Some things are less painful than you might think. Others.....

I bumped into an ex-boyfriend last night. By bumped into, I mean we were both on the same boat, on a river cruise down the Thames. It was quite a small boat.

There we were.  Trapped in a confined space for four hours with no way of escape unless you wanted to swim, and have you seen the Thames? No one wants to swim in that. (Unless you happen to be the very drunk man I saw a few weeks ago doing breaststroke in bright pink boxer shorts by London Bridge, apparently.  But his is a story for another time.)

This whole scenario has recipe for disaster (BBC election coverage ringing any bells?) written all over it, you might think.  Especially when I tell you about the free bar.  (There was a free bar.)

But you know what?  it was fine.  More than fine, actually.  As we chatted, and caught up on news, and talked all about The Past and marvelled at how much more grown up and sensible we both are these days I remembered exactly why he is, even now, one of my favourite people on the planet. (To be fair I haven't checked absolutely all of the people on the planet yet, but I'm pretty confident.)   We bantered and reminisced and in between all of that some apologies were made, old debts were settled, and I laughed more than I have in a very long time.  It was a really lovely evening.  If I do say so myself, I have excellent taste (mostly*) in ex-boyfriends.

Then on the way home, I fell down an escalator at Westminster and did this:

(That is a sideways view of my leg, which is sort of hard to tell. There is large-ish (larger than it looks here) gash down the middle of it. I also have a massively bruised and slightly swollen toe, which, annoyingly, none of the photos I've taken so far have quite managed to capture in all its multicoloured splendour.)

Some things are less painful than you might think.  The escalator at Westminster tube station is definitely not of them.

*There are some notable exceptions to this rule.  You do not need to know about them.

In the unlikely event that I ever own a cat

I'm calling it Vinyl (because of all the scratching.)  This is not my joke, as much as I wish it were.  It belongs to Toby Davies, who was one of the people I heard telling Tall Tales in Kilburn last night. 

I've mentioned Tall Tales before, so (assuming you are  the kind of dilligent reader who, after tripping over a link which has carelessly been left lying around mid-sentence, can't help but click through to find out more) you hardly need me to tell you that it's an evening of songs and stories performed by some very funny, clever, creative people.

Last night was a lot of fun. We heard more from the love-struck horses; details of a surprisingly savvy crow-based business plan and, in the same story where Vinyl makes his appearance, an excellent quiche metaphor.  Metaphor for what? Well.
That would be telling.  You'll just have to read the story for yourself and find out.

Science Fiction/Double Feature: Toy Story 3 and Inception

I'm quite proud of that title and have been singing the song all day, and since everyone is describing Inception as "action sci-fi" and Toy Story has some aliens, I'm sticking with it.  Even if it's not quite accurate. (Inception is not science fiction.)

I saw them both yesterday (lucky me).  Some thoughts:

Toy Story 3:   Like a lot of people I loved the first two Toy Story films.  I can still  remember leaving the cinema after seeing Toy Story 1 and thinking that something had changed in the world of movie making.  I wasn't sure what, exactly, but I knew that Toy Story was something quite special.  My memories of Toy Story 2  are more hazy but I *think* I was mainly relieved that I enjoyed it as much as I did, and was impressed that they had pulled it off.  After all, sequels are hard to do, and sometimes they are downright awful (yes, Grease 2, I'm looking at you).

There lies the problem.  Pixar created something amazing with the first Toy Story movie, and then proved they could do it all over again with the second.  Where did that leave them to go next? If sequels are hard, then third-in-a-series films (is there a word for this? Treacles?) are near impossible.

Without wanting to give too much away, Toy Story 3 is set ten years after the last one; the storyline is propelled by the fact that Andy, now 17 and off to college, has outgrown his toys.  Buzz, Woody and friends still take centre stage, but giving the humans a pivotal role as well makes it a different type of story.  Not necessarily worse, certainly not better, just......different.

There were lots of new characters: if you thought they'd already brought every toy you remember from childhood to life in the first two films, think again; there are some old favourites making their debut here.  There were some nice twists on the old ones (one in particular) as well, which I won't describe because that would definitely spoil things.  You'll know it when you see it.

I liked Toy Story 3.  Perhaps it lacked the "wow" factor of the first two, but it was still a lot of fun, very sweet and incredibly funny (I laughed out loud within the first three minutes). For a treacle (see? that term is starting to stick already) it was as good as it could have been.

You will notice that I haven't mentioned anything about having seen it in 3D. (Question: is it possible to see Toy Story 3 NOT in 3D in London?  It wasn't an option in the cinema I went to.)  The fact that I haven't even mentioned it shows you how much this film needed to be in 3D.  It didn't.  I'm starting to think 3D is pretty stupid.  Rant over.


Inception:   By the end of this film, I felt like my brain had just run the marathon.  You probably already know, since it's been all over everything, that it is Christopher Nolan's latest project; he also wrote and directed Memento which remains one of my favourite films ever.  (If you have not seen Memento, stop reading NOW and go and get your hands on a copy IMMEDIATELY.  It is ace.)   I didn't know much about Inception before I went to see it, and that turned out to be a good thing. 

I do think you need to know a tiny bit about it before going in though; mainly because an old colleague of mine hated Memento (which I will stop banging on about in a minute, I promise) because she went to see it one Sunday evening when she was looking for a sit-back-give-your-mind-a-rest movie experience.  Memento, with a storyline which works backwards  in 10-20 minute chunks (which is the thing you need to know before you start watching and which my colleague didn't realise for about half of the film), is definitely not that kind of movie.

Inception isn't that kind of movie either.  I really, really don't want to give anything away here but it does help to know before you see it that it's to do with dreams, and you'll need to be on your toes (not literally, unless you want to make other cinema-goers cross) to keep track of which dream you're in and who is dreaming it*.  That is all the information you need, and probably all the information you should take into the cinema with you.

Half the fun is working out what the hell is going on;  there are a couple of key things it's possible to work out a split second or two before they are revealed on screen, which is particularly satisfying, and will make you feel all clever and smug.   It is very long though, which is my only criticism (and even that's not a real criticism because there's no way I could point to any bits which could be cut out). I had a worrying  moment about two thirds of the way in, when I could feel my brain going into meltdown and I was worried I'd lose track of everything completely, which would have been immensely frustrating after investing so much in the story until that point.  This didn't happen though; just when I thought I was on the brink of collapse things began to fall into place again.  Coincidence?  Maybe, but I suspect it was more a case of clever film making.

It's an incredibly good film. Visually stunning in parts (and just think! It's not even in stupid 3D!) but what I loved the most was the storytelling. For me, plot is the hardest thing to get my head around when writing; I have my hands full just trying to cope with basic, linear narrative structure.  Christopher Nolan's ability to play around with this - turn it back to front, add extra layers and dimensions then switch effortlessly between them -  while still making the story accessible (unlike, say, David Lynch, who messes with it so much you haven't a clue what is going on and end up just not caring) completely astounds me.



* if you've seen the film, and ONLY IF YOU'VE SEEN IT , there's an interesting visual representation of all that here. Seriously, I mean it; don't click that link unless you've already watched the film.  You will thank me for this advice.

Interesting Band Name Fact of the Day

"Hoosier" is the colloquial name for someone from the state of Indiana.   Two of the band The Hoosiers (Goodbye Mr A; Worried About Ray) spent some time at Indianapolis University on football scholarships.  These facts are related.

The Hoosiers were playing at a thing I went to last night; they have a new single coming out called Choices.  It's pretty good.

The importance of family planning

I have no idea what I am listening to on Radio 4 right now; something science-ish. They are talking about a killer frog fungus, which has all but wiped out the golden frog of Costa Rica, which is, I am sure you know, an icon in the frog world.

Hang on, it's just finished.  It was called Saving Species, according to the presenter, who I would assume has no reason to lie about these things.

As it turns out the killer frog fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis if you are being polite, "Bd" to its friends) is quite a serious issue.  According to the half an hour or so of Google-based research I've just done, anyway.  The numbers vary wildly across the different articles I have looked at, but it seems that around about a third of all amphibian species are currently under threat of extinction. There are various theories about the reasons for this, but chytridiomycosis, the disease caused by Bd, is one of the major players.

It's highly infectious and has a 80% mortality rate.  No one quite knows where it came from, or why it's suddenly become so prevalent, or how to stop it, but a lot of scientists are working on answers to these questions.  One of them is Professor Poulter, who is worried about the declining population of corroboree frogs in Australia:

I would really feel quite satisfied if we could say, 10 years from now, that you have to be careful walking around [Australia's] Kosiuszko National Park or you might tread on a corroboree frog because they're all over the place," said Professor Poulter. "I would take real satisfaction from that".

 The earliest reported case of Bd was in 1938, in some clawed frogs in South Africa.   I learnt this from an article in Science Daily, but this is the part of the story which completely blew my mind (which was already reeling from the discovery that some frogs have claws):

Around this time there was a huge trade in clawed frogs when they were used in one of the earliest human pregnancy tests. The global exportation of the clawed frog is likely to have spread Bd around the world.

Frog based pregnancy testing.  Who knew?  Certainly not me.

Getting Busy with the Reminsicing

My favourite piece of car-related economic activity happened a few years ago, when demand for Deloreans increased dramatically.  The reason?  An entire generation who had grown up with Back to the Future suddenly reached that stage in life where they had enough disposable income to buy the car they had been coveting since they were ten years old, and did. Clearly, nostalgia sells.

Cue the re-launch of SodaStream in the UK.  You might know about this already; there have been TV ads, posters and web-based marketing campaigns going on for the last few weeks.  I went to one of their PR events last week.  You may think, hearing this, that I'm a cool, hip media type with my finger on the pulse.  I am not, but my friend Dan is, and he told me it was on.  We had a lot of fun.

We tried some of the new flavours (green tea with berries was nicer than it sounds, pink grapefruit less so)  and swiftly moved onto cocktails which had been made from them.   In case you weren't sure, I can definitely confirm there are worse ways to spend a Friday afternoon than drinking free cocktails. 

 Early in the piece, my friend Dan said to the nice man from the PR company "Didn't Heston Blumenthal put Blue Nun into a Sodastream to make champagne?"

"Oh yeah", said the nice man from the PR company. "Er, we don't really want to encourage that though.  Have you tried all of these fantastic new flavours?"

A few mojitos later, Dan tried again.  "Didn't Heston Blumenthal once put Blue Nun....."

"Hell yeah! Let's give it a go!" said the nice man from the PR company.  Or words to that effect.  I can't remember exactly what he said, but I do remember drinking some rather nice, er, champagne-style sparkling wine (I don't think I have any French readers yet, but just in case I do, I don't want upset them) a few minutes later. 

At this point Dan had to go back to work.  I, on the other had, did not, and after reflecting briefly on what a grand idea this freelancing business was,  settled in for the afternoon, Moscow Mule* in hand, to reminsice with the other people there about the originals.

We came to the conclusion that our generation (anyone now in their late twenties to early forties) can be divided into two groups: those who had a SodaStream as a kid and those who wanted one.  I'm genuinely interested, now, to find out who ends up buying them this time around.  My guess is it will be the people, like me, who belong to the second group; those of us who still need to fill what someone described as 'the Sodastream shaped hole in our lives'.

We also worked out that the other must-have gadget of the era was a Mr Frosty machine.  No household, we think, ever owned both.

(Did they really think they needed the cute kid in this photo?  It's a MR FROSTY for goodness sake!!  It makes crushed ice beverages! Of many colours!!)

I thought these were the two main toys I wanted as a child.  Since then I have remembered several more:

A wooden labyrinth

I was desperate for one of these. Our dentist had one in his waiting room, and I never got past number 12. The fact that I still know this just goes to show: some scars run deep.

Simon
I would have happily traded in my little brother, also called Simon, for one of these:

Remember them?  The lights flashed in a sequence, which you had to remember and then repeat.  The further you got, the longer the sequences became and the harder they were to remember.  I have huge respect for whoever was in charge of marketing this;  I expect I was not the only child  who pestered their parents constantly for what is basically a memory training device.  And a pretty cheap looking one, at that.

The Game of Life

I have never, ever, got to the end of a game of The Game of Life.  All of my friends who owned it hated playing it, and by the time I had convinced them to get the box out and set up the spinner and find the little plastic pegs to put in the little plastic cars, it was time for me to go home. One day, I will finish a game.  I WILL.  I am under no illusion that I might actually enjoy this experience; everyone I have ever met who has played it tells me it is rubbish.  But that's not the point.

Operation

There were bones with comedy names  and it made a buzzing noise.  What's not to love?  My Dad is a doctor, though, and I am pretty sure we weren't allowed to have this for professional reasons.

I am sure that there are iphone apps available for at least some (if not all) of these games.  I am sure that, at some point, I will cave and buy at least one of them.  Am I the only one? And are there any I have missed?

*1 part vodka, 1 part lime juice, 4 parts ginger beer.  Heavy on the ice.

Sunday Night Music Club

You know those songs that you love, and then you don't hear for ages, and then you hear again, and think "oh wow..... I used to LOVE this song!" ?

I used to LOVE this song. Still do.