majorarcana

Generally speaking, my experience of trains involves daily commutes on our increasingly dilapidated underground system or else impossibly crammed Friday afternoon virgin train carriages heading northwards, so it’s easy to forget they’re actually my preferred form of transportation. When it works it’s relaxed, comfortable, even dignified, and allows time and opportunity to lose one self in the scenery. It helps that I usually take long trips for good reasons. Last month, trains took me to Bristol to see an old friend, and this month they took me to Exeter to see an entirely different old friend.

Travelling west always feels peculiar. I lived for a long time in the M3/M4 corridor of course, so there’s plenty of personal memories and genera life detritus associated with that particular, most Ballardian of landscapes, however over the years a number of my oldest friends have, through chance rather than choice, drifted westwards and the act of visiting them - reconnecting with good times past - has lent the journey a slightly unreal, almost mystical feeling of going back in time, a feeling the landscape of rolling hills, fairy mounds and standing stones only serves to accentuate. Like I say, peculiar.

Anyway, my point is long train rides through the country, weekends with good company, sunshine and the seaside rock.

Also on the train, I read Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food, a short eating manifesto preceeded by 200-odd pages of argument  as to why you should adopt it. It offers much food (haha) for thought. At times Pollan seems to be adopting a mildly anti-science, preachy new-agey tone of which I’m instinctively sceptical, however his argument is more broadly anti-bad science, in particular science he believes is biased or outright compromised by food manufacturers. His main target is ‘nutritionism’ - the reductionist view that the value of food is entirely derived from the sum of its nutritional components, and the only value of eating is to promote bodily health. Pollan provides many examples of just how tenuous that argument is, and exposes the health claims of many food manufacturers as at best a quasi-science ill-supported by real research. The manifesto itself is delightfully simple and revolves around advice like: eat with company; avoid anything with more than five ingredients on the label; cook; and the book’s core message, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”. Pollan makes a convincing argument and offers workable solutions. I’m already finding myself trying to follow some of his advice, checking food labels, going all-organic, and generally worrying myself about becoming too middle-class. As someone who’s general diet has gone completely to pot over the last few months though, this feels like a very positive step in the right direction. Cheers, Michael.

I’ve been following Harper’s Island on iPlayer. It’s advertised as a mystery thriller, the novelty being a character gets killed off every episode, with even the cast none the wiser as to what order they were going to be offed in until the day of shooting where their number gets called. Nice idea, except it really isn’t all that suspenseful waiting to see which muppet gets to die, and the killings themselves feel a bit tagged on to the end of every episode. It’s essentially a slasher film dragged out to thirteen-odd episodes, but I have a weakness for slashers, and whist the characters are every bit as inept and uncurious as their big screen counterparts, I’m finding it oddly compelling viewing.

It’s been a mad few weeks at work, where I’ve been involved in launching some fairly major sites, all within a few days of each other. Stressful, but ultimately rewarding, and now it’s all over I have a bit of breathing space to consider things, and take a more thoughtful approach to what direction I want life to go in moving forward. For starters, I’m thinking I need a holiday now…

After celebrating a friend’s birthday a few weeks ago, and leaving the public house in which said celebration took place slightly on the inebriated side, I had the misfortune to leave my rucksack on the tube on the way home. Whilst it didn’t have my laptop or any other high value items in it, it did contain a lot of personal items that would have been difficult to replace, such as Patrick Harpur’s OOP Daimonic Reality, which I was halfway through reading. Feeling like a bit of a tit, I filled in TfL’s lost property form with little hope of ever being reunited with Harpur’s revelatory work, but lo, they got back to me in just four days to say my treasured possessions were safely ensconced at their office in Baker Street. Fellas, as far as I’m concerned you can strike anytime you want from now on.

Last Friday I attended dConstruct, which is still a great conference in terms of pricing, venue and (generally) speakers, however it’s gotten increasingly ‘big picture’ over the years, to the point where no one is really saying anything anyone could possibly disagree with anymore. You almost want someone to step up with a keynote entitled ‘Welcome back to tables’, or somesuch. Still, it’s always good to hear the likes of Adam Greenfield speak, and Russell Davies wrapped things up in a masterly fashion. Throw in fish and chips on Brighton beach and after-con pintage and you had all the makings of a great day out.

The Hangover is gloriously stupid and mostly hilarious, the latest in a string of Hollywood comedies that remove or else sideline the obligatory romantic subplot and concentrate on the business of actually being funny. See also anything by Ferrell/McKay, Superbad, 40-Year Old Virgin, Tropic Thunder et al. I saw it in the incongruous environs of the Tricycle Cinema, which I can get to from my front door in about three minutes and costs only a fiver, so there is the plus of easier access to cool stuff to mitigate the minuses of tides of insatiable vermin and casual street crime here in Kilburn.

Been keeping my weekends busy of late; firstly, had the family down to the big smoke for a couple of days, leading to many touristy things being done, such as paddling in Hyde Park, heckling people on the Plinth and pretending to be pirates on the Golden Hinde. Revelation of the weekend was that the Original and Big Bus companies’ employees really hate each other, and bad-mouth their competitors at every opportunity. Glorious visions of the two uniformed tribes engaged in pitched pub battles ensued. Also, ate at Planet Hollywood for the first time and was seated beside Bruce Willis’s vest from Die Hard with a Vengeance and one of Freddy Kreuger’s gloves, which went some way towards making up for a disappointing steak dinner.

Then last weekend I ventured out to Bristol to meet up with old chum Andy, and we went drinking on the Whiteladies Road. Our evening culminated in the Victoria pub and an increasingly dark conversation (”what this country needs is a dictator”) with an old boy who eventually announced he’d voted for the BNP in the last election (in his defence, he had nothing kind to say about Hitler). After a leisurely start the following morning, we went for a walk along the Downs, taking in Clifton and the Avon gorge, which was nice.

Rattled through Sarah Pinborough’s The Taken last week, which was a solid, enjoyable mass-market horror novel concerning a remote English village under siege by a multitude of evil ghost children rather than the traditional solitary apparition. Liked it enough to pre-order Feeding Ground, at any rate.

For those not following my epic struggle with the forces of pestilence and decay on Twitter, it transpires that the block containing my new flat has a rat infestation - the result of a lack of decent refuse collection facilities and some of my fellow tenants’ rather relaxed attitude to rubbish disposal. Traps have been prepared, poison has been purchased, but so far non-violent solutions - ensuring no food or rubbish is left out during the night - have been the most effective. Or at least I’ve stopped hearing them. It’s good to know sometimes an accommodation can be reached with even the most implacable of foes. More as the situation progresses.

Saw the new production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia at the Duke of York’s Theatre last week. Great show, with great performances, sets, lighting, all of which the play thoroughly deserved. I hadn’t seen it before and have somehow managed to avoid reading it, but it’s easy to see why many consider it Stoppard’s best, and possibly most representative work.

There are two types of post-apocalyptic novel, it would seem - the ones where the survivors gamely struggle against the harsh realities of their new environment, perhaps discovering or re-discovering new skills and attitudes, and eventually succeeding in re-establishing some sort of civilization. Occasionally there’s even the suggestion that the apocalypse might have been a good thing - the survivors are able to re-connect with certain core human values now that the flab of contemporary civilization has been cut away. And then there’re the others - of which the first half of Conrad Williams’ One is as extreme an example you could hope to find. The catastrophe - a massive gamma ray burst which kills everything on the surface of the planet suddenly, painfully, and in the case of humans, graphically - and the protagonist’s awful journey, motivated by an irrational unwillingness to accept his five-year old son is dead, is simply unrelentingly horrible and refuses to give even the slightest conciliatory offering. It’s among the bleakest things I’ve ever read; a truly awful end-of-the-world scenario and portrayal of survival as something only the hopelessly insane would be even remotely interested in. Unfortunately, I thought the second half of the book lacked some of the first half’s intensity, and the introduction of more survivors, a half-hearted crack at re-establishing a modicum of civilization, and a rather unlikely-sounding extraterrestrial threat didn’t really add anything IMHO. It’s still worth persevering with, however, and Williams has firmly established himself as one of my favourite writers in the genre.

RIP Captain Britain & MI:13, which I enthused about back in the day. Like so many new titles, it faced the insurmountable challenge of building an audience in a market notoriously apathetic to the new and/or different, and was found wanting. It won’t have done Paul Cornell any harm, as pretty much everyone who read it loved it, and whilst his take on Brian Braddock was a little bit too jingoistic for my liking at times, the image of Captain Britain killing a vampire by punching its heart right out of its chest has comfortably eased itself into a respectable position on my favourite comics moments ever chart.

Jonathan Nash and Mil Millington’s Sexton Blake. Great fun, extremely funny, and available on iPlayer for the next four days.

Spent the weekend up North, chilling with the parents. Went for a walk in the Lakes, ate a lot of good food, and broke the back of Iain M Banks’ Matter, which I’ve been struggling to get to grips with in tube journey sized chunks. It’s my first Culture novel in maybe… ten years? Nice to be reminded why I pray for Contact to show up each and every day. I started wanting to read it after enjoying the R4 adaptation of The State of the Art, in which the Culture consider assimilating the Earth but are driven off by the sheer awfulness of the 1970s. That bastard decade has a lot to answer for.

Not really warming to Psychoville. It feels very much like LoG-lite, and the fairly lifeless direction only serves to remind how important Steve Bendelack was to the success of the League. I also - God help me - watched Torchwood on the strength of various Twitterfolks’ ravings whilst it was on. Well, it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, but all in all I think I much preferred it the first time round. I am, however, really enjoying the latest series of Mitchell & Webb, which has really come into its own this season.

Discovered Sarah Pinborough whilst roaming on Twitter. I actually met her at Fantasycon in… 2002? Had no idea she was a published writer though. JT and I were really quite drunk and talked to her and friends about Milton Keynes and other topics for what I remember as being quite some time before they politely excused themselves and went off to hear the no doubt more eloquent and inspiring Graham Joyce speak. Anyway, the following morning I awoke to find an answerphone message on my mobile from an unfamiliar female voice thanking me for a great time and asking when we could get together again. I was in a relationship at the time, and not really going out a lot, so naturally I not unreasonably assumed it must be the people I’d been talking to the previous evening. I remember being utterly horrified (and yet quietly intrigued and a little bit impressed) as to how I’d managed to chat someone up, give them my phone number and been so charming I’d merited an almost immediate follow-up call - and yet had no memory of it whatsover. As it turned out, it was an entirely unrelated practical joke by another mate’s girlfriend, who bizarrely chose the only evening that month I’d been talking to single women outside of a work situation to make her opening gambit. Who says the universe has no sense of humour. Anyway, that’s my (sort of) Sarah Pinborough story. Now I know she has five well-reviewed novels to her name, I have ordered one and will let you know how that works out for me in due course.

Otherwise, it’s turning out too be a quiet week in which I endeavor to not spend any cash. Have to decide whether or not to play football in the park this evening. It’s exercise - good - but it also means inevitable pubage afterwards, which is a considerably greyer area.