The Secret River

On holidays at Queenie's place, I read this book by Australian writer Kate Grenville. Queenie recommended it to me from her personal stash (in fact, she more than recommended it to me, she left it on the shelves in the room where Mister Monkey and I were sleeping, such is her attention to guest comfort details). It's a fine piece of historical fiction about a Thames boatman who commits a crime and is transported to Australia.

It's got some great elements of the best historical fiction in it. First, it's got lots of stuff about boats and rivers and the sea in it. Second, it is, as far as I can remember the details of Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore, pretty historically accurate. And third, it takes its mission as fiction more seriously than its mission as history; it follows the rough outline of the typical journey of the transported convict, but refrains from having the protagonist commit a crime once he gets to Australia, which would, of course, have seen him sent to Van Diemen's Land. You can tell at one point that she was thinking about it, because she talks about it almost longingly, but she steers away from it in the long run and heads for the more straightforward story of just exactly what was required of people to become successful in Australia in those days. It wasn't pretty.

In a weird way this book reminds me of Little House on the Prairie with its details of everyday life on the frontier, grubbing a living out of harsh lands, living hand to mouth. However, I don't think Laura Ingalls ever had to see the things that these people had to see. It's the first book I've ever read that came close to providing an explanation of just how people from Britain were willing to come across the sea and, frankly, slaughter a bunch of people who were just minding their own business in their own home. Desperation is a powerful thing.

The Boleyn Inheritance

This is the book where Philippa Gregory talks about Anne of Cleeves and Katherine Howard. Yet again, we see how shit it was to have to spend your time sucking up to Henry VIII (I have no idea how men managed to do this, it's not like they could pretend he was fabulously good-looking) and how all round rubbish it was to be a woman around this time.

I knew nothing about Anne of Cleeves or Katherine Howard before I read this, and I'm kind of assuming I'm in good historical hands with Gregory, so it is with some confidence that I can express amazement that Henry got away with this shit for the few years that he did. After he divorced Katherine of Aragon and then executed Anne Boleyn, he seems to have gone mental and more or less chewed women up and spat them back out again on a kind of conveyor belt. It didn't help that he was getting older and fatter and less able to hold up his end of the bargain as each wife went by, nor that his succession was so contentious that that everyone with an interest in the future of the kingdom appeared to be chucking women at him.

My respect for Anne of Cleeves is colossal, as it was for Katherine of Aragon. These were women who could easily have run countries in their own right (I'm not sure I'd necessarily have given Jane Seymour or Katherine Howard such a task), and Anne of Cleeves even managed an amicable divorce from the old git. Good for her.

Mutiny on the Globe

Narrative histories about whaleships, mutinies, and shipwrecks are ten a penny, and this one has elements that are familiar to those who've read other ones. Crazy guy thinks he can set up his own society but needs a ship's crew to get him to the right location, then, once he gets there, he kills everyone who's not in on his plan. Gradually, however, he ends up having to kill more and more people in a Richard III stylee.

This book has those elements.

What makes it interesting is what happens after the mutiny is over, which is that the ship fecks off, and two guys are left on an island in the middle of the Pacific with some potentially hostile natives. The book tells the story of how they were, essentially, kept as slaves by the people who lived on the islands, and how they lived there for several years before eventually being rescued by the U.S. Navy. It makes a nice change from being cast adrift in a rowboat and having to eat their shipmates, I suppose, but it does seem to have been incredibly hard work, especially as they could never really be sure they weren't going to be killed, and they were separated from each other almost all that time.

Ringworm!

Ringworm is one of those fun things that if you probably never have to cope with if you are not a) a parent b) a farmer c) a vet or d) someone who gets pets from rescues. Given that I fall firmly into category d), our house has ringworm again. It hasn't been vet confirmed yet, but ginger kitten is showing all the signs: he's got little raised scabs on the back of his neck and his hair is starting to fall out.

Annoyingly, we've run out of quarantine rooms, which means we have no way of separating him from Rory for the duration of the treatment (usually a month), so she'll probably get it too if she hasn't got it already. Luckily it's not very bad, and he is small enough to be wrestled into a bath, so we might not have the six-week ordeal that we had with Linus and Lucy or the four-week misery fest that was Killick's battle with ringworm. His was so bad that Mister M caught it from him.

Unluckily, it does mean another month of being careful about keeping an airlock between the kittens and the other house animals at all times, vaccuuming the house every day, changing my clothes every time I move between the kittens' room and the rest of the house, and having a shower every time I leave them.

It's a good thing they're cute.

Phear it part two for today

Even though we're not keeping him, here are some gratuitous kitten pictures of the ginger kitten. He is not staying, so do not get used to photos of him.

Phear it!

We have a new kitten. We decided when Dweezil was here on his holidays last week that really it's better if Linus has company, especially when we have to put him into kennels or anywhere like that. So I contacted a pet rescue lady and lo and behold, we have a new kitten.

She is approximately 12 weeks old and at the moment is upstairs in my office with her little friend, who is going to be the new kitten for Dweezil to be friends with in his house, but they have an eye infection so we're minding them both here. Our kitten is called Rory, and she is a long-haired tortoiseshell. I am trying very, very hard not to fall in love with her (mainly in case she turns out to be a prick), but it's very hard when she keeps licking my arm really hard to make milk come out of it (I assume that's what she's doing. It's hard to tell with cats) and just being absolutely the most beautiful cat that I, personally, have ever owned.

She could be a prick, though. It's too early to tell.

Stupid RTE newsroom

Two gems from our national broadcaster yesterday. Okay, one of them might have been a misspelling, or a slip of the tongue, and I know that newsreaders don't always listen to what they're saying, but still, to refer to Ingmar Bergman's best-known film as The Seven Seas is surely pretty dense, no?

The other thing that really annoyed me was when the newsreader announced that Cork man Paul Cunningham was on the way to Dublin to collect his Lotto winnings, despite the fact that Mrs. Cunningham was the one who bought the ticket. Surely that makes them her winnings, or at best their winnings?

Perhaps I demand too much from the radio news.

Some day, we will storm the Citadel

But not this time.

Because of our stupid 24 hour delay, we got into Halifax on Sunday night instead of Saturday night, and so we missed the opportunity to actually go on board the Tall Ships in Halifax when we got there. Instead, Queenie and Himself collected us at the airport and drove us to the harbour where the ships were moored for their last night in town, so we could walk around them in the gathering fog. We ate hot dogs for our dinner and held off on talk of home and catching up so that Mister M could explain the difference between ketches and sloops and I could, like I always do, pretend to be able to remember it. It was very cool, because we got to see the Pride of Baltimore II, which was a privateer in the 1812 war, and we saw The Bounty, which is, of course, a reproduction. We also saw a couple of really cool national navy training ships, one from India and one from Germany.

On Monday, which was a scorcher (sorry, Irelanders), Mister M and I managed to haul ourselves out of the apartment to watch the (fanfare) Parade of Sail, in which each of the ships gave a little tour of the harbour before leaving for Lunenberg. We could have gone down to the harbour, but it was hot and packed down there, so we stood up on the hill just below the Citadel and watched from there for a couple of hours. We had binoculars and a camera, but no hats or sunblock or water. And so the inevitable happened, which is that we got amazingly sunburned and felt dizzy and had to go and sit in a very touristy pub and drink beer and eat lobster sandwiches until we felt better.

Queenie and Himself made barbeque happen in the evening, and although it had nothing to do with ships, it was good because it felt comfortable and friendly and proper, and we met their neighbours and played washer toss, which is a little like horseshoes, but with washers and boxes of sand, and we drank beers and it just felt really good, which is just as well, because it tipped down rain most of the rest of the week. Ha ha. Serves me right for getting the Angel Gabriel to give me a good haircut, and buying a fancy hat to keep the sun off.

Fear of flying

When I was younger, my dad worked for Aer Lingus and we used to fly places on standby. This was always an exciting proposition, because you were never quite sure if and when you were going to get away. Many's the boring hour I spent sitting in airports, waiting for the next flight, because there would be enough seats on that for us all. A couple of times, when flying on my own at peak times, I didn't get away on the day I wanted and had to go home or back to my accommodation having sat in the airport all day long, just to come back and sit in the airport all day long the next day. I swore when I got older that I would never take for granted the fact that I could afford to pay for a ticket and just get on a plane when I was supposed to.

It didn't quite work in Belfast this time. We were delayed by 24 hours on the way out to Halifax, which immediately gave me The Fear because I was convinced that we were going to end up like those people in Newark who were supposed to be flying to Knock. The airline strung them along for five days or something, and then finally cancelled the flight. I think a bunch of them are still trying to get their money back.

However, things work better with Zoom, it seems. They waited till everyone had checked in, then bussed us all over to the Belfast Hilton, fed us dinner and put us up there for the night, then bussed us back to the hotel next day at lunchtime to wait for the flight to be ready. They fed us lunch that day too, right before bringing us over to check in. It was all handled very well. Well done the Zoom. And John Hume was on our flight and may or may not have been trying to skip the lunch queue on the second day.

Ways in which TV is not like real life, part 437

I was singing the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies to myself this morning and it occurred to me that if a poor family found black gold, or Texas tea, if you will, in their back garden, their kinfolk would not advise them to move away from there. There's not a chance on earth you would suggest that your newly-wealthy family should pick up, leave the state and drive all the way to California. Why? What purpose would it serve?

It makes no sense.

Me meme!

Before I went on holidays, my mentor, Manuel Estimulo, invited me to join in this meme. I don't usually join in memes because I have a proper blog instead of a Livejournal (that was a joke, please don't kill me). However, who can refuse everyone's favourite fascist?

So, here are eight things you didn't know about me before:

1) I love driving. It's shameful, I know, but I love it. I pray for the day when electric cars, or hydrogen cars, or some non-shameful form of car comes on the market that I can pilot without having to feel like some kind of environmental criminal and curtail my driving. However, like all right-thinking drivers, I only really like driving on good, relatively quiet roads. There are about four of these in any one country, and so my enjoyment of driving is lessened somewhat. I do not listen to Bachman Turner Overdrive while driving.

2) I listen to Farm Week on RTE Radio One almost every week. There is no reason for this, other than the fact that I'm something of a stickler for certain routines. Back when the Big Breakfast was on Channel 4 in the mornings, I couldn't go to work until a certain point in the programme had passed. Now, I have to get up on a Saturday morning to listen to Farm Week.

3) The corollary to 2) is that I have become a morning person as I have grown older. If the weather is fine, I like nothing more than getting up at 6am and going out for a walk, and am one of those tedious coves who will tell you that the early morning is the best part of the day.

4) Although I dislike almost everything about the practice of it, and don't enjoy watching it on television, I actually think golf is a great game. It's sociable, non-combative, age-inclusive, and involves a lot of walking. However, the actual business of golf, with its enclosed lands that could be used as public amenities, wasting of natural resources, and ludicrous motorised carts that remove even the walking aspect of it, really annoy me.

5) People who can walk around the streets in flip flops amaze me. I get a cramp in my foot if I walk in mine for more than two minutes, and I trip over them going both up and down stairs. In fact, other people's footwear in general is a source of amazement to me. The heels are so high! The shoes look so uncomfortable and insubstantial! What is the point?

6) In fact, I'm boringly practical when it comes to buying clothes. I rarely buy handbags or coats that aren't waterproof, just in case, and I won't buy shoes that say on them that they're not supposed to be worn outdoors (what is the POINT?) Although I love fancy hats, I rarely buy them either, because I once saw some skanger rob a hat off a guy's head and throw it in the Liffey, and I live in fear that someone will do that to me and I will look a fool.

7) I look forward to the Autumn, because all my television programmes will start again.

8) I am happier now, both with my lot in life and with my own self, than I have ever been.

I understand that I'm now supposed to nominate someone else to complete this meme. I haven't decided who yet.

Medical tourism

Recently, some friends of mine have been discussing their lives and how well or poorly they've turned out. This discussion was prompted by some reminiscing about college days and the SU Mandate Scandal of 19__, and what the main dramatis personae in that exciting episode have gone on to achieve. Some of us were bewailing our lack of life momentum, but I guess in order for some to succeed, others must look on from the sidelines.

I, of course, am the mistress of underachievement, thanks to my legendary level of laziness in all things. Here's an example of what I mean. I have a friend who runs a company called Reva Health Network, which is a medical tourism website. You go to his site, and you can find health care professionals in many countries around the world, saving money as you go. Sometimes he tells me about this company and what it does, and I get tired just listening to him. Not just because he has a real company that he runs (with employees and everything!) but because even being a medical tourist requires a level of organization to which I can only aspire. If it comes to a choice between getting on a plane and flying to Poland to save €2,000 (or similar) and going into Dublin to see some rubbish doctor you've been going to for years out of habit who never cures you of anything and in fact can't even be bothered to read your notes when you're sitting in front of her or him... well, I know which I'd choose. Which, of course, is why I'm always sick.

Hmm. Perhaps some sort of life rethink is called for at this point.

Bless me, readers

For I have sinned. It is a whole month since my last blog entry. And a miserable month too, for many of us. A month during which the distraction of a blog entry would have been truly welcome. I'm back now, though.

Mind you, I'm not happy about it, given that the place I'm back from is Nova Scotia, where I would very happily spend the rest of my days because it is a) beautiful and b) where Queenie lives. As I said to her a couple of days ago, I really wish she lived somewhere shit, so I could tell her to come home. But you couldn't order anybody home from Halifax: it's too good a place to live, and besides, she knows heaps of lovely people, including Himself who, among other things, taught Mister Monkey how to eat every single bit of a lobster, including the bits that usually get sent back to the kitchen. Never again will Mister M be outwitted by a crustacean.

Anyhow, back now.

WILL YOU JUST STOP FUCKING RAINING FOR TEN MINUTES!!!!!

Ahem.

That is all.

I'm just saying hello!

In a feat of fun of the type usually reserved for Christmas specials, Doctor Who on Saturday featured not one, but two treats. Clearly RTD is doing his darnedest to make up for the recent Dalek story, which had me, for one, longing for the good old days when Daleks did more shooting and less hovering.

Anyway, yes. Two treats. First, Captain Jack is back, and well-explained. I love Captain Jack. He's saucy and heroic and fun and he will shag you, regardless of your age, gender, or species. Second, well, I can hardly bring myself to say it, but when we realised what was happening, we got very excited and shouted "oh my god!" at the television a lot. Yes. It's true. Sam Tyler has had an accident and woken up in the year five trillion.

Now, my ideal scenario for the next two episodes would be for the Doctor and Sam Tyler to stand around in a library lit by flickering candlelight and sneer at each other wittily for an hour and a half before challenging each other to a sabre duel, but that is, sadly, unlikely to happen. I just hope that the writers don't mess it all up.

The world of unfortunate acronyms

MANPADS

I know this is going to raise a flag somewhere and make me a security risk, but really, how have I not heard this acronym before?

See what happens when you use androcentric terminology?

The Greatest Garment Ever Told

I know that many of you have been waiting with bated breath for my take on the election results and the Green/Fianna Fail coalition. Well, here it is.

Is this not the greatest garment you have ever laid eyes upon? Maybe if I am very nice to my friend Leedy, she will make me one, and I can open my own salon, and wear the dress, and people can come and have intellectual discourse around me, and then I can learn everything there is to learn about what's happening in the world, and be like some modern-day Esperanza.

I realise that this may not be what other people think when they see this fine garment, but other people are often wrong.

Jesus, what is RTE's problem?

I have just had to run to turn off the radio with my hands over my ears. Not a gainly sight, I think you'll agree. But what am I supposed to do when Morning Ireland decides to have a piece about the very last episode of The Sopranos and play clips from it? And then get someone from the San Francisco Chronicle on to talk about it?

Assholes.

Furthermore, I would like to thank RTE Two very much for their inability to actually start a programme when they say they will. We set the Sky Plus to record the Saturday night repeat of The Modest Adventures of David O'Doherty, and it managed to start about 15 minutes late, which meant we missed the last seven minutes of it and don't know whether he actually did get into the Irish chart or not.

HI DERE, RTE! A television schedule is not like a hairdresser's appointment book! It is not okay to overrun late at night because you were busy earlier in the day. Please to act like professional television network. Thank you.

Screw you, Japan.

Charismatic megafauna win a reprieve.

Do you like a laugh?

This could be just the thing.

It starts on Tuesday night on RTE.

Do you like to be scared?

In my case the answer is yes, sometimes, but only a little bit. On last night's Dr. Who, for example, there were scary scarecrows. And they weren't just scarey in an if-I-was-a-child-watching-this-I-would-be-scared way. No, they were scary in a "Monkey, I don't like it," way. If I had seen them as a child, I would never have gone walking in the countryside again. Or at least, not for a week or so.

But the time passed and they went away and I had my dinner (yummy aubergines, which are proving to be the hit of our household these days. Wish I could grow my own. Anyway...) and thought little more about them. However, later on Mister M decided we would watch Asian Shocker The Eye.

This is a Hong Kong film made by a couple of mentallers called The Pang Brothers, and it is about a woman who is blind from the age of two, but then, in her twenties, has a corneal transplant which allows her to see. Unfortunately, she starts seeing people who are just about to die, and then they follow her around once they're dead. Ho hum, we thought, this film is very slow. And not scary at all.

Ha ha! Some of you may remember this line of reasoning from the time we watched Ring, which was so not scary for the first hour and a half that I actually fell asleep during it. Some of you may have been bored to tears listening to me talk about how scary the last half hour of that film is. I can only assume that The Eye is kind of the same, because after a good forty minutes of seeing not scary at all dead people, the woman in the film gets into a lift, and in the corner of the lift is an old man, who is obviously dead. He is facing into the corner of the lift, away from her. The lift rises slowly, and we can see him, moving around behind her in the lift. In fact, he is drifting very slowly towards her as the lift rises with agonising slowness towards the 15th floor.

I stopped looking at the screen at this point, and am reliably informed by Mister M that this was the right thing to do, since it was obvious that the man had not died from the happiness of being licked by a fluffy kitten, and he was just about to touch her when she burst out of the lift, to safety.

Except not safety, because she was only on the 14th floor!

We turned off the film after that. But it's in there, in the Sky box, waiting. Lurking. Calling to me to watch it to see if it gets scarier.

I think I might just watch the Dr. Who episode again. After all, David Tennant gets off with Jessica Stevenson in a kind of To Serve Them All My Days setting. What could be more comforting to watch than that?

Miserable election day, people

There was only one thing for it. We found ourselves a torrence of the season finale of Lost, because we couldn't wait till Sunday.

I reckon it's just about one of the best hours and a half of television I've ever watched.

I'm including a gratuitous picture of Naveen, just because it's one of the only two bright spots in an otherwise rotten day (the other one being Michael McDowell's concession of defeat, but I'm damned if I'm putting his picture on my blog).

Happy election day, everyone

Ha! They don't know they're being funny (part 2, the internet years)

This is great.

Separated at birth

Why aren't you funnier?

It's an old cry, I know, but a heartfelt one. Why aren't these women funnier? I've just been watching Neil Delamere's STOLEN Just for Laughs, and as usual, the women were not funny. One of the women in particular annoyed me. She is, apparently, the 30th most powerful woman in the Canadian media, or something. I can't even remember her name, and I just saw her twenty minutes ago.

She was not funny.

Another woman was mildly funny, but nothing like as funny as she thought she was.

And then there was You Know Who, who appears to have turned into Tommy Tiernan, but nevertheless somehow managed to be almost funny. Certainly entertaining to listen to.

It pains me, as someone who is conversationally funny, to watch women who are professionally "funny", not being funny. It pains me. (I am putting my hand over my heart in the manner of one who is pained.)

407 965 0600

Do you recognise this number? It's a U.S. number, and when I answered it on Saturday, a recorded voice told me I had been randomly selected to win a holiday in Florida. I called Eircom and asked how this was a legal call, since I am on a Do Not Call list.

Sadly, the Do Not Call list only applies within Ireland. People from outside Ireland can call me with whatever shit they like.

The Eircom person said that I should find out the name of the company making the calls and ask to be removed from their list. But, according to my friend The Internet, if you press button 9, as the call entices you to do, you then get to talk to a person, but you've also "displayed interest" in the product, and so you are no longer entitled to be removed from their list and it's legitimate for them to keep calling you.

They seem to be fishing for credit card details. And by "fishing", I mean "asking". I certainly won't be answering the phone to them a second time, even though they called again today.

Anyway, if you see this number on your caller display, don't answer it. That is all.

Update update! I posted my experience on a message board, and right before me there was a message from a guy called Paul who also lives in Ireland and has had the same calls. He was also told there was nothing that could be done because the calls do not originate within Ireland.

Tea Clipper vs. East Indiaman FITE!

It can be no coincidence (except it can) that on the very day that London's beloved tea clipper, the Cutty Sark, succumbed to fire and had to dump its cargo, causing massive tea shortages all over these isles, that the Swedish East Indiaman Gotheborg sailed up the Thames, cannons blazing.

Some parts of the above statement are true.

Anyway, once again I curse my metal legs and the fact that I don't live in London. The Gotheborg will be berthed there until June 2nd, and you can go aboard this fabulous replica of a ship that ran aground in 1745, and learn all about the oppression of half the globe. Good, eh?

Luckily, Queenie continues to send me updates on the Tall Ships festival that will be taking place for my benefit in Halifax in July, and I live in hope of seeing the Batavia in the Netherlands in September.

Arrr.

RTE is the weakest link

When Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in Great Britain in 1978, she turned down an invitation to debate Prime Minister James Callaghan on television. The decision was probably based on the knowledge that she wouldn't win, but the reason her team gave at the time was that a president was not being chosen, so why should the two leaders of the parties debate each other?

I wonder the same thing about the Irish elections. Do people in Ireland really vote on who they want to see as Taoiseach, or do they vote based on what the local representative of a particular party can do for them and their local area? Unless you're in Bertie Ahern's constituency, you're not voting for him directly, so what's the point of the debate, really?

Nevertheless, RTE have spent the entire morning so far talking about last night's ridiculous festival of name-calling between the possible Tanaisti (is that the right plural?), and trying to get people to watch tonight's debate between Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny. They talked about it on Morning Ireland, where I got to hear Michael McDowell's "oh no he di'nt!" line that he's clearly been batting around the office for weeks, about being on stage with the left, the hard left, and the left overs. Leftovers, geddit? It's great to live in a country where the kind of line they trot out for the lineup section on Never Mind the Buzzcocks is considered cutting satire. And there was Pat Rabbitte's line about McDowell being like a "menopausal Paris Hilton; he's an inveterate attention-seeker".

OH SNAP!

Oh please. I may not watch the debate tonight (let's face it, I won't), but thanks to Morning Ireland, Ryan Tubridy, and Pat Kenny, and their tireless self-advertising that passes for current affairs programming, at least I know it's on.

Sweeney Todd

Earlier in the year, for my birthday in fact, Mister M took me to the Abbey to see Julius Caesar and we were so pissed off with the whole experience that we left at the interval. There were three reasons for this.
1) People in the theatre were talking along with the famous bits
2) The acting was poor to shouty. There was none of the seemingly relaxed, conversational style of Shakespeare acting that we had witnessed in Anto and Cleo in February
3) The seats were deathly uncomfortable, even allowing for our noble girth. I, a woman with notoriously short legs (just ask my tailor), was jabbed in the knee by the girl in the seat in front of me every time she reached for her mobile phone, which was every five minutes

I put it down to a poor production and thought no more about it (well, you know, except to complain loudly at every opportunity).

But last week we went to see Sweeney Todd in the Gate, and I was reminded of nothing so much as the time we went to see the Rathmines and Rathgar Musical Society do Guys and Dolls about 25 years ago. The acting was, well... Anita Reeves was very good as Mrs. Lovett, and Barry McGovern was excellently creepy as the judge. The juvenile leads were sorely lacking any kind of appeal or lung power, however, and Sweeney himself was a little too shouty and not enough singy for me.

Moreover, the whole thing just kind of smacked of not quite enough attention to sound quality, which is not fair when you're putting on a musical, especially one that hasn't got a lot of dialogue in it, so you kind of need to be able to hear the words of the songs in order to follow the plot. Don't get me wrong. It was very enjoyable, a good time was had by all, the show is great and rollicks along like, I don't know, some sort of bloodthirsty child in a fairground, and even the enormous school group managed to stay quiet most of the time, even if the ones near us did continue to hit each other for a very long time after the show started. Still though, the tickets were €35 each, and the scrapey violins did sometimes drown out the singing, something I don't expect. And the chorus' lyrics could never be made out. And there just weren't enough of them to make a big, threatening sound and a bustling street scene. I don't know, maybe I'm too demanding, but I kind of expect proper, good professionals for that kind of money.

Oedema!

This is what I have now. Swelling of the extremities due to pooling of blood or something. Lovely.

Mister Monkey and I spoke this morning of what I would need to do to try to manage my hypertension without recourse to medication, given that the medication appears to disagree with me. Sadly, what I would need to do is basically reinvent my entire self and become some other, healthier, calmer human being. I would need to eat well, follow a whole food diet, and avoid alcohol and salt. I would also need to be calm (no laughing at the back, there), and meditate and do yoga and all that stuff.

On one level, it's very appealing. I would like to be calmer. I've never met anyone who is as stressed out and mental with so little external stress and cause for mentalness. I've even heard it suggested that part of the reason for my day-to-day boiling rage is my high blood pressure, and that if my blood pressure came down I would be more calm and less anxious anyway, and then would find it easier to become more calm and less anxious. I don't know about that, but I know some things, namely:

I still hate going to the doctor, and it gives me stress.
I really hate going to the hospital.
I don't like taking medication, especially given it makes me puke/cough/swell up like Violet Beauregarde.
I don't want to have a stroke/heart attack/whatever the hell else high blood pressure puts me at risk of. (Nice hanging preposition there. Shut up, you.)

It doesn't leave a huge number of options, does it? Except there is one sliver of hope for the medication I'm on at the moment, and that's pine bark. Apparently it's some kind of miracle herbal remedy, and can reduce oedema. God, I hope so. It hurts to walk. So I will once more consult with my doctor next week and see what she thinks about pine bark. Maybe she might even read back over my file this time!

I would say "fingers crossed", but I can't actually cross them at the moment.

The Gun Seller

This is a highly entertaining book by that nice man Hugh Laurie. In a little interview at the back of my U.S. copy (because you can't just sell people a book any more. You have to sell them ancillary bits, as if it was a DVD) nice Mr. Laurie explains that he wrote the book because a quick review of his diary one day revealed that he had done exactly nothing interesting for six months. So he decided he would write himself a more glamorous and exciting life. It's a simple reason to write a book, and it's a simple book.
Imagine if P.G. Wodehouse had written a thriller.
There you are.

Of course, the fact that it was written ten years ago, or thereabouts, means that it has aged hugely. There's all kinds of things in it that just wouldn't happen now. Everything about international terrorism has changed since then, so it all looks very innocent now. But it's still fun.

Further illness update

The fun marches on.

So, about six months ago I got a really bad chest infection and went to the doctor, who prescribed me antibiotics and inhalers and steroids, and I took them, and the chest infection went away, but the hacking cough stayed. It was constant. It kept me awake at night, it woke me up in the morning. It made it impossible to work, read, or enjoy anything. It made me strain my back and neck from coughing. It was awful, in short. I went back to the doctor about it and was given more antibiotics and more inhalers and more steroids and it still didn't go away.

So then my doctor told me that it sounded like I had asthma, and she took blood to determine what I might be allergic to that could be making it worse. I moved all my stuff out of the upstairs office where the cats sleep to the kitchen, where everything is tiled; I considered putting in wooden floors. She gave me more inhalers, a steroid one and another one. Neither of them really did anything, but I carried on taking them anyway. The cough persisted.

I went back to the doctor last week, a month after the blood tests, to see if they had come back. They hadn't, but when she looked at my file to see if there was anything that could be done for me, she said "oh, you're taking Lisinopril for your blood pressure".
"Yes," I said. "You prescribed it for me because the Micardis was making me sick. The whirling head, the throwing up."
"Lisinopril can cause a dry, persistent cough," she said.

I almost cried. I almost hit her. I almost walked out of her office. But I didn't. Instead, I calmly pointed out to her that she had put me on this drug, and that since she had put me on it, I had spent almost €200 on inhalers to get rid of the cough, and had missed work, and been utterly wretched for six months. She apologised profusely and didn't charge me for the visit.

Now I'm on another drug. This one made me sick and dizzy for the first couple of days, but that seems to have stopped now. The doctor warned me that it will probably make my hands and feet swell up, and might make it hard to walk, which will be fun for me, considering I walk an hour and a half every day.

Stupid pharmaceuticals industry. Stupid genetics. I hate them both.

Three to See the King

Perhaps you are familiar with the high weirdness of Magnus Mills' rather repetitive, hypnotic style of writing. If you are not, you could be forgiven for thinking, like Mister Monkey, that his books are boring. If you like him, though, you admire his ability to create whole worlds of the type you're more used to seeing in the animated films of the National Film Board of Canada.

In this book, a man lives on a windy plain in the middle of nowhere, in a house made entirely of tin. Things happen to him and around him that upset his world where he shovels the sand away from his house every morning. As usual, I hesitate to give much more away than that. This book doesn't have the same tension that some of his previous works do, because at no point is the man who lives in a house made entirely of tin doing anything he shouldn't be doing, and so at no point are you afraid he's going to get caught. Nevertheless, there is still plenty of incident and that Pinteresque sense that a lot is being said in a very short space of time.

The Constant Princess

I can't believe I've only read two new books in the last month and a half. Bit rubbish, no?

Anyway, here's Philippa Gregory again, with a book about Katherine of Aragon. Substantially less racy than her usual fare, but no less fun and interesting for all that. I never connected Katherine to Ferdinand and Isabella, and I never knew how long she was married (sorry, "married") for before she married Henry VIII. In fact, I knew very little about her, and now I know more. It's interesting also to read about the contrast between the Spanish, almost Moorish life that she came from and the English court that she came into. There was no privacy for women in the English court, no harem, no hiding from the king. If he wanted to come into your room and boss your ladies around, well, he just did. And if he wanted to make you have women he was planning to fuck as your ladies in waiting, well, he just did. And if he wanted to basically hold you as a hostage in a strange country, not pay you your allowance, betroth you to his son, and leave you sitting penniless in a little house somewhere while you figured out what to do, well, he just did that too.

It wasn't all gravy for the ladies, is essentially often Gregory's point. She makes it well.

NOOOOO! They be takin' away my Gilmore Girls!

It appears that this will be the final season, and the last episode will be broadcast next week. I am v. sad, as this has become one of my very, very favourite television programmes of all time. :(

Gratuitous post in order to include CUET photo

So I finally bought one of those quilted mattress topper things for our bed, and we have started getting up half an hour later in the morning as a direct result. Yesterday I threatened Mister Monkey that if he did not get up and make my breakfast IMMEDIATELY, the mattress topper would be removed and only reinstated at weekends and holidays.

Emergency care package arrives

Life on Mars finished last night, causing great sadness in the Monkey House. And, as mentioned before, The Sopranos is also finishing soon. Rome is gone, as is Studio 60 (even if it was rubbish, and still has not officially been cancelled). What's a monkey to do?

Luckily, a care package arrived from the Glasgow House this morning, containing several budget movies on DVD, including Paint Your Wagon, Sunset Boulevard, and Gunfight at the OK Corral. It also contained a Dr. Who box set of The Keeper of Traken, Logopolis, and Castrovalva, which are the episodes where Tom Baker turned into Tristan off All Creatures Great and Small, and which were some of my very favourite episodes when I was a kid. It's all about the scary robot.

I've also got the first four seasons of NewsRadio winging their way to me from the U.S. So, the telly wasteland between May and September can be negotiated safely once again. Phew.

Torn

Between wanting to rush all the way to the end of something you're really enjoying because you want to know WHAT HAPPENS, DAMMIT! and wanting to savour every last little bit, because you're aware that when it's over, it's over, and you can never again experience it for the first time.

Things that fall into this category include:

• The Aubrey Maturin novels
• The super expensive posh chocolates that the housemates bought me for my birthday
• The just-started-last-night final episodes of The Sopranos

I don't want it to be over.

Stranger Than Fiction

Will Ferrell is a boring man whose life is the same every single day. He is alone most of the time, but there is no real sense that he is lonely. Then things start to happen to him that could reasonably be called the beginnings of a story, and suddenly a woman's voice starts narrating his life. It's hard to know which comes first. To tell anything else about the film would be to ruin it, really.

Stranger Than Fiction got okay but not great reviews when it came out, and although I can kind of understand why--there are some bits that could maybe be trimmed from it, the wristwatch as framing device could maybe use a little tweaking and may not work for everyone, and there does seem to be some discussion about the ending--it is basically an excellent film. It's funny and sweet, beautifully shot in bizarrely utilitarian locations around Chicago, and it features some lovely quiet acting by a cast you would normally think of as being pretty hammy. It has one of those modern Brian Reitzell hand-picked soundtracks, which makes it seem a little bit like Lost in Translation at times, but without the incredibly boring bits. It's also got a lot of self-referential and post-modern stuff about the construction of stories in it, but without the kind of DO YOU SEE shiteing on of something like (oh god, how I loathe it) Shakespeare in Love.

Also it has Tony Hale in it, who I consider a mark of quality.

This goes up there as one of the lovely stories, for me anyway.

Did you have a good Friday?

Ours was brilliant. There have been a lot of miserable and even slightly down posts on this blog of late, but yesterday was brilliant, I'm happy to report. Not that anything even slightly exciting happened to us. Friends from the Big City visited us, and I had homemade banana bread to give them (even if they didn't actually want it). We spent several hours getting our garden ready to grow things in, and it actually looks half decent now, instead of the bizarre obstacle course of winter buildup and shaggy grass that was there yesterday morning. And the sun shone, and we watched an excellent film, and drank some nice wine, and even our neighbours who had a party last night weren't too loud and didn't keep us awake too late.

It was good.

I has groomin

Everybody has things they like to spend money on, occasional indulgences that they would, if they had shedloads of cashcould, do all the time. False nails, valeted car, that kind of thing.

I have just discovered that if I had pots of cash, I would send my dogs here once a month to be groomed. They look great, they smell amazing (for exactly three days, as it turns out, until they roll in horse poo again), and the women who work there genuinely seem to enjoy the company of wet, waggy dogs. €70 for two dogs was money well spent, especially as it means Cody won't be too hot in the exciting warm spring weather. It's going to be 18 degrees today! Mental.


See if you can spot the difference between pre-and post-grooming dog. I'll give you a clue: pre-groomed also includes flob on nose bridge.

Oh yes, my house is clean.

Master and Commander

There are times in a person's life when, for one reason or another, she is a little low. It could be that she's been coughing constantly and violently for four months and has recently been to the doctor and received a tentative diagnosis of possible asthma, with the recommendation that she gets rid of her cats. It could be that her house is still crowded and her parents have been in and out of hospital for minor procedures that could turn into major procedures down the line. It could be that she hasn't really been doing a whole lot of anything lately and just feels a bit meh.

At times like these, a person needs to re-read Master and Commander. There just is no finer antidote to a dose of the meh. If you are a regular reader of this blog, or anyone who has come into casual contact with me over the last few years, you already know how I feel about this book and the books that follow it. I will simply remind you, therefore, of the tender friendships and the sharp humour, the nautical noise and the naturalistic quiet, and the bright fresh air of the open sea.

IM PLOTTIN MY EXCAPES

UR PUNY PRIZZIN CANNOT HOLD ME!

IM ON UR DESKS

LAFFIN AT UR ASTHMAS

Daybreak

Imagine if, in Groundhog Day, Bill Murray had had to, instead of becoming a nicer person, solve a mystery in which he was being framed for the murder of an assistant district attorney. Now imagine that instead of Bill Murray, it was Taye Diggs. Well, that's Daybreak. It's a fun programme that they had on in the U.S. while Lost was on its ten-week hiatus, and now it's being shown in the U.K. on Bravo.

We've been watching it, partly because it's on telly, partly because it has Adam Baldwin in it, and who doesn't love him? And partly because all our U.S. shows are on hiatus again for another few weeks. I really liked the non-fucking around of the first episode, and the fact that Taye Diggs' character does not spend ages wondering why this is happening, but just tries a different approach to solving his problem every time he wakes up in the same day.

There is one thing that really annoys me about it, though. In the very first episode, the first thing he does when he gets up in the morning is to go to his apartment, having spent the night at his girlfriend's. His dog is waiting in his apartment for him to get back so it can get outside and, presumably, take a shit. It has, again presumably, been sitting around since some time the previous evening waiting for him. I know this because one of the neighbours says to him "your dog has been going crazy in the apartment", by way of a CLUE. To me, though, this just means that every time he wakes up on this day and doesn't go to his apartment, his poor dog has to sit there all day long, unfed and unwalked. Forever. That seems kind of mean.

Birthday cards

It was my birthday a little while ago, and I got nice presents, including a new lens for my camera and dinner out and the theatre and HMV vouchers and nice chocolates and CDs of Durutti Column and Talk Talk.

But sneakily, my favourite things I got are these two cards, one from Ed and Claire and the other from Eoghan. The one Eoghan sent is from the New Yorker collection and would be funny to anyone, but Claire chose the other one just for me, from the Punch collection. See if you can guess which is which.

Ha! They don't know they're being funny

Thanks to Big Boss for sending me the link to this. You can get your context from here, and you can read a wider selection of comics hilarity here (which I think is where the first guy got his from).

Never forget

... how good the Eurovision used to be.

Watch out for Glenn Wool on the left!

Missed!

It was supposed to be my job , according to Queenie, to give the Scots a good kicking for not letting us win the Six Nations at the weekend, but sadly I failed to do my job, because I missed my flight. I hit that weird little pocket of everyone piling into Dublin airport at the same time and everything going slightly wrong and managed to miss check-in by about five minutes, which of course means missing the flight completely, because you can't check in online for the Glasgow flight, even if you've no baggage. So, thanks, mister drunken arsehole (I assume) who drove precariously in the fast lane in front of me on the motorway at 60mph between Balbriggan and Donabate, and who I was afraid of overtaking on the inside for fear you would choose that exact second to pull into the inside lane.
Thanks also to the good people of the long-term car park, who had one single barrier open when I arrived, so I had to sit in a queue of cars to get my ticket, and then park in Zone Y.
Thanks very much to the driver of the bus from the car park, who didn't notice that our bus was totally rammed and that we were all sitting or standing there, waiting to leave, for ten full minutes before a passenger got off the bus and shouted at him to get us to the terminal so that we could get our flights, please.
And a final thanks to the good people at Aer Lingus, who have done away with all their actual check-in desks, and now only have Bag Tag 'n' Drop desks, so that if your flight has just closed and the machine tells you so, you have to go to the Ticket Sales desk to plead to be let on, and there's only one of those, and the queue was, I am not exaggerating, all the way to the door of the Departures section. So I gave up and went home again, stopping to pay €8.50 in parking fees for the privilege of parking for half an hour.

Still, at least I went to the correct airport, unlike some people in my family who were also flying that day.

Also it was the perfect excuse to start reading Master and Commander again.

Official seal

Windy

I pity anyone flying across the Atlantic in this weather.

Poor Mister Monkey.

Phear teh CUETNESS

Okay, okay, I saw it on Ian's blog, but holy crap, look at the cuteness of this.

This is my favourite picture of the lot. "I'm helping! I'm helping! Don't kill me in three months!"

Ha ha, I am the best wife ever

I was talking to Mister Monkey on the phone the other night and he asked me what I wanted for my birthday.
"I don't really want anything," I said, "honestly, I have all the books and films and music I need."
Then yesterday I bought two new albums off the Internet, and today I was in HMV's 3 DVDs for €30 sale, and I got The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers set that has four films in it, and yes, I know it's sad, but a copy of Wimbledon also.

So I guess there was stuff I wanted after all. Ha ha.

Oscars 2007

Or, who cares anymore?

Maybe that's not fair. I'm glad that Martin Scorsese finally got a best director Oscar, even if it's for a film I haven't seen, but I'm of the opinion that the Oscars started to matter less when

• they stopped saying "and the winner is..." and started saying "and the Oscar goes to..."
• all the men stopped dressing in formal wear and started looking like they were going to one of those soap opera funerals
• I stopped recognising half the people there
• I stopped fancying anyone there

Although my trusty People magazine feed did provide me with this great exchange between Joan Rivers and Michael Sheen, who plays Tony Blair in The Queen.

Rivers: What do you think about Tony Blair? Cause you're English
Sheen: Well, Welsh.
Rivers: I know, but Wales IS in England.
Sheen: Well, over here it is.

Got a birthday coming up?

I know I have.

What do you get for the pet owner with everything? One of these.

Don't believe the impact it can have? See it on the cover of the Portland Mercury.

Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke

In possibly the least catchily-titled book ever, Rob Long brings us another volume of What It's Really Like to Write for Television. Apparently what it's really like is a lot of sitting around, either worrying or thinking of stuff to write, or listening to other people's problems, or listening to network people give you notes, or trying to interpret fruit baskets that have come from the network. If you read his very funny Conversations With My Agent, you will already know what this book is about, more or less.

This time, however, it seems a little different. Everyone in his cohort is a little older and they're starting to get pushed out by younger people, even the writers. Everyone has a little less job security than they used to. The shows get lower ratings, they have less of a chance to make it before they get pulled, and everyone just seems to have a narrower window of opportunity and a greater air of desperation as a result.

It's interesting that this is his perception of things, because he is, essentially, a bit of an outsider who, if IMDB is correct, hasn't had a show on the air since 2001. So of course he would feel out of touch and wary. I'd be interested to read something from the point of view of someone who is actually working, but of course, they don't have time to write about what they're doing, they just have time to write.

30 Rock

Please. Do yourself a favour. Find it somewhere and watch it. It is the best thing on television. Really. And there isn't even anyone in it I fancy, so you know that must be a strong recommendation.

American Buffalo

Currently running at the Gate, this is a beautifully designed and excellently acted production of a slightly bewildering David Mamet play. Slightly bewildering in that, unlike other David Mamet plays, you're kind of not really sure what exactly has happened by the end of it, but you know it's something really bad. Or maybe nothing at all has happened and you kind of imagined the whole thing like when you look at something out of the corner of your eye and it looks weird and out of place, but then when you look back it's completely normal again and nothing has changed.

The play concerns Don, played to perfection by Sean McGinley, who runs a shop that sells, you know, stuff. Bits and bobs. Whatever he can get his hands on. He just kind of opens his door and lets things collect inside on the shelves, and they do. People also collect inside on the shelves, and Don gives house room not only to Bob, the slacker idiot man-child guy, played by Domhnall Gleeson (who steals the show right out from under the other two, doing a great impersonation of a very laid-back David Thewlis) but also to Teach, the twitchy, angry, well, David Mamet character, played by Aidan Gillen. Between the three of them they plan to do a thing to or with a guy, concerning a coin. The coin may or may not have been stolen and may or may not be stolen again. There's no way to really tell. Okay, I'll confess that maybe there is some way to tell, but when you're just trying very hard not to cough and that's all you're concentrating on, it can be easy to miss things.

I remember seeing the film of this some years ago and thinking it was very boring. The play, however, is excellent. The three actors play off each other so well, and the whole thing is fast-paced and funny, as well as completely bewildering. I recommend it, if you like Mamet already. If you don't, this isn't going to help you any. But things are... what they are.

Warp Spasm! part 2

There is a bit in an episode of Friends where Ross, having stayed up all night reading Rachel's letter detailing how he is to blame for everything that went wrong in their relationship, flies into his standard "we were on a break" rage. The funny thing about this is when he says "oh, and by the way, Y-O-U-apostrophe-R-E spells YOU ARE. Y-O-U-R spells YOUR!"

If you are a warp spasm person, you understand how this feels.

Today's warp spasm is brought to you by the good people at some stupid Irish advertising agency, who currently have an ad running about how you should buy glasses if you can't see (no, really?). The ad goes like this:

JULIET: Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

ROMEO: Eh, I'm right in front of you. In fact, you're standing on my foot.

ACCENTMONKEY (not actually in the ad as such): OHMYGOD! Wherefore means why, you fucking morons, not where! Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name or, if thou wouldst not (wilt not? I can't remember), be but sworn to me, my love, and I'll no longer be a Capulet. WHY! Not WHERE!

Exeunt, pursued by a bear.

You are completely surrounded by armed BASTARDS!

Life on Mars is back. Okay, it's lost a tiny bit of the shine of the first series, but it's still great.

Antony and Cleopatra

While we were in London recently, we went to the RSC's production of this, which starred Patrick Stewart and Harriet Walter, two marvellous actors. As usual, it is funny to see how much of the chat in the play deals with Cleopatra's advanced years and how much she is knocking on, when Walter is in fact ten years younger than Stewart. But never mind. The play itself is quite strange. There are not many familiar lines in it, apart from the bit about age not withering her nor custom staling her infinite variety, and I'm not really sure what it's trying to say about anything, other than it's nice when your bloke loves you enough to top himself when he thinks you're dead, and it's a pity women are a bit mental (familiar Shakespeare themes, some might say). It does have the feel of a late play to it, and I believe (which means I've just looked it up) that Shakespeare wrote it just after Macbeth, which is interesting, because I was just remarking to Mister Monkey how, for all that Cleopatra comes over as a bit flighty in it, she is nevertheless supportive and does not interfere in his work at all, making her the exact opposite of Lady Macbeth, who was somewhat ambitious. Everyone in the play seems kind of tired of fighting, and the battle scenes don't have the same vim and vigour as they do in other plays. Perhaps Shakespeare was tired.

That said, it's a fun play, with plenty of "my lord, some important action has just taken place offstage!" moments, and it seems much easier to follow than other Shakespeare plays, but that could be because I actually know who most of the characters are already, and don't need the members of different factions colour-coded in order to help me out, though they were anyway. Thanks, RSC, for admitting that Shakespeare can be a bitch to follow sometimes.

Even apart from the colour-coding, this production had several of the strengths and weaknesses I have noted in RSC productions (I R CULTUR) over the years: amazing leading performances that actually manage to make Shakespearean dialogue seem almost conversational and naturalistic, combined with some slightly ropey and earnest supporting characters (including one particularly bad messenger, who got a great write-up on the billboard outside, for reasons that escape me) and a basic set. It's all about the stars. Of course, for Antony and Cleopatra, that was the case anyhow.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

First can I say how amusing it is to me that my husband FORBADE me to buy a copy of this book in case it frightened me, and so I borrowed it from a friend, in true underground style. I have now left that copy with another friend to loan around his circle, and will buy first friend a new copy to cherish and loan out to more people. So it goes with truly classic books that don't have an enormous marketing push behind them.

So, to the book itself. Well, you're either the kind of person who reads and loves zombie books and watches zombie films, or you're not. I can't really explain the joy of having the shit scared out of me by zombies, although the friend who loaned me the book did liken it to the creepy experience you get from watching a load of old Protect and Survive films, and it is a similar feeling. It induces, in me at any rate, a genuinely thrilling and almost paralyzing fear of the dark, of walking on the beach alone, and of being in a house in the country that has a ground floor seemingly composed entirely of flimsy glass (burglars take note), such as my brother's. The result is a satisfactory period of about a week of sleepless nights, and possibly many more nightmares to come, depending on how often I think about the book.

There's a lot to think about. Max Brooks has considered almost every possible aspect of a global zombie outbreak which results in boggling figures, such as the idea of the continental U.S. playing host to some 220 million zombies, and chilling stories, such as the one about the family that flees north above the snow line only to find itself in the midst of brawling, starving families and a bleak future. The little touches are amazing. The big sweep is incredibly detailed and beautifully faithful to current political and topographical regions. And, like all the best horror or science fiction, the zombies can stand for any major threat you care to name. Eurabia, greenhouse gases, the suffocating crush of an uninsured aging population, dumbing down of society, they can stand for anything.

This is one of the most frightening, most inventive, most fun books I have ever read. Just please don't ask me to read it next to a darkened window.