Tarquin Sheen

War Horse

2012-01-24T12:39:00.001-08:00

This started out as a comment on Vlad's blog, but it got so long I thought I'd just write a blog entry of my own. It's a review of War Horse, which Vlad and I saw over the weekend. Vlad makes a number of good points on his blog that I shan't bother to repeat here. Go and read his review first, and my comments are a follow-up.

First of all, the nonsense about the boring horse that can't even jump I can almost forgive, because I assume that's in the original book and play.

What most annoyed me was the saccharine style Spielberg adopted for the pastoral scenes. I have a lot of admiration for Spielberg as a director despite his frequent lapses into schmalz, but this time he waaaay overdid it.

Take the lighting, for instance. It looked fake, like studio lighting, even in the external shots. Maybe that was a deliberate echo of the stage play, I don't know. But it gave the film an unreal quality that didn't seem to fit the inherent darkness of the material (I know it's a kid's book, but it's still dark).

Please leave me my horse, he fits so well with this pastoral idyll

The father of the hero (to the right in the above screenshot), a Devonshire farmer, was a drunken failure whose stubbornness almost reduced his wife and son to beggary. Now, if rural Devon had been made to look as grim and depressing as it probably was at the time, and less like a biscuit tin, maybe the appearance of this beautiful horse would have meant something. But the whole world looked so idyllic it was impossible to believe that anything bad could happen. That's why I thought Ken Loach would have done a better job directing.

Eeee but tha's a beautiful bird, our Kes

Like Vlad, I was also irritated by the scene of the horse wrapped in barbed wire in No Man's Land. But I was mostly irritated because it was the most potentially interesting and believable scene in the movie. It's not unknown for units of men in the midst of war to form close emotional attachments to animals, as mascots or totems of good luck. So when a British and German soldier awkwardly joined forces to free the horse, and then tossed a coin to decide who gets to keep it, I was really drawn in, and I thought the scene was genuinely poignant and beautifully written.

It just happens that the surrounding two hours were crap.

River Browney

2012-01-15T10:01:00.001-08:00

This river near my house is one of my favourite thinking places. It's a place I go to think when I need to think about things, for example what I'm going to have for lunch.

Stab boy

2011-12-30T09:37:00.000-08:00

This disturbed me. On the front page of my Yahoo Mail, the main news headline was 'Life meaningless' without stab boy.

'Stab boy', otherwise occasionally known as Seydou Diarrassouba, was murdered in London last Monday, as the news article explains. His family shared their grief in a press statement:

"This is a very difficult time for our family and we would really appreciate to be given the chance to grieve privately and honour his memory. Whoever took his life took our backbone away.

"Seydou kept us upright and now we feel weak as we have lost a very special part of us. Life seems meaningless without our special son and brother."

After reading this heartfelt elegy from his distressed loved ones, the Yahoo news editor still thought that 'stab boy' was an appropriate way to commemorate Diarrassouba.

I mean, I know that his surname is unfamiliar-looking to most of the British public, but 'stab boy'? It sounds like the name of some kind of depraved super villain.

First of all, he was 18 years old, which makes him a man, not a boy. Also, if anything it should be 'stabbed'. Are we so eager for bite-sized news that we can't spare time for three extra letters which don't even add up to another syllable?

Normally the peculiarly succinct English of tabloid headlines is just another interesting adaptation of language to a specific media. This example stuck out because it seemed so heartless, especially when juxtaposed with the words 'life meaningless'. It sounds almost sarcastic. Imagine the family saying:

"Stab Boy kept us upright and now we feel weak as we have lost a very special part of us. Life seems meaningless without our special son and brother, Stab Boy."

This isn't print media, where every inch of headline costs money; surely the Yahoo news editor doesn't need to trivialise someone's existence for the sake of economy. How about 'Life meaningless' without Oxford Street murder victim? Or what about even using his actual name?

Roman movies

2011-11-29T13:40:00.000-08:00

My bro just started watching an obscure collection of Italian sword and sandal movies from the 50s and 60s.

http://roman-movies.blogspot.com/

Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 6

2011-11-07T12:22:00.001-08:00

The best thing about B&Bs is the free full English breakfast you get in the morning. Well, technically it’s not free, but I like to pretend it is. It’s a good start to the day.

From Carlisle the walk is totally flat, and it gets flatter. It’s so flat, every bump above 5 feet seems like a mountain. On such bumps one finds villages huddled like desperate sailors on desert islands, usually including a medieval church built from Roman stone.

One of the last sections of the path follows the course of a 3-mile long dyke built to protect against flooding from the Solway. I think I saw more people along that stretch than anywhere else on the walk – it was a Saturday in July, so a lot of hikers were just starting the hike from west to east.

A mile or two before the end I stopped at a pub and had a steak and ale pie for lunch. When I first walked in the barman saw my rucksack and said, “Bloody hell, have you brought the kitchen sink an’ all?” So I replied no, that would be a stupid thing to take on a hike, and he was an idiot for even suggesting it.

Then I walked to the finish line, which is in Bowness-on-Solway, a village on the edge of the known world to which nobody ever goes for any reason at all, except walking Hadrian’s Wall Path. They’ve made a cute hut and terraced garden overlooking the windswept mudflats of the Solway Firth.

And then I went for a pint of Guinness in the village pub, where I saw a big cardboard cutout of a Roman.

And then I went home.

Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 5

2011-11-06T05:49:00.000-08:00

Not much of the Wall survives above ground after Banks, but the walk follows its former course across pretty rolling meadows and babbling brooks, passing through occasional hamlets.

Shortly before the hamlet of Walton I came across some picnic benches and a sign pointing through a hedge to ‘The Haytongate Hut: Drinks and Snacks’.

Fearing a trap – my enemies are never far behind – I crept through gingerly. Luckily my enemies had not yet prepared themselves, for the place was deserted. I saw one hut filled with chocolate bars, crisps and refrigerated drinks. There was an honesty box and the inside walls were papered with post-it notes on which people had scrawled little messages of thanks or celebration or mutual encouragement.

I smashed the place to bits, pissed in the corner, ate all the free chocolates and used the wrappers to spell SUCKERS on the floor, and moved on.

After Walton the path veered off into some dark and damp woods. Deep in these woods was a farm offering bunkhouse accommodation. This is the sign erected by the farmer to lure weary hikers into his snare.

I think he needs to hire some advertising advisors. I'd been warned about this sign in advance by some other hikers who'd stayed at the bunkhouse (and survived) while walking the path in the opposite direction. The farmer had told them that he nailed dead crows to the sign "as a warning to the rest."

At lunchtime I lay down to rest under a tree in a graveyard. All in all it was rather a morbid day.

It always seems to happen that after about four days of hiking I start getting proper muscle strains, and this time it was my achille’s tendon that left me limping the last seven miles to Carlisle, stopping every mile or so to let the pain subside (I forgot to take anti-inflammatory drugs with me). I basically need to start doing longer hikes, going more slowly at the start, so I don’t always spend the final couple of days hobbling.

Carlisle is pretty; I went for a walk after I checked into the B&B but forgot to take my camera, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Carlisle cathedral is weird though.

The B&B owner was very nice. He upgraded me to a double room because the place was almost empty, and recommended a great curry house where I sat reading a book about Hadian’s Wall and stuffing my face.

Then I went back to the B&B and turned on the TV to be confronted with the early reports on Anders Breivik’s shooting spree in Norway. That wasn’t such a cheerful end to the day.

Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 4, part 2

2011-08-13T03:38:00.001-07:00

Just after Greenhead, the path came to Thirlwall, a hamlet overlooked by a little castle on a hillock, built from robbed Roman stone, which made me mad. So I smashed the castle up. This is what it looked like after I was finished with it.

This bullshit story was on the 'information' panel for Thirlwall Castle, it's complete rubbish, there's no such thing as magic

I also found a cat which had been grafted onto a stone by some sick monster.

Past Gisland, the Wall runs in a tidy straight line down to the river Irthing, which it crossed over a substantial bridge whose massive foundations can still be seen.

On the far side of the steep valley stands Birdoswald fort. I was excited about Birdoswald because it has a museum and stuff. It also has a fake Roman shouting from a fake rampart.

Best of all, though, is the site of the granary in the fort, where excavators found evidence for a massive post-Roman timber hall. They marked the positions of the main posts with wooden bollards, as you can see here.

The information boards show what the granary was like in Roman times...

... and then what it was like in the Dark Ages.

The theory is that Birdoswald, after the Roman withdrawal, became the headquarters of a chieftain or petty king, one of the many local strongmen who must have exploited the power vacuum left by the empire.

I admit I’m a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to the sub-Roman period. A few years ago I saw ‘The Not So Dark Ages’, a documentary by the prehistorian Francis Pryor, in which he knocked down a series of cunningly erected straw men to show that the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ were actually a vibrant and sophisticated era in British history.

The documentary included a stroll around Birdoswald, and the argument that things kept ticking along smoothly after the end of the empire. Pryor also used evidence of pollen analysis to argue that there was no mass re-forestation of Hadrian’s Wall, which would be one knock-on effect of population decline and reduced farming.

As far as I can tell, Birdoswald shows pretty clearly how far things declined in the sub-Roman period. The elite were no longer able even to maintain the stone buildings around them, let alone build new ones. Instead they lived in the crumbling shell of a far more technologically advanced civilisation. When one granary building collapsed, they moved into the neighbouring one; only when that one also collapse did they erect their own timber hall.

As for the pollen analysis, from the documentary itself it looks to me like the fifth century saw a massive increase in alder woodland on Hadrian’s Wall, and a mirror-image reduction in heather and grassland, while by the sixth century very few cultivated grains were turning up in the samples. But then I’m not an expert in pollen analysis.

Basically I’m of the opinion that after the withdrawal of Rome from Britain, the population dwindled, the economy contracted, agriculture returned to near-subsistence levels, and the former British provinces fragmented into tiny warring polities which hardly deserve the title of ‘kingdoms’. I do get irritated by post-Roman apologists who seem reluctant to concede that the end of the empire led to a systemic collapse across the board.

Anyway, once I’d finished kicking over the gay little wooden bollards and spray-painting ROMANS RULE on the walls of the fort, I walked the few remaining miles to a campsite at the hamlet of Banks, where I accidentally camped in someone’s back garden.

Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 4, part 1

2011-08-12T10:01:00.000-07:00

From Steel Rigg westwards was probably my favourite section of the Wall, although the fact that the weather turned nice may have been a factor. Also, I saw far fewer people, at least until I reached Greenhead.

Looking back to the east from Steel Rigg

At the highest point of the Wall (not very high)

Milecastle 42 is another ingeniously situated fortification, accessible from the north only up an impractically steep bank. There is no reason for this at all, except for asinine military planning. In this capture from Google Earth you can see the Wall running down the ridge from the top left, and the rectangular milecastle near the bottom.

If the engineers had shifted the milecastle just 50 yards to the right, the gate would have been placed in the convenient cleft where the modern lane runs. But the boneheads obviously didn't do this. I suppose this strict, inflexible level of regimentation helps explain both the success and the ultimate failure of the Roman empire...

Just before Greenhead is the best-preserved section of the Wall, which in places survives above head height. It's the most amazing thing in the world.

Hadrian's Wall

The so-called 'Great Wall' of China

I didn’t have time to stop at the Roman Army Museum near Greenhead, but at noon I did pause at a visitor centre, where I was stalked by a chaffinch who wanted my ice cream.

Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 3, part 2

2011-08-08T08:11:00.001-07:00

From Housesteads the Wall climbs and dips along the ridges towards the west: over Cuddy’s Crags, Hotbank Crags, Highshield Crags and Steel Rigg. I’ve walked this section on a bright, windy day, when the moors feel vast and open, and broken cloud-shadows glide swiftly over the folds of the land.

From an earlier trip, when the weather was less shitty

Today, though, cloud was everywhere, and everywhere was damp. Not that it mattered, with so much of interest to see. At milecastle 37 you find the arch of the northern gate with its springs still in place, as well preserved as any on the Wall.

A little farther the path takes a sudden dip into Sycamore Gap, where you see what is now popularly known as the Robin Hood Tree. This spot, as Hollywood has taught us, was once part of Nottinghamshire.

Scramble up the path on the other side of the gap, and there is a fine view of milecastle 39, whose north gate leads directly to a sheer drop from the crag. This makes the gate useless from a practical point of view, but it does demonstrate the strict by-the-book mindset of the Roman engineers, who insisted on placing their milecastles at precisely regular distances. There’s an even better example of this peculiar sort of military madness farther west.

And coming to Steel Rigg, here is a fine view of one of the turrets originally built between the milecastles. The turrets were systematically demolished by the Romans later in the second century, presumably because they were no longer considered necessary for the functioning of the Wall.

I left the path at Steel Rigg and finished my third day at Once Brewed youth hostel. I wanted to stay here mainly for nostalgic reasons, as I stayed here with Dunk thirteen years ago (almost to the day) during our Land’s End to John O’Groat’s bike ride.

I arrived two hours before the hostel opened, so I sat and drank more tea and hot chocolate in the neighbouring visitor centre. In my bunk room were two oldish men, also long-distance walkers. One of them was doing the Pennine Way, but had just decided to quit after two weeks of continual rain. Unluckily for him, the weather decided to improve the next day...

Garden gnome

2011-08-08T06:24:00.000-07:00

Sotheran bought me a paint-it-yourself garden gnome for my birthday, so I painted it myself. I think it's turned out a lot better than the shit he usually produces.

I once went to Gräfenroda, the village in Germany which invented the garden gnome. True story.

Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 3, part 1

2011-08-04T03:39:00.000-07:00

Those poor Romans. What did even the height of summer have to offer them here, on these wild, craggy moors that collar the neck of Britain?

If the Wall crosses the neck of Britain, then the high ground between the valleys of the North Tyne and the Irthing is its throat. The land is scrubby and rough, broken by outcrops of limestone and the great rupturing ridges of volcanic rock that rise gently from the south and fall sharply to the north: a most suggestive natural defence whose potential must have made Hadrian’s engineers giddy with excitement.

Probably the giddiness wore off when the diggers of the north ditch reached Limestone Corner: at any rate, having made a frustrated attempt to smash their way through and clear the ditch of boulders, they threw down their tools and called it a day.

Screw this

These were the upland pastures where the farmers of the river valleys found summertime grazing for their stock. Every spring the hills were invaded by legions of goats and cattle, driven up paths well-worn since prehistory. Many of these paths and grazing lands must have been severed when the Romans built their wall, and doubtless the auxiliary troops garrisoned here had a busy time regulating the transit of flocks and herds at the beginning and end of summer. It gave them something to do, at least.

It was early morning, two days by foot from the conurbation of Newcastle, a day removed from the tourist hotspots of Housesteads and Vindolanda, and the weather was uninspiring: damp, cold, foggy. Outside Carrawborough – the old fort nothing but a fenced-off field of grassy tufts – the temple of Mithras squats beside a little boggy stream.

I had the place to myself. The temple was ankle-deep in rainwater, as quiet and still as a tomb. No doubt Mithras was below in his cave, wrapped up warm against the Northumbrian chill. The last time I was here, on a university field trip, a coachload of American tourists appeared and their leader ceremonially placed a rubber chicken on the high altar. Even this sacrilege had not been enough for the god to emerge in anger.

The next few miles were quiet except for a couple of determined hikers. There were times when the distant road was empty of traffic and the only sounds were the soft patter of rain and the bleating of far-off sheep, muted by the fog. Strangely absent were birds; only later, when the rain paused, did they emerge, seemingly from nowhere, and swarmed the air above me in a banquet of bugs.

Heading west to Housesteads

A mile or so before Housesteads, the public began to appear: daytrippers, Roman enthusiasts, families. This is the most famous and most dramatic part of the Wall, where it rises up and down the switchback-like convulsions of the Great Whin Sill. Housesteads is also one the best preserved forts, built at the top of a volcanic ramp, with a civilian settlement huddled below it.

Approaching Housesteads

The surrounding slopes are striped with cultivation terraces, for the soil here was richly suited for crops in Roman times, and this was not so much a lonely garrison outpost as a bustling community of troops, farmers, retired veterans and their families.

From a previous trip to Housesteads

I skipped the fort, since I had visited it twice already in the last year, and went down to the visitor centre, drawn by the prospect of tea and a dry place to sit. My backpack was heavy enough, but I couldn’t resist buying this book by Alistair Moffat – a little thematic reading to keep me entertained in the evenings.

Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 2, part 2

2011-08-01T00:50:00.000-07:00

Later on the downpour hit, rain as heavy as I’ve ever seen in fair Albion. I took shelter under the thick roof of an oak tree, hoping it would pass over, but this hope soon passed. So I decided to put my waterproof gear to the test, since I was lugging it around with me anyway. Backpack cover, coat, trousers and gaiters all deployed, I headed out into the maelstrom.

Soon I passed Mr Japanese Predator, who was hiding under a tree. The path turned down a steep country lane which had turned into an inch-deep torrent as the floodwater poured down from the high ground. Happily, my new boots performed well, and my feet were still dry an hour later when I reached a café at Chollerford.

The river North Tyne at Chollerford. There was once a really big and impressive Roman bridge here. You need to use a bit of imagination though.

After spending five minutes peeling off my waterproof layers so as not to soak their nice clean floor, I hammered my fist on the nearest table and demanded a pot of tea. By the time I finished it the worst of the storm had blown over, and I was ready to continue the remaining three miles to the next campsite.

A Roman turret

From Chollerford, site of a major Roman bridge and the fort of Chesters (I didn’t stop, since I’ve seen them before), the Wall – visible again for the first time since Heddon-on-the-Wall – climbs steadily up to the moorlands of the central section. The campsite was on a farm about a half-mile from the path, down a dirt track; it was starting to rain again, so I was glad to see that the farm also had a bunk barn.

A bunk cost £10 instead of the £5 for a camp pitch, but it was warm and dry, and I was doubly glad for the upgrade when I opened my rucksack and found that my sleeping bag was wet through. I cooked noodles on my stove in an adjacent junk barn, watching swallows flit in and out from a nest in a corner of the roof.

Batchelor's noodles taste good wherever you eat them. On the left is my tent, hung up to dry.

I shared the bunkroom with a mother and her four children, all hiking the path in the same direction as me, and three chaps about my age from London, who were hiking in the opposite direction. They had planned to bivy-bag the whole route, sleeping under the stars, and had reckoned that mid-July offered their best chance for dry weather. Unfortunately, the last week had seen the worst weather of the year; on their first night they had almost drowned in their bags, and they had quickly decided that youth hostels and bunk barns were the way to go. Also hiking west-east were a father and his eleven-year-old daughter.

This doll house was in the farm's laundry room. The weirdly crooked chimney bothered me.

Wall hikers turn out to be a very varied bunch. I met retired couples, pairs or groups of friends, old and young, male and female, entire families, and solitary hikers like me. The majority are middle-aged or slightly older, and they typically carry only a day pack, arranging for their luggage to be ferried from one B&B to the next. I deliberately made the walk more of a challenge (not to mention cheaper) by tenting where possible and carrying everything with me. This included five days’ worth of food, even though it was easy enough to buy food en route.

And so ended the second day. I was looking forward to the third, which would bring the most remote and dramatic section of the Wall.

Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 2, part 1

2011-07-29T14:54:00.000-07:00

I was woken by the dawn light, a yellowish-green glow through the fabric of my tent. It had rained heavily overnight, but the morning brought clear skies. I shared the campsite, a small field behind a farmhouse, with a couple of other hikers and a pair of cyclists. One of the hikers I would see every day except my last: he was in his 40s, wiry and fit-looking, with a distinctive khaki neck-flap hat and a GPS mounted on his shoulder like a miniature space cannon. Like a Japanese version of Predator, except he wasn’t Japanese. Or an alien.

It stayed bright into the afternoon. The walk was pleasant, following the line of the military road which was built in the eighteenth century along the course of the Wall. This section was actually built on top of the Wall, using the Wall and its associated forts as the main building material – an act of egregious vandalism that shocked antiquarians at the time and led to bitter complaints in Parliament.

For now, though, the sight of the massive ditch defences were enough to excite me, both the ditch to the immediate north of the Wall line, and the much larger ‘vallum’ ditch to the south. Archaeologists debate the precise purpose of this southern vallum ditch, which follows the course of the Wall closely, varying in distance from 50 to several hundred yards, depending on terrain. It clearly serves to demarcate some kind of military zone, but one wonders how it worked in practice.

I passed a few day trippers, but this part of the route was pleasantly quiet. The sense of isolation didn’t help when I crossed a stile to be confronted by a faceless scarecrow.

A little later I crossed another stile to find a small purple dragon staring up at me. A few yards farther on some kind of hippo was perched on a fence, and it was followed by an array of Scooby Doos.

By this point I was hardly even surprised when I saw a SNES shell embedded in a garden wall. At first I thought it was a novelty letterbox, but no, it was filled with cement.

Hurrying on, I passed by the Robin Hood Inn – because if you decided to establish a pub right next to the most important Roman monument in Britain, in fact built out of stone from said Roman monument, and decided to give it a relevant historical theme, you would name it after that most famous Roman of all, Robin Hood.

Around lunchtime I saw this crude but friendly bucket lid inviting me to stop at St Oswald’s tea shop. This place was actually already a planned stop, mostly because of the name. St Oswald was a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon king who converted to Christianity and won a famous victory on this very spot, and to celebrate he founded a tea shop.

It was a beautiful spot. I threw down my backpack and hammered my fist on one of the tables on the patio, and demanded a cream tea, which duly arrived. Eating the scones was a challenge as the tea shop was crawling with pests in the form of an assortment of cats and kittens, who stalked my food with admirable persistance. The kittens were quite easy to flick away, but the mother cat, clearly a grizzled veteran at such things, had the clever strategy of hopping onto my leg and trying to reach my tray while digging her claws into my trousers to prevent removal.

Next to the tea shop was the battle site of Heavenfield itself. A lonely church stands in the middle of the field, surrounded by a circular wall. Inside the church was a little exhibition about St Oswald.

My favourite part was a children’s colouring book, the novelty of which was that it was not only meant to be coloured in by children, but had also been drawn by a child (to be precise, Caitlin, aged 3).

I teach Anglo-Saxon history, but I don’t remember the part in the life of St Oswald where he rode around on a psychedelic llama.

Or where he rowed a boat carrying a queen whose body comprised nothing but a massive head.

Or the part where three soldiers knelt in front of him while he clutched his crotch in a worrying fashion.

I left the church and moved on. My punishment for making fun of a three-year-old was a growing darkness in the sky; brooding storm clouds loomed ever closer from the west, as you can see in this photo, and soon I would pay the price for my wickedness...

Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 1

2011-07-29T02:05:00.000-07:00

This is my account of walking the Hadrian's Wall path last week.

It was a typically bright and sunny morning in the north-east. As I walked to the station thoughts were running through my head. Not very interesting thoughts though, so I won't bother recounting them here.

To reach the start of the walk I had to get to the Wallsend Metro station in Newcastle. The Newcastle metro system isn't exactly very extensive, but they do manage to make it incredibly confusing, which is quite an achievement. When I eventually worked out how to get to Wallsend, I got off the train to be greeted by bilingual signage.

Then I started to walk. And I saw a big round picture of Hadrian's head, so I knew I was on the right track.

The route left the Wall almost immediately, and followed the river Tyne through Newcastle.

There were many bridges.

After about 15 miles I found the Wall again at Heddon-on-the-Wall. Hooray! Then it was another 3 miles to my first campsite.

Harry Potter review

2011-07-17T07:26:00.000-07:00

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 review

I went to see this film yesterday with Moogdroog as I had nothing else to do, except buy some zip-lock plastic bags. Apparently “Harry Potter” is quite popular with the kids these days. I think I read a couple of pages of the first “Harry Potter” book once, but then I put it down and decided to read Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe and Gore Vidal’s Julian instead, because I realised I’m not twelve fucking years old.

Anyway, this film is directed by some guy whose name I forget. Daniel Redcliff plays the eponymous wizard “Harry Potter”, Emily Watson is a she-wizard, and Rupert Grinch is a ginger wizard. Together they form a kind of wizard triumvirate. Towards the end of the film Emily Watson and Rupert Grinch started kissing, which I didn’t like very much.

“Harry Potter” and his friends are fighting against a villain who was constantly referred to as “you-know-who”, which was annoying, as I didn’t know who. I shall call him nose-face man. He had a pet snake.

I feel a bit bad for the producers because they obviously picked the three young leads when they were about five years old, and none of them has turned out to be a particularly good actor. Emily Watson wanders around looking vaguely fretful, and Rupert Grinch is sort of there and not there at the same time, and Daniel Redcliff stands about like a pouty cornstalk. Sometimes he turns his head to look at things, like he’s been caught in a lateral gust of wind.

There was a bit with a dragon, which was good fun, and a big fight when nose-face man and a load of evil wizards attacked Hogwards Wizard School. As far as I could understand it, which isn’t very far, “Harry Potter” had to destroy a group of things which had part of the soul of nose-face man in them, like a cup, and a tiara, and himself. He died and ended up talking to Michael Gambon in an Apple Store for a while, and then (for reasons that were not clear) he came alive again at a dramatically appropriate moment, had another fight, and won.

Er, spoiler alert.

I quite enjoyed it, on the whole. The CGI was overblown and cumbersome, but that was more or less necessary in order to fill the vacuum left by Daniel Redcliff’s lack of presence. The dialogue was crappy, but then “Harry Potter” is meant for children, isn’t it? Apart from all the violence and terrifying monsters.

In fact the scariest scene of all was at the very end, when the triumvirate see off the next generation of Hogwards Wizard School students at King’s Cross. They are meant to be about 40, and they look like this:

Final verdict: 10/10!!!!11

Lindisfarne

2011-07-13T00:15:00.000-07:00

The other week I went on a day trip to Lindisfarne with Alex, Nole, Anna and Helen. Lindisfarne is a tidal island off the Northumbrian coast. Monks made a monastery here in the olden days. Then Vikings came and burned it down and stole loads of stuff. Then the monks rebuilt it. Then a bunch of other stuff happened. Then we came for a day trip. Here are some photos.

Climbing up to Lindisfarne Castle

This image gave me nightmares for days

Anna in a boat

Alex goes for a paddle to a little holy island

Alex rejoicing on the little holy island

Note monk at lower right sending a text on his mobile

Bus stop sign seems to have bullet holes in it

Bird

Sat 20 - Sun 21 Aug: Viking Raiders re-enactment day at Lindisfarne. A bit tasteless, I think, like having a German WW2 Wehrmacht re-enactment day at Dachau

Holy bin

Helen and Alex wondering if Alex will be able to pass into the sacred precinct without his face burning off

Saint Cuthbert, who never looked this relaxed in real life

Guns

2011-07-07T23:52:00.000-07:00

Now this juxtaposition of news and advert from the FOX News front page sums up something unsettling about American culture...

Law and order in the 6th century

2011-05-23T14:36:00.000-07:00

From the Law Code issued by King Gundobad of the Burgundians...

Chapter XCVII

Concerning hounds, hunting dogs, or running dogs

If anyone shall presume to steal a hound, or a hunting dog, or a running dog, we order that he be compelled to kiss the posterior of that dog publicly in the presence of all the people, or let him be compelled to pay five gold coins to him whose dog he took, and a fine of two gold coins.

Hostel crazy

2011-05-22T11:35:00.000-07:00

There’s a reason I don’t like staying at hostels, and it’s the same reason I should probably do so more often: I always attract the odd types. This time I was staying at a hostel in Chicago, sitting in the foyer, minding my own business, reading a book about fourth-century aristocrats in the western imperial court, when a large, heavy-featured, middle-aged guy deposited himself on the chair next to me.

“Just gonna sit down before I take off,” he said. I smiled vaguely and tried to look busy.

It didn’t work.

The name of this place should have been my first warning

For the next fifteen minutes or so we exchanged occasional polite comments, and I kept my nose in my book. I learned nonetheless that he had hoped to get a dorm bed in the hostel for the night, only to find that none was available. So he had booked one for the next night, and was planning to spend the night in a 24 hour Starbucks, then he would come to the hostel and check in as early as he could. And he would sleep until someone kicked him out. “No-one better disturb me,” he growled, his black baseball cap pulled low over his brow. “Anyone wakes me up, I’ll put a foot in their ass.” Then he started telling me about his haemorrhoids.

It wasn’t long before he was explaining his theory about why America has gone to hell. He was fifty years old, a former factory worker, and unemployed. He had travelled across America and had seen the pollution everywhere. He blamed the British for the terrible state of the country: micro-toxins in the water, emaciated trees where once were virgin forests, the nuclear moonscape that is Nevada. The best of the British had stayed at home, he said; only the worst, the greediest, the cruellest, had come to America. He was Hungarian – 100% Hungarian – and despised the bastard tongue he was forced to speak, when he should have been speaking his mother tongue, or at least German.

100% Hungarians

But it wasn’t just the British. It was the Africans, too. The British, of course, were to blame for bringing the Africans over, and starting wars with them. The last time his people, the Hungarians, had fought the Africans, under Attila the Hun in 398, they had beaten them. (Half a century too early for Attila, and his Huns had fought Franks, Gauls, Italians, Burgundians, Goths, Vandals – in fact just about everyone except Africans. I didn’t mention this, of course, as I didn’t want to derail his delicate train of logic.)

Why had America lost its manufacturing base? Simple. The factories had become multi-racial workplaces. (He looked over his shoulder, leaned in close, and explained this part in hushed tones.) People of different colour didn’t get along in the factories. The worker of one colour (i.e. black) complained to the foreman that a better worker of another colour (i.e. white) had called him an offensive name, and the better worker was dismissed. Then the black foreman sabotaged the manufacturing process so that the American-built car went rusty, and the industry was destroyed. He didn’t explain why the black foreman would want to do this, but he did ask me to guess what happened next.

Racial tension

“Hmm,” I said.

“Go on, guess.”

“All right,” I said, “all the manufacturing jobs went overseas.”

“Where?”

“The far east.”

“Exactly.” This is where his logic came to form a beautiful, racist circle. All the people in China look the same, so there is no racial tension on the factory floor between persons of different colour. Quite entranced by this argument, I told him he should write a book about it. He agreed. “People want to hear the truth,” he said.

Racial harmony

The Jews came in for a hard time, too, of course; no semi-coherent rant about why any particular country is fucked up is complete without a mention of the Jews. I can’t recall exactly what they had done. It wasn’t good though. (Earlier in the conversation he had shown me his current reading material – Albert Einstein on the theory of relativity – in order to demonstrate his intelligence. In fact he tore out the back page to give me his email address.)

He had a simple ten-year plan to fix America. First, stop all of America’s wars and bring the troops home – not just from Iraq and Afghanistan, but from Europe, Japan, anywhere else. This sounded quite reasonable, I thought, but then he said that America should also build a huge wall along the Mexican border, and plant mines along it, and I knew we were back in Crazyland. Then America should invest in manufacturing, and build up the military (this seemed a bit contradictory with stopping America’s wars, but never mind).

That was pretty much it. “Give it ten years, and we’ll see where we are.” This was important, for within ten years, he believed, China was planning to occupy Taiwan and provoke a nuclear war with America. He had obtained this information from a retired colonel in military intelligence whom he had met once hitch-hiking, and whose name he could not recall.

At about this point he decided he needed to go to Starbucks and sleep. He rose and shook my hand and wished me well, and left.

Setting the world to rights is a tiring business, that’s for sure.

Roman Holiday

2011-04-28T10:51:00.001-07:00

Mithraea and I went on a Roman roadtrip a couple of weeks ago and visited a few piles of stone. Here are some photos.

A very tidy ruin

This is Wroxeter. It's near Shrewsbury, which has two claims to fame: 1) It's the setting for Ellis Peters' series of novels about the medieval monk-detective Cadfael, and 2) nobody knows how to pronounce it (I've heard Shroosbury, Shrowsbury, Shoosbury).

Wroxeter is now just a pile of crap in a field, but it was once the fourth biggest city in Roman Britain. The big piece of standing masonry, known as 'the Old Work', was a wall of the civic bathhouse.

What ruins should look like

A bunch of people recently built a replica Roman villa on the site and filmed the process for a multi-part Channel 4 reality documentary, because nowadays people will watch any old shit about something being built or renovated. The gimmick of the show was that the people who built it were regular 21st century builders who, naturally enough, had no idea how to build a Roman villa, and had to learn from scratch on a tight budget.

Mithraea and a replica Roman villa

They even got the 21st century builders to do the decorating. For comparison, here is a genuine Roman fresco from Pompeii.

Amazing

And now from the Wroxeter Roman villa:

Less amazing

It's a bit like what Roman villas would have been like if Roman villas had been built by children. We also checked out the medieval church in the nearby village, but only because its builders used Roman columns and stone when constructing it.

Spot the Roman columns

We went to Caerwent in south-east Wales, another old Roman city which is now largely abandoned. It has a lot more to see than Wroxeter, and the remains were even more impressive than I was expecting. The south side of the city wall has survived amazingly well - to give you a sense of scale in the next photo, Mithraea is about twelve feet tall.

The missing brickwork is the part Mithraea ate for lunch

Quite a lot of Caerwent has been excavated and left exposed - a temple, the forum and basilica and a some townhouses. Here we see Mithraea walking along an actual Roman street. You can see the drain and building foundations and everything.

OMG WHERE IS MY HOUSE GONE LOL

Not far from Caerwent is Caerleon, whose highlights include a pretty awesome Roman museum stuffed full of stuff, and a very well presented section of the legionary bathhouse which includes an olympic-length swimming pool for the Roman legionaries to practice swimming. Also visible was a massive amphitheatre which was full of kids drinking cider and eating crack.

Next we headed for the Cotswolds, a pretty corner of England where all the well-heeled wankers of Londinium built their country homes, thus pricing locals out of the housing market. This is Great Witcombe.

In olden times it supposedly looked more like this:

A little to the west is Chedworth, an even more impressive villa. Unfortunately much of it is covered with scaffolding as it's undergoing a huge refurbishment that won't be finished until 2012. We were so mad we kicked over a bunch of hypocaust piles. Here's a reconstruction though:

And a lizard we saw:

All in all, I learned a lot about the Romans, and I saw the first lizard I've ever seen in Britain, so it was definitely worthwhile.

Silverstone 2011

2011-03-02T03:39:00.000-08:00

This coming Sunday I'm running the Silverstone Half Marathon along with Gemma and Edmund. My run is in aid of Cancer Research UK, and is in memory of Dunk, who passed away in January.

I've set up a charity fundraising page here. Any donations to the cause, no matter how much (I know times are hard) will be greatly valued.

The Diet Delusion

2011-02-20T14:48:00.000-08:00

I finally finished reading Gary Taubes’ The Diet Delusion (originally published in the US as Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health). It took me months (I started some time last summer) because it’s massive and unapologetically dense: 460 pages of prose, followed by 45 pages of endnotes and almost 100 pages of bibliography.

This isn’t your typical popular diet book. Taubes is not a nutritionist or lifestyle guru, but a science journalist, and this book is as much about science and the scientific method, and what happens when they meet politics, as it is about what we should or should not eat.

I came across the book when I began reading up on the paleo diet, which I stumbled across by chance and began to follow precisely one year and two days ago. Since then I’ve kept to the diet quite well, apart from extended lapses at home through the summer and over Christmas, when I was too lazy to buy my own food.

But these lapses, if anything, have only convinced me further that the paleo diet is the way to go. Since Christmas, never a healthy time of year for anyone, I’ve pulled out all the stops. I’ve scarcely touched bread, rice or any type of grain or starchy food; my caloric intake derives from some vegetables, but mostly protein and fat – including saturated fat. With gay abandon I ignore those scary red warning stickers on supermarket packaging. I’ve even ditched olive oil except for salad dressing, and now I fry everything, which means most breakfasts and dinners, in lard.

Saturated fat alert!

The result after six weeks is that the Christmas gut has evaporated and I haven’t had a single heart attack. I feel healthy and energetic and I never let myself go hungry. The only time I feel lethargic is when for some reason I have a high-carb meal, like when I had lasagne for lunch yesterday and two hours later the post-glucose crash left me falling asleep on the sofa.

Lard makes you be young and fall in love!

Being an archaeologist interested in human history, I found the basic premise of the paleo diet attractive as soon as I started reading about it, but Gary Taubes has really helped elucidate two things: first, the science of fat metabolism, which explains why the diet works as well as it does; and second, the politics of dietary research, which explains why the diet diverges so starkly from what governments and health experts tell us we should be eating.

This is what Taubes has to say about people who work in nutrition, chronic disease and obesity:

“I believe it is difficult to use the term ‘scientist’ to describe those individuals who work in these disciplines, and I have actively avoided doing so in this book. It’s simply debatable, at best, whether what these individuals have practiced for the past fifty years, and whether the culture they have created, as a result, can reasonably be described as science, as most working scientists or philosophers of science would typically characterize it.”

It’s truly alarming, since we base our personal notions of what constitutes a healthy diet so much on trust.

Taubes explains that obesity is not caused by caloric input and expenditure per se – i.e. the idea that you get fat because you eat too much and/or exercise too little – but on a dysfunction in how the body stores and mobilises fat deposits.

The comedy documentary filmmaker Tom Naughton can explain it better than I can, as he does in Fat Head, which I highly recommend.

None of this is scientifically controversial, but due to politics, peer pressure and lack of communication, the obvious conclusion that eating fewer carbs will promote weight loss has been swamped in the last three decades by the twin misapprehensions that eating fat makes you fat and clogs your arteries, leading to heart disease (it doesn’t), and that chronic obesity is principally the result of a character defect, in other words lack of willpower (it isn’t).

While Taubes’ main focus is on obesity, he also suggests that excessive carbohydrate consumption is a root cause of diabetes, cancer, heart disease, dementia and even premature ageing – the so-called ‘diseases of civilization’. Clearly a lot of dedicated research needs to be done to test these hypotheses, but the possibility is intriguing.

Basically, The Diet Delusion is perhaps the most important book I’ve ever read. I can honestly say that it’s changed my life – and how often can we say that?

The Album Leaf - Streamside

2011-01-25T13:07:00.000-08:00

Dunk

2011-01-21T10:35:00.000-08:00

I’d known Dunk long enough that I only have the haziest memories of first meeting him at some point in school. I do remember the first time we did anything together, when his dad drove us to a big swimming pool in Birmingham. It had one of those tall olympic diving platforms. I’m confident I didn’t jump off it, but I believe Dunk did. And even if he didn’t for some reason, he would have wanted to. Dunk enjoyed throwing himself off high places.

Obviously the coolest kids in the school

Of our small group of friends at school, Dunk was the one who went out and really did things. He was the first to get a driving license, and the first to get a part-time job (working at a hardware store), which meant he could buy a car – a white Austin Maestro if I remember right – and a leather jacket, and I don’t know which he was most proud of. He was the first to get properly, truly blind drunk, too, when on his eighteenth birthday we took him down to my local and had to carry him back. He was the first of us to get married, and in Nini he had a wife no less remarkable than himself.

Any earnings he didn’t spend on his car in those school days went into his other great passion: flying aeroplanes, or else jumping out of them. It was Dunk who drove his mother frantic by disappearing one weekend to take his first parachute jump – without telling her beforehand. The first I knew about it was when she turned up on our doorstep in a panic, beside herself with worry that her youngest son was about to fling himself into thousands of feet of nothingness. And when he couldn’t be in the air himself, he sent up rockets; I once helped him fire one up, a rocket he had built shaped like an X-Wing fighter, in the hopelessly unsuitable location of a Redditch neighbourhood, and we watched fretfully as it sailed back down on its parachute towards the middle of a busy road.

Dunk and Mak, last day of GCSEs, summer of 1996

At high school Dunk and the rest of us had most of our classes together, and outside school we hung out together. Mostly this meant choosing one bedroom to fill with computers and cables and spending the day in some kind of creative nerd heaven. We messed around with video recorders and microphones and once we tried to film our own space epic, cobbling together a spacecraft cockpit in Marek’s loft from cardboard, paint and parts we scavenged from an old MG.

Ant, Dunk, Sharpy, summer of 1997

In the summer of ’96 Dunk, Ant, Sharpy and I spent a few days exploring the Welsh Borders on bicycles. Dunk’s dad, I remember, brought our bikes in his van to the Wyre Forest, and that’s where we set out from, cycling from one youth hostel to another. The next summer we did the same, this time to the Black Mountains.

Dunk (with leather jacket), Ant, Sel, in sixth form

In the spring of ’98, during our final high school exams, I was poring over some photos from those trips and was siezed by a sudden urge to get out on the road again. But this time it would be serious: we’d cycle 1100 miles, the full length of Britain, from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Straight away I picked up the phone and asked Dunk if he fancied it, and he didn’t need to think twice. “Let’s do it,” he said.

From Land's End...

These are the best memories; summer, freedom, youth. For the rest of my life when I think of Dunk, this is where my thoughts will turn.

... to John O'Groats

After that trip, we said the next challenge would be to hike the Pennine Way the following year, our first summer break from university. But Dunk, with typical panache, took up rugby at uni and almost immediately broke his leg, which put paid to any hiking.

We never got round to resurrecting those plans. I saw less of Dunk over the years of university and post-university, except when I came home for the holidays, and one time, in 2004 I think, when I went with Ant and Mak to visit him in Newbury, and he took us up to the top of Watership Down. I was disappointed to see no rabbits. Eventually he married Nini and moved to Thailand, where he lived until recently.

Just last Monday Dunk and I finalised the dates for a new adventure in April, when we were going to go to Egypt (an adventure for me, at least; Dunk was a native). It would have been the first time I’d spent proper time with him for years: a chance to rekindle that old spirit that had once sent us cycling across the country on a whim.

Dunk had been fighting cancer for a while. He was never the sort to accept defeat or to stop making plans. The last time I saw him, at a New Year’s Day morris dancing extravaganza at Cookley, he had looked tired, but the latest news from the doctor had been positive. Ant had been playing guitar in the rain, so Dunk had stood beside him the whole time with an umbrella.

Dunk was the best type of friend: noble and generous, kind and true. Most of all, he was courageous: he threw himself into life with as much zest as he threw himself from planes. Those who knew him could only watch in admiration as he struggled with such trials and personal grief over the last couple of years, not least the sudden loss of his father, yet never stopped smiling.

When Ant called me on Wednesday morning to say that Dunk, after being rushed suddenly and unexpectedly to hospital, had passed away, I put on my boots and went for a long walk.

Ant, Dunk, me, summer of 1997

It was a beautiful day; clear and crisp, with a blue sky and a sun that was distant, but not so distant that I couldn’t feel its warmth. I took a path I didn’t know and kept going. The hardest part was when I eventually had to stop and turn home.

The Avett Brothers

2011-01-11T01:33:00.000-08:00

These guys are good.

Social network sites are evil

2011-01-08T02:38:00.000-08:00

Here's another reason I left Facebook...

BBC News: US wants Twitter details of Wikileaks activists

In 2007 I wrote a blog piece about the sinister data-mining types who ploughed millions of dollars into Facebook because they saw the obvious potential of having such a vast and up-to-date depository of information about social networks. Governments ain't stoopid, and now we can see precisely how they plan to use things like Facebook and Twitter to spy on their own citizens. All they have to do is subpoena the social network owners, who are hardly likely to refuse.

The mad thing is that governments don't even have to make any effort to gather the data. Gone are the days of the Stasi, who were almost admirable in their dedication to covert surveillance. Now the public voluntarily supplies tidily organised and digitally compiled information about their social lives.

The good old days

This is really not good. The Wikileaks activists are not terrorists. I doubt that terrorists tweet their terrorist plans. They are whistleblowers who have done nothing but expose factual documents that threaten the public image of the US military-industrial complex's international adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This latest development shows that by invoking 'national security' world governments will be able to get any information about anyone that happens to be stored by social networking sites. The temptation is simply too great for them to resist. And if this is happening now, who know what they might be doing ten years from now?

More art

2011-01-05T13:01:00.000-08:00

I'm still learning how to draw with a graphics tablet in Photoshop. This is honestly the best I can do at the moment.

Happy New Year

2011-01-01T08:33:00.000-08:00

Ant gave me a sweet Wacom drawing pad he wasn't using, so I can start to experiment with drawing digital art. I just need to get used to drawing with a magnetic pen. This is the kind of stuff I'm aiming for:

This is the level I'm at so far.

Nearly there!

Eagle

2010-12-30T07:42:00.001-08:00

Not long now till the release of the new movie adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff's classic The Eagle of the Ninth! I'm pretty excited about it. Frankly I'm willing to go and see it just for this reconstructed shot of Hadrian's Wall.

This is a photo I took a couple of months ago:

Here's a grab from the movie trailer:

How awesome is that? Pretty awesome.

Mouthy bitches

2010-12-29T10:38:00.000-08:00

Scene: Morrison's checkout. I am packing my purchases. A woman is walking in a nearby aisle with a little dog in a green body warmer.

Man in checkout queue: Look, that lady's brought a dog inside. She's not allowed to do that, is she?

Checkout lady: I don't think so. [presses buzzer to summon reinforcements]

Woman with dog: It's all right, I'm allowed, I'm deaf. [exit]

Me: It's a hearing dog.

Man in checkout queue: A what dog?

Checkout lady: Oh, a hearing dog. I've heard of them.

Man in checkout queue: A hearing dog? How does that work then?

Me: They teach it to speak.

Man in checkout queue: [ponders this idea for a moment] I like it. So long as it's not a female dog.

Me: Ouch! [exit]

I like a bit of old-school misogyny when I go to the supermarket. Now I think about it, though, it wouldn't do much good to teach a hearing dog to speak, would it? There was a funny sketch about this years ago by the Not the Nine O'Clock News team. I couldn't find it on YouTube, so here's another sketch instead.

The worst thing about the threat of civil war

2010-12-22T09:44:00.000-08:00

As far as I can tell this isn't meant to be ironic. It's good to know the BBC reporters have their fingers on the pulse of the British public.

BBC: Could Ivory Coast turmoil make chocolate more expensive?

Snow picture

2010-12-03T09:26:00.000-08:00

Abi said she wanted to see snow pictures of Durham, so here's a snow picture. It includes an awful poem by Sir Walter Scott about how much he loves 'mixed and massive piles'. Whatever, Walt.

Penitente agite!

2010-11-17T11:14:00.000-08:00

From the eleventh-century Old English penitential Scriftboc:

"If an animal has been polluted by a man's penis, let it be killed and given to dogs. If there is doubt about this, let the animal live."

I know it's rude, but it's so funny. Not about the bestiality, but the fact that they leave room in case of doubt. As though some Anglo-Saxons were running about having sex with so many animals that they lost track. Or perhaps they got so drunk that the next morning they couldn't remember if they'd fucked a pig or not.

Done done done

2010-11-05T12:40:00.000-07:00

I finally finished work on the big book. I've spent almost every evening for the last three weeks indexing it, which involved going through 400 pages of proof with a highlighter at what felt like an agonisingly slow rate. It's a good job nobody told me beforehand how mind-numbingly tedious indexing a book is.

But it's done! After six years of research and revision, all the final typos and errors have been teased out, copyright permission obtained ($230 for the privilege of quoting a single Wallace Stevens poem on the first page!!) and index finished, and the whole thing passed on to my editor.

As I was finishing it this evening I cut my thumb opening a bottle of milk. I didn't have any plasters so I just waited for Mother Nature to do her congealing thing, but then instead I grabbed my indexing proof and scrawled

IT IS DONE

on the front page in my own blood. It seemed fitting. Outside I hear fireworks going off. They may be for Guy Fawkes Night, but I'm going to pretend they're for me instead.

Busy busy

2010-11-01T07:31:00.000-07:00

I haven't updated for a while because this new job is a time vampire. Things are starting to calm down slightly now though, so my evenings and weekends may re-emerge from the amorphous blob of seminars, lecturers and admin meetings that has absorbed my formerly innocent post-PhD life.

I sympathise, Steve

To give you an idea of how dull my life now is, the most exciting thing I did recently was buy a little action figure of Mr Spock which I saw in Sainsbury's. I'm not sure if it was really an impulse buy, as after I saw it I rolled my trolley slowly all the way down the home furnishing and kitchenware aisles while I mulled over the pros and cons.

In the end I took the plunge and counted out pennies until I was sure I afford the curiously specific asking price of £4.11. I then had to endure a conversation with a checkout kid who turned out to be a complete nerd and wanted to know my opinion of the latest Star Trek film. (I told him I thought it was shit.)

This is what my Spock toy looks like:

£4.11 well spent, I think. I bought it in honour of a planned Star Trek movie night with Moogdroog and her housemate, to show that even Babylon 5 fans like me are willing to make conciliatory gestures towards Trekkies.

Speaking of which, I read a Babylon 5 vs. Star Trek forum discussion where this comment made me Laugh Out Loud:

I love B5. My missus preferred DS9. It's a good job we weren't seeing each other at the time as she'd have got a punch in the face.

It's nice to see love crossing such great cultural divides.

I've put my Spock action figure on my kitchen window sill next to my British soldier action figure. The British soldier action figure, however, keeps falling over when I try to stand him up by himself.

Maybe I should buy an American soldier action figure for him to lean on.

Dunstanburgh Castle

2010-10-06T11:51:00.000-07:00

This column is at Alnwick, which has an impressive second-hand book shop, except for the lack of medieval history books. The column was erected in honour of some big landlord who wasn't a total bastard, or at least that's what the inscription says. Someone had thrown a bunch of dead rabbits over the fence, which were lying about on the steps in varying states of decomposition. Weird.

The rest of the photos are of the coastal castle of Dunstanburgh, which is pretty damn impressive, so the pictures can speak for themselves.

Durham photos

2010-09-26T09:07:00.001-07:00

Finally got round to taking my camera for a walk.

This is the History Department

Onion News: Archaeologists Unearth Lousiest Civilization Ever

2010-09-23T08:43:00.000-07:00

I think every archaeologist has felt like this at some point...

Naas

2010-09-22T09:22:00.000-07:00

While pillaging my old university notes for some help in putting together my new teaching course, I came across a forgotten poem I wrote when I was 23, living in Ireland and evidently going through my W. B. Yeats phase.

Naas, winter 2003

Her senseless mercy shines upon you still
And tempers time and grief with pins of joy;
None but the purest heart would dare employ
That snare of kind and poisonous goodwill.

The worried walk away from beauty's sight
Is set with foreign voices faintly heard.
Into the fog a line of lanterns blurred
Warms the sleeping stillness of the night.

Then rise and face the winter's silver dawn
That over mist-strewn fields pours,
For crowds of stars and mountains are yet yours:
A lover's balm for pity's gentle thorn.

I think we can all be forgiven for turning to poetry once at some point in our lives.

OH NO

2010-09-19T06:17:00.000-07:00

The front cover of Saturday's Daily Express:

Turns out someone in London overheard some Algerian guys talking about the Pope's visit, thought it sounded suspicious and reported it to the police, who arrested a bunch of people and searched a bunch of properties.

The police said it was standard procedure to take such reports seriously, but that they had no other indication of a plot. The men were held overnight but haven't been charged with anything yet. The Vatican said it was unconcerned by any of this. According to a brief follow-up story published on the Daily Express website today, "a Met Police spokesman last night said the investigations had finished without the discovery of anything significant."

Sounds like a damp squib, all told. Of course the Daily Express could just wait to see if anything concrete actually does turn up, but why waste a good old reactionary, xenophobic headline that might sell a few more papers?

Tabloid editors are horrible people and they make me want to cry.

I must be getting old

2010-09-14T03:56:00.000-07:00

This is a long ramble, so I've divided it up into sections, like a Kit Kat.

For the past week in my new, unfurnished home I’ve been living through a novel double-experiment: having no chairs, and having no internet. In order to obtain either, I’ve had to come to my new office in the university, or pay the cost of a cup of tea in a suitably equipped café. Of the two deprivations neither has been pleasant, but the latter at least has been beneficial.

The lack of convenient internet access, unlike the lack of chairs, was also premeditated. I’ve been increasingly troubled for quite a long time by the intrusion of the world into private life via the devious means of the Web. (The name of which, if you pause to consider it, does sound rather sinister, like a great space-net dropped on the Earth by a race of malevolent alien slavers in order to capture humans for their intergalactic meat farms. But I digress.)

This growing worry that our society is becoming too dependent too quickly on this new technology, coupled with my natural aversion to crowds and clubs of any sort, has led me, now that I have the free choice, to delay having broadband installed in the house. I somehow feel that it is important to wean ourselves from the tightening embrace of modern technology just as toddlers must eventually be weaned and taught to walk on their own feet. For what infant has ever written a great novel, or led an army into battle, or (Jesus Christ excepted) ever accomplished anything of note, supposing we can agree that wailing at every slight discomfort and continually soiling oneself (and others) do not rank among the noblest achievements of the human race?

In a similar way the presence of the internet in every corner of life threatens to keep us infantile: dependent, amused only by novelty, increasingly incapable of concentration and independent thought. It teaches us not to think, but to parrot and recycle, to cut and paste, to hyperlink; curiosity becomes something to be sated with the click of a mouse, not through a slow and difficult search which leads us to places we never intended or expected. I’m thinking of this now especially because in a few weeks I’ll be teaching my first batch of 18-year-old students, and I’m expected a hard fight to get them in the library reading actual books.

I’m too young to be a trenchant technophobe, but I’m also old enough to remember a childhood spent in the uncertain dawn of the digital age. We bought our first home computer when I was nine, I was making computer games with my friends at fifteen, and at university I first grew acquainted with the World Wide Web, like me a child of the 80s which reached maturity in the late 90s (in August 1980, as I was busy being born, Tim Berners-Lee was busy fathering his pre-WWW ENQUIRE software experiment at CERN). I got myself an email account and a mobile phone, and joined MySpace, then Facebook, as the fashion demanded, which were followed by accounts on last.fm, Spotify, XBox Live and I don’t know what else. The internet is the miraculous tool of a thousand uses, an all-pervasive, ever-adapting pocket knife, the defining technological triumph of our age, and I’ve recognised and exploited its benefits as much as anyone.

But when a tool starts to determine how we think, feel and behave, we change from being controllers to being controlled. Like all cults, the cult of technology succeeds through giving the illusion of freedom and the security of acceptance. And we are fast approaching a decisive juncture, if we have not already passed it. Witness a recent TED lecture by tech-guru Seth Priebatsch entitled ‘The Game Layer on Top of the World’, where he predicts, surely correctly, that whereas the last decade saw the steady construction of social networks which bound us ever more closely together (Facebook being the obvious winner), the coming decade will be about the exploitation of these networks through game theory - that is, through the subtle manipulation of our behaviour in ways that advertisers and social scientists have known about for years, but which Web-based social networks have allowed to become exponentially more powerful.

Priebatsch, standing on stage, is the archetypal prophet of the digital church: young, healthy, hip, with a pair of wraparound shades propped on his head, a Princeton drop-out (as he is fond of reminding us) who evidentally does not play by the rules - except of course he does play by the rules, merely a different set, the rules of game theory, which he promotes with almost creepy enthusiasm and seems to take for granted we also will follow. Judging from the mindless applause of his audience, he is quite right. And if you think you’re not already the plaything of game theorists, think again: anyone who regularly plays Farmville or uses any kind of retail loyalty card has already lost the first fight, even if they were unaware it was being fought.

III

Concerned voices have been echoing around the Web for the last few years. The other week Teknofobe (a deliberately ironic nickname, I should note) told me about Nicholas G. Carr’s new book The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, which I’ve since ordered and await eagerly. As far as I can tell without having yet read it, Carr is vexed chiefly by the cognitive effect of excessive internet use on the brain, and it seems that there is some scientific evidence for the rewiring of neural pathways even among relatively light internet users. Whether the overall implications are good or bad, I have no idea. You could probably also detect the rewiring of neural pathways in people who played gin rummy for an hour a day.

My own concerns are personal and instinctive, and found some resonance in a recent essay by Hal Crowther entitled One Thousand Years of Solitude. Unlike me, Crowther is an unrepentant technophobe: he damns the growing obsession with social connectedness and talks melodramatically, but with genuine feeling, of hives, cocoons and electronic slavery, of the internet as Trojan Horse and Gorgon. His is the parting shot of a dying, bewildered breed of pre-internet writers and thinkers: ‘If you’re offended or threatened,’ he laments bitterly, ‘console yourself with the impotence and rapid extinction of my kind.’

Yet he has a point. Solitude - not just physical solitude, which is irrelevant in the age of Blackberries and Twitter, but true, unwired social solitude - is becoming rarer and more precious by the day. I can’t deny that the sci-fi nerd in me likes the idea of a hyper-connected society of ease and plenty, a futuristic utopia where everyone is linked by beneficent technology and we all skip gaily towards a horizon of Tweets and rainbows.

The anti-social loner in me, however, long ago came to loath the banality of continual Facebook updates from people I hardly know, and even from people I do, when I would not trouble them to reveal such mundane facts and observations even if they were sat two yards from me and I was in a particularly friendly mood. The critical thinker in me is repelled by the ways in which total connectedness encourages group-think, and the internet, far from encouraging independent thought amidst mutually constructive dialogue, can just as easily become an echo chamber for a thousand isolated tribes of bigots and fools. The libertarian in me fears the seductive embrace of a virtual network which is founded on data-mining technology and by necessity regards human beings as nothing more than a collection of digits to be shunted around and manipulated en masse according to the models of game theory. The leftist in me fears the fact that this technology already lies in the sweaty hands of a global plutocracy.

The internet is a tool. We should no more let it determine our thoughts and actions than we would restructure our minds according to the uses of a Swiss army knife. Let us decide when we need to use it, and then use it, and then put it away, and not have it pipe itself into every room of the house every minute of every day. I confess it makes me nervous to think of a life without broadband wi-fi at home, where I have to walk 20 minutes to my office or to a wi-fi café if I want to use it. On the other hand, I spent the first twenty-seven years of my life in such impoverished circumstances, and the fact that the prospect of doing without the internet makes me so nervous is perhaps the only reason I need to go ahead. If I habituated myself to it so easily, surely I can de-habituate myself too, hopefully before it’s too late.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the potential of the internet, not least because it allows me to post such long ramblings as this to my audience of literally a dozen or so readers (few in number, but treasured, except for Vlad, who represents the most devious and spiteful depths of the internet community, and everything that is wrong with the modern world). Yet as much as I love the potential of the internet, I also love the potential of a printed book to encourage deep reading and slow, active engagement in what I read without fear of distraction. For that matter, I love the potential of a bottle opener to open bottles, but I don’t keep it always in my pocket. If I did, it would be indicative of a serious addictive problem. And there’s the crux of it, and the reason why I shall try to continue to deprive my home of the internet.

Although I will eventually buy some chairs.

House and Housesteads

2010-09-11T08:48:00.000-07:00

This is my mascot at the kitchen window. I was going to put him at the front of the house but I was afraid people might think I was some kind of flag-waving nationalist, and I'm never going to make that mistake again.

I found this pot in a charity shop and was instantly smitten. Not only is it perfect for storing teabags for easy access, but it can be used to reflect my inner mood. For example, if I hear some good news, such as that HBO have given the green light to a 5-season remake of the 90s sci-fi cult classic Babylon 5, I can have the pot like this to express my joy.

If, on the other hand, I hear some bad news, such as that HBO have decided not to give the green light to a 5-season remake of the 90s sci-fi cult classic Babylon 5, I can turn the mug around to express my anger and sadness.

I also went up to Hadrian's Wall today. The last time I went I was 17 and cycling the length of Britain with Dunk, and we stopped one night at a Youth Hostel near the Wall and in the evening I walked up to take a look at it, was disappointed to find that it was the size of a garden wall, and then pulled a calf muscle to boot. This visit was better.

Here's a text exchange I had with Mithraea, who shares my reasonable infatuation with all things Roman. (I apologise in advance for the obscenities, but it was an emotionally charged moment for both of us.)

TARQUIN: I'm sending you this text from hadrian's wall. I am literally standing right on the actual fucking wall with a boner the size of the parthian empire.

MITHRAEA: That is totally fucking awesome. I hope you have your gladius out and your helmet too. Marcus Aurelius would be proud!

TARQUIN: I am stabbing every scotch person i see.

MITHRAEA: I hope you scream "remember mons graupius!" at them in latin as the blade sinks in.

New job

2010-09-06T09:27:00.001-07:00

I just arrived in Durham for the start of my new job. Dad and I came in two cars loaded with books, I met the estate agent and received the keys, and then decided to make tea, quickly realising that this was no mean feat without a kettle or pan to boil the water. Then I remembered I had my camping cup thing, so the disaster was averted.

After dad left I stood about the house for a bit because I don't have any chairs yet. Indeed I don't have any furniture except a little coffee table, which actually functions very well as a stool, so between the coffee table and my boxes of books perhaps I won't need to buy any chairs after all. After a while I grew bored of sitting on my coffee table, so I decided to go and look for a supermarket, following the faint rumours I had once heard of a Sainsbury supermarket at the north end of Durham.

And by god, the rumours were true. Not only did I find a Sainsbury, but it was the largest Sainsbury I've ever seen, and it was besieged by a whole damn retail park with about a million different shops. Since I'd brought practically nothing with me except clothes and books and CDs, I ended up filling the car with stupid household crap that nobody really needs, like a couple of little bins, a box thing to put towels in, a bag of dishcloths, detergent and a dustpan and brush, et cetera.

I bought a cheap set of cookery knives in a vacuum-packed plastic case, and when I got home I realised I didn't have any knives or scissors to cut the case open with. The only thing I had that could cut it open was a corkscrew I'd also bought, but the corkscrew was fastened up with plastic ties that I needed a knife to cut. This is a rum pickle and no mistake, I thought. I was eventually able to liberate both knife set and corkscrew through the use of brute force, which proves that sometimes violence is the only solution.

LOL

2010-09-04T00:20:00.000-07:00

Possibly the worst comedy sketch ever written.

Possibly the best comedy sketch ever written.

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter XX

2010-09-03T01:51:00.001-07:00

A mighty army of literally scores of soldiers clad in gleaming armour was arrayed before the foreboding walls of Suno, the great capital of the Swadian kingdom. The city’s defenders bristled on the ramparts like the spines of an immense hedgehog made from steel, its towers and gates rising from the earth like huge cliffs of stone, banners and flags fluttered in the breeze like enormous scraps of cloth on sticks.

Asgarth surveyed the scene before him, his heroic jaw square with determination and lack of fear. “We shall storm these walls and raze this fair city to the ground, and the Swadian curs will run from our blades like lambs fleeing the deadly scythe of the shepherd,” he breathed.

The men around him quivered with fear as the attack trumpets sounded to signal the start of the assault, but Asgarth felt no fear. “Come, my loyal band of warriors,” he triumphalised. “Charge!”

They clambered as a single great mass onto the ladders they had propped against the city walls, storming up to the ramparts as men fell left and right to arrows of the defending archers and fell screaming to a horrible death below. The air was filled with the stench of blood and sweat and piss, with body parts flying everywhere in confusion, detached from their owners for the rest of time, and steel flashing in the bright sunlight as it sliced through arms and legs and faces.

But it was to no avail. The ramparts held as the attackers fell into great carrion piles below the walls, heaped bodies of men who mere hours before had laughed and joked and loved as only men can who know that the hour of their death is near. “Retreat!” cried Asgarth, his tunic claret with the blood of his foes, seeing that the situation was hopeless. He ran down the ladder and back to the siege positions, only to see that everyone in his entire warband was dead.

“This is bullshit!” screamed Asgarth with a fury that shuddered even the distant mountains, and he decided to retire from adventuring and romance and go and find a quiet teaching job in the distant land of D’Urhám instead.

FIN

Eluvium

2010-09-02T06:18:00.001-07:00

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter XIX

2010-08-30T00:52:00.001-07:00

And so our hero found a caravan of Sarranid merchants in the south, and rode them down, and put them to the sword to the last man, woman and camel, and stole their chattels and money, and left their broken bodies littering the parched desert sands, and returned with his merry band to Sargoth, where King Ragnar was not impressed and told him to stop behaving like an arsehole. “This is bullshit,” muttered Asgarth, lowering his voice respectfully in the regal presence of the king.

“But I see that your fame is spreading,” conceded King Ragnar. “Thus do I confer unto you, my loyal follower, the fiefdom of Mechin. You are to have all its lands and resources to dispose of as you see fit, and you are to be the liege lord of its occupants. May you treat them with compassion and justice.”

“Thanks,” rendered Asgarth.

“One more thing,” promulgated King Ragnar. “We’re about to declare war on the Swadians. Our marshal, Jarl Aedin, wishes to raise an army of all the lords and march on Suno and put it to the torch. Asgarth, lord of Mechin,” he emitted, leaning close and placing a firm hand on the hero’s shoulder, looking him in the eye with a gaze of regal steel, “will you join us?”

“All right,” expressed Asgarth, his chest swelling with pride at being asked to join the king on his campaign. He was definitely on the right track now.

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter XVIII

2010-08-26T14:45:00.000-07:00

Sad and angry at the failure of his heroic plans, pining for the lovely Lady Kaeteli, Asgarth returned shame-faced to Sargoth. At a feast at the royal castle he happened upon Jarl Gearth, one of the leading nobles of the land.

“Well do I see,” whispered Jarl Gearth to Asgarth, taking him aside, “that thy heroic heart suffers as does mine under this weighty burden of peace. Men such as we can profit little in such times. Thus do I suggest that we provoke a war with the Sarranids, and thereby open a fresh path to glory and renown.”

“Good idea,” complied Asgarth.

“Excellent,” glowered Jarl Gearth. “Go and attack a Sarranid caravan somewhere near their borders, and make it known who was responsible, and such an outrage will surely provoke war.”

"The king won't like it," cautioned Asgarth.

"The king can suck the spiny tendrils of the demented nymph-beast of the mountains of Lazaroth!"

The two men laughed lustily together, guffawing and slapping each other’s backs in a masculine fashion, as they hatched their scheme.

Max Richter, Vladimir's Blues

2010-08-25T13:12:00.000-07:00

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter XVII

2010-08-23T13:34:00.000-07:00

As he led his victorious band of adventurers and misfits out of the sandy wastes, Asgarth encountered a caravan of traders who informed the hero that the sea raiders he had been hired to vanquish some weeks before had been espied far to the north, on the rocky coast of the Vaegir Kingdom.

“Forsooth,” commented Asgarth manfully. “Three days will bring us to Rivacheg, where I can finally vanquish the foe whom I am pledged to vanquish, and collect the reward which is my due.”

“But my lord,” breathed Rolf, “The contract expires in three days. What if thou dost not find the sea raiders at once?”

Asgarth unsheathed his long, mighty weapon and waved its naked length in Rolf’s face, who cowered in terror. “Do thou obey me or face the consequences!” he exclaimed.

Thus Asgarth charged across the hills and valleys and mountain passes of the Khergit Khanate unto the lands of the Vaegirs, lo! to the very gates of Rivacheg, and from there tracked down the roving sea raiders who had eluded him so long.

Soon did he find them, and pursued them unto their beachy lair, where their longships were loaded with their ill-gotten gains. “Now shall ye pay the price for thy murdering and plundering ways!” gasped Asgarth, charging upon the terrified sea raiders with his loyal warriors, murdering and plundering them.

The battle was swift as Asgarth swung his blade left and right, chopping off arms and legs and faces in an orgy of corporeal demolition, blood flying everywhere and seeping into the thirsting earth. When it was all over he stood joyfully amongst the crumpled remnants of his enemies. “At last we can now collect my reward!” he guffawed.

“Not really, my lord,” lamented Rolf. “The contract expired a few hours ago.”

“This is bullshit,” muttered Asgarth, gazing out across the limitless blue expanse of the Endless Ocean, towards his distant home.

*

DISCLAIMER

Imagine my horror when I visited the pictures the other day in order to see new the big screen adaptation of The A-Team, something I've been eagerly anticipating for about twenty years, only to discover that Bosco "B.A." Baracus had been given a new catchphrase which I swear did not appear in the original TV show: "This is bullshit!"

I was so mad I threw my pick 'n' mix bag at the screen, but I was still mad so I got up and punched the screen, and then I was escorted out.

Given that I don't believe in coincidences, the only possible explanation is that some production crew member on the movie read my Asgarth stories and decided to steal Asgarth's catchphrase. I know the movie was probably finished before I wrote any of my Asgarth epic, but they can do wonders these days with digital technology. If they can retrofit a 2D movie into 3D, they can insert a few catchphrases they stole off someone's blog.

I'm not threatening court action or anything, but it's definitely a possibility. This genuinely is bullshit.

Pete Postlethwaite

2010-08-22T01:48:00.001-07:00

Fate of the universe

2010-08-19T23:29:00.000-07:00

Here's something to make you wish you never bothered getting out of bed.

BBC News: Fate of Universe revealed by galactic lens

I heard this theory years ago, that the universe seemed to be not only expanding, but accelerating as it did so, and that this would eventually distribute matter so widely that gravity would no longer be able to collapse it into stars and galaxies: the so-called Big Freeze. I remember asking Big Bruvva about it and he said frankly, "This is what will happen."

Now it seems that a Nasa-led team at JPL has got final confirmation by measuring the distortion of light from a distant galaxy through the gravitational lens of an intermediate galaxy cluster. While I doubt many cosmologists were surprised, the BBC presents it as easily the most depressing result ever produced by a scientific experiment: "[The Universe] will eventually become a cold, dead wasteland, researchers say."

The media being the media, however, this has nothing to do with the original research article published in the latest issue of Science. Here's a more prosaic account of the Nasa project from the ESA Hubble site, and another from the JPL's own site. The scientists were cheerfully "exploiting a beautiful phenomenon in nature" to tackle the great riddle of dark energy and its role in the development of the universe.

The end result, as reported in the Science article, was that they were able to reduce "the current 2σ contours on the dark energy equation of state parameter wx by about 30%," which admittedly doesn't make for a grabbing headline, but neither does it say anything directly about the fate of the universe, because that wasn't what the scientists were primarily interested in. I suspect the BBC science reporter went angling for some dramatic quotes and made up the phase "cold, dead wasteland" himself, since that is what journalists do. They do it all the time with archaeological news stories.

Ultimately, what depressed me most about this news story is not the scientific research it supposedly reported - for if we can be sure of anything, we can be sure that the fate of the universe will have absolutely zero impact on the life of any human being who ever lived or ever will live. Rather, it was the the media will do almost anything to put an emotional, negative spin on what should be an inspiring and significant scientific accomplishment.

History repeats itself

2010-08-13T11:40:00.000-07:00

Here's a strange thing. This image is a nineteenth-century depiction of the Sack of Rome by the Goths in 410.

Here's a photo of US Marines in the centre of Baghdad in 2003.

Look at the composition of the two figures on the statue, the posture of the statue itself, the rope, even the guy at the bottom with the raised hand. Uncanny.

Less nudity in the second one, though.

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter XVI

2010-08-13T11:17:00.000-07:00

“This is bullshit,” uttered Asgarth as he gazed across the flaccid deserts of the south. They had seen neither man nor beast except camels for two days as they trekked across the seemingly endless expanses of sand, like a massive beach or an ocean without the water, that lay between the cities and villages of the Sarranid Sultanate. Their food had run out and they had no liquid sustenance.

“I’m hungry,” whined Rolf. He was a supposed hero whom Asgarth had found in a tavern and hired before leaving Sargoth. The first thing Rolf had done was ask to borrow 300 denars to buy back an heirloom he’d pawned, but he probably just spent it on drink and gambling, which was bullshit.

“Shut up!” cried Asgarth, spinning around on his saddle, his rippling torso gleaming in the shimmering heat of the midday sun, in order to face in Rolf’s direction. “Look, there’s a castle on the next dune!”

They rode to the castle but nobody was home except a few guards who ignored Asgarth, so they left again. Next they came to a remote village which was being plagued by bandits. Asgarth heroically offered to defeat the bandits for them, which he did, and then rather less heroically demanded that the villagers give him all their food and chattels or he would burn their houses.

As they rode away from the village back into the desert, their bags weighed down with precious booty, Asgarth addressed his warband. “This is bullshit,” he remarked. “Let’s go somewhere else to seek my fortune.”

Thus did the hero take his leave of the Sarranid lands.

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter XV

2010-08-10T00:36:00.000-07:00

Greatly was Asgarth perturbed by the sudden outbreak of peace in the Kingdom of the Nords. He pondered upon the news for a slew of moments before he came to his decision.

“Alas,” said he, “but a war-dog such as myself will profit little in peace-time. Therefore I must seek my fortune elsewhere.”

Thus with downturned heart he rode into the foothills of the western mountains, to the gates of Castle Hrus. After much entreatying, he was finally admitted into the castle for an audience with his beloved Lady Kaeteli.

She stood resplendent in a gown of velvet and taffeta, with a hem decorated with gems and lace, covered in a long overtunic called a bliaud, which was in turn covered by a mantel which was trimmed with expensive fur and pinned at the shoulder with a brooch. She wore shoes designed for castle wear made of silk and leather and fitted with a buckle. Her plaited her was covered by a guimpe, which is a piece of silk or linen drapped and pinned over the hair, wrapped around the throat and tucked into the neckline of the gown. She also wore a hat with a sort of band around it.

“Forsooth, my love,” emitted Asgarth, “but I must leave this kingdom. I intend to travel far to the south, to the endless deserts of the Sarranid Sultanate, to win my fortune and then, if the gods smile upon me, your heart.”

Lady Kaeteli looked unto him with eyes like sapphires glittering in the midsummer dusk. “Who are you again?” she asked, her ruby lips parting like luscious strawberries.

“This is bullshit,” complained Asgarth, and left.

Offa's Dyke Path (part 2)

2010-08-09T07:32:00.000-07:00

Völlig coventriert

2010-08-03T09:19:00.000-07:00

I went to Coventry today to pick up Mithras from the train station and visit Lunt Roman Fort. Unfortunately the fort is closed on Tuesdays for reasons known only to the gods. So instead we popped over the road to the Midland Air Museum, where we climbed inside a Vulcan bomber and pretended we were bombing things, and saw an arsenal of other flying dealers of death. Mithras will probably upload photos at some point, but in the meantime here's an artist's impression of me and Mithras about to bomb things in a Vulcan.

We then went into central Coventry, which could be fairly summed up as a confused mess. I hope I never again have to drive into the hellish ring of shit that passes for the Coventry traffic system. On foot it's also rather a confused mess. The few medieval streets which do survive only make it sadder that the rest were destroyed.

As if sitting in a Vulcan bomber didn't get us pumped enough for one day, we went to a bookshop where Mithras bought a book called Empires and Barbarians, and I bought a book with the punchy title War.

I'm off hiking tomorrow and will be in the wilderness for a few days.

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter XIV

2010-08-02T12:04:00.000-07:00

At the royal city of Sargoth, truly the gem of cities, rising above the coast like a great gathering of buildings, Asgarth paused to take rest. But he did not tarry there long, because he received much mockery for fleeing from Count Deglan, and Jarl Bulba even called him a frightened chicken. Thus, his heroic heart convulsing with shame, Asgarth left once more.

“I shall never yield to the rampant vagaries of fate,” he uttered defiantly. No doubt the fair Lady Kaeteli would admire his resolutedness! He galloped far to the west once again, to the Swadian village of Gisim which he had looted and pillaged in the recent past.

The surviving villagers were trying to rebuild their shattered lives, having finally buried their departed loved ones. The pens were filling once again with cattle, the roofs of their humble peasant dwellings bedecked in fresh thatch. Asgarth felt a tear stir his manly eyes as he gazed upon their simple, honest fortitudiness.

But he quickly wiped the tear away. Little did it befit a true warrior to weep for his foe. “Forward, my valiant companions!” he screamed to what was left of his warband. “Leave no survivors!” Then he added quickly, “Except the ones you take prisoner, which is as many as possible!”

Shortly afterwards, as Asgarth stood amidst the burning wreckage and corpses of what was once Gisim, a messenger rode unto him. “What is it?” snarled Asgarth as the messenger approached. “For we are about the business of war!”

“Our great King Ragnar has made peace with the Swadians!” the messenger announced. “The war is over!”

“This is bullshit,” implicated Asgarth. What a stupid waste of time.

Old man

2010-07-31T07:40:00.001-07:00

Old art

2010-07-30T08:40:00.001-07:00

This is a sketch from about 10 years ago. It didn't turn out quite how I wanted. (It was meant to be a tree.)

I then realised I couldn't really draw anything except faces, so I stopped trying. This one is from 2005. It's a girl from Roman Britain wearing actual proper Romano-British jewelery, looking across at some Roman stuff going on nearby.

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter XIII

2010-07-30T08:14:00.000-07:00

Agarth led his warband and his train of Swadian slaves deep into the lands of the Nords, high up a steep pass at the head of which, like a crown of stone upon a mountainous head of rock, towered Castle Hrus, stronghold of Jarl Harald and home to his beloved Lady Kaeteli.

“She isn’t interested,” shouted the guard when they arrived. “Clear off.”

“This is bullshit,” yelled Asgarth in return, and decided to retain his dignity and ride away. Yet the great warrior was not downcast in his heart. Perhaps a dozen Swadian slaves were not enough to impress so refined a lady, he mused. Therefore I shall bring her two dozen.

He rode to the east for many days until he came upon a different stretch of the Swadian borderlands overlooking the village of Ryibelet. “Behold!” he breathed to his men. “Let us ride forth upon the Swadian foe, and slaughter him, and hear the lamentation of his women, which is surely the finest of musical forms which can please the ears of the valiant!”

Thus they charged and pillaged the village, and were doing quite well when one of Asgarth’s men announced, “Alas, I see Count Deglan of Swadia beriding unto us, with approximately 115 men-at-arms!”

“Bollocks,” cursed Asgarth, whose warband at this point still numbered a mere twenty or so. “You there,” he ordered, pointing at ten of his men, “you stay and hold them off. The rest follow me!”

As half his warband prepared to surrender their lives in a valiant attempt to save their lord, Asgarth led a no less valiant retreat from the village. “This is bullshit,” he complained as he galloped over the hills with the remainder of his warband, his mind burning with the icy sensation of shame. Now he had no prisoners at all. He would never win his fair maiden at this rate.

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter XII

2010-07-28T09:48:00.001-07:00

For many days Asgarth and his retinue galloped to the west, following the rocky coastline of the Nordic lands, the crashing grey-blue of the Endless Ocean colliding with the solid mass of the mainland, sea foam roaring heavenwards like fountains of water from the mouth of a terrible beast of legend.

Eventually they came upon the Swadian borderlands. Far off in the distance Asgarth did witness a village by the name of Gisim, a peaceful hamlet of farmers and milkmaids. “Behold, my bold warriors,” enunciated the great hero. “Our first moment of glory awaits!”

As one the heroic band galloped upon the unsuspecting villagers, slaying them left, right and centre, throwing burning brands onto the thatch roofs of their miserable hovels, driving the cattle from their pens, until the earth was awash with the crimson life-fluid of the peasants and the air black with the ash of their burning homes.

Truly a great victory, thought Asgarth after two days of pillage and death. He rallied his men, gathered their booty and set in hot pursuit of those few peasants who had escaped the slaughter and were heading to the mountains.

After some miles he rode them down and a brief battle ensued. At the end of it his men stood cheering and triumphalising over the prostrate forms of their victims, most of them still alive. “Bind those Swadian curs,” snarled Asgarth at his men. “We shall ride in glory to Castle Hrus, where I shall offer our captive slaves to Lady Kaeteli as a token of my deep and sincere affection. If this doesn’t impress her, I don’t know what will.”

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter XI

2010-07-27T07:18:00.000-07:00

Once the forces of the Nords were once again victorious and Jarl Harald had once again ignored Asgarth, which was bullshit considering that Asgarth had just been knocked unconscious three times while trying to help him win a battle, Asgarth returned to the royal city of Sargoth to recover from his wounds. While there he was engaged in conversation by a drunk.

“You are Asgarth the Invincible, are you not?” verbalised the drunk.

“Aye aye, I am he,” confirmed Asgarth, looking him in the eye.

“I thought so!” recommenced the drunk. “It is much spoken of abroad how you aspire to the heart of the Lady Kaeteli. The best way to impress ladies, you know, is to give them presents.”

“Keep her blessed name from thy peasant lips!” stated Asgarth, drawing his sword and cleaving the drunk’s skull in twain.

“He may have a point,” he ruminated as the deceased’s dead body crumpled to the floor, lifeless. “I shall shower my love with the most precious commodity money can buy - people!”

Rousing his men, he strode forthwith from the crimson-stained floor of that den of iniquitousness. “Sire, whither do we ride?” enquired one of their number.

“We ride to the west!” trumpeted Asgarth.

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter X

2010-07-26T03:35:00.000-07:00

Asgarth regained conciousness and found himself being dragged from the blood-saturated battleground by his warband. “Let me go!” he bemoaned.

“You are injured, sire, and thy noble steed is slain!” they expiated.

“You can shove my steed up thy arse!” expressed Asgarth, writhing free from their vice-like clutches. He rose and charged back into the fray on foot, waving his sword valiantly as he uttered blood-churning death-cries.

Soon he awoke once more to find himself being dragged from the battleground by his warband. “What happened?” he queried angrily.

“Ye were knocked out once more, my liege,” mouthed one of their number. “Thy health is very low.”

“Let me go, thou scurrilous sewer rat whore of a bitch!” growled Asgarth, escaping their hands and charging afresh into the battle.

Not long afterwards he awoke to find himself being dragged from the battleground. “Was I knocked out again?” he expressed. “By the gods of the Jurellian Temple, it is fortunate that heroes such as I apparently cannot be slain, only knocked out.”

“By my troth, sire, thou art greatly blessed in this way,” guffawed one of his men-at-arms a moment before an enemy arrow came from nowhere and plunged into his open mouth, killing him.

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter IX

2010-07-24T00:36:00.000-07:00

It was a bitter moon that glowered upon Asgarth as he rode astride his valiant mount through the yawning gates of Sargoth, his band of loyal adventurers close behind. Many days had they spent in pursuit of the ignoble sea raiders, but to no avail. If he was to win the voluminous heart of Lady Kaeteli, he would have to explore fresh fields of glory.

As Asgarth left the city he saw another mighty fracas underway in the plain below, an invading force of Swadians in pitched battle against the nobles of the Nords - including none other than Jarl Harald, father of Asgarth’s beloved. “Now I may prove my love for his pulchritudinous offspring!” exhaled Asgarth vigourously. Spurring his steed forth, he betrod the shadow of doom once again, plunging into hell-fury like a demon unleashed by the death-dealing forces of Hades.

As he charged his mount into the depths of the Swadian lines, Asgarth realised he had left his men behind and was now surrounded by dozens of enemies, thirsting for his beating life-blood. “By the peaks of Gahalala,” he gasped as his mount was pierced by a ten-foot-long pike and crashed whinnying to the ground, writhing in the throes of equine mortality.

No sooner was his horse dispatched than the Swadian foe turned their attention to its rider, and launched upon Asgarth’s fallen form like a pack of ravenous blood-wolves from the misty Mountains of K’Shah’a, where the sun rises but once a year, and the valleys are steeped in a total blackness of the sort which now came over Asgarth’s awareness, though not before he uttered a furious, “This is bullshit...”

More art

2010-07-22T04:35:00.000-07:00

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter VIII

2010-07-22T00:54:00.001-07:00

Presently, as Asgarth sat nursing a flagon of ale and his bruised self-confidence in the tavern, a stranger approached him. “If ye seek gainful employment,” he expatiated, “the lands around here have been plagued by a gang of sea raiders of late. Perhaps ye can raise a squadron of mercenaries and hunt them down, and thus win glory and renown.”

“Aye,” verbalised Asgarth, rising with newfound vigour. “This shall be my path to glory and fame indeed, and will win me the fair heart of Kaeteli much better than a stupid bullshit tournament!”

Hiring some hired swords, he left Sargoth and went in search of the rasculous sea raiders of whom the man had spoken, who had promised a bulbous reward if they should be slain by the hero’s keen blade-edge, which sang with the thirst for blood, within two months.

Seven days and nights did Asgarth and his men hunt the sea raiders, chasing them unto as far as the snowy stretches of the Vaegir borderlands, before he fell upon them and slew them to a man. Two of Asgarth’s mercenaries died a noble death.

In joy Asgarth returned on the long road to Sargoth and went to the tavern. “I have slain the miscreants,” he conveyed.

“Those weren’t the ones I meant,” said the man.

So Asgarth betook his men and once more ranged the length and breadth of the borderlands until they came upon another clutch of sea raiders, and destroyed them. In exultation Asgarth returned on the long road to Sargoth and went to the tavern. “I have slain the miscreants,” he perorated.

“Those weren’t the ones I meant,” said the man.

A third time did Asgarth brave the hostile expanses of the borderlands, after many days finding another band of sea raiders, exterminating them. In delectation Asgarth returned on the long road to Sargoth and went to the tavern. “I have slain the miscreants,” he recited.

“Those weren’t the ones I meant,” said the man.

“This is fucking bullshit,” declaimed Asgarth, and left the tavern.

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter VII

2010-07-21T16:48:00.001-07:00

Asgarth came unto Lady Kaeteli and bowed deeply. “My lady,” he expressed. “I am Asgarth the Invincible. Allow me to declare myself thy ardent admirer.”

“No thanks,” quoth Kaeteli, her voice a rush of honey into the hero’s ears. He sadly vacated the feast and exited the castle onto the streets of Sargoth. “This is bullshit,” he muttered, his heart aching a thousandfold at the fair maiden’s rejection. “I shall must needs endeavour to win her then,” he asserted to himself.

There was a tournament underway in Sargoth at that time, whither all the greatest warriors of the land had conglomerated in order to prove their might and win the favour of a lady. Asgarth approached the arena and entered himself as a contestant. My victory here will surely secure her good graces, he pondered.

Unfortunately he should have changed his name from Asgarth the Invincible to Asgarth the Vincible, for the other fighters were a lot stronger and better at fighting than he, who was soon lying in the dust of the arena, covered in bruises and blood. “This is bullshit,” he growled, spitting sand out of his mouth.

After he recovered from his wounds, Asgarth advanced upon the royal castle inside Sargoth. “I desire to speak unto the Lady Kaeteli,” he explained to the guard at the front gate.

“She isn’t interested,” the guard countered.

Asgarth shuffled away in anger. “This is bullshit,” he muttered, heading for the tavern, where he might drown his misfortunes. This wasn’t how he had imagined the adventuring life at all.

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter VI

2010-07-20T11:07:00.000-07:00

In the royal city of Sargoth, the gabled roofs of whom thrust high into the air like the spires of mighty buildings, Asgarth heard that King Ragnar was holding a great feast in celebration of his victory over the Swadian foe. Luckily it was surprisingly easy to walk through the front gate of the castle and join the great nobles of the land in their revelry, which is what Asgarth did.

At the head of the table was King Ragnar, bedecked in ermine and clad in furs and sleeves of silk, his crown glistening upon his head.

“Mighty king,” proclaimed Asgarth, bowing. “I come to offer you my sword as your loyal vassal.”

“No thanks,” promulgated King Ragnar. “I don’t need your help right now.”

This is bullshit, muttered Asgarth, but under his breath so as not to cause offence. Across the room he saw Jarl Harald, whom he approached. “It is I, Asgarth the Invincible, my lord. Sorry I failed thee before. Mightest thou have another task for me?”

“No,” uttered Harald, but Asgarth did not hear. His eyes had been caught by a vision of beauty beside Jarl Harald. It was the Lady Kaeteli, Jarl Harald’s daughter, the most renowned beauty in the kingdom.

Her hair was flaxen blond, her cheeks like porcelain with a taint of rose, her lips full and sensuous like a blossom on a sweltering summer’s day, her neck graceful and soft like a swan.

“Alas, my heart is slain,” mouthed Asgarth to himself. “For on this day I have met the fair maiden whom I shall one day make my betrothed.”

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter V

2010-07-16T02:04:00.001-07:00

Asgarth hung around the mighty clash of armies for a while, curious to see who would get the upper hand. Reinforcements rushed from both sides, Nord and Swadian noblemen and common soldiers alike rushing to die horribly in the name of their respective kings. Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity of pain and senseless slaughter, the Swadian invaders broke and ran to the south.

“Hurrah!” rejoiced Asgarth, wishing he had been allowed to join in like the hero he truly was.

He rode down into the field of battle, now strewn with the detritus of battle, broken men and horses, limbs and body parts scattered across the grass and shrubs like confetti after a particularly violent wedding, the cries of injured and dying men a perverse chorus to the bride that was Death and her husband, Lamentation.

Not far distant he espied the banner of Jarl Gundur, a great noble of the north. “Hail ye well met,” Asgarth announced as he rode unto him. “I am Asgarth the Invincible, sire, an adventurer come to this land in search of fame and glory. Hast thou need of such a man in your war-band?”

“My losses this day were terrible indeed,” enunciated Gundur, shaking his weary head in a tired fashion, surveying the corpse-encrusted land before him. “Aye, I will take thee under my banner, Asgarth the Invincible.”

Thus did Asgarth join Gundur’s war-band.

Pausing only to bury the dead, Gundur’s force betook itself from the field of slaughter, heading into the Swadian borderlands. For three days and nights they rode back and forth, from town to village, but nobody would tell Asgarth what they were looking for.

On the fourth day still nothing had happened. Asgarth had joined a war-band expecting to see some war, not so he could have a horse-holiday with a group of sweaty men. “This is bullshit,” he muttered, and left Gundur’s war-band for the direction of the royal city of Sargoth, where he had been heading in the first place before all this bullshit happened.

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter IV

2010-07-15T06:48:00.001-07:00

Far did Asgarth ride to the east, through the great forests of the northern lands, unto the royal city of Sargoth. But hardly had he reached the great bridge over the river of K’Lód leading towards that city when he did espy in the distance a mighty battle underway, many hundreds of banners fluttering in the breeze like flags, cries of death and slaughter carried upon the wind like birdsong to his warrior-ears.

“At last,” he gasped, “the Swadian king has invaded this kingdom! Perhaps now I can prove my mettle!” He spurred his flaxen mount onwards, roaring a battle cry.

Ten minutes later he stopped roaring because his throat was sore, and the battle was much farther away than he had thought. He cantered a while longer and came upon some troops of Jarl Reamold, ready to enter the fray.

“Hello”, Asgarth greeted them. “May I join you in this noble carnage?”

“No,” they said.

“Why not?”

“Because,” they snarled, and galloped off into the riot of violence unfurling in the distance.

“This is bullshit,” grumbled Asgarth.

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter III

2010-07-14T05:30:00.000-07:00

An epic battle along the dirt road of the village ensued, but unfortunately the murderer was a lot stronger and better at fighting than Asgarth, who was soon left unconscious in the street. When he awoke, covered in his own blood, the murdered had fled far, no man knew whither. “This is bullshit,” muttered Asgarth, dusting himself off.

Mounting his steed, Asgarth heading back across the hills to seek out Jarl Harald and deliver unto him the fateful tidings. As he passed the royal city of Sargoth, he was set upon once again by sea raiders.

In moments he was in chains once more. “This is bullshit,” he muttered as the sea raiders dragged him around the country for two days. Eventually, seeing his chance, he escaped their clutches, took his horse and continued anew upon his quest.

He came to the presence of Jarl Harald. “I have failed thee,” he commiserated. “The killer is escaped.”

“That is a disappointment,” said Jarl Harald.

“Hast thou perhaps another quest by which I might prove my mettle?”

Jarl Harald thought a moment. “No,” he said.

“This is bullshit,” muttered Asgarth as he walked away. He would just have to find another lord, again.

Mount and Blade fan fic

2010-07-13T03:49:00.001-07:00

Apparently I'm not the first person to attempt Mount & Blade fan fiction. I found this example on a forum.

Sharow stood on the hill looking down at the field of battle. She watched the river of blood draining down the valley wondering if it was enough to drown those few still alive. She wished there moans and screams would soon be silenced so she could think.The thought didn't even take her by surprise. So few of her men had fallen that none of those pain filled voices could come from any one but those who had tried to kill her. She never wished pain on anyone but nor did she feel the need to be sorry for those who brought it on them selves.

"A grate victory" the voice cut across her thoughts and she looked up to see nazir "you must have been deep in though to let me sneak up on you like that" he finished seeing the look in her eyes. She silently reprimanded her self before smiling back up at the man.

"Yes" she said "I don't think even you expected this when you signed on" none of us did she thought as he sat down next to her.

"Maybe not this but i could see you where going to lead us to grate things" he paused looking up at her as she sat to join him "just how grate remains to be seen"

Epic.

Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter II

2010-07-12T13:44:00.000-07:00

Asgarth delivered the letter and returned to Jarl Harald later that day. “I have completed the quest upon which you had set it upon me to complete,” enunciated Asgarth, bowing to his new liege-lord. “What fresh task might I accomplish in your name?”

“There is a murderer loose,” said Jarl Harald, stroking his long fair beard. “I charge you to hunt him down for me and do unto him the justice he deserves.”

This is a bit more like it, thought Asgarth. At least I might get to kill someone. He mounted up and set off across the dry-sunned expanse of rolling grasslands that is the Kingdom of the Nords. If I complete this task, he considered, perhaps Jarl Harald will take me into his warband and I could see some real adventuring instead of all this bullshit.

Not half a day-length had Asgarth ridden when he was set upon by sea raiders, roaming the country in search of victims. “Halt, knave!” the lead sea raider expressed.

Before Asgarth knew what was happening, he was overpowered and cast in chains. “This is bullshit,” he muttered as the sea raiders dragged him around the country for two days. Eventually, seeing his chance, he escaped their clutches, took his horse and continued anew upon his quest.

As night fell he came to the village whither the murderer was said to have fled. “Hail ye,” Asgarth announced towards the village elder as he rode into the village, recognising the village elder by his long white beard. “I seek a murderer who is hiding among you.”

“It’s dark,” said the village elder. “Come back when it’s day.”

“This is bullshit,” roared Asgarth, but withdrew and camped outside the village. He tried to read the only book in his possession but couldn’t work out how. At dawn he re-entered into the village. “Hail ye,” Asgarth announced towards the village elder again. “I seek a murderer who is hiding among you.”

“He’s probably skulking around here somewhere,” said the village elder. Whereupon Asgarth investigated a cabbage patch behind a house, which is where he had learned murderers tended to conceal themselves. Sure enough he found a murderer. “I mean to bring you to justice,” Asgarth snarled, drawing his sword.

The Adventures of Asgarth the Invincible

2010-07-11T07:17:00.001-07:00

I just got hold of an amazing new game called Mount & Blade: Warband. It's basically the perfect game for every 14 year old boy who ever dreamed of donning a loin cloth and becoming Conan the Barbarian.

This is the official blurb:

In a land torn asunder by incessant warfare, it is time to assemble your own band of hardened warriors and enter the fray. Lead your men into battle, expand your realm, and claim the ultimate prize: the throne of Calradia!

Sounds fun, I thought, so I entered the fray. Unfortunately the game strives towards a certain level of difficulty and realism (no magic, thank god), so it's turning out to be a humbling experience for my heroic alter-ego, Asgarth the Invincible. To make myself less guilty about playing a video game I've decided to chronicle his valiant efforts to achieve fame and fortune.

*

The Adventures of Asgarth the Invincible

Chapter I

Asgarth the Invincible, heir to the throne of Azoria, had come to the Kingdom of the Nords to seek high adventure and low romance, not to waste his time loitering outside an empty castle. “This is bullshit,” he muttered.

There was nothing for it but to ride back across the stupid Kingdom of the Nords in search of a lord who couldn’t even be bothered to stay in his own stupid castle. Asgarth mounted his mount and spurred it back across the grassy steppes of the north. A whole day wasted. This is bullshit, he thought. It’s as bullshitty as that time I came out of the tavern in the royal city of Sargoth and saw that my horse had disappeared. This is even more bullshit than that.

At length, as the flaming orblet of the sun completed yet another weary day-course, Asgarth came upon a large conglomeration of behorsed lance-warriors. He recognised the banner of Jarl Harald, one of the mightiest nobility of the Nords. Unfazed, he arode to the head of the column and saluted Jarl Harald. Perhaps this lord will take me into his service instead, he mused. “I am Asgarth the Invincible, noble adventurer. What would you have of me, my lord?”

Jarl Harald gazed him up and down. “Aye, I have a quest for thee, Asgarth,” he betoned. He reached into his jerkin and pulled out something. “Deliver this letter for me.”

This is bullshit, muttered Asgarth in his mind. But he took the letter and stuffed it in his pocket. “I will complete this quest for you, my liege; I will brave the loftiest peaks of the Vaegir Kingdom, the broadest deserts of the south, until this blessed token rests in the hands of him to whom it is intended.”

With these words he turned his mount, his valiant hair flowing in the freshing breeze, and betook himself across the plain.

Bromsgrove Folk Festival 2010

2010-07-11T03:17:00.000-07:00

I popped over to the folk festival on Thursday and Saturday, mostly to offer moral support to various friends and siblings. And to take random photos of stage equipment.

Apparently Abi, Gem, Noel and I have also been volunteered to form a pure Clay supergroup to play at the local folk club. That's fine with me, but I only play Uncle Tupelo covers. Regardless of what everyone else in the band is playing.

A word from my hero

2010-07-05T09:32:00.000-07:00

Chris Hedges, a voice in the wilderness (literally this time).

Rick Barber

2010-07-01T11:02:00.000-07:00

This is the best election ad I've ever seen.

Colin MacIntyre

2010-06-30T00:44:00.000-07:00

Colin MacIntyre, aka Mull Historical Society

Al Swearengen

2010-06-30T00:41:00.001-07:00

The wicked Al Swearengen from HBO's Deadwood, played by Ian McShane

Star Wars revisited

2010-06-28T09:27:00.000-07:00

I was rummaging in the loft last week for some old Star Wars toys for Nephew and Niece to play with. Amidst the piled up bags and boxes receding into the blackness I found just about everything except for the X-Wing and Jabba the Hutt. I even found this, which Big Bruvva made from cardboard and paper mache about a million years ago: some kind of massive snow tower from the Battle of Hoth.

I'd forgotten all about it since it was sent up to toy heaven. It's amazing though. None of the official Star Wars toys were as cool as this, a three-storey fortress with doors, roof hatch, side ramps, escape tube, windows cleverly fitted with (clear plastic) glass, gun turret. Big Bruvva even painted it up with battle damage.

If anything, twenty years of sitting in the loft has only made it look more rugged and authentic. It seemed a shame to leave it there with a ten-year-old Nephew who is the biggest Star Wars nut on the planet running about, so it is now entertaining a new generation. It is officially the coolest Star Wars accessory after Lego Star Wars, whatever that is.

Henley-in-Arden & Wooton Wawen

2010-06-26T06:46:00.000-07:00

Today I went for a drive to Henley-in-Arden, a pretty little market town across the border in Warwickshire. I went there in 2001 to do look at the church for my undergrad dissertation and was curious to see if anything had changed. It hadn't.

Kim the Dog on the site of the old Norman castle

I went up the hill overlooking the town, which used to have a Norman motte and bailey hill on top of it. Nothing there now though, just grass and nettles.

Down in the town there was a church fete, so I decided to look for some ice cream. The old man at the entrance said I had to pay 20p to enter, then he threatened to take my credit card and beat me up, so I punched him in the chin and ran past. Once inside I completed my objective of purchasing ice cream (rum and raisin flavour), and also bought a homemade gluten-free chocolate cake (of the various cakes on offer it seemed to offer best value per ounce) before running back out.

I'd left Kim the Dog in the car with the windows slightly open as it was a hot day and I wasn't worried about anyone trying to steal a broken-down old Metro with an aggressively paranoid collie in the front. Also, Henley-in-Arden is not exactly GTA.

Middle England

On the way I home I decided to swing by the village of Wooton Wawen, because: a) I also had to visit it in 2001 and haven't been back since; and b) it has a silly name.

I won some Anglo-Saxon nerd points because this is one of the oldest churches in the Midlands, founded in the early eighth century, and perhaps my favourite medieval church anywhere. It's like a massive lego set which has been randomly expanded over a thousand years.

This, my friend, is a genuine Anglo-Saxon archway

Wooton Wawen was the site of a priory for centuries until the Dissolution, at which point the manor fell into the ownership of a stubborn Catholic family, even though the church itself became Protestant. So Wooton Wawen remained an isolated pocket of Catholicism, with a third of its population refusing to convert. In 1700-and-something the Anglican Church finally sent a minister to root out and correct all the Papist heretics, but he ended up converting to Catholicism himself. ANGLICAN INQUISITION FAIL LOL.

How it should be done

Across the road was a general store, which had this friendly sign outside:

Huzzah, England and Ireland united by a common hatred of the French!

Nerdfest 2010

2010-06-20T02:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to Bletchley Park with Ant and Tiff for the 2010 Vintage Computer Festival, the most concentrated amount of nerd in one place I ever hope to experience. The Amiga fanbase, which has been in virtual exile since the collapse of Commodore in 1994 (comparisons with the Jewish Diaspora are justified), was out in force to celebrate the official launch of the first new Amiga system in 16 years.

Since we were an exclusively Amiga household for many years, I wandered about getting nostalgic over all the old machines on display, many of which I'd never seen before.

The Amiga 1000, where it all started in 1985!

Amiga 500 (1987), our first home computer

Amiga 2000 (1987)

Amiga 3000 (1990)

Amiga CDTV (1991), a CD-based home entertainment centre which was waaaaay ahead of its time and therefore failed

Amiga 600 (1992), the first computer Edmund bought

Amiga 1200 (1992), made of awesomeness

Amiga CD32 (1993), our first games console, not that it was any good

After the Amiga excitement we went into the Bletchley Park mansion, the ground floor of which had been turned into pure nerd heaven, each room filled with row upon row of every games computer and console known to man, from Binatone to PS3.

This guy looked like the happiest person on the planet

This A1200 happened to be running Deluxe Paint II, so I drew a picture

We also popped into the on-site National Museum of Computing and saw lots of computers which are now apparently museum pieces.

Left to right: Amstrad 1512 (Dad's first computer); Amstrad CPC464 (my friend Bob had one of these); Sinclair ZX81; Amiga 500

Ant & Tiff in front of a Harrier Jumpjet

After the museum we went back to the marquee to witness the launch of the Amiga X1000, the first new Amiga system in 16 years. It was a truly momentous event, although the sheer volume of overweight, balding geeks crowding around the X1000 display meant we couldn't see or hear anything.

Sixteen years I waited for this moment

Doctor WTF?

2010-06-15T06:53:00.000-07:00

Of the many things in this world I have resigned myself never to understand (among them quantum physics and any form of organised sport), one is the BBC's flagship sci-fi campfest Doctor Who.

It's not like I haven't tried to like it. I like sci-fi in general, being quite partial to really good TV series like Babylon 5 and the new Battlestar Galactica. I also have no problem with off-beat drama that doesn't take itself too seriously and rejoices in its very cheesiness. But after watching a couple of episodes of the new series of Doctor Who I was left amazingly unmoved.

The new Doctor Who, Matt Smith, who according to Moogdroog "looks like a giant foot"

If it was a nerdy niche show that would be all right, but it seems to be massively popular with a broad swathe of the viewing public. Is it because it's so undemanding and family friendly? Do people find it funny and exciting instead of cheap, poorly written and melodramatic? It pretends not to take itself seriously, but it this is belied by its insistent moralising and hapless stabs at dramatic profundity. What the hell is going on here? Can the BBC truly do no better?

Sorry. Had to get that off my chest, it's been bugging me for several years.

* UPDATE *

Stephen Fry agrees with me, and he's right about everything except the iPad.

Action Man reborn

2010-06-12T08:57:00.000-07:00

Moogdroog, being a thoughtful soul, decided to get me some kind of "well done" present after I was awarded the Josef Leinweber Prize earlier this week, an international award given every three years by the Faculty of Theology of Fulda for the best doctoral thesis on the history of the bishopric of Fulda, Germany.

She obviously racked her brains for some time before she found the most suitable gift imaginable: a 10" fully posable Royal Marines Commando action figure.

I received an official gift very similar to this from the Dean of the Faculty of Theology, except instead of being an action figure it was a certificate in a leather folder

The toy is from a new line called H. M. Armed Forces action figures, which offers a realistic yet affordable alternative to highly expensive collectible military action figures on the one hand, and the day-glo travesty that is modern Action Man on the other. Any British male born between about 1960 and 1985 may well have fond memories of the old, authentic Action Man, the greatest toys ever to shuffle awkwardly across the earth, before something terrible happened and the brand turned into a weird cartoony rip-off of every line of super hero toys ever produced.

From this...

...to this.

I wonder if one reason for the demise of Action Man is that parents grew wary of filling their kids' toy boxes with such highly realistic militarism. A fierce and heartfelt reviewer debate about H. M. Armed Forces toys on Amazon seems to suggest so, where one critic derided the new toys as "digusting propaganda", only to be countered by a fan with the witty retort "Diiiiiiick".

It didn't really strike me as being military propaganda (I loved Action Man but don't much like the idea of joining the army) until I visited the website and discovered they also produce a range of "role play" toys for children. Then I saw the TV advert for these toys, and I have to say I was a little creeped out...

The Old World and The New World

2010-06-11T03:03:00.000-07:00

I was in the university library yesterday evening and bored of reading about monks (having overdosed on St Boniface in Fulda a couple of days earlier), so I sat down with my shiny new copy of Mark Sisson's The Primal Blueprint, in which he advocates a lifestyle founded on a version of the Paleo Diet. I've already been following the Paleo Diet for the past two or three months, with occasional lapses due to moving about and visiting Pizza Hut and suchlike. Sisson certainly knows what he's talking about. I always hated biology at school, but Sisson manages to make the biological basis of the Primal lifestyle both comprehensible and interesting. The main thing is to hunt and kill at least one animal every day - it could be a duck or a cat or an elk or anything else, as long as it can be eaten.

I also got Terrence Malick's 2005 The New World out from the library on DVD, starring Colin Farrell as Captain John Smith and Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas. It is either a piece of sublime cinematic genius or lumbering and pretentious, I'm still deciding. Much of the film consists of long, slow shots of forests, shorelines and meadows, with ponderous internal monologue voiceovers which reveal the surprising truth that north America was settled not by pilgrims and pioneers, but tortured emos:

If only I could go down that river. To love her in the wild, forget the name of Smith. I should tell her. Tell her what? It was just a dream. I am now awake.

Or:

Who are you whom I so faintly hear? Who urge me ever on? What voice is this that speaks within me... guides me towards the best?

Or:

There is only this - all else is unreal.

Or my personal favourite:

You flow through me, like a river.

A line worthy of an Avatard. The New World reminded me a lot of another of Malick's films, The Thin Red Line, which is one of my favourite war movies but similarly strays rather too often into portentous philosophising (the film's opening line, I think, is a dreamy voiceover which asks, What is life...?) and idealisation of the old Western trope of the noble savage living in harmony with nature.

There's also the question of Colin Farrell, whom I do like as an actor, but I'm not sure why he sticks with his Irish brogue in this film when he's supposed to be playing an Englishman. The gaggle of Jamestown urchins also provide a couple of the best moments in the film with their Ken Loach-esque realism, but again, I'm not sure why these diminutive English colonists sound like they were picked up from some Dublin backstreet. Maybe it's because Irish accents sound more Olde Worlde to cinema audiences.

Malick's version of the John Smith/Pocahontas romance aims to be a more a historically accurate retelling of the story, except for the fact that the romance never actually happened; the real Pocahontas was only 10 when she saved John Smith (she's portrayed as 14 or 15 in the film), and the idea that they were romantically involved is a later fiction. The Pocahontas story has always bothered me anyway. There's something weirdly paternalistic and prurient about it which, ironically, is an effective metaphor for the philosophy of colonialism as a whole.

Never mind, New World (aged 15), the Old World (aged 30) is here to look after you

Still, this version is much less offensive and more inventive than Disney's. Although that may not be saying much.

The pursuit of perfection

2010-06-06T04:03:00.000-07:00

I've almost finished my current job, which was supervising 1st year archaeology undergrads on a university training excavation here in York. The little tikes have just about learned how not to smash their toes with a mattock, so I consider my work here done. Tomorrow I fly with Moogdroog to Germany to give a speech about German history in German to an audience of Germans.

Speaking of Germany and the inevitable connotations of Aryan supermen that come with it, I see that Britain's Got Talent (aka Britain's Got Too Much Time On Its Hands) has been won this year by the Children of the Corn. Either that or they are the product of some secret Nazi experiment to grow a race of blond super-athletes in underground vats which has at last come to fruition.

Nole sent me an email informing me that some über-nerds had created a replica of Babylon 5 on Second Life. I moseyed on down to have a look, but not before giving my avatar a thorough facelift. (Or rather several simultaneous facelifts in different directions.)

The result is this malformed dwarf bearing an odd resemblance to Sylvester Stallone who scurries around the Second Life universe dressed in pink and lime green lycra, refusing to talk to anyone, attracting piteous glances from his physically perfect fellow-citizens.

Mark Kermode on Sex and the City 2

2010-05-30T02:47:00.000-07:00

When former Trotskyite film critic meets Sex and the City 2 on BBC Radio 2's film review show...

Kermode: I should say right at the beginning of this, you're not going to get a rant about this... My expectations were low, and I have to say they were met. It's ghastly. I've spent quite a lot of time in the last week trying to figure out exactly what it is that is so ghastly, and putrid, and vomit-inducing about Sex and the City 2.

[There follows a 5 minute dissection of the film's plot and themes, including its "horrible" portrayal of women.]

Kermode: I'd like to move this on from sex war politics to class war politics... Firstly, you are meant to be engaged with these characters who are stinking wealthy and consumerist beyond your wildest dreams. The main one, the one played by Sarah Jessica Parker, appears to write books, although we never actually see her write; every now and then she goes and sits down and does a little bit of fiddling around. She lives in an apartment with her husband, who in order to be funding this apartment is probably an arms dealer. It's never really discussed where all their money is coming from. And she gets cross with him because at one point he buys her a massive flat screen television, and she's cross that he hasn't bought her a bit of jewelry. And then, because their relationship is a little bit on top of each other, she goes back to her other apartment, which she's just kept on. She has a whole other apartment.

Okay? So they have one lavish apartment, massive television, huge amounts of wealth, massive amount of clothes, walk-in wardrobe that you could put a family in, then she goes off to another apartment that she hasn't been bothered to sell because we're all so wealthy, and then she moans and complains about how awful her life is, and isn't this difficult, I really have to get away from all this...

The point is, why do I care about this character? This is a character who has so much money, so much wealth, that, actually having two apartments, she's still, "Oh god, it's so hard, so difficult, I'm having problems with my relationship." The defining moment for me is: she goes to this hotel which is $22,000 a night, okay, but she's getting it on the free. When they arrive, each one of them is given their own personal exotic flunky who then waits on them hand and foot... At no point does anyone say, I'm sorry, this is just ghastly beyond belief, this is horrible...

The unacceptable facelifts of capitalism

So what happens is, at one moment the flunky she has been given points out that actually he can only go and see his wife once every couple of months because the airfare is expensive. And you expect this to be a moment when she suddenly realises that the ghastly wealth she's living with has a consequence, that there are people around who have less money. But no! This is used as a moment so that she can go, "Oh yes, I have to be away from Mr Big sometimes as well, therefore..." And you're going, I can't believe you have done this! You stinkingly wealthy consumerist, dripping with gold, shoes, blah di blah di blah - he doesn't have enough money to go and see his wife, and what you see in this isn't horrible, staggering inequality of just corpulent, filthy lucre, but "Oh yes, we both have the same issue, which is to do with being apart from our loved one." Point number one, okay?

Mayo: This is the old Trot at the barricades, isn't it?

Kermode: I'm sorry, this is. This was the point at which I starting going, [sings and beats chest] "Then comrades, come rally..." Sorry, okay. As for the rest of them-

Mayo: What was that?

Kermode: That's the Internationale.

[There follows another 5 minute rabid dissection of the film's political and racial offensiveness.]

Kermode: Essentially, the message of the film is this: feel sympathy for people who are disgustingly wealthy, and so digustingly wealthy that they not only don't notice having a spare apartment, not only don't notice losing the income from a job, not only don't notice that one of the people they're employing is so poor that he can only afford to go and see his wife once every three months, not only that, but are also imperialist American pigdogs of the highest order when it comes to cultural imperialism. I mean honestly, I tell you, it's one of those things where you just think, this is a satire, right? ... On the class war politics, it is the most-

Mayo: Yeah, we get the point.

Kermode: Don't say it like that!

Mayo: You did say, "I'm not going to rant", and that was about ten minutes ago.

Kermode: It is just - it is consumerist pornography, it is an orgy of just dripping, you know, just dripping wealth that made me want to be sick.

Mayo: Well, as many listeners have said, if that wasn't a rant, then what is?

Talking with Ukrainians

2010-05-30T02:28:00.001-07:00

Scene: Tarquin is in the kitchen with Ukrainian Butchers 1 and 2. Ukrainian Butcher 1 notices some washed tin cans on the drying rack next to the sink.

Ukrainian Butcher 1: [Picks up tin can.] Why you put this here?

Tarquin: So I can put it in recycling.

Ukrainian Butcher 1: [Points at recycling bags.] In there?

Tarquin: No, that's just for plastic and paper. I have to take this to the supermarket.

Ukrainian Butcher 1: They give you money?

Tarquin: No. I just take them and throw them in a big bank.

Ukrainian Butcher 1: [Stares at Tarquin in incomprehension.] Why?

Tarquin: Because it's good to recycle.

Ukrainian Butcher 1: [Points at waste bin.] Why not in there?

Tarquin: Um, because less waste is better. It's good to recycle things.

[Ukrainian Butchers 1 and 2 stare at Tarquin in total bemusement. They exchange a comment in Russian.]

Ukrainian Butcher 2: You have good family, yes?

Tarquin: What?

Ukrainian Butcher 1: Wait, wait.

[Ukrainian Butcher 1 takes out mobile phone with built in Russian-English translator. Awkward silence while he looks up a word and shows the translation to Tarquin. The word is "upbringing".]

Ukrainian Butcher 1: You have good upbringing, good family, yes?

Tarquin: Well, I suppose so, yes.

[Both Ukrainian Butchers laugh.]

Iron Man 2

2010-05-23T06:13:00.000-07:00

Being at something of a loose end last night, I went to see Iron Man 2 with Moogdroog, Vlad and a friend of Vlad's. After picking up Vlad and friend from the city (drunk and five minutes late, as usual)*, we stopped by Moogdroog's place and went to the shiny Vue multiplex outside York.

I didn't have high expectations of the film. The first Iron Man was amusing and distracting enough, but to give a meaningful judgment I suppose you need to be a comic book fan, which I'm not; it had explosions and fighting with enough of a trace of wit and irony, at least, to keep it from turning into Transformers. I don't remember much about it to be honest.

This sequel is pretty much more of the same. Lots of special effects, some of them impressive. There were two really good things about it: Robert Downey Jr himself, and the part where psychotic Russian evil genius Mickey Rourke strides onto the Monaco Grand Prix race track and smashes all the cars to bits with his lightning whips. And while the story is uninspired, the dialogue and performances manage to keep enough life in it to last till the end credits.

On the down side, Scarlett Johansson is wasted as a hard-as-nails-and-improbably-sexy-yet-ice-cold female special agent ninja Black Widow. The role is probably necessary as a gender counterbalance to the leering playboy sex-pest that is the central character, but it's not exactly one of Johansson's most challenging roles. Gwyneth Paltrow spends most of the film looking like she's about to cry or be punched in her simpering face. And then there's the product placement, but that's par for the course these days.

I thought the real problem was that I ended up feeling rather sorry for the main villain, Rourke's Ivan Vanko. The poor guy had a really tough upbringing in Siberia with his disgraced and exiled father, and all he wants is to exact revenge on Stark, whom he blames for his family's fate. He cobbles together his homemade power suit from what looks like tin cans and bits of twine before smashing up Stark's orgy of wealth and privilege at Monaco. He never really stands much of a chance against the resources of his nemesis, who spends most of the film strutting about like the self-obsessed wanker he is.

I couldn't tell if the film's apparent celebration of fascistic militarism was supposed to be ironic or not. The movie starts with Stark landing on a stage surrounding by fireworks, a huge American flag and a team of dancing girls in hotpants.

Subtle

Jon Favreau is no Paul Verhoeven, that's for sure. The camera pays a little too much attention to the girls not to be salacious. Stark is a great character largely because he is a wanker: born into the millionaire lifestyle like Bruce Wayne, minus the brooding self-importance and tortured emo double-life, plus an unhealthy dose of the arms industry. But are we seriously supposed to identify and sympathise with Stark on this level? Isn't the character of Ivan Vanko, the poverty-stricken underdog driven mad with desire for vengeance, much more tragic and sympathetic? When he isn't killing innocent civilians, I mean.

Spot the wanker

Spot the underdog

Spot the dog

* I mean Vlad was drunk and late, not me.

Ridley Scott's Robin Hood

2010-05-13T10:23:00.001-07:00

I have made three big mistakes in my life. The first was riding my bike into a ditch full of nettles when I was eight. The second was taking Media Studies for A Level. And the third was going to see Ridley Scott's Robin Hood.

Russell Crowe was interviewed on Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's BBC radio show last week and said that Scott wanted to make a new film about Robin Hood because it was ripe for reinvention: once Mel Brooks has made a parody of a particular genre or story, you know it's time to move on. Which is fair enough, I suppose, except that the tale of Robin Hood has been reinvented so many times already...

... there can't be many places left to go with it. Still Ridley Scott, being the cinematic genius he is, has found a new direction which nobody else has dared attempt. He's turned the classic tale of Robin Hood into a cock-eyed shambles.

It's a bold move, and sure to be controversial. Russell Crowe does his part with a remarkably incompetent attempt at a "regional" English accent which meanders quite happily across the Irish Sea and back again several times in each sentence. He and Cate Blanchett also somehow manage to take one of the great historical romances and sap all life out of it. The dramatically pivotal moment when Robin says the line "I love you, Marian", he may as well have been talking to his horse. The rest of the cast isn't bad, but so uninspiring there's nothing much to say about it.

The big problem is just that the film flails about all over the place, perhaps because three writers, three producers (including Crowe) and four executive producers is waaaay too many cooks in the kitchen. I won't be spoiling anything if I say that Robin Hood isn't actually declared an outlaw until the last five minutes of the film; in fact I'll be sparing you the agony of spending two hours wondering when the real story is going to start.

See, I always thought that the story of Robin Hood was about an outlaw who lived in a forest and stole from the rich to give to the poor in the face of tyranny. Very simple, very iconic, which is why it's always been so popular.

Ridley Scott thinks that the story of Robin Hood is about some common archer called Robin Longstride who fought in Richard the Lionheart's army, got put in the stocks, then escaped and pretended to be a knight in order to get back to England to fulfill the dying wish of Sir Robin of Loxley that he return his sword to his estranged father in Nottingham, who then decides to pretend that Robin Longstride is his son, even though he looks nothing like his son, largely in order to contrive some narrative excuse for romantic awkwardness between Robin Longstride and Robin of Loxley's widow, Maid Marian (who isn't a maid at all, since she is a widow), and by some moronic coincidence it turns out that Robin of Loxley's father actually knew Robin Longstride's father, whom Robin Longstride has forgotten about, and says that he was a political visionary who wanted common rights for all men, then Robin Longstride (still pretending to be Robin of Loxley, mind) has some flashbacks in which he remembers the murder of his father by a bunch of soldiers and realises that he is from Barnsdale, and decides to become a great general and hero of the common man by shouting at King John, who then promises to sign the Magna Carta if they all join him to defeat the French invasion, which they do, but then all the people cheer Robin Longstride (who at some point has gone back to his true identity) instead of him, so he gets mad and refuses to sign the Magna Carta after all and declares Robin Longstride an outlaw. Then, just as it starts to get interesting, the film ends.

Basically you pay to watch 140 minutes of exposition. But there's plenty of additional retardation thrown in to keep you exasperated and/or amused.

1) Robin Longstride and his boring bunch of wanker friends decide to pass themselves off as knights after Robin says, "There's is no difference between a knight and an ordinary man except the clothes he wears." Now I'm sorry, but no. It worked in A Knight's Tale because that was a comedy. In this film it is just dumb. For one thing, the knights whose clothes they steal were Anglo-Normans and would have spoken French. Could a modern English yokel pass himself off as a member of the French elite by donning a beret? I think not.

2) British people laughed at Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves because the film had Kevin Costner land at Dover and walk in one day to Nottingham via Hadrian's Wall. In this film, an entire fucking army gallops non-stop from Nottingham to the south coast via what looks like the Lake District or Snowdonia.

3) The beach set-piece battle at the end is stupid. Having hundreds of horsemen charging through the surf looks impressive in the trailer, I admit. But really, the battle is such an obvious attempt to make a medieval version of Saving Private Ryan's D-Day scene that I was laughing through most of it. They have the same frenetic, handheld style, the same blue-grey washed out colouring, even some shots are almost identical, except with bows and arrows instead of machine guns.

French coast, 1944

English coast, 1199

4) The stupidest moment in the entire film is when Maid Marian, being a modern, liberated twelfth-century woman, turns up at the final battle riding a war charger in full armour and proceeds to hack her way through the French army, because, as we all know, medieval warfare was nothing more than sitting on a horsey and waving a sharp thing around at random. By this point I wasn't even surprised to see Friar Tuck also in the fray. My standards of logic had fallen so low that seeing a middle-aged, overweight, drunkard clergyman slaughtering professional soldiers made perfect sense.

It's a pity, because a couple of weeks ago I went to see a largely ignored historical film by Alejandro Amenabar (director of The Others) called Agora, starring Rachel Weisz. It was a dramatisation of the life of Hypatia, who was a pagan female philosopher in Alexandria at the end of the fourth century, a time when it was a bad idea to be a pagan female philosopher anywhere. The film chronicled her earnest pursuit of reason and scientific truth while the world around her was being torn apart by bloody street fighting between pagan mobs and militant Christian monks.

Agora was trying to be intelligent and interesting, and mostly managed to do both. It also had something useful to say about the nature of religious conflict. It got a mixed reception because critics thought it was too highbrow, which it wasn't, provided that when you go to the cinema you're prepared to have one or two brain cells excited instead of having all ten billion numbed into oblivion by explosions and punches and stabbings and penis jokes. All of which Robin Hood has in abundance. Thanks, Ridley, for lowering the collective IQ of western civilisation another couple of points.

Offa's Dyke Path (part 1)

2010-05-07T03:40:00.000-07:00

I injured my back sledging in January, and then managed to tear my gluteus maximus by limping about for a few days without a walking stick, a mistake which left me more or less bedridden for a month while the muscle tried to stitch itself back together. But being stuck in a flat and unable to hobble any farther than the corner shop without insufferable pain did at least remind me that having fully mobility is, after all, a very Good Thing not to be taken for granted.

So during my temporary crippledom I decided to set myself a target for recovery, and a lengthy hike seemed a nice idea. I needed one which would fall neatly within the two-week window between finishing in Vienna and starting a new job in York; it couldn't be too harsh, and somewhere close to home would be best.

Offa's Dyke Path fit the bill: 182 miles from Prestatyn on the north Welsh coast to the Bristol Channel, roughly following the border through the hills and valleys of the Welsh Marches. Best of all, Offa's Dyke is an early medieval earthwork built by the Mercian King Offa to keep out (or at least annoy) the Welsh, so I would gain medieval nerd points by walking along its length.

On the Mayday bank holiday weekend, a few days after I returned from Vienna, I went up to Prestatyn with Moogdroog and a few siblings and together we rambled the first 27 miles. On the third day Gem and I continued south with Fin the Dog (who had to go home on the fourth day, sadly), reaching Knighton, just over halfway, on the sixth.

Here's a musical slideshow thing...

Bluetones

2010-04-13T14:40:00.000-07:00

Because I'm jealous that Moogdroog is going to a Bluetones gig in York, and because one is never too old to be 16 again, if only via a crackly VHS tape recording...

Clash of the Titans, or not

2010-04-10T10:58:00.000-07:00

I was going to watch Clash of the Titans today but I decided not to because almost everyone on the planet seems to think it's a heap of crap. While I'm a firm believer in working out my own opinion about stuff, I also believe in succumbing to peer pressure when the only (half) dissenting voice left is Roger Ebert, whom I have never forgiven for the nasty things he and Gene Siskel said about David Lynch's Dune.

The BBC's Mark Kermode, on the other hand, was not remotely impressed.

If you've seen the trailer, you're pretty much seen the film, but without the headache-inducing thunderousness of watching the film itself. So: the script is terrible, the acting is completely wooden, the romantic element is boring and uninteresting, and the interaction between the human characters is totally without merit.

It also provoked a five-minute rant against the retro-fitting of blockbusters to the new trend of 3D, one of Kermode's special hates, which ended thus:

So what you're left with is the headache-inducing spectacle of watching something made in 2D, converted into 3D, badly written, ploddingly played, with some big monsters, which, incidentally, through the miracle of 3D are made to look smaller, because that's what happens when you watching 3D, going "Oh, for Heaven's sake - can we STOP THIS NOW."

I'm not big on the 3D thing either. I once saw a reissue of The Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3D which didn't work because my eyes appear to be broken, so I what I actually saw was The Creature from the Out of Focus, Bluey-Greeny Lagoon. And I saw Avatar in 3D, but I felt it only worked in certain kinds of shots, such as when the camera was in a cockpit and you were looking out over the jungles of Pandora. Most of the time, like Kermode says, especially with very tight or very wide shots, 3D simply ruins the sense of proportion, making stuff either too big or too small.

And I'm also happy to boycott the new Titans because the 1981 original is one my favourite childhood films, as a well-worn VHS tape at home will testify. I always preferred it even to Jason and the Argonauts, which opinion I understand is a minor heresy among Ray Harryhausen fans.

Apart from not going to see a film, I have little else to report. I'm writing an article about Anglo-Saxons which is becoming more and more racist. Specifically, I think Dorchester-on-Thames was ethnically cleansed in the fifth century. Not that I'm saying this was a good thing.

Avatar review

2010-03-28T07:18:00.000-07:00

1 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

this film made me cry!!, 27 Mar 2010

J. Clay

This review is from: Avatar [DVD] (DVD)

i'm only puting 1 star for this film because when i saw it at the cinema it made me CRY! i havent cried so much at a film since i saw new moon, honestly this was the most amazing dilm ive seen since new moon. the only thing that would make this film better is if they someow crossed it with new moon so you could have BELLA and EDWARD togehter on pandora, they could live in piece in harmony with Nature and with each other, there are no werewolves or bad vampires on pandora are there!

really this film gets FIVE STARS!

Reviews:

A. Vlad says: Nice attempt, troll.

Mr J. A. Hetherington says: An opinion is one thing... but REALLY?! There are no words.

Lee J. Simpson says: Are you for real?

Chapman says: Worst. Review. Ever.

I'm amazed that these comments were all made within a few hours of submitting the review last night. There's a lot of Avatards lurking about Amazon, clearly. To be fair, though, people only have to click on my profile link and look at my other reviews to see that I'm obviously a troll with nothing better to do.

Apart from abusing Avatar fans, I got a job at Durham starting in October. It's left me in the weird position of having July and August free without any work or research planned and I'm trying to work out how to fill them. My ideas so far include one or more of the following:

1) Going on an intensive French course somewhere, probably Lyon

2) Going hiking

3) Sitting at home watching Deadwood

4) Renting a cottage in Donegal through July

Re. number 4, I'd aim to get a place with 2 bedrooms so anyone out there who fancies a summer break in the west of Ireland could come for a week of their choice and we'd share the rent for that week. (The cottage would be about €400 per week.) So if that tickles yer fancy get in touch; if I go ahead I'll need to find somewhere pretty soon in order to book a whole month.

It's a good day to die

2010-03-20T10:04:00.000-07:00

Starship Troopers 3 is one of the biggest mistakes ever committed to celluloid, but this song makes it worthwhile.

Car laptop tray

2010-03-17T15:44:00.000-07:00

I despair, I really do. (Click to enlarge.)

Eating like a caveman

2010-03-16T14:30:00.000-07:00

For the last month I've been following my first ever conscious diet. I started it because I happened to stumble across an online article which led me to the homepage of Arthur De Vany, a professor of economics and fitness guru who's developed something called Evolutionary Fitness. His fairly simple argument is that the best possible diet and fitness regime for humans is the one to which evolution adapted us over millions of years. This does not include any foods produced by agricultural techniques.

This got me looking into the so-called Paleo Diet, which led in turn me to the low-budget comedy documentary Fat Head by Tom Naughton, a kind of rebuttal to Morgan Spurlock's problematic Supersize Me. The basic message of the documentary is that the dietary meme that has been repeated in western societies for the last fifty or so years (saturated fat = higher cholestoral = heart disease) is completely bogus, and always has been.

According to this new (for some people, not so new) theory the healthiest diet for human beings is high in vegetables and high in saturated fat from meat, fish, eggs and nuts, with liberal amounts of sugar from fruit. The most important thing is to avoid simple carbohydrates and trans-fatty acids, since they raise blood sugar levels, cause the body to store the sugar as fat and in many people can lead to diabetes and heart attacks. This means no cereals or grains or starchy foods - corn, bread, pasta, rice, potatoes - and only naturally occurring oils for cooking, so out with corn oil, sunflower oil, any kind of vegetable oil, all of which has to chemically extracted from the plant, and in with ladlefuls of butter and extra-virgin olive oil.

As an experiment I decided to go cold turkey on all cereals and grains and stick with the diet for a month. Since for years I've basically eaten some kind of cereal or grain with almost every single meal, this left me rather disoriented for a few days, but I bought a basketful of herbs and spices, explored forbidding corners of the vegetable market and looked for good lean meat, and soon, for the first time ever, I realised that cooking was actually rather fun.

Having tried it out quite strictly for a month, I see no reason to stop. I've decided there's no point being fascist about it if I'm in the mood for a hot cross bun or a pizza or a takeaway, but so far I haven't missed bread or pasta or rice at all. That in itself says something about my body's needs, I think. I've been experimenting with a few different recipes which I may post at some point. The best thing about the revelation, though, is that suddenly this...

... is good for me. Yes. A good heavy fry-up of quality meat and eggs in a pan of olive oil or melted butter is good for me. All that oil and saturated fat does not clog up my arteries. It was all a humungous myth which has been soundly debunked by the latest research, even if the massive momentum of the health and food industry, with the occasional exception such as the Atkins Diet, will not advertise this fact for years. Provided I also eat lots of fresh vegetables, I could have a fry-up every morning for the rest of my life (minus the bread, of course), and my body would thank me for it. This is happy news indeed.

Oooohhh yeah

2010-03-10T10:02:00.001-08:00

Beckship Troopers

2010-03-09T07:08:00.000-08:00

During one of my occasional trawls through the blogosphere of the rabid left I came across a clip from Mr Glenn Beck's opinion show on Fox. Beck has hit on a genius formula of being so absurdly irrational and extreme that he is effectively beyond parody. He seems to frustrate the left in part because his arguments are not really arguments at all, but a series of disjointed assertions repeated in similar forms over and over again, like some kind of multi-layered conceptual jazz experience aimed at an audience of Neocon traditionalists.

Anyway, Beck is not very interesting any more. He's like a car alarm that's gone off outside your place of work and shows no sign of stopping; one just has to try to get on with things and try to ignore it. But he said something in the clip which actually made the sci-fi nerd in me laugh.

He was ranting about recent leftist groups who have been protesting against budget cuts in education. Apparently they've been waving suspiciously red banners and claiming that education is a universal right, and indoctrinating schoolchildren with such socialist propaganda.

Beck: Education is not a right, it's a privilege! How many of our students even look at that "right" as a privilege? They sit there, they don't listen! [dramatic pause] Because they don't have to earn it. Unless you earn it, you don't value it.

Leaving aside the fact that moaning about how children never listen in class rather undermines his claims that they're being successfully indoctrinated with anything, his words reminded me of the classroom scene from Verhoeven's classic 90s ultraviolent spacefest Starship Troopers, which, in case you haven't seen it, is set in a kind of Nazi Star Trek version of the future.

Michael Ironside: Let's sum up. This year we explored the failure of democracy, when the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since. You know these facts. But have I taught you anything of value this year? Hm? You - why are only citizens allowed to vote?

Student: It's a reward. What the Federation gives you for doing Federal Service.

Michael Ironside: No. No! Something given has no value!

He took the words right out of Beck's mouth. Beck strikes me as the kind of fellow who might watch Starship Troopers and not realise that the whole package is an ironic spin on Robert Heinlein's thoroughly un-ironic book.

It's bollocks, of course. None of us "earned" the right to be born in the first place. Does that mean we don't value our own lives?

We're not talking about university or college education here. The debate is about basic education. What kind of nutter goes on national TV and claims that no child in the country should have an automatic right to a free, state-provided basic education? What century is this guy living in? Not in the distant future century of Starship Troopers, sadly.

Someone commented that my blog wasn't allowing anonymous comments, so I've fixed that now. Sorry.