Classic Book Club failure

Not only did I not make it to Classic Book Club this time, because of being in that London, I haven't even finished the book yet. I may have mentioned before that I often struggle to read books in translation, and Stendhal's The Red and the Black is yet another novel in translation that I'm finding it very hard to get to grips with. I have tried to make allowances for the fact that the book is an early "psychological novel", one of the first in which you actually get to read the characters' thoughts and motivations, but I have so far failed to engage with any aspect of the book at all.
Missing out on the actual meeting means that I've missed out on the chance to talk myself round to liking or finishing the book, like I did with Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, which I thought I didn't like when I read it, but managed to sort into some kind of managable order in my head while discussing it with other people, with the end result that I have a much more favourable opinion of it now.
I might try and persist with The Red and the Black, partly because I don't like to leave a book unfinished, and partly because the point at which I've dropped it--where Julian Sorel arrives in Paris--is apparently the start of the good half, so maybe it suddenly throws off its shackles as a novel and becomes fantastic.
I'll have a run at it this weekend and see how I go. If I still don't like it in another hundred pages, I'll leave it.

Oh little blog, how I have neglected you

There's really no excuse for it.

Did I mention we had another dog here for a couple of days? He followed me on the beach last Monday. It was a beautiful day and we were having a particularly thirsty walk, so I decided to walk my guys down to the Boyne for a drink and a splash about. I figured there would be people around, but I figured if I kept them on the lead till the last minute, all would be well. Just as we reached the river bank, though, along comes this very bouncy collie cross who decided he wanted to hang out and play with us. After a couple of minutes of hanging around with him I realised that nobody seemed to be looking for him. Nobody was calling him or walking towards us with a lead in their hand. He wasn't wearing a tag. He didn't leave us and go running off. I started to ask people if anyone knew him. Nobody did. I walked all up and down the bank, nobody had ever seen him before. I got all the way back to the car. Still had an extra dog, who was very excited by all the other dogs I had in my care.
I couldn't leave him (this is what it will say on my tombstone, by the way). I was worried he'd be hit by a car or taken away by someone less reputable than me if I just let him loose. Actually, that's not even true. I couldn't leave him because at this stage I know the difference between a dog who's just having a run around and a dog who is lost, and this guy was lost. I'd already spent over an hour looking for his people, so obviously nobody in the immediate vicinity had lost him. Therefore, he had to come home with me.

So he did. He was so well behaved, I loved him immediately. You always think you're going to love the difficult ones more, but honestly, sometimes the handsome ones who don't pee in the house, don't start fights, don't chase the cats, don't need a lead when they're walking because they just stay beside you, don't cry at night, and don't do damage do make you fall in love with them straight away.
The next day I drove him back up to the same spot and walked him around again. A woman approached me, delighted to see us both. I hoped she was his owner, but no, it turned out he had followed her home the previous day as well, and she couldn't take him in because she was leaving the house to go to work. She had called both the warden and the rescue about him, but had to leave him there. She left out a bowl of food and water for him. She said he was shaking when she tried to pet him. I said I didn't have that problem with him, and we figured it might be because I had dogs with me so he knew I was alright.

I had a little cry when Liz came to take him away to his proper foster home. He just looked so scared in the back of her car. He'd only just got settled in our house and stopped pacing up and down in confusion, and now here he was being shunted off again.
He'll get a lovely home, but I do still worry that he was stolen from someone and dumped up by us. I just can't believe anyone would get rid of such a beautiful, friendly, well-behaved dog on purpose.

I beg you, if you have a dog or you know someone who has a dog, please, please, please make sure the dog has a name tag including a phone number. Have a couple of spare tags knocking around in case you lose one. Please, if the dog came from a breeder and it has a microchip, make sure the microchip is registered to the owner, not the breeder.

This fine fellow is microchipped. Hey, he's IKC registered as a pure-bred rough collie (I know)! He's got a kennel name and everything!
But none of this is any bloody good to the dog because the chip is registered to a breeder who doesn't want to know, didn't keep any records of who he sold the dog to (of course) and couldn't be of any further help (of course).

Anyway, if you know this dog, please let Drogheda Animal Rescue know. If he's not reunited with his owners in a few weeks, he'll be neutered and rehomed. If you've ever wanted a first-time family dog, this is the one for you. But you must be LOVELY. I will accept nothing but the best for this gentleman.

Part dog, part gremlin - one year on

Some time in the next couple of weeks I have to go to the vet with Trixie and get her boosters done. I've never had to do this with a foster before, because I've never had a foster dog for a whole year before.

I just don't understand why nobody wants this wee girl. I want her. I love her. But she should move on for a whole host of reasons, only one of which is a selfish reason on my part.

Yes, I will admit that one of the great things about dog fostering is the novelty of having new dogs coming in and out of your house all the time, and we haven't had a new dog in for months and months. And yes, I love a bit of drama and high emotion and a happy ending, so there is something very satisfying in taking in a dog that's in bad condition or just a bit lost, feeding it up and worming it and teaching it basic manners and then sending it out to a new home to be loved by a new family. I don't get to do this anymore because Trixie never leaves.

But most of the reasons she should leave have to do with her and the person I know is out there for her. Somewhere out there is a home, preferably headed up by an older woman with either no children or grown-up children, who likes to go for rambly walks some days but shorter walks on other days, who wants a dog to sit on her lap in the evenings and obligingly cover her in hair and breathe dog breath into her face while she's watching telly. Sometimes, if her new owner is really lucky, Trixie will do the very cute thing she does where she pretends to bite your face in order to get you to pay attention to her (seriously, I know this doesn't sound cute, but it is. Enormously.) Or she will settle beside her new owner on the sofa and snore loudly and regularly like your dad at the opera or a pompous business person on a train. (She particularly likes to do this if you are really invested in your programme, like if your friend wrote it or your brother is on it.) Someone is missing out on this.

And Trixie is missing out on what she needs: a home without a pack of bigger, noisier, rougher dogs in it. Our own three core dogs have certain things worked out. They bash against each other to get through doors. They rob each others toys. They steamroll over each other while getting in and out of the car. They bark insanely at other packs of dogs we meet out walking, and the other packs of dogs bark madly back, and the owners manage three seconds of conversation over the heads of these barking dogs before giving up and going their separate ways. They smash into each other running up hills. They bowl each other over running down hills.

Trixie doesn't like these things. She likes to eat her food slowly without other dogs staring at her, willing her to give up in the middle of it. She likes to take her time getting up off the floor to go out, or getting off the sofa. She likes to leave bones in the back garden and for them to be where she left them when she comes back for another look at them. And so on.

Yeah, okay, she has a heart murmur. Who doesn't these days? And yes, she only has one eye and a dead tail and she barks at everyone we meet on the street as if she hated them (she doesn't though. This is just her announcing herself) and she likes to bring me dead rabbits and she comes over all deaf when she's called and she tramples over my laptop when she sits on my lap and she sneaks upstairs and eats the cat food out of their bowls and then throws it up in the kitchen. Again I ask, who doesn't?

She also needs to move on because while she's here there are other dogs we could be fostering, who may otherwise have to go to the pound, or remain in unsuitable homes where both they and their owners are unhappy, or be in kennels where they get no socialization or training or experience of living with a family in a home.

And also, though this really is selfish, if she stays much longer I won't be able to part with her at all.

Sometimes I am the nutter

On today's walk, Cody found the most unpleasant shit I have yet encountered on a dog walk and smeared it all over himself when we were only about two minutes from the car at the start of an hour's walk. He was so pleased with how badly he stank. I was very annoyed. I immediately expressed my annoyance by calling him a "fucking shitty bastard" in a very growly displeased voice, and clipping him onto the lead so he couldn't go back for more smearing/rolling fun times.

By the time we got up to the playing fields he was very upset at being on the lead and it was beginning to dawn on him that I wasn't happy with him. He walked with his head and tail down and kept licking his lips the way dogs do when they're not sure what's going to happen next but they are sure they're not going to like it. I saw a full five-litre bottle of water on the ground beside one of the benches at the edge of the football pitch (obviously left over from last weekend's football matches) and figured this was my chance to get some of the shit off Cody without rewarding him.*

So I clipped Cody's lead to the bench, pulled a few fistfuls of grass, and started slopping the water over his back and rubbing at him with the grass. He was a bit whingey about this, but not too distressed. I was muttering at him and doing that great arguing thing that makes people think dog people are crazy.

Cody: whinge whinge whinge (trans: don't kill the Cody!)
Me: Well, if you're going to roll in shite you're going to have to have it washed off.
Cody: whinge whinge whinge (trans: I thought it would bring us closer together!)
Me: Well, it didn't. Now stand still, you fucking shitty bastard.

Just as I was slopping the other half of the water over him, a woman ROARED at me from the other side of the pitch, where she was walking her dog. "What are you doing to that dog?" she shouted.
"Eh?" I said. "I'm washing him!"
"You're what?!" she said. She came a bit closer. "Oh yeah, that is water," she said, "I thought it was petrol."
"Ah right," I said. I laughed nervously. "Yeah, it does look a bit bad, I suppose."
She waved and went on her way. I unclipped Cody. He ran to the middle of the football pitch and started eating some rabbit poo and we were friends again.

*Usual method of de-pooing dogs is to throw a stick into the river over and over again for them to chase. Sadly this is like punishing kids for bad behavior by taking them to Disneyland.

Any colour as long as it's funny

Here's an interesting article in the New York Times (linked from the front page of Chortle) about a new, even more stripped-down, even more assembly-line approach to comedy production, courtesy of the good folks at Country Music Television.

Working Class - new CMT sitcom (photo from NYT)

Looking at the positive side of this style of production, it could break a whole new raft of really tight, really good comedy writers who are currently finding it difficult to get bigger networks to take a chance on them and their work. These lower-budget comedies could offer them the showcase they need to get noticed, in a way that sketch shows, radio comedy, and the Edinburgh Fringe seem to do in the UK and, as Mrmonkey pointed out, in the same way that Roger Corman has done over the years for aspiring film-makers. It could also mean more comedy, and there are few things I love more than comedy. If my television schedule is going to be filled with cheap programming, I'd greatly prefer it be filled with cheap scripted programming rather than unscripted (and madly inarticulate) programming. If I'm going to be expected to laugh at people, I'd prefer it if those people were in on the joke.

But of course we know that's not what will happen. What will happen is that the big networks will look at these new, brightly-liveried, low-cost, no-assigned-seating comedies and they will look at their own beloved, high-budget, single-camera, first/business/premium economy/economy/free-meal-with-every-seat comedies and they will change the way they make their shows. That's not actually going to affect the world's biggest comedy juggernaut too much. Two and a Half Men will continue as it has always done, because it's a traditional multi-camera setup and it's shot like an old-fashioned comedy. They might lose the studio audience (if they haven't already. I don't know if they tape that show in front of an audience, actually) but otherwise they're probably fine. But the shows I truly love could be in big trouble. Who's going to give Dan Harmon the money to bring in actual movie directors for his wonderfully crafted Community if shows like Working Class become the norm?

NBC's Community - photo from some other blog somewhere

Don't get me wrong, I'm a great fan of the traditional sitcom format, but Community and 30 Rock and The Office are some of my very favourite television programmes of all time. All time. 

Watching the DVDs of the first season of Community, it's easy to see the work that goes into this show, from everyone. They treat these episodes like 20-minute films. They care about the costumes, the characterisation, the story arc, the music, the effects, the props (check out some of the posters on the walls around the college when you have time), and they still manage to pack in jokes. You can't do that kind of thing if you've got a three-day shooting schedule and you're working on sets left over from someone else's pilot. 

I guess what I'm saying is that you should buy Community on DVD. I guess that's mostly my point.

No more Daily Show in the UK

Instead, this from Channel 4. 

Look, I know why they've dropped the Daily Show from More 4. I know it's because the ratings aren't high enough for what they've been paying for it (which slightly makes me wonder why they don't just put it on the more prominent Channel 4 station instead of continuing to tuck it away on More 4, but whatevs). That doesn't stop me feeling irritated when I read something like this (from the Guardian):

The hope, at the channel also responsible for Bremner, Bird and Fortune, is that it will become a UK equivalent to The Daily Show, where leading figures such as Barack Obama feel comfortable sparring with Jon Stewart.

and thinking "just to be sure it becomes a UK equivalent to The Daily Show, we've cut The Daily Show back to once a week to ensure that it's harder to make direct comparisons between the two."

I also wonder about the wisdom of basing your hopes for the future of a show on the ratings it got during a particularly high profile election night. Yes, 1.6 million people watched your show on election night. That's because people, particularly 24-hour-news-cycle generation people, like to watch live election results come in, and many of them thought they'd rather watch it fronted by comedians than Jeremy Vine. But will that translate to regular weekly viewing?

Most of all though, will this programme be any good? The trailer is poor, but of course it's hard to trail a live show because you don't actually have any footage yet. I would like it to be good. I wasn't keen on the election night version, which seemed to have a lot more titting about than actual coverage, but maybe that wasn't a great indicator. The network is apparently throwing everything it has at the show, so let's hope some of it sticks.

I am also heartened by this quote from David Mitchell:

I think too much of political journalism is thoughtlessly scrutinising," argues Mitchell. "It's always about contradicting the thing they've just said and crucially finding the difference of opinion they may have had with someone else they work with. Apparently, that's what you get 1,000 points for.

 This also bugs me about political journalism, and if anyone could start introducing a new, non-combative interview style, I would welcome that.

Meantime, we're buying our Daily Show from iTunes, just like I've resorted to buying Downton Abbey from iTunes (RTE doesn't have it on its web service and my Sky box has no way of learning that if I recorded all of Little Dorrit and Upstairs Downstairs, hey, maybe I'd like Downton Abbey as well ). If this keeps up, I'll just start getting all my telly from iTunes and do away with my satellite dish entirely.

EDITED TO ADD:

The actual show was alright in the end, I thought, although it needs quite a bit of work to make it actually good. I was surprised to see that out of the four presenters, I liked Jimmy Carr best and if I had to pick one of them to be the British Jon Stewart, I'd pick him. Who'd have thought, eh?

Happy new year, you narky old bastard

I met the most awful man today. He was walking his dog off the lead and so was I, and when I saw him in the distance he had all the hallmarks of trouble: unsteady on his feet, flat cap, one dog, walking stick. I always put our guys on the lead when I see people like that, so I leashed up all five dogs and started to walk towards my car. The man leashed up his dog and continued to stand right where he was, on the path between me and my car. I then realised he was shouting something at me, but I couldn't hear him. He started to gesture with his stick and I figured he wanted me to walk the other way. When I got within earshot I called "I'm just trying to get to my car, it's right there."
"You and your car can wait!" he shouted, "you stay there while I walk on."
"Do what you like then," I said, and set off to make a wide circle around him. Then he called something else after me and I stopped.
"Excuse me?" I shouted.
"You've too many dogs. You can't hold all those dogs on the lead at the same time."
I looked down at the dogs I was holding on the lead all at the same time, quite comfortably, and said, "I'm doing just fine, thanks. If I couldn't hold them I wouldn't walk them together."
"It's against the law to have that many dogs."
"It's not. It's against the law to have more than three unmuzzled greyhounds."
"You're breaking the law. And you can't control those dogs."
By some miracle, my dogs were not only under control, but were actually just walking along patiently. They weren't even barking at the guy, never mind straining at the leash.
"I'm controlling them fine," I said. "You're the only one around here having a problem."
"If they come near me I'll take the stick to them," he said, and as if to prove his point, he hit his own dog with his stick.
"If you touch my dogs with your stick I'll have the guards on you," I said in a very stern voice, "and there's no need to hit your own dog, he's not doing anything."
"Mind your own business!" he shouted at me.
I swear to god this is exactly what happened. He told me to mind my own business.
"Oh, do you know what?" I said, "just fuck off, you narky old bastard." (I'm not especially proud of that, but I was shaking with anger now and I needed to blow off a bit of steam.)
I walked off towards the car, him still calling after me that I had too many dogs to control and that he would call the guards on me. When I had all the guys piled into the car, I watched him for a bit. He hit his dog several more times, not savagely, but hard enough for the dog to be worried. He really could barely walk and he certainly couldn't manage a dog. He kind of reminded me of what my dad would be like if his health was a bit worse and he was a bit more narky with strangers. I know that mobility difficulties and unexpected circumstances can make people edgy and defensive, and that can cause them to become aggressive, but this was beyond the pale. I considered going after him and taking the stick from him, but then I would be the bully and I didn't want that.
The sad thing is, if he wasn't such a horrible old bollocks, I would have offered to walk his dog for him.
In the interests of balance, I should also point out that I met four other people today who were out with their dogs and we all had a lovely time, with dogs running around together and barking and a bit of chatting among the people and so forth. If the thing with the man had happened at the start of the walk instead of the end, the effect of his sour old personality would have been dissipated by the friendliness of the others. Oh well.

Go cry, emo Frankenstein

We read this in Ian's Classic Book Club recently, and although I read it years ago, I was glad of the chance to go back and read it again. People's memories of it are so bound up in the movie versions that even I had forgotten that there are no villagers wielding torches, there is no fear of fire, and that the monster is articulate and well-spoken throughout most of the book.
Okay, so the book itself is kind of amateurishly written: there's a lot of repetition of words like "enduced" (a word I've never seen before and had to look up), Frankenstein does an awful lot of moping about some of the most dramatic scenery in Europe, and some of it just reads like a thrown-together travelogue at times, but overall it's a gripping book filled with tension, heartache on both sides, and serious allegorical points about human expansion into uncharted physical and scientific territories. Shelley gives a clue to her intentions when she talks about the tears the family of cottagers weeps over the fate of the American natives, the attempts of the ship to push through the Northwest Passage, and the suspicions of the Irish people in dealing with the outlander who comes among them.

Other things of note:

• It's very hard to read phrases like "I was working in the laboratory all night" and not start singing "Monster Mash" to yourself.
• Victor Frankenstein is a very stupid man. On his wedding night he's practically smacking himself on the head going "r-r-i-gh-t, now I get it". 
• It's interesting that the actual creation of the monster, something that's gleefully indulged in several of the movies, sometimes involving grave robbing and murderers' brains and so forth, is completely glossed over in the book, apart from some vague hand-wavey stuff about galvanism. I did wonder how Frankenstein intended to put together a bride for his monster on Orkney, where he said himself only about three families lived.
• I never really realised how tense the book is. That monster just chases him around for years and years. 
• BUT WHO IS THE REAL MONSTER??

That is all my thinking about Frankenstein. Next up in Ian's Classic Book Club, Northanger Abbey, which I have never read.

Ten things I learned to love in 2010

1. The Kindle
Just as I inherited Mrmonkey's iPhone when he switched to a Nexus, I inherited his Kindle when he moved to the iPad. I had my reservations at first, and honestly found it difficult to concentrate on the first book I read on the device; I was too wrapped up in the novelty of reading an ebook to pay proper attention to the book sometimes. This wore off though, and although I can't see myself ever abandoning paper, I do love a book I can read while brushing my teeth, or with both arms under the covers. And I can get a new book right away! Plus I can read huge or embarrassing books with the same ease and confidence as I read slim or erudite ones. Result.

2. Ian's Classic Book Club
Okay, so I only read three of the books and (so far) turned up to one of the meetings, but it's good to be part of a book club that admits to not having read many classics, and that it's good to read those classics. I was particularly gutted to miss the discussion on Frankenstein, but it was my own stupid fault. Next up is Northanger Abbey for February, I believe. I've not read it before, and I'm greatly looking forward to it.

3. Going to the gym
Once upon a time, long long ago, I used to go to the gym on a regular basis, but I stopped (great story, Trish). Well, I started again this year and although there's been a bit of a hiccup due to the bad weather recently, I really enjoy it. Overall, in fact, I've been enjoying an increased level of fitness this year, partly due to losing a lot of weight, but also due to just getting out and about and moving more. Must keep this up in the new year. I don't want to slip into bad ways again.

4. Watching television with people on Twitter
The Apprentice, Coronation Street, and most of all, The Eurovision Song Contest, are just some of the shows that are massively improved by watching them with your pals on Twitter. Indeed, Twitter's done more for getting people to adhere to the actual published television schedules in 2010 than any other factor (I have made that up, but if I was a freelance journalist I would leave that there and let it become a truthy fact).

5. Audio books and podcasts
Don't know why I never cared about these before, I guess I was always a reader who listened to music when I was a commuter, and now that I'm not a commuter anymore, I just don't listen to as much audio content as I used to. But 2010 brought us more stable foster dogs (well, ones who were either going to stay with me or piss off as they saw fit, regardless of whether I was listening to them), so it became more feasible to stick in a single earphone and listen to A History of the World in a Hundred Objects, Pimsleur Spanish, and my second audiobook ever, The Man Who Invented the Computer by Jane Smiley, which I listened to while in the gym. Like the Kindle, listening to audiobooks is something I've had to learn, but I have the hang of it now and will be doing a good deal more of it in 2011.

6. Pointless
Hosted by Xander Armstrong and Richard Osman (brother of Matt Osman from Suede, connection fans!) this is ideal cup-of-tea-time television. Featuring beautifully laid-back banter, intriguing questions, and no ad breaks, it pisses all over Countdown.

7. Taking my camera just bloody everywhere
When it comes to photography, I am certainly not Mrs. Right, but I am often Mrs. Right There, particularly when it comes to documenting big family events. Take your camera with you when you go places. It's no use to you sitting at home. And then print the photos, or at least put them online where people can see them. Otherwise, really, what is the point?

8. Going out for dinner
Since we moved out to Laytown our eating out arrangements have really slipped. But we've been taking advantage, unlikely though it may seem, of our weekly visits to our diet counsellor to eat out in Dublin at least once a week most weeks. It helps that so many restaurants have top class early bird deals right now. Mmm, mundane.

9. Being 40
There's something liberating about being able to say "I am 40. I don't have to care about this." Particularly things that people with children have to care about. Noisy, expensive things that take precedence over more genteel entertainments, like, I don't know, Justin Bieber maybe. Or that young woman who smokes a bong. I don't care if the X Factor single gets to number one in the charts. I've no idea what's in the charts anymore, or what that word is that they're all using this week (are they even doing that anymore? I couldn't tell you).

10. Paying someone else to walk the dogs
This year, our neighbour set up his own dog walking and dog minding business. The freedom this has given me, I can't begin to describe to you. Going to the city, going hillwalking up in Carlingford, and more activities have become so much easier now that I can just text Michele and get him to take the dogs out, bring them back, feed them, and leave them to snooze till I get home. They know him really well and will go anywhere with them, and he gives them a decent walk for not much money. It is a result. 

I don't mean to be all Angry of Laytown

But I'm listening to people on the radio saying that people should be made to wear winter tyres on their cars because councils and local authorities can't be expected to clear the roads. It should be the law, people are saying.

Maybe it should. But it is currently the law that you have to have working headlights on your car, and people don't bother obeying that. And that you should observe the speed limit, not drive on your emergency tyre, turn your fog lights off when it's not foggy, not throw litter out of the car window, etc. etc. etc., and nobody bothers with any of these. This wouldn't annoy me so much (we all break minor laws, after all. Just the other evening I was driving home from the city behind a guy from Cork who I assumed was lost, when after a while I realised he was just driving at 30 kph, like you're supposed to in the centre of Dublin. I'd never seen anyone actually do this. I certainly don't do it), but not only do I see gardai break these minor laws all the time themselves, I very rarely see them stop anyone for speeding, and I never, ever see them stop anyone around me for broken lights, cracked windscreens, dodgy driving, or any other minor infraction.

Good, you might say. Let them get out there and catch some proper criminals. Well yes. Fine. But it's stopping people for minor offences that lets you pick up guys like this, who are on the run from prison or have "99 previous convictions, 92 of which were for driving offences".

Well, maybe it is very right-wing of me. Maybe. But every time I'm dazzled by a single headlight set on high-beam (because one headlight on high-beam is the exact same, safety-wise, as two headlights on dipped), a common occurrence at this time of year, it makes me think of the money that could be collected from fining these eejits, and how that might bring in enough to grit the road a bit, maybe.

Moan moan moan. Grumpy of Laytown.

Off on the wrong trotter

Strictly Come Dancing is over for another year, and not before time too. I have loved this show since halfway through the first season when I discovered that, far from being yet another reality show in which "celebrities" bicker with one another over stupid tasks, it was actually a show that celebrated improvement, cooperation, and partnerships. It has always had lovely little character arcs, individual "journeys", and fantastic interplay between the pro dancers and the celebrities they look after.
Oh, but the recession has hit Strictly hard. I'm guessing that part of the decision to jettison a bunch of my very favourite dancers this year in favour of some unknowns (Matt, Ian, Darren, Lilya, and Brian were all out and Robin, Artem, and some others I still don't know the names of were in) had to do with being able to pay the newer, younger dancers less money. In fact, the amount of dancing on the show was drastically cut. Contestants didn't do as many numbers, there were fewer pro numbers in each show (sometimes none at all), and a lot of the little bits of VT they used to do to make up the running time of the show were also removed. In an effort to draw attention away from these changes, they brought in props and non-traditional costumes, like they have on (whisper it) the American show. To my mind, and I realise I have come over all Federation President Barry Fife here, these are changes for the worse. They also introduced the Argentine Tango at a much earlier stage of the competition (I wonder if that was in order to get celebrities to agree to appear on the show? Everyone seems to want to dance the Argentine Tango), which was definitely a mistake because you just need a certain level of skill to be able to dance it even vaguely well.
It was a real shame as well, because apart from the inexplicable popularity of homophobic, reactionary, conservative old crone Ann Widdecombe, the core of the show was strong. The dancing was great, there was a little romance, and yes, I even warmed to the new dancers. Well, to Robin and Artem anyway. I still couldn't tell you what the other ones are called.
Even Claude's show was compromised. She had the same people on over and over again, no celebrity guests, and no budget for VT bits. Much discussion of pictures of dresses, which was most dull. Even Claude couldn't hide how bored she was with business like the Strictly A-Z.
Of course, it's possible that none of these changes had anything to do with cutbacks and everything to do with trying to shake the show up in order to make it more competitive. If that's the case, that's even worse. If the BBC are just trying to ride out the lean times by putting on a stripped down show for a few years, that's fine, but if they really are messing about with it to try to attract viewers, then the tinkering won't stop until they've wrecked it, because that's what happens.
Still, there's always Pointless.

November is almost over. Did you write your novel?

I did.

After I posted the first chapter, some people said they wanted to read it, so I'm posting the rest of it here. But let's be very clear about this: I wrote this at a gallop in thirty days, and I've only skimmed it since then to correct spellings where I could. I can't guarantee that the action is consistent or that the characters retain their proper names all the way through, or that it makes any sense at all.

Nevertheless, here it is.

After four attempts and three completed novels, I think we can draw some conclusions about Nanowrimo and me. I obviously respond well to this particular challenge. It's about the only thing I complete on a regular basis, the only deadline I happily meet and take seriously, and the only way I ever seem to get any writing done.

I obviously like writing books featuring smart women and tall men.

I have a tendency to write what seem to me at the time very steamy scenes and then go back and change them because I am embarrassed to think that anyone would ever read them.

I do not know anything about the criminal underworld and would probably do well to stay away from it in the future.

So, thanks for all the support as usual, especially Mrmonkey who walked the dogs for me a couple of Saturday mornings and let me write in bed, and to my coach, Judith Ecker, who was keeping an eye on me from over there in Wisconsin to make sure there was no slacking off.

I hope the link works. Please let me know if it doesn't.

Can we still be acquaintances who never speak?

Hannah Pool has an article in today's Observer on a topic that fascinates me: the breaking up of friendships. I don't have a lot to add to what she says here, really. I've tried both of the "techniques" for breaking up with friends that she describes and agree that neither of them is pleasant. I've also had them done to me. Not so much the slow one, because if I call you a couple of times and you don't call me back, then I stop calling you pretty quickly (and by "call" I also mean email/write/whatever). And then if I hear from you months down the line because you've either changed your mind about breaking up with me or because you genuinely were busy or depressed or something, that's fine.

But the quick one I've had done to me twice. At the time I was extremely hurt by one of these breakups, which was done by letter. It came as a total shock to me and I was very upset to read the words "I don't think we should be in touch with each other any more". This was like a real breakup. (Subsequently the person in question did get back in touch and we did meet up a couple of times, but we both realised that his initial instinct had been correct and we haven't been in touch since. Still, nice to have everything put on a more civil footing.) The other time, I was out for a drink with the person and we were arguing about personal politics. I was finding these meetups less and less enjoyable every time we had them, but I basically liked this person and I was living on my own at the time, so I was reluctant to lose contact with even more people than my divorce had already cut me off from or allowed me to lose contact with, depending on how you look at it.

At the end of the evening I suggested we meet up for brunch in a couple of weeks (I preferred brunch because there was less chance of drinking and therefore less chance of argument) and he just said "yeah, brunch doesn't really suit me any more. Look, don't worry about it." And that was it. We never called each other again. It was a massive relief. Sure, we've seen each other on the street a couple of times since then, and we've said hello and exchanged highlights, but that's it. So civilised.

Anyway, that was all apropos of not much really. I wanted to save that article and I wanted to save the comments too. Some interesting stories there. I'm particularly interested by the person who starts her comment by complaining about using the word dump to describe breaking up with friends, then says she's had this done to her several times by people who are cowards, then talks about how awful people are who break up with friends. I don't know this person, and I don't like to be judgemental (or rather, I don't like people to know how judgemental I am) but I already want to break up with her and I've not even had to be her friend for any period of time.

People also talk about how Facebook and Twitter makes this all much more complicated, and it probably does. But for me, as for a lot of people, Facebook and Twitter are an aid to maintaining casual contact with people I care about very much who happen to be far away. I see the minutiae of their daily lives, comments from other people they chat to, and it makes me feel connected to them. It also makes it easier to keep that connection, so I don't worry so much that I don't have time to write a letter.

These are things, as someone points out on the comments page for the article, that rear their heads at this time of year, both for those of us expecting people home for Christmas, and for those of us who are coming home and don't know who we''ll end up having to talk to when they hit the pub on Christmas Eve.

Let's write a novel

Perhaps unwisely, I've set myself an extra challenge for this year's Nanowrimo. Rather than writing the requisite 50,000 words and have to listen to people tell me that that's "not really a novel, is it?" I've decided to try and write a full 80,000 words, so that people will have to resort to admitting they didn't read it, or that they just didn't like it.

More action/adventure/romance this year. I confess that I have little to no idea what's actually going to happen, but at least I have enough experience now to know that I just need to keep things moving along. I've got a first chapter, which I'm going to post here because some people might be curious about it (Hi Myles! Hi Queenie! Thanks for always reading at least most of my stuff!), but then I won't be posting anything else until it's all done. Yes, I know there are typos and things, but November means being a novel-writing shark, and I won't be looking at this chapter again until December. Or maybe never.

You should be able to see the first chapter by clicking here. I actually really like this as an opening chapter, which is almost a shame because it means that I think the rest of the book should be good rather than just fecked onto the page to bump up the word count.  

Two days in and we're on target with only a couple of hours writing a day. That's good, right?

Good luck to you if you're doing it too. Go to meetings if there's one near you. You never know, you might meet some lovely people.

Little things that annoy me, perhaps irrationally

This is by no means a definitive list.

1) "Boutique" hotels where the towel hooks in the bathroom don't actually hold up your towels, you can't make yourself a cup of coffee in your room, and instead of giving you a ballpoint pen on the desk they give you a pencil in a fancy iron pencil holder, but no pencil sharpener.

2) When my company refers to its website as its homepage. (It took me months to work out that they meant the entire site when they said homepage.)

3) Television programmes where the people can't speak English properly. "Comfortability" is not a word, Apprentice contestants, and perception and perspective are not interchangeable.

4) The ITV Player website.

5) The warning signs they have on American menus now, where they have an asterisk next to anything with egg or meat in it to warn you that eating undercooked eggs or meat can cause DEATH BY EGG OR MEAT. My favourite one is on the entrance to the Ferry Building, which warns you that the building you are about to enter may contain chemicals, including cigarette smoke, that are known to cause harm to people. (Srsly, I will photograph it if I get a chance.)

That is all for now. I am grumpy today.

Our adventures in Heathrow Airport (tl;dr, I expect)

On Friday, October 1st, Mrmonkey and I left our house in cheery spirits ready for our two-week trip to Seattle and San Francisco. Not a holiday (as I'm slightly weary of explaining to people now), this is a necessary work trip for the monkey and I'm just tagging along because I can because all my work happens by magic laptop now, so it doesn't matter where in the world I am as long as I have an Internet connection.

Annoyingly, though, when we got to Dublin airport it became apparent that our flight to Heathrow was delayed. Never mind, said Mrmonkey, they'll just stick us on a flight to Vancouver or something when we get to Heathrow, and we'll still reach Seattle tonight. When we boarded the Aer Lingus flight (EI 164, the 12.10 flight, which seems to get delayed a fair bit, in case you're interested, and generates its share of customer complaints), we were told by the flight attendants that everyone who had bags checked all the way through to their destination should go to Flight Connections in Terminal 5, where they would be rebooked onto a later flight to get them where they needed to go. Only those who had NOT checked their bags all the way through should stay in Terminal 1 and go to the Aer Lingus desk. So, off with us to Terminal 5 on the special bus that Aer Lingus had arranged to whisk us there. Oh yes.

We joined the BA queue at Flight Connections. We didn't think there was anything suspicious about this, because, after all, we were on a BA codeshare flight from Dublin, which meant that BA had booked seats on the Aer Lingus flight for their customers, so we were flying under the BA umbrella the whole time, right? After about 20 minutes of standing in the queue, the guy behind us asked a BA staff member if there was a different queue we could stand in. He said that there was, but it was about four hours long. "Four hours!" we all said, "hoo, don't want to stand in that then!"

Four and a half hours later we reached the top of the queue. I won't bore you with the ins and outs of the actual queuing. Yes, someone from BA did give out some phone numbers for BA customer service to see if they could help us, but they couldn't do anything except say "you should stay in the queue, we don't have any information." Yes, after about three hours someone did come along with one bottle of water for each person in the queue. Yes, a pane of glass did get smashed after some people tried to skip the queue and a staff member stopped them. But the important thing is, we made it to the top of the queue without anyone triaging the queue to see if everyone in it was actually in the right place.

The woman who was dealing with the people to the left of us apologised to them for the long wait when they reached her. Our woman said "oh, you're booked on two separate booking references," small sigh, "it's more convenient for us when people are booked on a single reference."

What I didn't say because I didn't want to get booted out of the queue and possibly arrested: "Well, it's more convenient for us not to have to stand in a queue for four and a half hours with no apology or explanation, but hey, we all have our crosses to bear."

The woman then said she could get us on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt on Sunday, but Aer Lingus don't have an agreement with Lufthansa and... you could almost see the hey-wait-a-minute look in her eyes as she said "in fact, you should be talking to the Aer Lingus desk. Your delay has nothing to do with us."

We pointed out to her that it was a codeshare flight and we were booked BA the whole way, with BA flight codes and everything.

"Doesn't matter," she said, "you'll have to go back to Terminal 1 and talk to Aer Lingus."

So we took the half hour bus ride back to Terminal 1 and found the Aer Lingus duty manager. A more sour-faced woman I have never seen outside of a film about the Magdalen Laundries. She listened to our tale of woe and, without a single expression of sympathy or word of apology or admission that Aer Lingus had somehow fucked up, she told us we could fly back to Dublin tonight, go home, and re-present ourselves at Dublin airport at 6am the following morning for a flight to Charles de Gaulle and on to Seattle from there, or we could stay in Heathrow until Sunday and take a flight to Chicago and then on to Seattle. She was unmoved by tears and provided an absolutely stellar model of the new customer service paradigm of staring stony-faced at the customer until they stop talking, before doing the bare minimum required by law.

She wrote out coupons for a cheap hotel in the airport, meals, and the shuttle bus to and from the hotel. "And our bags will be delivered over there tomorrow?" I said. She said no. If we wanted our bags we would have to go back to Terminal 5 and get them. She would not provide bus tickets for us to do that. If we wanted the bags, we would have to pay the £4 each way bus fare from the hotel to get them.

Then Mrmonkey checked the boarding passes she had handed us and pointed out that they were for economy, when we had paid for premium economy seats. She said that United doesn't have a premium economy class, so we just had to have economy seats. So, fuck the extra money you paid for your ticket, basically. Aer Lingus couldn't give a shit. She then presented Mrmonkey with a slip of paper on which was written the mailing address and fax number of the Aer Lingus customer complaints department. There is no phone number. You may not call them.

We went back to the hotel, ate a crappy meal, watched some of Some Like it Hot, (I'm not glad at all that Tony Curtis died, but if he hadn't there wouldn't have been anything at all worth watching on the telly, so thank you Tony Curtis), and went to bed. At four in the morning I had to shout at people in the hallway to shut up so we could go back to sleep.

The next day Mrmonkey set out to get our bags and see what he could do about the flights. There was no point in my going with him, because I would just get us thrown out of the airport, so I stayed behind in the hotel to do work. He left the hotel at about 10am, and returned at 3pm. His tale was one of adventure, more lies and incompetence from airline staff (he went to Terminal 5 to get the bags and was told that they had been transferred to Terminal 1. So he went to Terminal 1 (bear in mind that this takes half an hour each time) to be told that they were definitely in Terminal 5, and he was given the name of the person to talk to. He went back to Terminal 5, and yes, they were there.)

But it was also a tale of hope. It was a tale of one woman, Emma, who wasn't at the end of her Friday shift and therefore the end of her rope. It was a tale of someone who has not yet learned the ways of modern customer service and still thinks that it's about trying to help the customer instead of trying to make the customer give up and go away. She agreed with Mrmonkey that the Aer Lingus staff had, in fact, probably just been trying to get rid of everyone, which is why they sent them over to Terminal 5. She said that all airlines do this. They just try to get rid of you for now, and if you come filtering back like a homing pigeon, well then, they'll deal with you because you're obviously some masterpiece of Darwinianism who deserves to be flown to another destination. She made several phone calls which involved her talking to actual people instead of just tapping on her computer, and she summoned us up two seats in the class we had paid for, on the Sunday version of the flight we were meant to have been on in the first place.
She emphasised to Mrmonkey the importance of going to an actual ticket desk instead of just a kiosk. She might be the greatest human currently working in Heathrow Airport.

The next day, we presented ourselves at Terminal 5 to check in for our flight, and stood in the queue of people. Within seconds, a uniformed staff member came over to check that we were in the right queue. I realised that this level of care was because this queue was in a public part of the airport where customers from other airlines could see us, and where people who might be making flight decisions in the future could see us from outside. The queue in Terminal 5 at Flight Connections, however, is not, which is why nobody cares at all if you are stuck in it for four and a half hours. Everyone in there is already a BA customer. They don't have to buy you flowers, they've already shagged you (copyright ComedyB). Which is also why Aer Lingus sent us there, so they wouldn't have a massive queue of people standing at their customer-facing desks in Terminal 1.

In the end, we were bumped to business class.

"Lucky you," some people said. I don't think we were lucky. No air passenger is lucky anymore. Because this is the real cost of low-cost airlines. Sure, people like Michael O'Leary can crow about all the "frills" they've managed to cut back on, but by choosing to always fly low-cost, people have driven other airlines, like Aer Lingus, to go the same way. So instead of customer service staff you have stony-faced evil nun types who won't even/aren't authorized to even give you a lousy extra £4 bus ticket so you can go and collect your bags when something goes wrong with your flight and you have to be rebooked (never mind having the bags delivered to your hotel within the bloody airport). This is why the queue in Flight Connections is four and a half hours long. If you search for stories similar to ours you'll see that this queue is always that long, because of the number of staff that are working on it at any one time. See all those people in the business class queue who are zipping along and being seen inside ten minutes? They used to be you, before airlines decided that you didn't want to pay for all these behind-the-scenes "frills".

The thing that makes me angry about this whole episode is not that this shouldn't have happened to us, it's that it shouldn't have happened to anyone, but it does, because this is business as usual for airlines now. This is how it is now when anything goes wrong. There's no spare capacity or spare staff or money to pay overtime. It's all bare bones operations, which means that instead of being put on a New York flight while we were still in Dublin on Friday, we ended up in Heathrow till Sunday.

And I haven't even told you about Saturday night yet.

It's been nearly a year

I moved from my (posssibly greatest ever) job of abstracting articles from periodicals like The Economist and CQ Weekly--and hey, let's not forget Russian Social Science Review--to writing marketing copy almost a year ago. During that year, I have slipped back into my old ways of essentially not really picking up much about the world beyond what I hear on Radio 4 or see on The Daily Show.

Apart from the three years I spent doing that job (which is the longest I've ever spent doing the same job), I've never been a reader of newspapers or magazines, nor much of a consumer of world events. But I enjoyed knowing things about the world, about who was in charge, what countries were in political turmoil, whose elections were going to be close and whose were more or less fixed. I liked spending five or six hours a day just reading and learning about politics and protest movements, world events and medical developments, sociological theory and environmental catastrophes. It made my brain work in a way that it has only ever done before when I was studying, because I wasn't just reading magazine articles, I was reading the academic journals as well.

Now that I don't get to read that stuff for work any more, I just don't read it, in the same way that if I stopped going to Motivation in two weeks when my 20 weeks is up, I know I would put back on all the weight I've lost. You can't just unlearn in a short time the habits it took you a lifetime to pick up. It takes application and work.

It came as a shock to me recently to discover that Álvaro Uribe is no longer president of Colombia. How can that be? (I actually know how that can be. See above.) I have no idea how things are going to go in the midterm elections in the U.S. this year. It feels a bit weird.

I miss that job. I don't learn anything new in this job.

I miss Álvaro.

David O'Doherty/Anthony Jeselnik/Arj Barker last Sunday

What else would we be doing on a Sunday afternoon anyway, David O'Doherty asks us all, other than sitting in a temporary mosque in a garden in Dublin listening to some comedy? What indeed. David O'Doherty is the ideal man to host a gig like this. He points out himself that his credentials are impeccable, given that he often does readings for children in libraries, and they mainly take place during daylight. Plus he just has that kind of comedy that lends itself to the daytime. Sure, he has some strong opinions, but unlike a lot of other comics, those opinions are not really about porn or sexual positions or how hateful women are, but about Shakira and how great bicycles are because they just stay up on their own by magic, and about pandas and what panda-related facts may or may not be true. He looks completely at home and everyone happily goes with him on the stories of personal frustration and childhood non-trauma.

Arj Barker isn't far off being this kind of comedian either, although he does look more like a night-timer who's been woken up and pushed on stage before being given his breakfast. He brings plenty of laughs with his stories about Avatar, Internet scams, and this own unique view of global warming and environmental disaster. He gets a couple of nice local references in, and in general does enough to make any right-thinking person want to see his full show.

And sandwiched in between these two easy talkers was Anthony Jeselnik. He's the other type of comedian. He speaks in short sentences, and waits for laughs. He waits too long. The laughs don't really come. I imagine him as a contributor to Sunday Miscellany and that's amusing for about two minutes till he tells a joke that nobody laughs at and suggests that we were offended. Sometimes we're not offended. Sometimes you're just not funny.

That is the problem with these three-comic bills. Of course the other problem with festivals is that your MC might come back and suggest that everyone go over to the big tent and beat up Des Bishop, just because he's in the big tent. And that's a lot of effort for a Sunday afternoon.

Hilarity in the Iveagh Gardens

The Carlsberg Comedy Carnival has just finished its fourth run, and I pronounce it a success. Sure, none of the gigs I attended on Sunday were sold out (how does Emo Phillips not sell out? What is wrong with people?) but Saturday was chockers, and everyone seemed to be in very good spirits.

The festival's two main selling points for comedians, as far as I can see, are that it's just before Edinburgh, so they can get in that one last polish of their material before their Edinburgh shows, and that (unlike Kilkenny) there is a dedicated space for the comedians and their mates to sit and get a drink without having people coming up to them all the time. I wouldn't like to give the impression that comedians don't like people approaching them, nor would I like to suggest that people are assholes about it, but if you're getting ready to go onstage, or you've just come off stage, sometimes you just want to be somewhere where you can relax a bit and not be 'on', and the organizers of this festival get that.

You also can't get into the Iveagh Gardens at all unless you have a ticket to at least one of the shows. Once you're in, you can hang out all day and eat burgers or crepes and drink as much €5 Carlsberg as your stomach can hold, but the cordon does prevent the place from being flooded with extra people.

I did also see some actual gigs while I was there, but I will talk about them later.

Kids, eh?

For about a year now, I've been walking a dog belonging to some neighbours of mine. This happened by chance: I was walking my own dogs on the beach one day and I met a woman and a friendly, extremely fat labrador. We got talking, and her dog was nice, and she asked me if I ever looked after other people's dogs, and it turned out that her foster parents were looking for someone to look after the friendly, extremely fat labrador in her own home for two weeks while they went on holidays.

Normally I don't like the idea of dogs being left alone for long periods of time in their own homes, but I was assured that she was used to it, so I agreed, and every day for two weeks I took her out with my own dogs for a long walk, which she loved. When the two weeks were up, I hadn't the heart to leave her to her fatness, so I said I would keep walking her as long as it was convenient. A year later, I'm still doing it. Last week, however, the neighbours' grandchild, a ten-year old boy, came to stay with them for three weeks. So now I seem to be walking him as well.

It's fine, because it's an hour out of my day and what do I really care, right? Plus he loves the dogs and they really like him, and I remember when I was his age some childless adults were really good at giving up their time to me as well, so I don't mind.

But this morning he lost my ball thrower. He was throwing the ball for the dogs, he put the ball thrower down in some shallow water close to the shore, and it just vanished. Swallowed by the seaweed and the current and a child's inability to really concentrate on looking for something properly. I took off my shoes and rolled up my trousers and waded in to look for it, and when I looked up five minutes later he was a dot on the horizon, with all five dogs crowded around him and all heading towards some people who had children but no dogs. So I gave up my ball thrower, put my shoes back on, and followed him.

There isn't really a point to this story, except to remind me that this is what life is like every second of the day for people who have kids. It's just constant wrangling. Mind you, I never would have thought to bring home so many greenish crab claws if he hadn't been with me, so I suppose I won in the end, really.