Weekend update

Cody is still hobbling about on his bandaged leg, and wearing a waterproof covering over the top fashioned from a long-life shopping bag and some duct tape. Crafty hen strikes again.

Also I have unlocked the boxing rounds on the Wii Fit. Hooray! Punchy punchy!

Wii fit interruption!

Bless me, readers, for I have sinned. It has been two days since I did any exercise. Yesterday I was too tired, after only having four hours sleep the night before. Plus I knew I was going into town in the afternoon to meet an old friend for lunch, so I didn't want to be completely knackered when I met her, so I gave it a miss, telling myself I would exercise in the evening when I got home.

HOWEVAH! In the evening when I got home, I put on my beach clothes and took the dogs down the beach for a run. I was standing chatting to some people next to a small entrance to the beach, when a guy in one of those little jeeps came up off the beach and Cody ran under his car. The guy didn't see Cody and drove over him. Much screaming from Cody, but when I got the guy to reverse off him, Cody was basically fine. He had to spend the night in the hospital on a drip and have a load of x-rays. He has to wear a big bandage on his leg and is an extremely poor soldier, but basically we got off very lightly. Funnily enough, the people I was talking to when the accident happened told both sides of the argument very well. Yes, Cody did run right under the guy's car, but on the other hand, a dog should be able to run around on the beach without having to watch for traffic. (Note that this was not one of the usual traffic entrances to the beach, which is why I wasn't really watching for traffic). Also the guy in the jeep, when he saw that Cody was not dead, just fucked off. Thanks, guy.

Really though, it was just an unfortunate accident and no major harm was done, except to my exercise programme. But it did give me a shock, which is why I spent most of the day today either eating Maltesers or sleeping rather than exercising. I'm not sure I can explain that adequately to my Wii fit trainer.

It's okay, he's not a real bear

Paddington is back.

Ray's regrets

I'm sure there are a few, but one of the things I suspect Ray might regret is asking me to blog my Wii Fit experience. Because, you know, I will. In detail.

Today I had a 20 minute workout which included

• hula hooping
• jogging
• leg extensions
• torso and waist twists
• a lecture about my crappy balance (screw you, machine! I'll show you!)
• step class
• slalom skiing (which involved letting down my tiny Mii skiier, because I am unbalanced)

Life lessons taught today: I should visualise my ideal body while doing my muscle exercises (this is actually true, I should do that).

Conclusions come to about Wii today: I am going to ditch the male trainer in favour of the female one, because until now I didn't notice he has a stupid tiny ponytail and his smug gob makes me want to kick him.

Favourite exercise: Running, because it gives you nice backgrounds to run past so you feel like you're making progress, and you have a pacer Mii who runs just in front of you. Also, tiny Nintendogs run up to you periodically during your run, thus mirroring REAL LIFE. I believe it will not be long before Nintendo make a Wii Fit/Nintendog crossover, where you can bring your Nintendogs out for a run on your Wii Fit. Perhaps this has already happened.

I am thinking of making a new blog, which will just blog the Wii Fit, so that people who couldn't give a crap about my exercise "program" can avoid reading about it. I predict my enthusiasm for it will last approximately six months, though, so maybe it's not worth it.

The thing is, I do feel like a bit of a tool for having this latest gadget and getting all excited about it, but the thing is that it fulfils a long-held desire to be able to do a bit of running and training and so on without anyone seeing me.

F**k you, I won't do what you tell me

Apparently I'm old. According to the (presumably) young woman on Morning Ireland this morning who was talking about Oxegen this weekend, the fact that Rage Against the Machine have reformed is "good news for older rockers".

There's something about the phrase "older rockers" that conjures up images of... well, geezers in Sabbath t-shirts who complain about all this modern noise and still wear their hair long even though they don't really have any hair. Or, if you're a woman, Suzi Quatro.

Do you trip up a lot when you walk?

This is what my Wii Fit asked me when it had finished doing my balance test. It also tells me I have a Wii Fit age of 54. I am actually 38. Bastard.

On the good side, it did not say "one at a time, please" when I stepped on it. It also knows that I am a "friend" of Mister Monkey (because it asked me when I was registering), and so when I had finished my exercise program this morning, it asked me if I had noticed any change in his posture. When I chose "no" from the menu, it suggested that maybe I'm not paying enough attention to him. It went on to recommend that I try to build on our relationship a bit more by making more eye contact.

Yes. Life lessons for only €89.99.

The bloody thing is obsessed with "balance" and has a whole section of games just to improve your "balance". I'm beginning to think, however, that it's mistranslating the word, and what it actually means is a kind of combination of balance and reflexes. Because I can balance just fine, but it turns out I'm SHIT at heading footballs. Oh yes.

Cold blow and the rainy day

Our walk this morning was heap o'fun. We walked up towards Mosney, where the army was shooting smaller things at bigger things. A couple of soldiers were posted at the perimeter of where the shooting happens to make people turn back.

Except that Woody did not turn back. Oh no. Woody ran up to the soldiers, gave it the double-time wags, then robbed a cling-film-wrapped packet of sandwiches out of a haversack on the ground and noshed them down in two seconds flat.

I apologised wholeheartedly, but the soldiers seemed unconcerned. "He's about the only one would eat them," one of them said.

At least this is unlikely to happen to them in Chad.

When questioned about his actions, Woody said, "I like to eat all things."

These Foolish Things

Some time ago, prominent Irish playwright Gavin Kostick remarked that he thought that nowadays, the theatre should offer you an experience that you can't replicate on television or in films, and he vowed to come up with such theatrical experiences.

Deborah Moggach has made no such pledge that I know of, and that much is fairly obvious from this book. Don't get me wrong, it's a perfectly pleasant story about an Indian doctor living in Britain, married to a British woman with a dreadful father. When the father moves in to their house, the doctor complains to his entrepreneurial cousin, and the next thing you know, they've set up a retirement home in a dilapidated hotel in Bangalore. It's a cute idea, the characters are well sketched out, people's motivations and actions are believable, and there's even a bit of action and intrigue thrown in. But you just can't help thinking, as you're reading it, that there's no reason for this to be a book at all. It's got Sunday Night Drama With a Quality Cast of Veterans written all over it. Like the novel of The Commitments, there's nothing to it that you couldn't get onto the screen, and a production designer could have so much fun with the creeping entropy trying to reclaim the hotel even as older people try to carve out a new meaning for it.

Perhaps that's underselling it a little--it does have some nice themes of changing lives, shifting priorities, cultural ideas of getting older, dealing with families, and the new place of India in the world. But it just lacks some depth for a modern book. As anyone will tell you, you have to be competitive in the modern market.

Books about motherhood: Can Any Mother Help Me? and We Need to Talk About Kevin

If I was a writer for the LRB or some similar heavyweight publication, I'd have added Anne Enright's book about motherhood, Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood in here as some kind of bridge between these two books. Having read several extracts from it, I know that it addresses many of the problems tackled in them, but in a humorous fashion. However, I'm not, so I haven't.

Can Any Mother Help Me? is one of them there social history type books. It deals with the history of a circulating magazine started in the 1930s by a group of mothers in the British Isles who felt isolated and bored with their lot in life. Most of them were middle class and well educated, and several of them had been in good jobs before they were forced to give them up when they got married and/or started families.

Although none of them would go so far as to suggest that they resented their children, they most certainly felt the lack of adult company and the drudgery of domestic engineering, not least because they had never really done much housework as children. Moreover, they became housewives at a time when people of their class no longer had servants, but before the great era of affordable labour-saving devices came in, so they genuinely spent most of their time washing and cleaning and cooking and minding children, and they were mostly quite isolated from friends they would have had in their early adult lives. The book contains many fascinatingly ordinary and matter-of-fact entries about things I found quite shocking.

The two stories that really stood out for me were one in which one of the women talks about what would now be called an attempted rape by a male friend, but which she just treats as a silly incident in which he had too much to drink and became overly amorous (things end fairly well for her, however). This reminded me of Beryl Bainbridge's attitude to rape and sexual politics, which is very much one of "so you didn't want to have sex but he made you. Well, there are worse things, eh?" Clearly a major generational difference.

The other was when one of the women found out that her child had Down's Syndrome. The two things about it that struck me were the way in which she found out: the doctor took her husband into his office and told him, then the husband drove her home, got his courage up, and eventually told her some hours later. Again, this seemed perfectly normal to her at the time, but to me as a modern reader it just seemed the most insidious abuse of male power. The other thing, however, was the public admission of the fact that this would make her life more difficult to deal with than if her child was "normal". Offers of help from her friends and family poured in. People rallied round. Now, okay, I know that having Down's Syndrome is not the end of the world, but it does seem to me that on a societal level, accepting the full spectrum of the human condition as part of one's family does seem to put an extra strain on families, because they're expected to behave as though everything's fine all the time, when it may very well not be.

The admission that motherhood may be harder than it looks, that it may turn out to be a mistake for some women, and that some women feel even more pressured into it today than they might have done in the past (because obviously today it doesn't mean that you have to give up your career, or give up anything at all in fact) is at the heart of We Need to Talk About Kevin. On the surface, this is a horror story about a monstrous child who is the product, in a magical realist fashion, of his mother's failings as a mother. She does not really want him, she does not bond with him, he is angry and distant and weird and violent and destructive from the word go, and she has made a horrible mistake with her life. Underneath, it's a book about family pressure, success, failure, the disintegration of larger society, the whims of the unreliable narrator, and the struggle between the genders. I know several people who were expecting one thing when they started reading it, and got something very different. To say I enjoyed the book would be untrue, but it was very good in its coldness and stiffness and lack of humanity.

I would recommend reading these two books together, as I did by accident. The first really does make an excellent antidote to the second, and both give you a lot to think about.

ComedyB and BuntyB are married

It happened last Thursday in God's Own County of Derbyshire, where BuntyB is from. We had a great time, the weather and food were amazing, the people were lovely, and all the family and friends were on top form. The day after the wedding, BuntyB's farming family held a hog roast, with bathtubs full of champagne and beer, a whole roast hog, and field games. It turns out that her family are CHEATERS at tug of war, and that my family are lethal at welly wanging.

A game of scotch was also played, and there was a whiskey chase, in which many members of the party ran (or scrambled) up a very steep hill to try to grab a bottle of whiskey, which was then chugged by all and sundry. An excellent tradition, and just the kind of thing there should be more of after roast pig and copious booze. Mrmonkey did not win the whiskey chase.

It turns out that BuntyB's brother is some kind of superhuman being (or "farmer", if you prefer). The night before the wedding, he was in the hotel bar with us till midnight. Then he took BuntyB home and sat up with her a little while longer. He got up at 6am on the morning of the wedding to take his cattle to market, went home and scrubbed up for the wedding, stayed there till 1am partying, then got up at 6am again to do more farm chores and clear the field for the party. He then proceeded to win 4 tug of war matches and the first whiskey chase. He brought his final trailer load of party-goers home at about 1am, then was up at 6 again for what he referred to as a quiet day, but which still seemed to involve a list of about 40 chores, including cleaning up after the party.

He is going on the list (along with The Man from Roscrea and Queenie's Himself) of people who will be airlifted to my compound when the zombie threat level reaches critical.

It's cool to link to The Onion again

This is how you write books.

It's hard to home black dogs

Apparently nobody wants them. Particularly large ones. I find this kind of funny given how funny they are to look at when they try jumping into the air; we derive much amusement these days from watching Woody fall over himself when he leaps after a kicked football.

Guys, big dogs have less energy than small dogs. Sure, they can reach more stuff and you have to put things like pot scourers and chopping boards up on high shelves out of their reach. And okay, their tails can sweep your coffee table clean with one swipe. And they are at the perfect height to dip their noses into your tea, coffee, or beer when you're relaxing on the sofa.

But they are relatively easy to exercise if you like walking for hours and hours, and they have satisfyingly heavy heads when they put them in your lap and sigh heavily at you. Plus, when you're playing tug rope with them, they look really cool when you lift them up off the ground and swing them around. And they keep the horrible young people away from you.

And you can't hurt them when you step on them, or when they slam their heads into doors. This is not the case with small dogs, who yowl vigorously at the slightest provocation. Big dogs save that kind of nonsense for when it's needed. Such as when another dog somewhere within a 50-mile radius is saying hello.

ACROSS Benefit Comedy Night

This was great, and hopefully will become an annual event. More about it when I have time, but thanks to those who came along and supported it, and really, four top-class comedians for €20? You can't say fairer than that.

A Respectable Trade

I love to have a Philippa Gregory book to read when I'm going anywhere. They're easy to get through and I don't mind leaving them behind if necessary. So I was glad to pick up A Respectable Trade in the bookshop for €4, but almost put it down again straight away, because it seemed, um, exploitative.

The story concerns a lady of the upper classes who is penniless and unmarried. She ends up marrying a Bristol slave trader, who has this idea to bring slaves into England, have her train them as fancy house servants, and sell them on at a vast profit. Unfortunately for him, his wife develops an, um, relationship with one of the men (which is, of course, the bit I found a bit yeesh) and his business more or less collapses and he goes a bit mental.

On the whole, the book is simplistic and a bit slavery-is-bad-DO-YOU-SEE? But there are some lovely touches in it. Gregory reminds her readers, for one thing, that the kind of investment and trading behaviours she talks about in this book (and has, as is typical of her, meticulously researched) are the kind of behaviours that the men in Jane Austen's books would have been engaging in when not flitting around the countryside saving ladies from consumption. The ridiculous social climbing and the horror of debt that seemed to be a feature of the merchant class in the late 1700s are also well sketched. Overall, I'd have to say her intentions are good, her detail is excellent, but her plot and characterization are weak. The book wasn't quite as cringey as I expected, though.

Excellent appearance from ComedyB

In case you missed him on Graham Norton's show, saving Preznit Bartlett from certain PAINT, someone has handily put the whole thing up on YouTube.

(You know you can embed these nowadays)
(Yes I know, but I don't like doing that)

Woody has had his balls off

It's true. If I was better with computers I could probably make some sort of mock up of the poster for Face Off, but call it Balls Off and put Woody's face in it instead of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage's faces. But I'm not good with the graphics, so you'll just have to accept the tortured joke instead.

So now Woody is wearing a buster collar and banging into all and sundry. My legs are a mass of black bruises, Milo and Cody spend most of their time hiding, and the bin gets knocked over about 50 times a day.

Having a labrador with a buster collar in your house is a bit like having a poltergeist you can see.

Hey, Sky HD, I have a question for you.

It is this:

Why exactly am I paying for a Sky HD subscription in order to watch LOST, when RTE is showing it almost a full week before you are?

Why is that, you cocks? Hmm?

I feel safer already

Good time moustache man Willie O'Dea has sent us all a handy bilingual, glossy handbook in the post. It tells us what to do if there is an emergency. It makes useful suggestions such as "do not use lifts". Thanks. I will be sure not to use the lifts IN MY HOUSE if there is an emergency. What makes this information doubly redundant is the fact that every lift in the country has a sign in it saying "in case of emergency, do not use lifts."

The booklet also has an entire page saying "it would be useful to learn first aid", and suggesting you call the St. John's Ambulance in order to do that. It does not teach you first aid, or even provide you with a money off coupon for a first-aid course.

Frankly, the Kleeneze catalogue that comes uninvited through the door several times a year is more welcome than this useless piece of junk mail on which who knows how many thousands of euro have been spent.

Essentially, instead of sending us an actual iodine tablet, this time round the government has sent us a note saying "you know what? You should get some iodine tablets."

Tossers.

Edited to add: in even greater tossery, they've even got radio ads telling us to watch out for these useless booklets coming through our doors. So that's more money fucked away, then.

Dear people who make Heroes,

Please note that I used to really like your show. However, you have turned it into total shite. I can't believe you were allowed to make another series of it, but it seems you will be bringing it back in September.

I will not be joining you. So, yes, Milo, put your shirt back on and go back to your Oirish girlfriend, because we are finished.

That is all.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

It's not just me, right? This book is rubbish, isn't it? I know I'm not the biggest Harry Potter fan under the sun, but I enjoyed all the other books, and would actively rep for The Prisoner of Azkaban as being a really good and genuinely quite creepy children's book. But, man, this is a tedious, overlong, confused book. It really pisses away the whole build-up and, as William rightly points out, contains one of the worst epilogues ever.