Will is to hijack my blog

Will is going to be taking us back to the dark ages on some kind of quest to piss me off. I will let him elaborate, as he will using this blog to spread his evil mission. See you in a month.

Croatia = rad

Why did I come back to sit at my desk and watch the rain pouring down my window, why why why??? PS final photo is Will's cousin James (in foreground) with his brand new wife, Tania. At 6.30am the next day. After having been up all night.

List of books that I may have read

OK so now I am copying Neil, Tom and Dan, so here goes with the list (I refuse to call it a meme). Just so you know, I have a bit of a problem with "canonical" works - who gets to choose them? And what bias is there? And how in God's name did Dan Brown get in???



PS: the code is red for those I have read, asterisked for more than once, blue for those I want to read, and green for those started but never finished. 44:13:9, fact fans.



Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Anna Karenina

Crime and Punishment

Catch-22*

One Hundred Years of Solitude*

Wuthering Heights*

The Silmarillion

Life of Pi: A Novel

The Name of the Rose

Don Quixote

Moby Dick

Ulysses

Madame Bovary

The Odyssey*

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Eyre

A Tale of Two Cities

The Brothers Karamazov

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

War and Peace

Vanity Fair

The Time Traveller’s Wife

The Iliad

Emma

The Blind Assassin

The Kite Runner

Mrs. Dalloway

Great Expectations

American Gods

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Atlas Shrugged

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Memoirs of a Geisha

Middlesex

Quicksilver

Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales

The Historian

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*

Love in the Time of Cholera

Brave New World*

The Fountainhead

Foucault’s Pendulum

Middlemarch

Frankenstein*

The Count of Monte Cristo

Dracula*

A Clockwork Orange

Anansi Boys

The Once and Future King

The Grapes of Wrath

The Poisonwood Bible

1984*

Angels & Demons

The Inferno

The Satanic Verses

Sense and Sensibility

The Picture of Dorian Gray*

Mansfield Park

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

To the Lighthouse

Tess of the D’Urbevilles

Oliver Twist*

Gulliver’s Travels*

Les Misérables

The Corrections

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time

Dune

The Prince

The Sound and the Fury

Angela’s Ashes

The God of Small Things

A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present

Cryptonomicon

Neverwhere

A Confederacy of Dunces

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Dubliners*

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Beloved

Slaughterhouse Five*

The Scarlet Letter

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

The Mists of Avalon

Oryx and Crake : A Novel

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Cloud Atlas

The Confusion

Lolita

Persuasion

Northanger Abbey

The Catcher in the Rye

On the Road

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Freakonomics

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The Aeneid

Watership Down

Gravity’s Rainbow

The Hobbit*

In Cold Blood

White Teeth

Treasure Island

David Copperfield*

The Three Musketeers

Flange-mounted active probe

Yes, that's what I'm working on. Snarf.

Birthday approaching... fast!

OK, not fast. More like in September. But that's no reason not to come up with a ludicrously over-complicated plan right now!

I am thinking of coming up to London (madness I know) and either hiring somewhere out to put on a Labyrinth-themed 80s Venetian ball*:

* For which I have found a supplier of masks. But no big hair yet, excluding my own of course.

Otherwise I have heard tell of a night called Guilty Pleasures, at Koko, and it has been suggested that with my eclectic (OK, indiscriminate and sometimes crap) taste in music this might be an option.

Thoughts on a postcard please!

Hay Festival - 22nd May onwards

I want to go to the Hay Festival this year, but have heard rumours that it is almost impossible to find accommodation. But I have a tent.

Anyone been/going this year? Advice welcome.

sickly child

So yesterday I spent most of the day lying on my sofa between trips to the loo to be sick. And why? No booze or dodgy food consumed the previous day (the same as Will, who is fine), so 'tis a mystery. Hope none of last weekend's guests have succombed to same.

Also have found potential next stop for pan-European tour, a town in Albania called Puke. I kid you not.

In other news, I am trying to plan a visit to Dubrovnik in the summer, anyone been there?

House = new

So we've moved. Devizes seems nice so far, with a rad deli which sells chocolate faberge eggs amongst other things, and proper butchers etc. Also we have milk delivered in glass bottles(!), something I've not seen for many years. This makes up for the semi-constant drone of the firing range which is apparently very close. Nothing like a chorus of RPGs to help me concentrate on my extra boring work. Or maybe it's not the army, I forgot it was half-term.

Also I have spoken to several neighbours already, thus beating my London score of 3 in 3 years in a mere 3 weeks. I've even invited some round - it seemed like the thing to do. But Will has caused us to be self-exiled from our local, didn't take long.

But it's bastard cold outside the protective smogzone, and I can't seem to keep the fire going. In fact my extreme ineptitude in the face of owning a home is now coming to the fore - I couldn't find the gas meter until yesterday, and have so far managed to change one light bulb and sand down one shelf (piece of timber at the moment, I speak for its future use). I have been looking at the garden hopefully, but not actually doing anything in it yet. Like planting seeds in the enormo veg garden. Or constructing the compost bin rather than using plastic bags which keep it nice and stinky.

Which all begs the question, please can someone with an ounce of sense come and stay and teach me how to be an actual grown-up? No, Dan, this does not mean you.

update

Yeah, yeah, moved house dinni???

False economy

Buying a hand blender (to make soup) from Tesco for £3.96 + waiting to get home before reading instructions including that old chestnut DO NOT USE IN HOT LIQUIDS x deciding to go ahead anyway = kitchen painted in parsnip and apple soup and a funny smell.

DOH!

Sardinia

Went to Sardinia the week before last, quite a random destination courtesy of Ryanair's foolishly low prices. We stayed in Alghero, on the North-East coast, a medieval walled city, which was pleasant without being particularly memorable. However there was sunshine, which was the point of the trip, as having been starved of it all summer (including August's trip to Scotland) I was feeling a little peaky.

Ate some nice seafood (no sardines though) and plenty of ice cream, and even managed to coerce Will into swimming in the sea at one point, as it is clear and beautiful all around the coast.

My bad

Apologies again for being so rubs at keeping this up-to-date. In news, I am working on my first freelance job, which is going well, although I seem to be able to distract myself very easily despite the fact that I'm not getting paid by the hour people! (Thanks, Apone)

Went to End of the Road festival at the weekend, handily only 10 mins away from my parents house, as we got rained out on Friday night, so slept in car/crashed at theirs for a couple of hours on Saturday morning. Otherwise had a great time, personal highlights were Architecture in Helsinki, Seasick Steve, and The Bees. Think I might lay off the cider for a while though...

Also we are finally coming up to London at the weekend, after what seems an age since we've seen many people not in our immediate families, what with all the weddings this summer. So hopefully will see some Stokey types, do give us a bell!

Work, or not

Unemployment beckons again in a few days' time, though sadly I have failed to ensure the weather is as good as it was for my last 6 weeks off last summer. And I don't have travelling to look forward to, but instead the yawning abyss of poverty and withdrawal from society as I emulate Dan by going freelance. See you on the other side, suckas!

I am Scolar

With the newly discovered love of, nay obsession with, facebook currently taking over my working hours, I realise I may have rather rudely neglected my blog for some time now. So, to business:

I am shortly going to Scotland (for the first time) to Edinburgh festival, and wondered if anyone might have any tips for enjoying said event? Also after the weekend there we are heading to the Highlands, and again, anyone know where would be cool to drop by? We were planning on doing a lot of (well, some) walking but this may turn out to be rather weather-dependent, and on this month's evidence I may be regretting the choice of summer hol venue...

Will's 30th Birthday

For those of you not on Facebook, a note on behalf of my lord and master:

Birthday

It will be celebrated on the first full moon after the summer solstice (June 30, fact fans) in the field opposite Will's house in Salisbury. We are hoping to have some kind of fire going, presumably lit without the aid of matches, round which to sing songs and generally behave like pagans. No change there, then. We will be camping in the field, with or without the van, and foraging for food of course. Release your inner hippy!

Bad, badder, baddest

Top 5 worst films of all time:

1. Dude where's my car? - The only time I almost (but not quite) walked out of a cinema, despite being pissed
2. Days of Thunder - A Lockwood recommendation which failed to score on the promised whoop-o-meter
3. Punch Drunk Love - Adam Sandler, nuff said
4. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (original of course) - Not so much bad as unwatchable
5. Flashdance - You may not believe this, but I had such high hopes...

And I usually love bad films. Or so I get told. Looking forward to a sequel-tastic summer with which to update this list though! My money's on Die Hard 4.0

WTF?

File under "Freddie Starr"

When will this madness end?

Monday boredom

This afternoon I am mostly laughing at Charlie Brooker while batting away the sinking realisation of the fact that I have way too much work than it is possible to do in this short week.

I know, let's go on the internet then! That will help I'm sure.

Had a cool weekend with Rachel and Dan, which makes work seem even worse - I still haven't thought of a way to get paid for doing something I would choose to do anyway. If only there was a way of making money out of inane commentary... Wait a minute! I think some people actually get to do this! Bastards.

last.fm 1.0

Because I now drive to work in a 106 with a suitably crap stereo, I have been forced to rediscover the beauty of tapes. As I stopped making them/being made them as late as 2004, some of the songs are what might be loosely termed as modern popular music, but the cream comes from way earlier.

Currently top of my pops include:

• pretty much the whole of Now 10 Tape 1
• Velvet Pants: Propellorheads
• Pussy Control: Prince
• Thunderstruck: AC/DC

Stone the crows

If anyone wishes to perform an entire body purge, I direct you to this offering in the name of Joss:

gagfest

If you get to the end and manage to hold down your lunch I will be impressed!