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Thursday 20 November 2008
Jealous? Me?
At this very moment, David is in Cardiff, watching an advance screening of the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who. I'm awaiting his review with interest, obviously, but now, come the 15th of April, I'm going to have to ban him from the room when I watch it myself, just so he can't distract me with smug foreknowledge.
EDIT: First review is in - it's a hit, apparently.
Competition For World Of Warcraft
I've remarked before how World Of Warcraft is the only computer game since probably Defender that's well and truly hooked me. I'm almost salivating at the thought of The Burning Crusade expansion coming later this year. But David has been salivating over a more imminent arrival - the fourth volume of Bethseda's The Elder Scrolls series; Oblivion. It's a single player RPG for the X-Box 360 and PC, so in type it's not a direct WoW competitor at all, but clearly in terms of attention time it's going to put up a fight. The long pre-ordered copy for the X-Box arrived on Thursday while I was away, by the time I got back that night David was fully immersed and consequently, conversation in our house has been something that used to happen.
But I've had the place to myself this evening, and under some duress I've been giving it a go. And I confess I can see the attraction. It's a game with a main story that you can follow if you want, and countless other mini-adventures (to coin a phrase) that you can pick up and follow if you want. You can collect a quest today and get round to it next year if you want, and though you pick a 'class' for your character at the outset, if you want to try expanding your type into other areas you're free to do so. Most importantly of all - this is a world in which (until you hit its boundaries of course) you can go anywhere and do pretty much anything. You could quite happily just spend your days living as a citizen, meeting new people and exploring the world and never touching a 'quest' if you wanted to. Of course, if you did you'd be missing out on a hell of a lot.
I'm sold. Though not to the extent that I won't be keeping my WoW hand in between now and The Dark Portal Opening.
I know, I know: *cough*Geek*cough*.
Continuing Our Recent Scandinavian Theme....
I'm writing this on a plane. It's a Scandinavian Airlines System plane (SAS being the joint carrier of Sweden, Denmark and Norway in case you wondered), and I'm on it flying from Amsterdam to Stockholm because I got away from the office late and missed the KLM flight I was supposed to be taking. As a shorthaul flight, it's essentially undivided physically, though there are three travel classes; Economy (cheap, inflexible), Economy Flex (less cheap, more flexible) and Business Class. By the time I pitched up at the airport there were none of the first group of seats left, so here I am, the only passenger in the entire front two classes of travel. That's right - there's me and no one else between here and the front of the plane, and worse, I'm about seven rows from the first row of Economy, so unless I stand up and look around, from every perspective, it feels like I'm on a ghost plane. When the stewardess looking after me and no one else was talking to me I pointed out how embarrassed I felt, and she said "Thank god you're here or I'd have nothing to do."
So I've got fantasic service, a lovely, friendly attendant, and the oddest, creepiest environment I can ever remember being in. It feels strangely like if I went up to the flight deck I'd find that there's no one flying the plane....
The Unsung Heroine of Swedish EuroSong....
.... at least as far as we're concerned, is the fabulous Linda Bengtzing. Last year's inexplicable Swedish failure to select Alla Flickor (All The Girls) as their entry robbed them of an obvious winner and us of an English language version of a truly outstanding pop song (which is always produced if the winner is in Swedish). This year's overlooking of the previously mentioned there-are-better Jag Ljuger Sa Bra (I'm A Good Liar) has repeated these grave injustices.
What, oh what, are the Swedes thinking?
Linda Bengtzing, if your countrymen and women won't do it, here in our house, we salute you.
In Sweden Meanwhile....
(See - told you it would all hang together). In Sweden they know how to do it properly. Melodifestivalen is the event, and it's a true highlight. Twenty-odd songs compete in an equivalent of the main contest itself for the honour of representing Sweden. And there, it *is* an honour. So in the mix you'll find honest-to-God pop stars; people who the Swedes can name, unlike the man with the schoolgirls whose name is long gone from my mind. Performers who have had (*gasp*) chart hits outnumber the 'who the fuck?' element, and the songs are frequently both rock-solid pop numbers and also guaranteed EuroSong hits.
Weird then that the Swedes themselves frequently screw up their own chances by, for example, selecting the truly rubbish Las Vegas last year and the good-but-there-are-better-available thing they've selected this year.
Melodifestivalen is released every year on CD by the way. That's how seriously they take it.
And On The Subject Of Sweden....
....I'm going to talk about the British system for choosing our Eurovision Song Contest entry. No - there is a logic here, but you'll have to wait a couple of postings to see how it all hangs together. Before we went away, we caught the tail end (the voting bit) of Making Your Mind Up (do you see what they did there?), the British selection programme. For anyone who missed it (how could you?), six songs performed by a selection of luminaries are performed at teatime on a Saturday and The Great British Public(tm) then vote for the one they most want to see carry the hopes of the nation into the Grand Prix in (this year) Athens. Now, because we only saw the voting, we didn't see any but the winning song, but here I am, pondering the imponderable: Surely, at least one of those other five, never mind some small selection from among the 'long list', must have been better than the dreck we have once again chosen.
Seriously, a middle-aged white guy rapping while some mutton-dressed-as-lamb dancers prance around in schoolgirl costumes? Are we just giving up on quality from the off and resigning ourselves to aiming for the novelty vote? Or the sympathy vote? Or is it a grand post-modern statement about the nature of 'pop', the mainstream audience, and the anodyne sheen of EuroSong?
Nah - it's just a crap song that'll probably be an embarassment to us all on the night.
Coming In From The Cold
Brrrrr. Even I, who as people will know me will tell you can happily walk around in a t-shirt in sub-zero temperatures, has had cause to feel a bit chilly in the last week. It occurs to me that I forgot to mention that the holiday was five days at the Icehotel in Swedish Lapland. Above the Arctic Circle, spending one night sleeping on a block of ice and the other three in 'warm accomodation'. It's a slightly extravagant experience, but seriously, if you can manage it, do it.
We flew from London to Stockholm then connected to a domestic flight to Kiruna, which is around 15 minutes drive from Jukkasjärvi, where the hotel is built afresh each winter from ice carved from the Torne River. Each year the 'suites' in the hotel are redesigned by a different group of artists, each of whom lays out their room according to a different theme or principle. Ours was Japanese themed. You can't use a room in the Icehotel like a normal hotel room where you leave your clothes hanging in the wardrobe, for obvious reasons, so you only take possession of your room at night when you want to go to bed. From 10am to 6pm every day, every room is open to the public. So on our last morning we went round them all taking photographs. As we'd forsworn our thermals in order not to be uncomfortable on the journey home, by the time we got the hell out of there we were *frozen* - we stepped outside into a landscape of snow and ice, but with the sun shining suddenly we were back in the warm.
Other stuff we did: A 'moose safari' to look, unsurprisingly, for moose, a number of which we saw; a snowmobile excursion which took us over frozen lakes, through forests and down snow-covered trails, and a nighttime equivalent to see the Northern Lights. This last was a big worry, because the conditions were rubbish for it, but at the very last minute, as we were about to set off back to the hotel, David was the first to spot a shimmer in the sky that had the entire group entranced for the next fifteen minutes.
Snowmobiling, by the way, is David's big new passion, and devoted boyfriend that I am, I gave up my turn to do the driving so that he could.
We also hired a car and drove straight across the Torne. Even frozen as solidly as it was, there's something unnerving about that experience.
On Domestic Upset
Not in a serious way that is, but in the 'we've decided at no notice to have our bathroom complely ripped out and replaced in the next week. The timing is dictated by the fact that we're going to be away for the next week and so it's the perfect time for there to be no bathroom in the flat. But this was all decided on Thurssday evening, so it's all ended up being a bit of a mad dash to get things organised, board out Gramsci to Alison's, choose tiles and suites, and generally also sort out all the work that needs to be done before I can go away and actually get organised for the trip itself.
The last two days have been chaos and so I've been unable to find time to discuss certain items in the news. Oh well.
I've just sent my last work email, finished cleaning those parts of the flat that were just too untidy to leave for workmen to see (mostly caused by the previously-mentioned chaos because there are workmen coming....), packed the hand baggage, and the only things remaining on our to do list are for the morning - shoving all of the living room furniture to one side to give them space to dump bathroom suite, tiles, paint and various electrical apparatus, clear the last bits and pieces out of the bathroom, and set the recorder for those limited few items of TV we're bothered about.
The alarm is set for 4am and now I think I get to relax for 20 minutes before I go to bed.
Back Friday evening - I'll try to do a proper catch up next weekend.
No Smoking
Not me, I hasten to add. Or rather, yes me in the sense that I remain a non-smoker, but specifically in relation to David, who succumbed once again to the demon weed last year and has been contemplating giving up again for months.
He's decided to do it in a very serious way, using a program that includes a personal support website, email and text messages of support and encouragement, and various of his friends being officially nominated as supporters. I am of course one of the latter.
Today is his designated Quit Day, and having finshed his last cigarette and binned all his lighters last night, he's having his first day in a while without.
I shall be thinking supporting thoughts through the day and buying small treats for him on the way home.
Fortune Cookie
There's a new Chinese take-away opened near us and we sampled their very good fare for the first time tonight. As part of their package they provided fortune cookies, and I loved my 'fortune' - it may be that postmodernism has reached the world of the fortune cookie:
"Whoever dies with the most toys is, nevertheless, dead."
Poetry.
As The World Turns
So I contemplate the news of the week.
'Ming' Campbell is the leader of the Liberal Democrats, and once again Simon ('popular with the party activists') Hughes is pushed into an ignominious third place. Various people have trotted out their theories about why this alleged popularity didn't translate into election victory, and of course the 'revelations' about his sexuality didn't help his appearance as an honest broker, but the two things that struck me at the time of the sudden access of honesty stay with me:
One is that I always assumed that Simon Hughes' non-heterosexuality was just one of those open secrets that some politicians manage to keep - when he came out, the biggest shock to me was that he claims relationships with women.
The second is the more serious. I don't care if he's gay, straight or a bisexual transgendered badger - that's his business. And I don't much care that he was misleading about it - it was stupid politically, but not without precedent. What bothers me is that once again this kind of honesty only comes when someone is going to run the story anyway and the subject has their hand forced. As if, still and all in this day of greater equality than was ever previously imaginable, it remains something to be ashamed of.
Shame on you for that, if for nothing else, Mr Hughes.
Some Details
So the primary reason for my being in hospital was a condition called Orbital Cellulitis, which is a condition involving an infection in the tissue around the eye.
The background is that since I was ill before Christmas I've had chronic congestion in my sinuses. Somewhere along the line, this seems to have become infected, and the middle of last week, that infection spread to the eye. Hence I woke up on Thursday last week with my eye swollen shut and the right side of my face giving me a lot of pain.
Visits to the GP and then A&E immediately followed, and after an initial blast with oral antibiotics didn't halt the progress I was admitted to hospital a week ago today.
Five days of intravenous antibiotics later I was released on my own recognizance with three more lots of antibiotics and an instruction to rest up for the rest of the week.
So that's the 'in a nutshell' version.
It's Not My Fault!
This recent silence that is.
I've just come out (I believe the operative term is 'been released') from hospital, where I have languished since last week, and where I have, I cannot deny, been bored out of my tiny mind.
I'm just going to try and get my head together a bit and then I'll do some proper catching up.