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.

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