperate copy of this one.

But the two most recent entries into the saga are like those specials you get on TV at Christmas of old shows they don't make any more, like when the Two Ronnies had all but retired, they still rolled out for the Christmas day show. And because it's a special occasion, you do something big and spectacular. So, first up chronologically, we have Freddy Vs Jason (although Jason X was made first, FvJ fits into the gap between Jason Goes To Hell and Jason X) which is the Wrestlemania of slasher movies. It's a big dumb movie that belongs more in the Elm Street camp than Jason's oeuvre. It's all about Freddy getting the Elm Street kids to fear him again and as a monster mash, it works. It's certainly better than Universal's efforts from the forties when they started shoving every horror icon into the same film (Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, House Of Dracula) in a desperate bid to get bums of seats. It doesn't take itself seriously and it is a shame that the proposed sequel, which would have featured Bruce Campbell as Ash from the Evil Dead movies seems to have sunk without a trace (well, not entirely without a trace, a comic book series emerged last year which seemed to confirm that the movies was dead a buried, especially now there's a remake of Friday and a remake of the original Nightmare on the way, I'm sure that New Line aren't keen on having divergent continuity to confuse the cinema-goers).

And then there's Jason X. For me it's the crown jewel in the Friday series. Most other fans seem to hate it, and I can sort of understand why. It's not terrifically gory, a lot of it is played for laughs and it's another one of those entires in a long-running horror franchise which is usually suffixed with the words 'In Space!' (exclamation mark optional) which includes Critters, Hellraiser and - God help us - Leprechaun. Yes, it's Jason In Space. And it just so happens that it was this entry with which I celebrated yesterday's Friday The 13th.

Why is it my favourite? I know I'm biased, being much more of a science fiction buff than a horror fan but that's not the whole story. Sure, it's a great idea, and it takes the series away from the Camp Crystal Lake locale which - let's be honest - was tired even way before Part 4 (and let me just pause there and point you towards a very informative timeline which confirms the guess I had that Parts 2-4 take place over a very short space of time, and attempts to iron over some of the time-jumps in Tommy's age: http://www.fridaythe13thfilms.com/saga/timeline.html). It is essentially Alien, but instead of a phallic xenomorph with a vagina dentate, we have Jason, an unstoppable killing machine. And it has the most attractive cast for a long while, headed up by Lexa Doig who subsequently went on with co-star Lisa Ryder to do five years on Andromeda, a show which no one seemed to like but which inexplicably lasted five years.

The main problem with the series is the character of Jason. What is his modus operandi? Where do his powers come from? With reference to the other two titans of slasher film, Michael Myers and Freddy, he comes up rather short. His regenerative ability, referred to in Jason X as a freak ability, is nebulous at best - he spends twenty odd years at the bottom of a lake, emerges still as that child (if you accept the theory that the dream at the end of part one is actually a vision) or lives out in the woods by himself without actually killing anyone for all that time, only going on a murderous rampage when his mother has her head lopped off - then he has his skull chopped in half by Corey Feldman, spends another ten years or so in a grave before being reanimated by a bolt of lightning, another year at the bottom of a lake, gets blown up by the FBI, frozen beyond all capability to revive, blown up again, blasted out into space and finally (?) burns up in the atmosphere of Earth 2. Not bad for a little retarded kid who couldn't swim.

His goals are equally nebuolous. Most of the time he just wants to hack his way through anything in his way - unlike Michael Myers there's nothing malicious about his actions, where Michael would lay out bodies and hide things for greatest shock value, Jason just hacks them to pieces and leaves them where they lie. His mother had a very simple goal; she wanted to stop the camp that killed her son, in her eyes, from reopening. Jason seems to have had a psychotic break following the death of his mother (like all good psychopaths, he has mommy-issues) and while at first he seems content to 'defend' the area around Camp Crystal Lake, he doesn't stop at those trying to reopen the camp. Anyone in the general vicinity becomes machete-fodder, and when Jason is taken away from the lake, he simply continues on with his hacking, as witnessed in Jason Takes Manhattan and Jason X, although in those cases, they manage to stop him before he can cast his net wider.

In Jason X we hear of Jason's reputation as a mass murderer, apparently he's responsible for over 200 deaths, and isn't that a lot for a sleepy little town like Crystal Lake? You would think that people would generally avoid the area if it had a death toll like that. After all, there are hundreds of lakes in America, what's so special about this one? Leaving aside the issue of morbid curiosity (as most of the casts know nothing about Jason till he starts picking them off) it's still a stupid holiday spot.

So, final verdict on the series. It's a guilty pleasure, full of gratuitous nudity and classic cliched horror movie behaviour. It's the cinematic equivalent of a Chocolate Orange, sure it looks nice and at the time it's damn tasty, but it's not very good for you and if you eat too much, you'll just make yourself sick.

A New Beginning

I was going to talk about myself a little here, but I got carried away talking about Jason Voorhees. It happens.

So, I've been on holiday for the past week. I'm back at work tomorrow. And what have I done with my time off? Absolutely fuck all. I have watched a great deal of Stargate SG-1, finally seeing the entire damn thing right up through until The Ark Of Truth. I just have Continuum to go and I shall have seen the entire canon. It's only took me the best part of three months. Season 8 was a definite low point, it was water-treading season and it looked for all the world like they'd ran out of money. Luckily, once Richard Dean Anderson eased himself out of the show totally, making way for Beau Bridges as General Landry and the mighty Ben Browder as Colonel Cam Mitchell, things looked up again. And they even managed to get Lexa Doig of Jason X fame in as the new regular medical officer, a role that had remained empty since Janet Frasier's death on Season 7. Unfortunately they named her Lam, so you had a Sam, a Lam and a Cam all at the same time, which isn't good timing.

Thoughts? It didn't need to end when it did. Unlike many shows upon reaching their end (naming no names but X-Files, Babylon 5, Lois and Clark) it didn't feel tired. Maybe it was the infusion of new cast members and the jolt of the Ori storyline (both things which other series, X-Files comes to mind, had tried and failed to do) but Season 9 felt very much like a new series. I suppose it's a good idea to quit while you're ahead but you get the feeling that there was at least another couple of season's worth of stuff in there. And the lovely Caludia Black as Vala Mal Doran, we hardly knew ya.

I had made some tentative plans with Debra, but they feel by the wayside. I don't really want to get into the specifics of it all, but I kind of get the feeling that she doesn't want me. At all. When she said she wanted to be friends, I think she meant it, but friends merely in the sense that we don't actively dislike each other. Any hopes for getting back together have been somewhat dashed.

So, where do we go from here? There's not much happening on the dating site front; had a couple of people show interest, exchanged a few e-mails and, since Monday, nothing. Again we come to the conclusion that there is something wrong with me. It's happened to me too many times for it to be a simple coincidence. Now, I'm a nice guy, or at least I try to be. I know I'm selfish and self-involved and sometimes me and tact aren't the closest of friends, but I try, I really do, yet no one seems that interested in me. Not in 'that way'. And all my friends seem to think I'm great; in fact I just got a text from Emma not five minutes ago telling me not to feel down (it's a bit late for that; about ten years too late) and that she thinks I'm a great catch. Well that's all fine and dandy but all those people who think that are people I've known for a long time and subsequently people who have long since passed into the Friend Zone, which is kinda like the Death Zone on Gallifrey but less welcoming.

Every now and then I think that I should just give up on the whole idea of ever finding happiness with someone else and sequester what happiness I can from myself. And while that sounds like a reference to masturbation, it isn't. I could focus my attention on my writing and on being a science fiction fan - watching all that Stargate did make me happy on some level, and not in an entirely facile way. But at the same time, I can't imagine just giving up hope of ever finding anyone.

We'll see.

Peace out.

Selling Out

Go To The Mirror, Boy!

I did have a lot to talk about for this blog, but it's been a long day and it's all just slipped my mind. Oh well, as Fleetwood Mac once sang.

So let's talk about my love life instead.

Come on, you know you want to. Anyway, the only interesting thing I've seen at the pictures recently was the wonderfully disastrous Spirit, by Frank Millers to have sunk without a trace, perhaps not undeservedly. It's a bad movie. There's a lot to admire about it, and it's hideously enjoyable, but it's a bad movie all the same. To criticise it for being overblown would be missing the point entirely. Its lunacy is one of the key factors in its favour (along with a wonderully hammy performance by Scarlett Johansson) and Eva Mendes once more proving that she is foxy, a fact which so many of her movies recently have been in denial about. What it is lacking is a strong throughline - the plot, such as it is, is so perfunctory that it could have been written in large print on the back of a postage stamp - and a charismatic hero. Just because all the women in the story tell us the Spirit is appealling does not make him so. At the centre of the film is a vacuous gap that really needs a Tobey Maguire or a Ron Perlman, hell, even a Nicolas Cage would do.

So, now that's out of the way. Me and Debra. Yes, we're still split up, unfortunately. We're going out this Friday though and there's a big part of me that wants to break down in her arms, beg her to take me back. We haven't seen each other since that awkward night in November when we went to Fitzy's in Sunderland together. Sent her a Christmas card over Facebook, got one back. Sent her a text New Year's Eve, got one back wishing me a happy new year. So, at the urging of Andrea, among others, I got in touch with her again (and this is the part that bugs me, it's always me that does the chasing - it would be amazing if she would just get in touch with me and want to see me for a change - and I'm worried that I'm starting to feel a bit like a pest, but then, hopefully, if I was being a pest in Debra's eyes, she would tell me so. Right?) and ask her if she fancies doing something sometime. She does, but she's skint. So we're waiting till payday (this Friday - this month, despite it being 5 and a half weeks since we got paid last is just flying over) and then we're going to the pictures to see the new Underworld film (not starring Kate Beckinsale, not directed by the same guy that did the first two but by a special effects gadge - and we all know how well that turned out for Starship Troopers 2 - so it could be awful but there's in built entertainment value, it's vampires versus werewolves for fuck's sake how could it not be entertaining?). Hopefully we can have a drink beforehand, catch up, have fun. Part of me wants it to be like that magical first date we had when we went to see The Dark Knight. Everything just clicked that night and, yes, it was the start of a period of my life (a very brief period, but a period nevertheless) when I was actually happy. Another part of me knows that it'll just be like Fitzy's and nothing will happen and I'll come home feeling like shit.

It has been getting me down lately, you know. Shaun has recently embarked upon a relationship and despite the fact that his new boyfriend looks like a complete twonk, Shaun seems overly happy. There have even been proclamations of love from both sides on Facebook. Natalie, despite various incidents is still with Simon. Even Kayleigh is with someone (and again, very happy). So what's wrong with me? I'm going to be twenty eight in little under six weeks. 28. Ten years since I left 6th Form. Twelve years since I wrote Cold Heart and started on the path to the writer I am today. Eleven years since Sarah. And that's the thing that hurts the most (actually, it's not, the thing that hurts the most is how completely fucking oblivious everyone is to it and how they have always been) in that eleven years, including Sarah, I have spent something like four months in relationships. Four months out of a hundred and thirty two. Like I'm sure I've said before, I've probably spent more time in those years watching Star Trek. So, just what is it about me?

At school everyone was in relationships. Jav seemed to alternate between Lorna and Tasha on a regular basis, and no ill will seemed to be spent; Emma went through an unbroken stream of boyfriends. Actually, not everyone was in relationships. But those who weren't (Amy and Blades, mainly) didn't seem to want to be with anyone. It's like they didn't feel the need to latch onto someone so early in their lives. Like they were too busy deciding who they wanted to be to decide what they wanted in a partner. Or maybe they were just scared. I have a feeling that's what it was on Blades' part.

But me? I wanted someone. I've had the (mis?)fortune to have erected a pretty solid sense of self at a very young age and I know what I want. It's getting it that's the had part.

Forsaken, Almost Human - I Sink Beneath Your Wisdom Like A Stone

You see, Emma claims that I was fickle as a precocious teen. But I wasn't. What Emma doesn't understand is that I was constantly dealing with rejection. I would make a few moves towards someone, get rebuffed and - instead of embarking upon a Dan-like bout of obsessive behaviour - I would move on to the next person. It's not the most sound way of going about things, I grant you, but in my defence, I was young and didn't know any better. Plus, if you don't give it a go, how will you ever know? That's how I ended up with both Sarah and Anne (well, let's not count that one shall we?) and also two of my non-relationship fumbles. You never know. So maybe that's why I'm going out with Debra on Friday. Maybe I'll get some signal that she's prepared to give it another go. Maybe she's decided she does like me in the right way. Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this. Maybe she's just taking pity on a pathetic little shit. But she always asks me what I've been up to. The postive side of my brain thinks she's fishing for information to see if I'm seeing someone, the proof of the pudding being whether she's asking because she's interested in getting back with me or whether she's asking simply out of polite curiosity.

And, sidenote to Emma here, the two people who I - well, fetishised is probably the best word - in the 6th Form, who I knew well enough to still be friends with even now, I still have very strong feelings for. Gilli in particular, I would still drop almost everything for. So, eleven years (more in the case of Gilli, I can first remember fancying her in Year 10) and my feelings haven't changed. That's fickle how?

Past Prologue; A Man Alone

So that's pretty muct it. Christmas went well, or at least as well as can be expected. I got wonderfully drunk on Christmas Eve (two bottles of wine will do that, but in my defence, it was hardly my fault that no one else was drinking white wine) and offended Jan (like I care, she makes a big deal about it, but she manages to offend me every week and I manage to keep my mouth shut) but I had a big cloud of foreboding over me for most of that week and when it didn't turn to shit it was a pleasant surprise. New Year went well too, the best New Year since we stopped having them at Gilli's, I think. Well, there was the party at Emma's a couple of years ago when I groped Jennie which didn't suck entirely (but again, you've got to look at it from my point of view - me and Haz used to have a lot in common until he got with Emma and now he's forgotten what it's like to be single and to suffer from complete self-loathing, he's settled in to middle-class middle-age and my desperation/loneliness isn't as important to him as decorum). But it was good. Blades had to leave early to spend it with his dad, which was a bit sad, but perfectly understandable. We played SingStar (I acquitted myself surprisingly well, although the high-pitch I tend to sing in provoked guffaws) and fooled about on the Keerswell's new Wii (and that name still hasn't improved over time.

Oh, and my Playstation 3 broke. I got a new one swiftly though, as I was still covered by my HMV warrantee. The disc-reader portion broke and it was either send it off to Sony to get fixed (up to a month) or take it to HMV and get a new one. I took it to HMV. I got a better model (the 80 Gig harddrive, as opposed to the 40 my old one was, with the new Dualshock 3 controller and a free Blu-Ray of I Am Legend (not the greatest film - the first half is magificent, the second half is perhaps the worst vampire movie ever made, and that's saying something) and going through the MetroCentre, I also managed to read practically the entirity of a Doctor Who book, The Pirate Loop, which was fun. The only downside is that I lost the save data from Oblivion and GTA4. But I can cope with that.

So what am I up to now? Well, before Christmas I embarked upon (I'm fond of the word 'embark' today aren't I?) a bingy viewing of Stargate SG-1. Well, I had the DVD's lying around for ages so it was time I got round to watching them. Since the beginning of December I've managed to get through three seasons (and it would have been a lot more were it not for my enforced hiatus when I discovered that my Volume 25 had the wrong disc in and the first second hand copy I managed to track down on Amazon when delivered turned out to be Volume 51). I'm halfway through Season 7 now, the first season which I never really got round to watching on first broadcast. It's fun. It's a lot better than I remember.

And boy, Amanda Tapping is foxy...

Peace out.

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.