The quick wilderness

One of the advantages of my boyfriend living in Manchester is that it's just possible for us to nip to Scotland for the weekend.

One the trip we learned the difference between the two types of Too Good To Be True when it comes to hotels.

Hotel #1: £40 for a hotel room in Glasgow is cheap, but not insanely so. The booking website said it was nothing special, but would be fine. It was actually horrible. Horrible in a "reception full of building waste and a man behind the counter asking if we minded having no bathroom" way. The room was tiny and filthy and we checked out in about 5 minutes.

Hotel #2: £35 for a hotel room on the shores of a loch? Now that is ridiculous. But, actually, I can recommend the Arrochar Hotel. I can imagine it's hideous in summer when it's a coach trap for American tourists, but out-of-season it's The Shining with a great view. A really great view. A view so great that when I went to the breakfast bar I just stood and gawped at the view before even trying to locate the grapefruit segments. The bar was a laugh - it was lit like an airport lounge, and a man stood in the corner crooning hits from the 50s. But we didn't care - we spent the evening in our room, watching Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter and drinking scotch.

Hammer Time

Fans are mental. It's almost part of the definition. However, if you drew a Venn Diagram that showed "Loving something too much", "The Internet" and "HD Video Standards" the overlap would be the Hammer blu-ray releases:

As far as I can work out, the story goes like this - after years of firms slapping out "will this do?" DVD releases, Studio Canal come along and decide to lavishly restore them for blu-ray. You'd assume the result would be rejoicing in the streets. Instead it's more like this:

I find the whole thing baffling. There's a special blog in which Hammer painstakingly (to the point of eye-watering tedium) explain every single restoration choice in a language which is practically machine code (Sample sentence: "1.66:1 – a predominantly UK and European widescreen aspect ratio designed to be centre matted from a 4-perf 35mm frame..."). And underneath is a torrent of comments, bandying about acronyms and aspect ratios like quadratic equations (1.66:1 COF = 1.33:1 DNVR DPOD).

Like staring into the Matrix, it's mesmerising without making much sense. On one release the restorers offered a print that was deemed "too sharp without enough of the original grain visible". When they eased the effect back for the next release it is screamed at for being "too soft and too grainy". Clearly, they cannot win.

One of the latest furores involves The Devil Rides Out. On original release there simply wasn't the time/budget to finish the effects. The restorers have dared to sympathetically finish them - they've not added lens flare laser guns, CGI kangaroos, and Greedo does not shoot first - they've simply pasted in the odd background, tidied up some nasty matt-lines, and risked painting in a missing fetlock on the Angel of Death's horse. That kind of thing. You'd assume they'd be thanked for bothering.

No.

The outpouring of qaudratic anger is unstemmable. (http://blog.hammerfilms.com/?p=321#comments) Some of it is understandable - a few years ago, Optimum restored The Avengers, and nearly every release had to be recalled, reissued or apologised for, leading to a lot of fan cynicism about "restored releases". But in this case it seems to be some nice people caring very hard about some films for the first time in 50 years. I'm on their side (a deciding factor is that, on the special features, they all appear to be hot). Also on their side is a commenter who pops up, like a voice in the wilderness, to say:

"Chris Walker: It must be soul- destroying to restore a film after months of painstaking work, and then have to face a ton of abuse and criticism from so called “experts” who all know better...  It is a 55 year old film made for peanuts by a small company. It is never going to look like “Gone with the Wind”, so people please deal with it."

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.