Contains spoilers...

OK. So we all know the feeling when something we've really been looking forward to turns out to be less good than expected, or just a bit crap. It's easy to be disappointed and cross and irritated.

But it's equally easy to be irritated when something turns out to be better than you thought it was going to be. If that makes any sense...

I know this to be true because I nearly* went to see Edge of Darkness (The Film) and was mildly annoyed that it was OK. It wasn't brilliant, but I really wanted it to be awful. And it wasn't.

Now, going to see it was probably a risk all along because Edge of Darkness (The Not-Film 80s TV Series) won several BAFTAs and was genuinely dark and shocking. I remember watching it unfold over several weeks and it was a story that could only be told in that way, slowly and deliberately. It was Classic Drama - it says so on the DVD box.

So I knew the film was going to make a hash of it. There would be no comparison.

Well, actually, there would be a whole range of comparisons.

On the way there, we couldn't actually remember the last thing we'd seen Mel Gibson in. Let alone the last thing he'd been any good in. Whereas Bob Peck's performance is still grim and haunting even now. He can easily act most people off the screen, despite having been dead for eleven years.

Ray Winstone as Jedburgh? Maybe not. Presumably, as the whole thing has been imported into Boston, Jedburgh, American in the original, had to be English. But Ray Winstone can only play Ray Winstone. He played Ray Winstone in Robin of Sherwood and in everything since. And Jedburgh should really have watched Strictly Come Dancing... But he didn't.

So, not looking good so far. How would they capture that sense of foreboding which those lingering shots of the nuclear fuel trains and Eric Clapton created? Who would play Clementine? Would we get Time of the Preacher...?

At least we wouldn't have to put up with Joanne Whalley... Arguably the best thing about her appearance in the original was that she was viciously gunned down in the opening episode. (A punishment that really should have come after Willow, rather than before...) But Emma in the film was less convincing than Yorkshire Emma - less of a terrorist, less in control. And less of a guiding vision for her bereaved father.

The civil servants weren't quite right. You have to be British, with Queen's English and possibly a bowler hat, to do the tortuous bureaucracy required to cover up something politically incovenient. And possibly radioactive. You also have to be called Pendleton and Harcourt. Which the American attachés in the film may have been called, but not noticeably.

Plainly, there was so much that wasn't quite right. The cheesy, uplifting end for a start (or for an end...) I won't spoil what it was. But he dies and is happily reunited with Emma in spectral form. (OK, so I have spoiled it, but no more so than the film does...)

None of the uncertainty and ambiguity of the original, in which both Craven and Grogan face a slow, irradiated death. No particularly prescient environmental message. No Zoe Wannamaker. No black flowers...

But it was OK. No more than that. If you've not seen either, I'll lend you the DVD...



* "Nearly" because my sister nearly wasn't able to get the tickets at the cinema because she signed her debit card over the magnetic strip not the signature strip, rendering it useless in the "Collect your own tickets" machine. Or the "Can't collect your own tickets machine", as it's now called...

A Mrs Thatcher moment...

I suppose that I have this in common with a lot of people... I try not to fill my thoughts with Margaret Thatcher. But, earlier today, I thought about something she said 23 years ago.

I'm currently in mainland Europe, where it has snowed a lot...



(This is Mozart, in Salzburg, coping well with the "big freeze". Coping less well with the fact that he appears to be composing with a pencil, something which wasn't invented until 20 years after he died....)

...and here, they deal with the snow really well. It's 6-8 inches deep and the roads and the railways are all fine. Ahem, even the schools were open...

The fast, fairly luxurious, double-decker train from Munich got to Salzburg bang on time...



(...and that's in a different country. Through some Alps. Albeit small ones...)

And, of course, they get it all the time, so they are used to it. But there must be other underlying reasons why we're so rubbish at snow in the UK...

I wondered how, here, the trains were clean and reliable, how there were still conductors and ticket inspectors (plural) on the stations and on the trains, how the snow didn't bring it all to a grinding halt...



(Here at Ostbahnhof in Munich, this man spent the best part of 30 minutes clearing the snow from a platform and looked like he was enjoying it... He had a very substantial looking machine to help, but the two people doing it on our platform just had shovels, so no major investment needed...)

I'd decided that it was probably something to do with it not needing to make a profit; being a nationalised concern for the good of the people! Damn you, Mrs Thatcher, and your privatisation of all the train companies and the break up of the system!!

But it turns out that Deutsche Bahn is a private comany after all, so does need to make a profit. So that can't be it...

Anyway, I aksed Jon, who now lives here in Munich, why he thinks the public transport system is so good, how it manages to employ so many people, make a profit and not let a bit of (the wrong type - any type - of) snow bring it skidding to a halt. He gave a most complete and accurate answer in just three words...

"People use it..." he said.

And of course that makes sense.

When, in 1986, Mrs Thatcher said "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure," she helped to make sure that, if you have to use public transport in the UK, that's in some way shameful - you're just cattle; too crap to have your own car. She also engineered the system which means that it costs £8 to get to Southampton and back from my house, whereas here, you can travel between Munich and Salzburg (and back) - 180 miles, between countries! - for £5.

Bless her.

(On the down side, the snow here is just something you have to get rid of to make the trains run. It's commonplace, so no-one plays with it - no snowmen, no snowball fights. I don't think that's Thatcher's fault. Probably just miserable Europeans...)

Branded...

I finally went to the Minnellium Dome last night...

Yes, I know, only eight years late, but nearly everything they planned for the minnellium was late. And still doesn't work. It's a British thing.

In those eight years, I've flown over it, driven under it, sailed past it, tubed through it, but never actually been in it.

It's bloody clever actually. On a very narrow peninsula they've managed to thread the Jubilee Line under the Blackwall Tunnels - that's four tunnels under the Thames in total - and construct this very iconic building on top. (Although I suppose it's not really a building - just a big tent - and the buildings underneath it are fairly ordinary.)



And, of course, for about the last seven years of the eight, no-one in their right mind wanted to go there because it was an ill-conceived, publicly-funded white elephant full of crap. It was all cultural - Mind Zone, Body Zone, Spiritual Zone - and no-one wanted to spend their "lee-zhure" time doing all that nonsense, even if it was inside a triumph of civil engineering...

So what happened?

Well, firstly, someone decided it would be better if it were full of things people actually wanted to do - shop, eat, go to cinema, see Bryan Adams in November (OK, not the last one...)

Secondly, someone else decided it would be good if people could actually get there, so they built the aforementioned tube line...

But most important, branding happened.

Someone, probably in what Eddie Izzard calls one of those "4 o'clock in the morning, stroky-beard meetings", came up with the ludicrous suggestion of calling it after a phone company.

O₂ is one of the most successful marketing exercises of all time. The phone company used to be BT Cellnet - deeply untrendy and lagging massively behind the likes of Orange and Vodafone. No clear identity and losing money and subscribers.

But now, the strength of the brand is overwhelming. It can be identified by the subtle blue fade of the corporate colour, the little subscript ₂, the bubbles, Sean Bean being all northern and reassuring on the ads, etc.



And now, not only has it made the Dome very cool and trendy, every person who goes there (23 000 watching Kylie last night, not to mention all the people eating and drinking and watching films) gets the brand lasered right through their eyeballs into their brains at every available opportunity.

The branding is so successful that The O₂ is the only fully commercial organisation to have what is effectively a free advert on that other icon, the tube map...



Now that is bloody clever...

Urbi et Orbi...

Not your standard Papal Balcony affair, I'm afraid - just a few Easter things I need to get off my chest.

Stop moving it around...

It's confusing and inconvenient. Last Easter Sunday I was here...

(...where, coincidentally, it was also snowing)

...but that's not twelve months ago to the day - it was actually on April 8. Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This year it's about the earliest it can ever be because the spring equinox was on Thursday and the full moon was on Friday, so here we are. No wonder Tesco had to have their Easter Eggs on display by Boxing Day...

It was stolen by Christianity...

As we all know, the days used in the calculation - spring equinox, all druids and Stonehenge; full moon, all witches and werewolves and magic - are totally pagan things and nothing to do with the crucifixion or the resurrection. This is because Easter was happily going on for donkey's years before Christianity hit Britain - as a celebration of spring, new life, fertility etc... hence bunnies, eggs, chicks. It was a celebration of the goddess of spring and fertility Estre (or Oestre or Ishtar) and the word comes from her. As does the word "Oestrogen"...

"Do you wish to remove unused files?"

I went to Church of England primary school, so stored away in my brain, taking up valuable space, is...

There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.

We may not know, we cannot tell
What pains he had to bear
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffer'd there.

He died that we might be forgiv'n
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heav'n,
Saved by his precious blood.

I will never need this for any useful purpose again in my life (ie. beyond blogging and quizzes)and yet I can remember it verbatim. I didn't look it up. Some kind of brain clean-up facility is needed, along the lines of the excellent example here...

Even at the age of 8, I remember being bothered about "without a city wall" because I thought that it meant it hadn't got one. It was only a green hill far away, why would it have needed one? Only as my grammatical understanding progressed did I realise it meant "outside the city wall..." (Makes mental note to use this construction more often in everyday speech to confuse people... "Where's Starbucks? Just down the way, without the front doors...")

I'm still bother'd by the whole rhyming of "forgiv'n" and "heav'n" and the sing-them-as-if-they've-only-got-one-syllable thing, both of which happen loads in hymns. I suppose it was because the tunes and the words were probably written by different people, maybe centuries apart, and someone had to crowbar it all together. Maybe if Rice and Lloyd-Webber had done it instead...*

Open the bloody shops...

Why are they closed?

It can't be to force people into church, because it doesn't work...
It can't be an objection to making profit, because all the little shops can open...
It can't be an objection to trading per se, because of car boot sales...

It must just be to remind us about suffering...

Sod health and education and social justice, in the next election I'm voting for whoever sorts the Sunday Trading laws out. Or moving to Scotland.


*Oh...

"Tell me Christ how you feel tonight
Do you plan to put up a fight?
Do you feel that you've had the breaks?
What would you say were your big mistakes?"

They did...

Served by Pat at 8.29am...

It wasn't a pilgrimage, but it wasn't really tourism either. Part of it was curiosity, but not morbid curiosity; part of it was compulsion.

We went to Ground Zero.

And actually, the renewal which is going on there is quite uplifting.

The big hole in the ground is no bigger than the big holes at any number of major construction projects...



...and the things which remind you of why it's there are round the corner or along side streets...





So it really wasn't morbid, at any point. And it wasn't really particularly easy to relate what happened here to what we all watched on television six years ago. Not because I'm heartless or unfeeling, lacking in sympathy or empathy; just because, initially at least, it was like visiting a film set. But, as I realised later, only because up until this point in my life, everything in New York was just a film set.

And then we went into the temporary visitor centre and listened to some of the personal testimonies and looked at some of the belongings of the victims discovered in the wreckage. But it still seemed like a story, something unreal.

But it was the receipt which did it...



Until I found it again on the exhibition website, I'd remembered it from the exhibition as a train ticket, one tiny bit of paper, recovered from the rubble with a few other belongings.

And for me, it was seeing 9/11/2001 on the receipt which actually made it all real. Something which happened to real people on a real day. Served by Pat at 8.29am...

Latest update on Miss Ambler..

Here is my niece, seen with a new toy. One of those mobile-touchy-feely things which parents hang over cots, etc to stimulate the senses.



As you can see, she is so impressed that she has one eye shut, one eye open and her tongue out. Aren't modern toys wonderful?

Anyway, I got to see her too, which was my main reason for the "National Express" tour over the weekend. When I saw her at Christmas, she was still in her plastic box and I couldn't hold her, so it was very special to be able to this time.



However, no-one noticed at the time, and I didn't notice until I blogged this photo, that Evil Tony Blair is keeping a watchful, Nanny-State-style eye on proceedings... Scary!

Bah! Humbug! "Political Correctness gone MAD", etc

When I came back from New Zealand in August, I mentioned being somewhat surprised that in Boots, I was handed my purchases in this...



...the point being that, as it was still summer, this bag was far, far too Christmassy and inappropriate.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love Christmas, but now we are halfway through November and all the shops have their decs up and are full of "Evil Carol Vorderman's Interactive Family Christmas Sudoku" stocking fillers, a mere carrier bag seems not Christmassy enough.

Which brings me to Tesco, and my point.

Tesco has obviously decided it doesn't want to upset anyone of a nervous and non-festive nature this year by rebranding its advent calendars thus:



This would appear to be some kind of over-the-top Lambeth-esque move and I advise you as follows:

1. Buy an Advent Calendar - making sure it's promoted as such;
2. Make sure it has Jesus or Santa or both on it;
3. The countdown stops at 24. Don't buy one which has a "25" on it - that's when you open your presents;
4. Especially don't buy one that counts through Christmas as far as New Year;
5. In deference to Jamie Oliver and Christmas Dinner, avoid ones with chocolate behind the doors and lobby manufacturers for ones with Brussels Sprouts instead.

Croeso y Gymru...

Bore da!

(There seems to be no Welsh word for Hello, so Good Morning will have to do...)

Anyway, brief weekend away to Caerdydd to see Gina. Not much time for sight-seeing, but did get to see the Wales Millennium Centre (Canolfan Mileniwm Cymru - don't know whether Minnellium is easier to spell in Welsh or not...)

It wasn't finished last time I went and looked a bit like this:

(That was in 2003 - it's the big thing in the background with the scaffolding. All the people were there because Sinead Quinn off Fame Academy and Marc Almond were performing...



...people didn't know who Sinead Quinn was, and they threw bottles at Marc Almond, so it was a classy crowd...)

Anyway, back to the point...

It is finished now, all made out of slate and rain. As is so much in Wales. It is also five years late to have anything to do with the Millennium, but I guess they think they can get away with it here. It looks impressive...



...featured in Dr Who...



("Never mind Cardiff, it's going to rip open the planet!!!")

...and the inscription on the front isn't actually an inscription, it's windows. They say...

Creu Gwir Fel Gwydr O Ffwrnais Awen
In These Stones Horizons Sing



It's a symbol of the Welsh culture, its beautiful language, its history of music and song...
What's on? Saturday Night Fever, Harry Hill, The Wizard of Oz and, next year, Jerry Springer -The Opera.

Also saw the new Welsh Assembly building...



...not yet fully assembled, but assembled thus far of slate and glass.

(It's obviously some kind of law that all new building of any consequence in Wales must be made mostly of slate - as if the weather didn't make it grey and depressing enough...)


And just before I came back to England. This is SALT in Mermaid Quay...

Allegedly, Charlotte Church falls out of here in the early hours of the morning, three sheets to the wind, with great regularity. And once, Gina saw Noel from Hear'say there too. It all happens.

Mae f’ysbiwyr wedi dweud wrtha popeth amdanat...