19 January 2004
Life note: Drinking rules
On Saturday I forgot the old rule, "beer before wine: fine; guinness followed by white wine, red wine, white wine, bourbon: queer," so Sunday was spent sleeping. And to think I'd been planning on a detox day!
The whole of Saturday was unpredictable, in fact: the plan to go to a house warming party in Wellwyn Garden City metamorphasised into dinner in St Albans, changed into a house cooling in Plaistow, became a computer games evening in Bounds Green. And then an hour beforehand, the plan was cancelled altogether in favour of Ex Libris in Canada Water, where we discovered that Jane Eyre ends with the line "'Church cock church cock chuch cock,' he said, ruefully." and the novelisation of DARYL ends, "'I can't believe it turned out I'm a whale,' said Daryl, bored."
On Saturday I forgot the old rule, "beer before wine: fine; guinness followed by white wine, red wine, white wine, bourbon: queer," so Sunday was spent sleeping. And to think I'd been planning on a detox day!
The whole of Saturday was unpredictable, in fact: the plan to go to a house warming party in Wellwyn Garden City metamorphasised into dinner in St Albans, changed into a house cooling in Plaistow, became a computer games evening in Bounds Green. And then an hour beforehand, the plan was cancelled altogether in favour of Ex Libris in Canada Water, where we discovered that Jane Eyre ends with the line "'Church cock church cock chuch cock,' he said, ruefully." and the novelisation of DARYL ends, "'I can't believe it turned out I'm a whale,' said Daryl, bored."
12 January 2004
Life report: Christmas, New Year, the Whole Shebang
At the weekend I stumbled across my diary from 1997, which describes the year in amusing detail, from being lost in a blizzard on a Welsh mountain top at the stike of midnight, to my trip to the US selling books door-to-door, to my subsequent return to England and crippling poverty, to living in Westminster and struggling to find a job.
I hadn't realised there was a diary from this period, but was very glad to find that there was. It got me thinking, though, that the Rickbot of 2009 is going to be very pissed off when he's reading this diary and finds that the entire Christmas/New Year fortnight of 2003 has gone unrecorded. He'll wander: was that the year I went to Hawkhurst and burned paper hankies? Or the year Sam Rockwell invited me onto his yacht, and New Year was spent off Hawaii writing the first book of my best-selling trilogy?
Well, Mr Rickbot 2009, wonder no more! This is what happened:
Eddie Izzard: a gang of us trekked to see Izzard's gig at the Wembley Arena. His entire act was groaning under the weight of his ego, and his old, spontaneous style was reduced to a string of awkward catchphrases and repetitions of a golden age. He reminded me of a once energetic puppy reduced to senility in old age, but without the incontinence. Although I snickered throughout I was not very proud of what I was laughing at, and I only laughed gleefully once, although When Olivia later made a brilliant reference to this one gag I missed the joke completely. Almost a complete waste of time, although I enjoyed eating some chips on the way in.
Christmas in Edinburgh: a pleasant six days were spent in Edinburgh, entertaining and being entertained by my nieces, drinking gin and wine, and going on pleasant walks to abandoned mills, abandoned islands and invisible horses.
New Year's Eve Eve: there is an ongoing Bot tradition to meet up the night before New Year's Eve and get so drunk you cannot properly celebrate the real New Year's Eve. This was a tradition easily maintained at the Griffin, where a litre of pinot grigio is just ten quid. I remembered being quite sober, although the violence of my hangover indiciated otherwise - I admit, I had no memory of (as Abi reminded me) jumping on a table of strangers and shouting "Fee Fi Fo Fum", nor did I initially remember getting home and dancing for an hour on the coffee table.
New Year's Eve in Otley: The first half of New Year's Eve was spent in the car with the Tongs, driving north. Due to no small amount of short sightedness we had completely failed to buy any alcohol, and so we stopped at every service station en route, despite being told at the first one that service stations don't sell alcohol.
The second half of New Year's Eve started at the Spite, a pub on the northen boundary of Otley, a town on the northern boundary of the world. There was a warm, friendly atmosphere in the Spite, but not towards us - since we weren't local - so we just got quietly smashed on gin and snuck out around 11pm. In the meantime the whole valley had taken the trouble to coat itself in deep, deep snow, so we stumbled home hitting each other with snowballs and cackling. We ate some warming chilli soup to recover, and drank some fizzy wine at midnight. To herald the New Year I sang a punk-ska version of Auld Lang Syne, with improvised lyrics. What the hell does "auld lang syne" mean, anyway?
Two Tongs went to bed, the other three ran riot through the estate, a process cut short - after just one snowman on a stranger's doorstep, one wrestling match down a neighbour's driveway, and a session pelting a stranger with snowballs - when Ferklau hit me at point blank range in the eye, and the silly thing stopped working. Dreams of wearing a patch and becoming a pirate were cut short, however, when said eye returned to full operational capacity the following morning
Trek up the Chevin: "Wouldn't it be nice to walk to the top of the mountain," one of us said. By the end of the day, many of us wished we'd said "No, it wouldn't. We'll get wet and tired and lost, and end up drinking so much at the pub on the top that when we try to come down it will be pitch black, and we'll mistake a stream for a road, and end up so sodden that nothing but three bottles of wine and the rest of the gin will make things better".
That night, over dinner, Deepa said the word "Bazoomers," and my father instructed the Tongs to pack up their possessions and leave.
Trip to the breweries in Masham, followed by a fortifying walk by the river: our plans for a productive and informative day collpased upon discovering both the Crimson Pirate on the telly and white wine in the fridge. We followed this up with Jack Sparrow and cheese on toast, and then a little more wine. A short break was taken for dinner and Balderdash with my parents, and then we returned to the tv for 2001: A Space Odyssy and then - as "All That Jazz" began - everyone but Spim suddenly found a reason to retreat to bed.
Balderdash: Tongs do not play Balderdash like Bots. A typical Baldedash definition by a Bot might be, "Noose: a length of rope tied into a loop, attached to a beam, and then placed around an owl's clit." A typical Tong definition, however, lacks this whimsy. I played the Bot way anyhoo, although Ferg soon saw the light occasionally with curious definitions such as "A vibrating rice gantry".
Life note: Birthday
My birthday celebrations extended to a whole week this year. It started the Saturday before my birthday, when my parents took the Tongs out for a slap up meal at a restaurant with only one pot of ketchup for all two hundred tables. My actual birthday (the Monday) was spent energetically researching institutions in the Middle East, trying to ignore the dumb present my aunt bought me, and then drinking lots of wine and eating at Masala Zone (which achieves the difficult balance of being both cheap and delicious - where do they make their profit?)
To tide me over half way through the week, Bobbie and wTim took me out for sausages and beer (although I had to pay a refundable deposit of £10 to wTim).
Finally, last Saturday, we introduced the Nightclub Master Plan. Trips to nighclubs always fail because they open so late, and the only place to wait for them to open is the pub, so we're always drunk and tired come eleven o'clock. Not this time! No, we planned to see a movie at 7:30pm, and then planned to eat a light meal with only a little alcohol, and then to go to the club: drunk enough to dance, sober enough to stay awake. Unfortunately, the film ran later than expected and so the restaurant had stopped serving food by the time we arrived, but was more than happy to serve us giant jugs of margharita, which we guzzled during drinking games.
The club itself was okay. In my head, clubs are still large and mysterious places to be explored. It's always a shock, then, to find they're generally just bars without tables, and much louder music. Still, Darien, Olivia, Brock, Abi and I danced around until the DJ had run out of decent music and the queue at the bar was absurd, and we snuck home.
At the weekend I stumbled across my diary from 1997, which describes the year in amusing detail, from being lost in a blizzard on a Welsh mountain top at the stike of midnight, to my trip to the US selling books door-to-door, to my subsequent return to England and crippling poverty, to living in Westminster and struggling to find a job.
I hadn't realised there was a diary from this period, but was very glad to find that there was. It got me thinking, though, that the Rickbot of 2009 is going to be very pissed off when he's reading this diary and finds that the entire Christmas/New Year fortnight of 2003 has gone unrecorded. He'll wander: was that the year I went to Hawkhurst and burned paper hankies? Or the year Sam Rockwell invited me onto his yacht, and New Year was spent off Hawaii writing the first book of my best-selling trilogy?
Well, Mr Rickbot 2009, wonder no more! This is what happened:
Eddie Izzard: a gang of us trekked to see Izzard's gig at the Wembley Arena. His entire act was groaning under the weight of his ego, and his old, spontaneous style was reduced to a string of awkward catchphrases and repetitions of a golden age. He reminded me of a once energetic puppy reduced to senility in old age, but without the incontinence. Although I snickered throughout I was not very proud of what I was laughing at, and I only laughed gleefully once, although When Olivia later made a brilliant reference to this one gag I missed the joke completely. Almost a complete waste of time, although I enjoyed eating some chips on the way in.
Christmas in Edinburgh: a pleasant six days were spent in Edinburgh, entertaining and being entertained by my nieces, drinking gin and wine, and going on pleasant walks to abandoned mills, abandoned islands and invisible horses.
New Year's Eve Eve: there is an ongoing Bot tradition to meet up the night before New Year's Eve and get so drunk you cannot properly celebrate the real New Year's Eve. This was a tradition easily maintained at the Griffin, where a litre of pinot grigio is just ten quid. I remembered being quite sober, although the violence of my hangover indiciated otherwise - I admit, I had no memory of (as Abi reminded me) jumping on a table of strangers and shouting "Fee Fi Fo Fum", nor did I initially remember getting home and dancing for an hour on the coffee table.
New Year's Eve in Otley: The first half of New Year's Eve was spent in the car with the Tongs, driving north. Due to no small amount of short sightedness we had completely failed to buy any alcohol, and so we stopped at every service station en route, despite being told at the first one that service stations don't sell alcohol.
The second half of New Year's Eve started at the Spite, a pub on the northen boundary of Otley, a town on the northern boundary of the world. There was a warm, friendly atmosphere in the Spite, but not towards us - since we weren't local - so we just got quietly smashed on gin and snuck out around 11pm. In the meantime the whole valley had taken the trouble to coat itself in deep, deep snow, so we stumbled home hitting each other with snowballs and cackling. We ate some warming chilli soup to recover, and drank some fizzy wine at midnight. To herald the New Year I sang a punk-ska version of Auld Lang Syne, with improvised lyrics. What the hell does "auld lang syne" mean, anyway?
Two Tongs went to bed, the other three ran riot through the estate, a process cut short - after just one snowman on a stranger's doorstep, one wrestling match down a neighbour's driveway, and a session pelting a stranger with snowballs - when Ferklau hit me at point blank range in the eye, and the silly thing stopped working. Dreams of wearing a patch and becoming a pirate were cut short, however, when said eye returned to full operational capacity the following morning
Trek up the Chevin: "Wouldn't it be nice to walk to the top of the mountain," one of us said. By the end of the day, many of us wished we'd said "No, it wouldn't. We'll get wet and tired and lost, and end up drinking so much at the pub on the top that when we try to come down it will be pitch black, and we'll mistake a stream for a road, and end up so sodden that nothing but three bottles of wine and the rest of the gin will make things better".
That night, over dinner, Deepa said the word "Bazoomers," and my father instructed the Tongs to pack up their possessions and leave.
Trip to the breweries in Masham, followed by a fortifying walk by the river: our plans for a productive and informative day collpased upon discovering both the Crimson Pirate on the telly and white wine in the fridge. We followed this up with Jack Sparrow and cheese on toast, and then a little more wine. A short break was taken for dinner and Balderdash with my parents, and then we returned to the tv for 2001: A Space Odyssy and then - as "All That Jazz" began - everyone but Spim suddenly found a reason to retreat to bed.
Balderdash: Tongs do not play Balderdash like Bots. A typical Baldedash definition by a Bot might be, "Noose: a length of rope tied into a loop, attached to a beam, and then placed around an owl's clit." A typical Tong definition, however, lacks this whimsy. I played the Bot way anyhoo, although Ferg soon saw the light occasionally with curious definitions such as "A vibrating rice gantry".
Life note: Birthday
My birthday celebrations extended to a whole week this year. It started the Saturday before my birthday, when my parents took the Tongs out for a slap up meal at a restaurant with only one pot of ketchup for all two hundred tables. My actual birthday (the Monday) was spent energetically researching institutions in the Middle East, trying to ignore the dumb present my aunt bought me, and then drinking lots of wine and eating at Masala Zone (which achieves the difficult balance of being both cheap and delicious - where do they make their profit?)
To tide me over half way through the week, Bobbie and wTim took me out for sausages and beer (although I had to pay a refundable deposit of £10 to wTim).
Finally, last Saturday, we introduced the Nightclub Master Plan. Trips to nighclubs always fail because they open so late, and the only place to wait for them to open is the pub, so we're always drunk and tired come eleven o'clock. Not this time! No, we planned to see a movie at 7:30pm, and then planned to eat a light meal with only a little alcohol, and then to go to the club: drunk enough to dance, sober enough to stay awake. Unfortunately, the film ran later than expected and so the restaurant had stopped serving food by the time we arrived, but was more than happy to serve us giant jugs of margharita, which we guzzled during drinking games.
The club itself was okay. In my head, clubs are still large and mysterious places to be explored. It's always a shock, then, to find they're generally just bars without tables, and much louder music. Still, Darien, Olivia, Brock, Abi and I danced around until the DJ had run out of decent music and the queue at the bar was absurd, and we snuck home.
09 January 2004
Movie Review: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
I really, really, really wanted to like this movie, but didn't. Written by Andy Kaufman (like what Adaptation and Being John Malkovich were), produced by Drew Barrymore (like Donnie Darko and Charlie's Angels were), and starring Sam Rockwell (like what Lawn Dogs and Matchstick Men were), how could it fail!? Oh, perhaps because it was directed by George Clooney (like, um, nothing else). Clooney is an ass.
So, the plot is adapted from the 'unauthorized autobiography' of the same name: in the 1980s a game show host, who was so depressed by what little he had achieved in life, apart from being universally derided for reducing mainstream American television to the gutter, sought the respect of the public at the end of his career and wrote an autobiography in which he invented an entire double life, in which he was a CIA operative fighting for patriotic ideals like democracy. This is a cool concept, and some small amusement comes from watching as the CIA fantasy gradually take over from reality, until the Dating Game is just an excuse to chaperone young lovers across the planet as a cover for his missions - think Cilla Black as an assassin. In leather, if it makes things easier for you
Despite this excellent set up, the whole does not come together: there is no sense of energy or movement, and whilst the gameshow parts feel almost like a documentary, the actual missions are dealt with so briefly that it is never clear who these people are he is dealing with, or what they hope to achieve. I was left confused and annoyed, but am still willing - at some uncertain time in the future - to try watching it sober.
I really, really, really wanted to like this movie, but didn't. Written by Andy Kaufman (like what Adaptation and Being John Malkovich were), produced by Drew Barrymore (like Donnie Darko and Charlie's Angels were), and starring Sam Rockwell (like what Lawn Dogs and Matchstick Men were), how could it fail!? Oh, perhaps because it was directed by George Clooney (like, um, nothing else). Clooney is an ass.
So, the plot is adapted from the 'unauthorized autobiography' of the same name: in the 1980s a game show host, who was so depressed by what little he had achieved in life, apart from being universally derided for reducing mainstream American television to the gutter, sought the respect of the public at the end of his career and wrote an autobiography in which he invented an entire double life, in which he was a CIA operative fighting for patriotic ideals like democracy. This is a cool concept, and some small amusement comes from watching as the CIA fantasy gradually take over from reality, until the Dating Game is just an excuse to chaperone young lovers across the planet as a cover for his missions - think Cilla Black as an assassin. In leather, if it makes things easier for you
Despite this excellent set up, the whole does not come together: there is no sense of energy or movement, and whilst the gameshow parts feel almost like a documentary, the actual missions are dealt with so briefly that it is never clear who these people are he is dealing with, or what they hope to achieve. I was left confused and annoyed, but am still willing - at some uncertain time in the future - to try watching it sober.
Movie review: Stuck On You
Most of the reviews I have seen on film either embrace the surreal toilet humour of the Farelly brothers and declare it a triumph, or criticise the lack of taste in making siamese twins the focus of a comedy and declare it a tragedy. I take an approach about halfway through: I figure it would be a good idea to explore the humour of siamese twins, but point out that the Farelly brothers forgot to make it a comedy. The plot stumbles around blindly, the comic highlight is a double-entendre generated by a crossword puzzle, and the whole feels like the first draft of what could have been a pretty good movie, five or six rewrites down the line.
I have no idea why Damon is in this one - surely he doesn't owe the Farellys anything - and Meryl Streep is definitely slumming it with her dancing at the end. I don't think anyone else in it is famous (here, I archly overlook Cher's 'performance').
Only go see this if one friend blows you out because her work over runs, some others don't invite you to drink wine, sherry and port with them and it only costs £2.99 for a ticket.
Most of the reviews I have seen on film either embrace the surreal toilet humour of the Farelly brothers and declare it a triumph, or criticise the lack of taste in making siamese twins the focus of a comedy and declare it a tragedy. I take an approach about halfway through: I figure it would be a good idea to explore the humour of siamese twins, but point out that the Farelly brothers forgot to make it a comedy. The plot stumbles around blindly, the comic highlight is a double-entendre generated by a crossword puzzle, and the whole feels like the first draft of what could have been a pretty good movie, five or six rewrites down the line.
I have no idea why Damon is in this one - surely he doesn't owe the Farellys anything - and Meryl Streep is definitely slumming it with her dancing at the end. I don't think anyone else in it is famous (here, I archly overlook Cher's 'performance').
Only go see this if one friend blows you out because her work over runs, some others don't invite you to drink wine, sherry and port with them and it only costs £2.99 for a ticket.
Life note: Growing up
I took another step[1] towards being a grown-up today, and got myself a pension scheme. Urgh. I wouldn't have bothered at all, if it weren't for the fact that Seamus has one, and I can't bear to be more irresponsible than that reprobate.
Still, I'm not all that responsible, since I have no idea whether it's a good pension scheme or not: I was initially pleased to see I will be getting a pension of around £700,000 a year in 2036, and then realised they were taking inflation into account. In 2036, £700,000 won't buy you a Mars bar[2].
Footnotes:
[1] The other steps towards being a grown-up were: the seven birthdays between now and being 21, and having a mortgage.
[2] By 2036 Mars bars will have been replaced by Energo-Pods, which genetically modified tentacles plant in your stomach whilst you sleep.
I took another step[1] towards being a grown-up today, and got myself a pension scheme. Urgh. I wouldn't have bothered at all, if it weren't for the fact that Seamus has one, and I can't bear to be more irresponsible than that reprobate.
Still, I'm not all that responsible, since I have no idea whether it's a good pension scheme or not: I was initially pleased to see I will be getting a pension of around £700,000 a year in 2036, and then realised they were taking inflation into account. In 2036, £700,000 won't buy you a Mars bar[2].
Footnotes:
[1] The other steps towards being a grown-up were: the seven birthdays between now and being 21, and having a mortgage.
[2] By 2036 Mars bars will have been replaced by Energo-Pods, which genetically modified tentacles plant in your stomach whilst you sleep.
