What cool presents did you get?

I got some cool things this year, such as the Solio, which is attached to the kitchen window as we speak, soaking up any piece of direct sunlight that happens to pass by. I also got this Cary Grant DVD box set, which is a thing of wonder, and this Radley handbag, which I have wanted very much ever since I first saw it some months ago.

Funny thing, I never cared about handbags before in my life. I mean, I like a nice handbag, but I never cared about brand names before Radley came into my life. I love the shape of them, and yes, they have a little dog.

I got two books only, but man, there's no Cecilia Ahern books here. Columbo gave me a book about Pinter, and Queenie gave me a book that I can only imagine must have screamed my name when she saw it. Fair play to her for listening, I am looking forward to it immensely.

Edited to add: I also got some cool jewellery from ComedyB (please don't rob my house, thks). If you are a chap, and you're thinking about buying jewellery for a lady, you could do worse than take ComedyB with you. He has good taste in the bauble area (see what I did there?).

Happy new year, everyone

I know that January 1, 2008, is a couple of days away still, but the new year always seems to me to kick in properly after Stephen's Day, because that's when I want to tidy the house and take the tree down and examine the presents I got and make resolutions to Be Better Next Year and so on.

Looking back at this year's blog entries, I see that I read only something like 20 books this year, and some of them I didn't even blog! (How ever will my four readers negotiate their local book emporia without my recommendations?) In 2008, I resolve to do better. Here are my firm resolutions for next year:

1. Get my week's work done in five days.
The success of all my other resolutions depends on this one. For too long I have spent hours in the middle of the day dossing about and accomplishing nothing at all beyond watching television, and not even good television. This is all fine and good for a couple of months, but it's nothing to base a long-term lifestyle on, so it must stop.

2. Read 50 books.
Last year's book-related resolution was based around purchasing. "Buy no more new books until you've read all the ones in the house," I believe it said. Many people, quite rightly, predicted the abject failure of this resolution, because obviously everybody with even a passing interest in the written word bloody well loves buying books, and I am no exception. Strangely, refusing to allow myself the relief of buying more books seemed to act as a barrier between me and my existing books, so that I came to resent them and chose to ignore them, instead of reading them, which is what I should have been doing. Now I will go back to the easier resolution of reading 50 books in the year. Also, I am introducing a sub-resolution, which is this:

2a. Donate three books a month to Oxfam.
Read or unread, three books a month are going into the shop. Which, of course, allows me to buy more books. Neat, I think.

3. Volunteer regularly at something again.
I spent a few Sundays in the fair trade shop coming up to Christmas, and it was pretty good. I'd like to do some regular volunteering again, if only to get me out of the house once a week. I notice that I also made this resolution last year, and spectacularly failed to keep it. I blame this on the fact that I had not been out of the voluntary sector long enough to miss it at that stage, whereas now I believe I can legitimately have a stab at it.

4. Write a new novel.
For the first time in about seven years, I was without a novel to work on in 2007. I must get a new one. Admittedly, novels for me are a bit like those endless knitting projects that some people engage in, which involve a massive tangle of wool and needles in the corner of a room, to be poked at only on occasion and never, ever finished, but they are satsifying to work on and fun to think about on long walks with the dogs. God, I hope they hurry up and finish the foot bridge so I can get away from the beach with its tedious other walkers and back into the fields where few other people go.

Um, that's it. There are, as usual, no self-improvement promises in here, no getting fit or learning a new language or being nicer to my fellow humans or anything. It's pointless to pretend that I would ever do any of those things. At least some of the resolutions I've outlined above have a vague chance of succeeding.

Queuing for Beginners

Joe Moran's book is a series of short essays on various aspects of the daily routine of the office worker, laid out in roughly chronological order. He gives you a breezy history of commuting to work, having meetings, taking a smoke break, going for lunch, having an after work pint, eating dinner, watching telly, and going to bed, and gives you a taster of some of the theories that have been advanced concerning the sociological and psychological significance of each of these routines and rituals. What's not to like?

Frankly, there's nothing not to like (my employers would love that double negative). It's a highly enjoyable book, a quick but immensely satisfying read, and it's got my favourite thing in it: a nice bibliography compiled BY THE AUTHOR in case you want to read some more about any of these theories or specific histories. It's got bits of architectural, industrial design, and communications theories in it, as well as broader theories about communal living and post-war economic history. Fun stuff.

Blue light special

It may surprise keen readers to know that, when it comes to Christmas festoonery, I prefer things to remain on the tasteful side. However, I can still understand many of the more outrageous choices of my fellow estate residents. I can see that there is a place for giant inflatable Santys that ho ho ho all night long and take up the entire front lawn. I can even see the point (kind of) of the ripples of petit mal-inducing flashing white lights.

But even I don't understand what makes anyone say, "honey, this Christmas, let's have our house look like the BMI check-in desk at Heathrow".

It's beginning to look a lot like...

Today our first Christmas card arrived, from Adrian and Noelle and Lyra.

Now Ghostbusters is on the telly.

Truly the festive season has arrived.

(Note, while looking for a photo with which to decorate this post, I came across this site, which has a story about Christmas cards as war time propaganda in World War II. V. interesting.)

Breaking Master and Commander news

In a recent comment to me, Ian asks if I've seen the new covers for the books. I offer you an example of one here.

Ian reckons these are aimed at the kind of people who read Sharpe books. I reckon they're aimed at GURLZ, because they've removed the ships from the covers and replaced them with people in historical dress, which is what GURLZ like.*

What do you reckon?

Edited later to add:

I am repulsed by these covers, and I think I understand why. Because they remind me (deliberately, I'm sure, as I've said) of the covers for the Philippa Gregory books I read. So I feel like they're being marketed in a reductive fashion that fails to take their true greatness into account.

I realise that this is completely idiotic, given that I am exactly, not just the type of, but the actual woman who reads historical fiction. But Patrick O'Brian books don't have romps and racy sex scenes in them. And, well, you wouldn't understand.


*Oh my god, I'm GURLZ. Jesus, I hate it when I fit a demographic. I hate it even more when marketing people try to sell me things after I've already discovered them for myself.

Imperium

The lady who owns the apartment where we stayed in Rome suggested I read this book before going there so as to give myself a bit of a background into the operation of the city during the late Republican period. Having read Pompeii and quite enjoyed it, I gave it a go.

It's the story of Cicero's rise to the position of consul (hate to give it away, but then, unless you're even more ignorant about classical civilization than I am, which would take some doing, then you already know that) and features much chat about, well, legal affairs in Rome in the late Republican period. Overall, I found the central narrative a little forced, which could be partly down to the character of Cicero. True, he was a great orator, many of whose speeches and ideas about manners have stood the test of time, but as a main character in a novel, he's a little flawed. Or, to be more exact, as a main character in the hands of a professional journalist turned novelist, he's a little flawed. A really good novelist could make you root for him, but Harris never quite manages to get across much about him other than his ambition and the fact that he's not quite as bad as some, but that's really only because he doesn't directly kill anyone. Even in the excellent telly series Rome, he comes over as a bit of an effete eejit most of the time, who can't quite figure out which side is going to come out on top at any time because nobody tells him anything.

However, you can't fault the detail here, or the feeling of being immersed in the city of the time. When we actually went to Rome, it all felt far more familiar, and I had a much clearer picture of how the society of the place worked. And so, let me recommend this book to you as a crash course in Roman history if you're going there on holidays. Then you too can stand in front of the temple of Vesta and think of Cicero having an argument with his wife where he accuses her sister of being "more vestal than virgin" (this argument probably did not actually happen).

Post Captain and HMS Surprise

I can't believe the last book I blogged about was way back in September. I really haven't been doing much reading of late, which I suppose is pretty rubbish of me, and what little time I have spent reading has been partly taken up with re-reading Patrick O'Brian books.

Amusingly, I had my copy of Post Captain with me when on holidays and was able to pull it out of my bag when a conversation about Patrick O'Brian came up, leading my pal Dave to wonder if I maybe carry the entire series with me everywhere I go. Of course I don't, that would be a bit mental. But if you had to carry two, I think these would be the two I'd take. First of all, there's plenty of fun adventures by sea in them, with some beautifully written and quite tense battles even if, like me, you have some difficulty with nautical jargon.

Second of all, these are the books that kind of made me fall in love with Stephen rather than Jack. Yes, I know he's not a great catch. He's kind of funny looking and wears a weird wool suit. He is a laudanum addict and a man who loves nothing more than prescribing a slime draught or a yummy purgative, just to teach you a lesson about drinking. He's also not exactly steady on his feet a lot of the time and will, if left to his own devices, eat nothing but bread rubbed with garlic for days on end. He would probably also dissect your granny if you left her alone with him.

On the other hand, he plays Boccerini on the cello and speaks Portuguese, Irish, Latin, Catalan, Spanish, French, Arabic, and a smattering of Urdu. He's funny and smart and ferociously loyal. He's a really good intelligence agent, and an amazing naval surgeon (wouldn't look at you for under ten guineas on land, though). He is a keen naturalist who can sit and stare at birds or beetles for hours on end, and he will walk all day and night to get somewhere he wants to go, or just to have a think.

He is also, somewhat scarily and surprisingly, handy with a pistol. In fact, he's more than handy: he's deadly. He is the kind of man who can fight a duel with someone and then, when they shoot him, he can take the bullet out himself.

Jack, on the other hand, is merely the kind of man who can whip a convoy of East India Company ships into fighting shape, rescue his best friend from torture, get his own ship's company firing two broadsides in under two minutes, and get a beautiful woman to fall in love with him despite him having no money at all from one minute to the next.

Really, who needs new books when you can re-read ones you already love?

Rome

I have added photos of our trip to Rome in early November. It's fast becoming one of my favourite things to do, this going to a European city in November for a week. I had loads of things I wanted to say about Rome, but there's just too much of it. So, let me recommend a few things very briefly.

First, we stayed here. The lady who owns the apartment is a very friendly American lady, and the apartment is where she actually used to live, so it's got a proper "someone lives here" feel about it, rather than the more usual "it's too small to actually live in, so I'll rent it out to tourists" feel that you usually get. That said, it really only sleeps two people. However, the location is fantastic. We walked everywhere from here; the only time we got the bus was when we were going to the Villa Borghese. We also ate in a bunch of places that our apartment lady recommended, and they were all very good.

My favourite places to eat and drink were here, which does amazing fried artichokes with salt and pepper; here, where we ate fantastic pizza on a Saturday afternoon and watched trendy Roman people go about their well-dressed Saturday; La Scala, which is in Trastevere as well and does the most amazing orange risotto; and this cafe, which does the strangest sour/sticky sweet coffee you ever tasted, in a beautiful 1950s bar.

We also availed ourselves of a private three-hour walking tour, which can be booked by talking to the lady who runs the apartment and brought us to the Forum by a route we never would have thought of by ourselves and which helped us to make a lot more sense of the layout of the ancient city than we would have got by other means. So I would recommend that too, if you've much of an interest in the ancient times.

(I also really liked the dog park in the Villa Borghese, and the cat sanctuary among the temples in the Largo Argentino.)

It is exhausting, though, and really, really crowded. There are people everywhere, all the time, and there are always mopeds up your arse and cars trying to squeeze past you on the narrow streets, and there are no footpaths and everything's cobbled, which sounds lovely but means you have to watch your step. So if you're going, you need to build in some rest time during the day.

Nanowrimo 2007

I didn't do this in the end. I had done no prep and I had no story and no characters which, despite the cheery insistence of the organizers of the event, is actually something of a problem when you want to write a novel. Or it is if your idea of the kind of novel you can write in 30 days is (for some inexplicable reason) somewhat more consistent than one consisting of random pirate attacks or alien autopsies or cats called Greymilliker or whatever people fill their Nano novels with (she said dismissively, as if the reason for her failure to write anything this year was to do with lofty ideals of artistic merit rather than the sad fact that she spends all day watching telly and entertaining her cats with things made of feathers).

Also, last year the November holiday was spent in Paris, where there were fewer sights that we simply had to get out and see than there are in Rome, so there was more time to sit around in cafes and write. Try sitting around in cafes in Rome and you are liable to have the coffee snatched out of your hand by feral pigeons or be knocked to the ground by some wide boy on a moped.

Moreover, I'm a little tired of the Nanowrimo people constantly asking for money to keep the whole enterprise going, as if there weren't enough completely free forums on the Internet where people can meet and chat and update word counts and so on at some kind of reasonable processing speed. I'm sorry that your dotcom era dream of runnng this festival instead of having a job isn't working out to be quite as lucrative as you had hoped, guys, but the only reason I ever felt good about giving you money was because you were prepared to give some of that to projects to build libraries for children in Vietnam. Now you're not even doing that, having decided to concentrate on your "young writers" program instead, which I'm afraid I just see as an attempt by you to build brand awareness in American youth so as to secure your pensions.

Wow, I'm grumpier than I thought.

I am tired.

Teh Festival of Teh Bangers

We had kids round to the house this evening for Hallowe'en, as so often happens at this time of the year. One of the groups of kids had two Spidermen in it. "Is one of you evil Spiderman?" I asked.
"No," said the oldest kid in the group, "evil Spiderman wears black. He's Spiderman 1 and he's Spiderman 2."

During the ad break for Corrie, I noticed...

... that Peelers seems a strange product name for an Irish cheese company to use. Nevertheless, Calvita Peelers are now available.

Also, I know my house is never exactly clean, but the women in the Cillit BANG!!!! adverts are right mingers. Some of those stoves are positively unhygienic.

Alexander

Mother of god, what a mess of a film. I'm not even sure I can wtch it all the way through. The acting is awful, the story is all over the place, and Colin Farrell both looks and sounds ridiculous. He looks like Club Tropicana era George Michael, and sounds awkward, as if he's putting on a fake Irish accent. Don't talk to me about Val Kilmer. Woejious. I still like his horse, though.

New nemesis

You'll be glad to know that I have a new nemesis, because no dog walk is complete without a certain level of tension. While they're building the footbridge, it's difficult for me to access the fields up around Mosney, so I no longer get to see my arch nemesis, The English Guy With the White Van Who Has the Dog That Attacks Other Dogs On Sight Yet Is Not Kept On a Lead.

Luckily, I can now direct my dislike toward The Woman Who Walks Her Boxer By Driving Up And Down the Beach in Her Giant SUV While the Dog Runs Behind. The dog is perfectly nice, which is fortunate, because periodically it gets tired chasing her giant car and decides instead to play with whoever it finds on the beach, because it is lonely and sometimes needs a rest. Today it followed me as far as the main road, and I had to walk back down to the beach with it and kind of shoo it off. She was parked a good way off, or I would have said something to her. Silly cow.

Majority of people satisfied with their health care experience?

For some reason I can't find the link to the actual story from this morning's news, but I seem to remember waking up to the seven o'clock news to be told that the Taoiseach, although sorry for poor Susie Long, nevertheless wanted to remind people that a recent survey revealed that most people are happy with the care they receive in the health service.

I would like to remind the Taoiseach that this survey was carried out on Irish people, who are notorious for bitching to one another about what shitty service they're receiving in a shop/restaurant/public service, and then when asked directly by someone in authority "is everything alright?" invariably say "yes, everything's grand".

This just in...

Anne Enright is IRISH! And she won the Booker Prize! And she's IRISH!

God bless her, your honour. With her IRISHNESS. God bless her.

Theatre Festival fun

Yesterday I took in the last two shows of my theatre festival experience for this year. I did a lot better than last year, because I actually managed to see almost half of the shows for which I bought tickets, as opposed to last year, when I think I saw maybe two plays, largely because of medication-related illness. This year, I managed to miss plays due to bus not coming, traffic being bad on match day, being ill with an incredibly bad cold and deciding I just couldn't sit through four hours of Eugene O'Neill.

All of what I did see was excellent, though. I will get around to reviewing them all in depth (I bet you can't wait) at a later date, but for now, here's the list.

Radio Macbeth in the Project: I always enjoy the Project, and it has the best seating of all the venues I went to, for me anyway. Nice, straight-backed seat, banquette style so that if it's full you can all budge up, but if it's not so full you can spread out a bit, as a kind of reward for supporting less commercial theatre.

Fragments in the Tivoli: Amusingly, the Tivoli seems to be playing a Beckett-style joke on audiences with its seating. It looks very comfortable on the face of things, being proper old-style cinema seats, but then, when you try to sit down, you realise that there is so little leg room that you have to scrunch yourself right up into a ball and wedge your legs firmly into the back of the person in front. Neither Queenie nor Mister M would have been able to sit through this show, and I almost didn't manage it either. If it had been longer than an hour, there would have been trouble.

Road to Nowhere at the O'Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College: Functional seating, but no points to whatever bright spark decided to book a show that would attract an audience of seniors (many of whom would, obviously, have mobility issues ranging from the slight to the severe) into an auditorium where the toilets are on the second floor.

Saturday picks up after a rubbish beginning

My friend called me this morning to ask if I would go to the theatre with her this evening, because she couldn't get a babysitter and anyway there were sporting events her Mister wanted to watch. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what's known as foreshadowing. Sporting events, see?

At first I thought, well, it's a long way into town, but then I thought, fuck it, what else am I going to do with my Saturday evening? And it's always good to see her. So I said yes, I'd love to.

Cut to me sitting in traffic at the Port Tunnel (because I decided to really treat myself and drive into town, you see) for half an hour because yes, as you all remembered but I forgot, Ireland are playing (I want to say Germany?) in Croke Park this evening. So I had to phone friend, make a highly illegal Uey on the M1, and head home again.

Ah well. After that rubbish start, Saturday evening is actually picking up. There are certain advantages to Mister M not being here. Guilt free popcorn, for a start. With butter and maple syrup on. Then there's the fact that the other half bottle of red wine, the half I didn't put in the chilli, is still there for me to drink. And there is Strictly Come Dancing on the telly and two good films on the expensive bit of telly. And one of them, even though I've seen it before, has Paul Bettany in. Well, you can't ask for much more on a Saturday night in, can you? It's almost as if somebody 6,000 miles away was watching out for me.

Trish, what have you been doing all day?

I've been staring at this lady, as have all my Internet chums. You can either see her going clockwise or anticlockwise to begin with, and then you can make her swap and go the other way.

You'll also be glad to know that she has nipples. You can look at them.

Michael Clayton

Last night Mister M and I did something we never do. No, not that. The other thing. Yes, we went to the cinema. We were in town and it was a crappy night, so we figured, why not?

We saw that film Michael Clayton, which has that bloke in it who women want to be with and men want to be like (apparently). In it, he plays a fixer for a law firm who has to clean up the mess left behind when his friend (and, it seemed to me, mentor) has a bipolar episode while working on a really long-running class action suit against a major chemicals corporation. With hilarious results. Well, no. Actually slightly predictable results, really.

Some things about this film were just great. George Clooney, for one. He just looked grumpy and out of sorts throughout the entire film; his performance reminded me of Bruce Willis's in Twelve Monkeys, as if he had been given strict instructions not to do The Look, or The Twinkle, or any one of a number of little things he does to try to exude charm. I liked his relationship with his son, and indeed his family as a whole. It seemed kind of normal. I also liked Tom Wilkinson, because who doesn't? Also the overall seventies downbeat nature of the film is great. It's not funny, there are no jokes, there's no snappy dialogue, it just tells the story and that's kind of it.

However, it's nowhere near as good as everybody says it is. It's simply one of those films that is as good as films should be. Tilda Swinton's character has a major flaw, which is telegraphed from miles away. There are several things that happen that kind of don't make any sense. Above all, the character of Michael Clayton himself is a textbook example of told-not-shown.

I don't want to undersell it, though. I certainly enjoyed it and it was in no way stupid or too long or annoying in any way. It's just that maybe it was slightly oversold to me.

Also, whatever you do, don't go to the official site looking for photos to put on your blog post. Jesus, talk about overdesigned.