Jimmy Kimmel laying into Jay Leno

Now this is a presenter thinking on his feet. I can't believe Leno couldn't come up with a single riposte to any of Kimmel's remarks here.

I don't like that thing you like

British people seem to have gone a bit mad lately about television, especially the BBC, and what should or shouldn't be on it. People don't want to have to pay the salaries of Jonathan Ross or Frankie Boyle. They don't want subscription channels to get their precious sporting events. Even the comedian and New Statesman columnist Mark Watson, himself on the receiving end of "we shouldn't have to pay for this" complaints about his BBC 4 show We Need Answers, and a great fan of programming related to football (which I personally would rather nobody wanted to watch), would prefer it if there were fewer dance-related shows on the television and has (in jest, of course) asked for the number to be reduced.

I can't help thinking that everyone needs to calm down and stop wanting the stuff they don't like to be taken off the telly. Your telly is fine, believe me. You have no idea what it's like out there in other countries where they don't have the BBC. You really don't. Complaining about having to pay the license fee to pay the salaries of entertainers you don't like is a little like complaining about having to pay tax for a health service when you never get sick, or a school system when you don't have any children.

But it's easy for me to say, I don't pay for the BBC. Except I do, because I buy DVDs and I pay a Sky+ subscription which funds all those second-run channels that the BBC sells its shows into after they've run on the main channels. So I'm a customer as well. And I like dancing. And Jonathan Ross. Sometimes.

And, to add insult to injury, I, through my license fee, am required to pay the salary of this monstrosity. So you have nothing to moan about.

Roll on February

Okay, the first two weeks look like being a bit crap. Mrmonkey will be away, visiting the mothership and renewing his acquaintance with the endless ad breaks of U.S. television, and I will be here on my own.

But then will come the first gigs of spring, peeping out of the calendar like bright crocuses and acting like beacons to steer me through the rocky weeks of the mister's absence.

On February 14th we will be going to Vicar St. to see Midlake, one of our two favourite bands of the last ten years (yes, the Arcade Fire is the other one). To demonstrate how hotly I'm anticipating it, let me tell you that I am actually hoping they play tracks off their forthcoming album, because I could do with some new Midlake about the place.

Then, a mere four days later, we'll be going back to Vicar St. to see Dara Ó Briain. His gigs are a treat for people who (like me) love their comedy but get a bit fed up of the usual stand-up topics--women, eh? fat people, eh? chavs, eh? airlines, eh? Big Brother, eh?--and would like something just a little bit different and, yes, perhaps just a little bit nerdier. Reading the interview with Dara from yesterday's Irish Times (although the interview is a bit peculiarly written) whets the appetite, as does reminding myself of previous times we saw him in Vicar St.

All we need now is for the snow and ice to EFF OFF back up to the Arctic, and we can get on with getting through January and watching the crocuses come out.

Bored Slippy

Minister for Education Batt O'Keeffe (yes, that is his name) has decreed that our schools will remain closed until next Thursday. This is partly because of burst pipes, knackered heating systems, and the fact that many of our schools are in prefabs, which you couldn't possibly expect salaried members of the teachers' union, sorry, the precious children to use in this weather. Also, nobody can get to school because the roads and paths are all too slidey. Buses can't run, and nobody can walk anywhere without being afraid that they're going to fall over.

In a not unrelated development, the senior civil servant who has been appointed as our Bad Weather Czar (whose name I currently cannot find on Google) was on the radio this morning defending the fact that the Republic of Ireland's National Roads Authority buys the same amount of grit every year as does Northern Ireland's roads authority, despite the fact that NI has a quarter the road mileage that we have. He said that the government's priority was to ensure that "primary national routes" were kept clear.

Well that's all well and good for the people who live on "primary national routes" (which is almost nobody, except the elves who live in IKEA), but what about the rest of us mugs who live in glass-road housing estates and at the ends of little boreens halfway up hills? We can all just go and shite, can we?

Everyone's bored with this now. The weather isn't even all that bad. It's just that even a tiny fall of snow can break a crappy infrastructure.

And everywhere is sold out of Yaktrax. This winter is stupid. Roll on spring. When I will be going to London and Stockholm, assuming the ice age hasn't begun. If it has, I'm going to Rio.

Easterly

It's very windy out and about here today. In this photo, Ozzie is not shaking or moving her head at all. That's the wind, that is.

Looks like the weather will turn icy again tomorrow, so it's time to order my Yak Trax so that at least the dogs don't pull me off my feet when we're walking.

Did you have a lovely Christmas? I did. I seem to have cornered the market in Burt's Bees lip salve, though, so if anyone needs any, do let me know. No exaggeration, I think I have ten sticks of it. I did also get a pile of Lush stuff from youngest Byrne, which included a fantastically bracing salt and vodka facial scrub. Almost as good as a long walk on a very windy day by the sea.

Oh, did you have best-laid plans, did you?

Well, now they have changed.

To get the new year off to a rollicking start (all the extra two seconds of it, or whatever it was we actually got today), Lulu gashed the pad of her paw on a piece of glass or something on the beach. Not the part of her paw she actually walks on, more the ankle bit. But she sliced that pad pretty good. So off to the vet on the frozen road we went, where she got sedated and stitched and bandaged.

She's fine, but she has to have two kinds of medication for several days, and the medication might make her sick. And she has to come in on Christmas Eve to have her dressing changed and a new bandage put on. So it means she won't be going to kennels with the others tomorrow. I feel bad for poor Ozzie that her very best playmate won't be around to do kennels with her over the next week, but in another way I feel like Lulu's time has come. After all, she did have to spend two weeks in kennels, alone, when we went to Derbyshire in June. Now she gets to hang out at the parents' house with us in comfort over Christmas Day and Stephenses Day while the others are all in kennels, freezing their asses off.

In other news, two of my photos were chosen for the vets' calendar this year. And Blakey is the only cat on the calendar.

SUCK IT, OTHER PET OWNERS.

Happy new year

Today is the winter solstice. Which means that tomorrow is the new year, astronomically speaking. And astronomically speaking is good enough for me.

While out walking the dogs today--I saw the sun come up at about 8.45 and was out again when it got dark at about 16.30--I had that feeling you get when you are at the very bottom, or the very middle, of a very long tunnel. You feel stifled, and then you feel that lift as the carriage or the car starts to move out of the tunnel and you find yourself leaning forwards in the hope it'll get you out faster.

Not that I'm particularly going anywhere. Next year might just be the same as this one. For me, that's pretty much okay. (Your experience might be different, in which case I wish radical change for you.) Although I do wish I could have stayed in abstracting. I miss spending my work days finding out what was going on in the world.

Anyway, when I get up on the dunes with the dogs tomorrow morning, there will be that delicious, childish, primeval holding of my breath while I discover whether the sun is going to struggle up over the horizon or not. I don't know what we'll do if it doesn't. Go back to bed and wait to see what happens next, I suppose.

Good thing Mrmonkey isn't going to work tomorrow. We can wait and see together.

Is nice system, but please, where is heat?

We recently spent over €4,000 on a new heating system for our house. It's a very clever system that adjusts itself in line with the temperature outside and can be set to heat just your water or just your radiators and no water, whichever you prefer. However, it turns out that you can't just turn it ON when it's cold out. You have to fiddle with the settings to reprogramme its start and stop times. There's no "boost" setting that turns the heat on for an hour and then turns it off again.

There is NO BLOODY ON button that just turns the effing heat ON.

So stupid. See, that's what happens when you don't ask anyone for feedback before you start production on something.

Let's focus group this mother out

As I believe they say in the publishing trade.

I've decided to actually try to produce a workable second draft of my book. If you read any of it, I would like you to tell me what you thought of it, if that's not too much trouble. One thing you did like and one thing you didn't like will be sufficient. Also, if you didn't finish it, when did you stop reading and why? And if you did finish it, did you like it all the way to the end or did you think it got rubbish somewhere along the way but you finished it anyway because you're bloody minded like that?

I've already decided on some of the broader changes I'm going to make and some of the character relationships I'm going to rework (mainly the two lead characters, who I like better as semi-robotic loners who've found their niche in life as zombie killers than as nice, regular people who fall in love with other people ever), but it would be nice not to make the same mistakes twice.

So, if you can be bothered, please comment. I realise there's nothing in it for you except that book-group feeling, but you would be helping me with my project. Thanks.

The End of Innistown

So, Google Docs doesn't allow me to upload the whole novel in one go. Stupid, huh?

Here is a link to the first part of the novel.

And here is a link to the second part of the novel.

I don't know if this will work. If it doesn't work, I am sorry.

Usual Disclaimer: Please remember that this is a first draft that was written in 30 days.

Personally I think it lacks the charm of my previous nanowrimo novel, which I greatly enjoyed writing and still think of very fondly. But it's done now and that's zombies officially laid to rest. So to speak.

Accentmonkey, just how sad are you?

Here's how sad I am. I finally found a website where I can buy a proper deck-scrub broom, so I can wash my kitchen floor properly instead of just sweeping and mopping it.

And I am excited about this, because I have been looking for one for months.

And that is the story of how sad I am.

I won!

Look, I did NanoWriMo and I won!

I don't like this year's novel as much as I like the one I wrote a few years ago, but it was still fun to do it.

In April I'm going to do Script Frenzy. I am resolved.

So now I have some extra time on my hands. I really should do something useful with it. Yes. Something useful. I will get right on that, Taoiseach. I certainly won't, for example, spend my time propping up the bar in my local pub shiteing on about football and getting free tickets for stuff. No, because that would be wasting my time. Wasting it. See?

Best laid plans, eh?

I had big plans tonight. Oh yes. I was going to go into Dublin and meet people in the pub, something I haven't done for months. Honestly, months. My own animals are all packed off to kennels, I am going to Glasgow tomorrow, and I have a full day's work ahead of me.

Then I got a text about an older dog someone found in our estate. The woman who found it picked it up off the road outside the estate yesterday, and she can't keep it because it cries a lot and doesn't sleep. It's kind of deaf, and it's kind of partially sighted, and it can't walk properly because its back legs are wonky.

So I was asked would I take it for a while, and I said I could keep it until tomorrow. So he's here now. He has a fitful wander around every now and then, and he's obviously extremely confused about where he is, and probably a bit distressed about this change in his situation, but he's quiet enough. He really likes to be in physical contact with a person, though. He had a nice nap with me on the sofa earlier, stretched out beside me. So now I won't be going out, and I've to go to the vet later and see how he is and what we can do with him. He'll need to go to a reasonably quiet foster home for about a week, where there's someone at home at all day to mind him.

It would be great if he had just wandered from somewhere and we found his owner. It would be just great. I'm not holding out a lot of hope, though.

UPDATE!

Owners found!

His name is Max and he is 18. He lives in the village, and usually when he goes out the back for a pee, they attach him to a line so he can't wander off (he has had four strokes). But the line wasn't securely attached this time and he wandered off. He was only wandering for a few minutes when he was picked up, though. Poor old guy. Still, at least they'll be more careful in future.

Jane the cat

After only a year of living with us, Jane died. She was sick for a long time. Months, really. It turned out that she was FIV+ and possibly had been for ever? Who knows. Estimates about the prevalance of FIV in outdoor and feral cats vary wildly, and there's every chance that she picked it up during the years she basically lived as an outside cat.

In any case, I now have to decide whether or not to get my other cats tested for FIV. On the one hand, it's expensive to get them tested, and at least two of my cats really, really hate going to the vet or being put in their boxes or anything like that. On the other hand, if we have it in the house we need to know. We can't, in good conscience, take any more cats in to live here if we have FIV in the house. FIV in itself is not that contagious if there's no fighting or sexing or open wounds around the place, so the cat most at risk of catching it is Linus, because he goes outside, and that's the only place where fighting might happen.

I don't want to have to stop Linus from going outside. The whinging alone would be too much to bear.

Although I miss Jane, I don't miss how ill she was in recent months, and the constant visits to the vet, the upset of her being ill all the time, and the cleaning up after her. And Blakey does fill that sitting-on-me-even-when-it's-not-really-convenient-to-have-a-cat-sit-on-me niche that Jane used to occupy so well. Blakey has even taken it a stage further and will crawl up the sleeve of the Slanket and attack my armpits while I'm trying to type.

So cute. So inconvenient.

Poor Jane. I'm sorry there wasn't anything we could do, and I'm sorry we didn't know that sooner, or there might have been more chicken and less grumping at you in your end times.

Psst, want a pedigree cat?

Despite my five cats, I think of myself as primarily a dog person. This is because I think of myself as being largely sloppy, sprawly, mucky, and willing to eat just about anything if it's served in a bowl and someone makes yum yum noises while they pass it over.

However, the nice lady in Laois from whom we adopted Lorelai aka Rory aka Smidger Fee aka The Smidge contacted me yesterday to say that she has a posh breed cat who is looking for a nice indoor home, and she thought of me. I was simultaneously aghast at the idea of me as some kind of crazy cat collector person who fawns over her beautiful long-haired tortoiseshell kitty and would love to have a house full of long-haired tortoiseshell kitties, and highly flattered that when a valuable cat comes into someone's possession, they think of me as an ideal home for it.

(She probably would not think this if she heard me telling Jane last night that she better make her mind up to get well or die soon, because I'm not spending any more money bringing her to the vet or any more time and energy cleaning up her puke off the floor every time she eats.)

Anyway, six cats is a bridge too far, so I reluctantly turned down her Norwegian forest cat, but said I would keep an eye out for a good home. So if you have a good indoor home to offer a really beautiful cat, let me know and I'll pass your details along. If I think you're good enough.

By the way, the cat in the picture is just some random Norwegian forest cat, just so you can get an idea of what they look like. It's not the one on offer.

(Obviously I will continue to look after Jane. Come on, like.)

And we're off

Day one and I've got over 2,000 words written. Maybe I'll make it this year. First couple of pages are a bit boring though, so I might not bother posting them. If I write something exciting I'll post it.

What? What? You did what?

I mean, what the FUCK? WHAT?

What the fuck is wrong with people?

Um, that is all.

More Blakey cuteness

Oh, and did I mention that Blakey thinks that Lulu is her mother? Well, she does. Lulu has to bat her away when she tries to suckle, but she is happy enough to let her curl up beside her and sleep.

We went on holidays

To Markree Castle in Sligo.

The plan was originally to go to Cuba, but that turned out to be very expensive and a massive hassle, so we decided to have a cheapish reading week in Ireland, which wouldn't involve flights or luggage allowance or any of that crap. Markree, as a bonus, let us bring the dogs, so we didn't even need to worry about that. Just chuck everyone in the car and off we go.

From that point of view, the place was a dream. The dogs were very welcome, and the room was big enough for all six of us to bunk up together, spread over two beds. There was plenty of space to run them across the (as advertised) rolling parklands and formal gardens. Nobody disturbed us, and we didn't disturb anyone else. We took them out for a long run in the mornings, then spent the afternoons sitting around reading while the dogs slept. Then another run in the evening before dinner, and another short walk in the moonlight before bedtime. Top notch. And we saw a stag one of the days. It was all very Regency.

There were a couple of problems with the room. The shower was awful. Truly awful. With the shower head on, you were standing under a dribble of hot water. Taking it off produced a slightly more satisfying trickle, so we did that instead. Also the bed was broken on one side. Separately, the food was kind of strange, as if the proper chef was away and had been replaced by someone who had never cooked a vegetable before in their lives.

We still really enjoyed it, and looking at other people's photographs of the place on Flickr indicates that the food isn't always like that, so I would recommend it to someone else. Plus I read two novels while I was there, which was something of a result, because I can't remember when I last finished a book.

It has been an awfully long time

Things have been busy here on Waltons' Mountain. Life news in brief:

*Ozzie is doing better, thanks. She has stopped losing weight and actually might be putting it on a little. This is great news, because it means we've found the problem and it is treatable, which means that when she has her weight up to normal, we can start looking for a home for her.

*We have a new kitten. She is called Blakey. She is called this because she has kind of a Hitler moustache effect going on, but you can't really call a kitten Hitler, can you? (No, is the answer. The answer is no.) Blakey came to us from Roscrea, where we were attending the funeral of our friend's mother. At the reception afterwards, some people rescued her from a tree, but then she was just left there in the carpark, only a five-barred gate between her and the main Dublin road. So we took her away, leaving our details with the hotel staff in case anyone came looking for her (although given the worm load she was carrying, and the state of her ears, and how hungry she was, it seems unlikely that she strayed from a loving home). We are officially looking for a home for her, but there are kittens everywhere, it seems, and nobody appears to be interested. So that's five cats we have now.

*Jane has been ill, but she appears to be doing better now.

All in all, there have been a lot of trips to the vet, which has been expensive and time-consuming, and reached a nadir when I had to give Jane a suppository. Hopefully we're on a bit of an upswing now, because I can't manage much more animal hassle.