Bleak House

Bleak House has been defeating me for 20 years now. I guess I was spoiled by the amazing television version with Diana Rigg and Denholm Elliot:

I think it was on in the same amazing year that gave us Twin Peaks, GBH, and, er, Star Trek TNG Season 2. But I remember how great it was.

So, I remember how odd I found trying the read the actual book before going to University, how I abandoned reading it at university, and how I've picked it up ever since, read those first few pages about fog, and then put it sadly down. I've even bought repeated copies, as though somehow owning more and more would allow me to read it by osmosis. They all remained unread.

Every time I picked up another book, and I'm not kidding, I've always felt that tiny guilt that I wasn't finally getting on with Bleak House. I've not had this problem with other Dickens books - but there's something about this one. Perhaps it's that the title and the atmosphere are matched to a plot that (for all it's grubby tangles) is really quite simple.

Earlier this year, I tried again. I got quite far, then suddenly found myself reading half a dozen Perry Masons and thinking "Perry would have solved Jarndyce and Jarndyce in an hour and then gone out for cocktails and dancing with Lady Deadlock." Ever since, I've picked it up, got a little further, and stopped.

Finally, wonderfully, I found this:

I'm not sure entirely what to think. It's kind of cheating, especially when poor Hugh Dickinson is doing so much work (he really do do the police in different voices, he do). It's about 30 hours long, and I dread to think how long it took to record. But it means I'm whipping through it.

I am finally going to finish Bleak House.

Expensive Farts

It's our anniversary. Yes, two years since this blog stopped being fun.

We celebrated by going to a Vegetarian restaurant. I hate Vegetarian restaurants. There are exceptions, but, by-and-large you find yourself smugly overcharged for chickpea curry. I decided to be cunning, and asked friends on Facebook. I then presented my boyfriend with the crowd-sourced list and said "pick one".

He picked the wrong one. It was a bland shed lit by tea lights. In one corner a man read a Russian novel. In another, two women talked church politics ("I always find that black women, when you're dealing with them...", "Well, I'm black, and I never-", "That's you, dear."). We sat in a corner and looked at the menu. It was depressingly uninventive. He ordered the chickpea fritata. I ordered the chickpea curry.

We ate in glum silence. It was kind of like prison food, give or take a human ear. The whole dreary process lasted less than an hour and cost over fifty quid. We then went and bought anniversary gaviscon.

The shoddy horror of the whole experience is that there is fun vegetarian food. Inventive, exciting stuff - raw burgers, tofu fantasies, seaweed surprise. Not stuff worse than you could make at home. The shocker was the mark-up. Half a tin of chickpeas each is not exactly wild truffles.

We then went to a party (pausing only to stand outside McD's and sigh) and got talking to a beautiful Frenchman, who said "Me and my boyfriend, it's only been two years, but I tell you, you know after a few months. I knew immediately. I'm going to propose. Seriously. Here's my mind map for how it'll work." It was pastel-coloured. We said nothing.

After that we went home, watched a Hammer film about incest and drank scotch. Happy anniversary.

Your bacon isn't smuggled

One discovery of my flight to Berlin is that you can take bacon in your hand luggage. You do get a funny look from the x-ray lady, but no-one has yet discovered a way of weaponising bacon.

Don't Mention Berlin

I'm standing in a flea-market in Berlin. A young American girl walks past, dragging her hot German boyfriend.

"Oh wow, this stuff is amazing," American girl enthuses. "We have a wonderful word for this, you know. Kitsch."
"Yes," says her boyfriend, "we have that too."

Going to Berlin is a little bit like going on holiday to the Death Star. You can try very hard, but you can't quite forget that something dreadful happened here. There's still an abundance of wide-open spaces, leafy gaps appearing in rows of houses, sudden wastelands glimpsed as your train crosses districts.

You're even reminded of it in museums. I went to see the Pergamon Museum (do go - there's almost an entire Greek Temple and the Gates of Babylon. Indoors. Amazing), and even there there's a small exhibit explaining how the temple was damaged during the bombing, taken by the Soviets, and grudgingly recovered. It was then that they realised that still more bits went missing, and someone had the job of touring the home counties, visiting members of the English army who had taken away the odd souvenir.

The on-trend thing to do if you're a hipster is to break into the Spreepark and then announce that it's so over. The Spreepark is a theme park that went bust a few years ago. Its owner absconded to South America - not the first time someone from Berlin's done this, but he did take the rides with him, which must have been quite a unique DHL phone call. He and the rides returned, but customs discovered he'd stuffed the rides full of cocaine. So now the park remains, a creepy ruin, chained-up... with fences just begging to be climbed, and a giant ferris wheel spinning in the wind, making the sound of the screaming of a thousand souls. We broke in, and it was enormous fun.

It's a curious sensation - amusement parks are designed to give you safe, exciting thrills - and you get a similar sense of artificial danger sneaking around a closed one, trying to avoid the security company. We dodged one patrol and fell through some bushes onto a forgotten railway track. It is, actually, quite hard running on a railway. We ended up crouched by a stagnant log flume as a police car and a bicycle patrol went past our heads. It was at this point I said to my boyfriend, "Well, we've climbed over a wall and we're being chased by guards. In East Berlin." Hipsters have reinvented the cold war.

We left, feeling very daring. We then passed a crowd of American tourists kicking a padlock before clambering through a massive hole in the fence. They strolled around, taking photos with the flash on and laughing about how, if they met any guards, they'd just bribe them.

Later on, we went to a bear bar. Two giant screens hung over the bar. One showed bear porn. The other showed The Muppet Show. The bears stood around trying to be serious and growly (although one tried to chat another up by pointing at the Muppets' guest star and cooing "That's Gilda Radner. She's fabulous!").We stood around laughing at the terrible carpet in the porn.

When we left, my boyfriend complained "It's weird knowing everyone's looking at you working out how much you'd cost." He paused. "I'm sure you must have felt that way once."

On-Demanding

The problem with piracy, people point out, is that it's so much easier than doing it legitimately.

Last night, we decided to watch Iron Sky. I loudly said how it'd be avaialble through my Virgin set-top box. Turns out, it wasn't, but it was through Virgin's Online OnDemand service. How hard could it be?

STEP 1: Order film.

STEP 2: Install a new, different version of Silverlight.

STEP 3: Reinstall browser.

STEP 3: Re-order film.

STEP 4: Enter my Virgin account details.

STEP 5: Re-enter my Virgin account details.

STEP 6: Wait... you want me to set up a whole new Virgin account, different from the one I use for all other Virgin Media stuff?

STEP 7: (swearing)

STEP 8: Set up whole new account.

STEP 9: Order film.

STEP 10: Quick trip to Pay Pal.

STEP 11: Curious diversion on the PayPal site where they bring up whether it'd be easier if I entered my credit card details. Well, no, as that's why I use PayPal, silly.

STEP 12: (put dinner in microwave as it's getting cold now)

STEP 13: I have bought a movie!

STEP 14: But wait... would I like to stream or download? It's an either/or, chum. And no changing your mind.

STEP 15: Open up speed test. Apparently, my Virgin broadband isn't fast enough to stream a film from the Virgin website. Fun.

STEP 16: Click "Download movie".

STEP 17: Install "Virgin Media On Demand Movies Playing" software.

STEP 18: As Asterix would say "!@@##1!!!%%^&!¬"

STEP 19: Start downloading movie.

STEP 20: While waiting, try to ignore massive "Cannot play on this device..." caption on the player. It's just bad design, it's just there to tell me that I have downloaded no movies that cannot not play on the player. Helpful.

STEP 21: Movie downloads (in only 10 minutes, so actually, you now, I could have defied that speed test after all - but let's not risk it).

STEP 22: Movie starts playing. Amazing.

STEP 23: Plug laptop into telly.

STEP 24: Movie stops playing and flashes up error message.

STEP 25: Restart player. Movie plays.,

STEP 26: Remember crispy dinner needs re-microwaving. Press pause.

STEP 27: Movie crashes again.

STEP 26: Restart player. Enjoy Iron Sky!

THINGS TO POINT OUT:
1) We actually had no rows during this. This was partly because my boyfriend went and hid in the kitchen, eating Naan bread in the dark.

2) I had just downloaded a movie. The people of 2002 would be a bit chuffed by this. Craig David, for one, would be delighted all week.

3) Buying movies through set-top box? Sooo easy. Buying MP3s, even from audiobook firms (some of whom, yes, I work for occasionally) really easy and pleasant.

4) No, I haven't tried iTunes as that's installed on my Netbook. It's only just powerful enough to run it, and, while I'm quite happily letting iTunes declare liebensraum over it, I'm not going to risk damaging our fragile entente by asking it to play a film.

Amsterdamp

Recently, we went to Amsterdam. My boyfriend  bought a pair of shorts to go clubbing in.

"I think those are pants." I said.
"No, old man, these are definitely shorts. It's just a European cut. Can you hold my wallet? There don't appear to be any pockets in these shorts."

So, we headed out with him dressed in a micro t-shirt and a pair of knickers. Like so:

He suggested we go to a club called The Eagle because there's one with that name in Manchester and it's dead classy. I wasn't convinced - the Dutch branch had no windows and even from the outside, it looked a bit fisty. "No no," he assured me, "It's part of a chain. The one in Manchester is a swishy cocktail bar."

Slow dissolve to us standing in a dimly-lit bar that smelt of poppers and kidney infections. There were no cocktails.

"I'm fairly sure it's a sex club," I insisted, but he shook his head, suggesting we go to the "lounge" upstairs. It contained a lot of dark corners and a picnic bench lit by a single red bulb.

"Don't sit on the picnic bench," I said.

We went and sat in a corner and slowly sipped our drinks. They may not have been cocktails, but they were very strong. Probably a good cure for shigella.

There was a long pause.

"This seat is quite damp."

Another long pause.

"I'm sitting in a sex club wearing only a pair of pants and something is dribbling down my leg."

I'll take you to Blackpool

My boyfriend suggests we go to Blackpool for... well, he doesn't call it a romantic weekend. Instead he tells me there'll be chips involved.

Having seen a few too many episodes of The Hotel Inspector (apparently they can't do an episode in Blackpool without mentioning rodents and roaches) he decided that, as the gays like do like their cleanliness, we'd stay at a gay hotel. He asked his old flatmate for advice.

Which is how I ended up phoning a place where all the rooms are named after divas. "I can't give you Bassey, but Kylie's free then. It doesn't have a chiller but it does have tea and coffee making facilities." I'm sure Kylie would approve.

We check in. It's homely. Very homely. With a tiny disco in the front room and a notice advising us to book early for Christmas. We go up to our room. I boil the travel kettle while my boyfriend checks the Hotel Booklet. And then pauses. "Have you seen this...."

We had accidentally booked into a sex hotel.

10 good things about Freelancing

Ten good things about freelancing:

1. Sofa = Office
2. The canteen never shuts
3. If a book is that good, you may stay up till 3am reading it.
4. And have a lie-in till 10 the next day. Sometimes.
5. Being in for the delivery man
6. Lego = Team-Building Away Day  .
7. You get to go to the gym when the only other person there is a pervy-looking gymnast.
8. No meetings*
9. The giddy rush that comes from being able to turn down a hateful project. 
10. Cat = Manager

(* this is not true. Everyone has meetings)

I could list the bad things, the many, many bad things. But today I am celebrating the good.

The Party party

I went to a marvellous party given by a friend who likes Labour. She likes Labour so much the highlight was her children playing "Bash the Tory pinata" as a papier mache concoction of Boris and Dave exploded in a haribo shower. For her politics is fun.

Also at the party was a young Labour activist. He was good looking, even if all his clothes felt a bit tweedy/flanelly/corduroy, and he had that vibrant passion about politics that 19 year-olds have. For him politics was decidedly not fun. We'll call him Blairette.

My feelings about politics have always been summed up by Bridget Jones:

"Labour stands for the principle of sharing, kindness, gays, single mothers and Nelson Mandela as opposed to braying bossy men having affairs with everyone shag-shag-shag left, right and centre and going to the Ritz in Paris then telling all the presenters off on the Today programme."

I'm not really a details person. It's curious the way people are polite at parties - in that we tolerate people being very rude to us but go out of our way to avoid giving offence back.  Blairette was thundering away about how Boris was an evil, crypto-fascist Murdockian running dog (gawd, student politicians sound the same now as they did in the 90s). I casually said I thought he was actually rather endearing, and pointed out that, if Ken had got stuck on a tripwire, we'd have seen a massive sense of humour failure, rather than a grown man valiantly waving a flag and doing Thomas The Tank Engine impressions.

I did not, at any point, say I thought Boris was the best thing since sliced oxygen. Just that he was fun and handled bad situations well.

BLAIRETTE: (a hiss of denouncement) "Did you vote for him?"

ME: "No. I voted for the nice lady who is dressed by her cats. But I put Boris second."

BLAIRETTE: "That makes you a fellow traveller! The Greens don't count! You're voting for the Bullingdonian Enclave!"

ME: "Actually, I was just making sure I wasn't voting for Ken. He's the kind of boyfriend you'd have help arrange you a mortgage, whereas Boris is the one you'd got out for dinner with."

BLAIRETTE: "I'll have you know that Ken wrote a restaurant review column. It was very entertaining, actually."

ME: "Well, I'm not sure I'd eat at a restaurant he liked-"

At this point Blairette dismissed me and starting urging my friend to back his tabled point of order at conference, which, if passed would allow people to not only table points of order but also clarify a  mandated speaking point when tabling points of order. "It'll blow the place apart!" He really figured this nonsense really was the way to enhance the unions, grow power, and make people vote Labour again.

I found it all baffling, tiresome and sad. It's tedious being lectured on politics by a 19 year-old expert. It also made him quiet hard to fancy (I bet even his undercrackers were corduroy). My last encounter with Labour Activism was at a car boot sale where a book stall was manned by two very bright gay young things who urged me to attend meetings with the promise of free tea, biscuits, and a throupon in the disabled loos. The thing they remembered was that politics is supposed to be - just a little bit - fun.

That's why those of us who blithely voted Labour in 1997 voted for them - because it felt like we were putting the fun people in charge. And it's why I now find it so hard to vote for them. They started hanging out with weird friends, then doing hateful things, and finally, they became dull. Even the sexy ones.

The other thing was realising I was being lectured on why it was my social duty to vote Labour by someone who was 5 in 1997.

Them gays and their rights and stuff

I signed a petition. Just one. I didn't realise it would have consequences.

I am not a political person. I don't understand the reasons why things happen, I know enough about local politics to know I'm powerless, and at the last mayoral election I voted for that nice lady because she looks like she's dressed by her cats. The world is a bad, complicated place, and I'm fairly convinced that if I tried to sort it out, I'd make as much of a mess of it as when I tried to clean a laptop with spray bleach.

But, you know, from time to time, I sign a petition. The one in question was about giving a (quite hot) Ukranian gay some rights or something. I didn't read the small print, I just thought that bad things shouldn't happen to hot people.

What I didn't realise was that I was unwittingly joining the "Purpose Foundation" and consenting to receive regular emails from "Andre and Jeremy" urging me to sign yet more email petitions, and to forward their emails to my friends to get them to sign them. (The phrase "one final push" may have been used, several times).

You remember when The Guardian launched that double-page spread in the middle of the paper to publish a a daily poster of a striking piece of photo-journalism? At the start, it was eye-catching, wonderful and occasionally moving. It then became your Daily Misery Porn Pull-Out, an interchangeable blur of crying mothers and starving babies, screaming "You Should Care More!". The fact is, after a while, you don't. Like a familiar picture on the wall, after a while, you stop noticing it's there.

The same with sending regular emails from "Andre and Jeremy" about fresh atrocities that demand my signature on an e-petition to strike a vital blow/send a stern message/change the game/refresh the legacy etc etc. You may think you've created a protest movement. You haven't. You've just created manual spam.

In my imagination "Andre and Jeremy" have become idealised idealists. Andre gets back from his shift at the Shelter, hanging the bike up on the hooks in the lovely whitewashed walls of their uptown apartment. He's about to prepare dinner using some locally-sourced ingredients, when he notices something wrong. Jeremy is sat, staring sadly at his macbook. "Oh no," Andre sighs, giving his lover a backrub, "What's happened now?". "Don't worry," says Jeremy, "I've got the internet onto it. Together we'll fight this."


I just don't entirely buy that signing an online petition changes a thing. It may do. But it just feels too easy. Remember when we all got hot under the collar about that nasty Jan Moir and rushed to the Press Complaints Commission? Nothing. And filling in a PCC online complaint form was actually quite hard.

Sending me constant emails telling me to be outraged yet again just makes me sad and even more convinced that I can't change anything.

There's a lovely mention in Private Eye of Ethan Zuckerman's Cute Cat Theory of how online activism really works. In brief - people don't really care about much online beyond looking at cats and porn. Governments think they do and block their access to stuff like Facebook. The masses can't look at cats any more. They get cross. Result: uprising. He came up with the theory in 2008. When the Arab Spring happened in 2010, Mr Zuckeman got proved very right indeed.