Thursday 7 August 2008

Wednesday 6 August 2008

I think the black gay footballer from ‘Footballers’ Wives’ portended only pestilence.
I woke up this morning and felt as rough as a bear’s astrakhan coat. Thinking that I would clear my head and go in to work late, I set off and got as far as Hammersmith before a wave of dizziness swept over me, and I was forced to go back home, but not before I’d bought a Boris Karloff Frankenstein jigsaw for £2.00 from Tiger Tiger.
The Ugly One rang when I got back to tell me that he also was feeling queasy and on his way home.
So, we slept the afternoon away and then caught up with Corrie. I’m getting a bit tired of Mad-Eye Moody, who’s taken over Mike Baldwin’s Knicker Factory. Nobody likes him, apart from Carla, and even she can’t see his bulging eye, which I suspect is fitted with a Satnav Gaydar system. Even Ted, David Platt’s gay grandad, hasn’t spotted it yet.
What’s wrong with these people?
And what is Dev up to, making the beast with two backs with Nina, an ageing alleged Bollywood star? I’m finding this storyline very unwholesome, particularly as I suspect that Nina’s creepy husband Prem is lining them up for some kind of kinky Asian threesome.
They should give more lines to Amber, Dev’s wise-beyond-her-years daughter, who seems to know more about life that Dev will ever know.
Sinbad’s wife can go too. I cheered when they chucked her out the first time, and my heart sank when they let her move back in.

Tuesday 5 August 2008

As it was our anniversary we took ourselves off to The Bombay Bicycle Club on Holland Park Avenue, a slightly upmarket restaurant which does a rather nice line in fish curries. I went for a lamb fillet khabli as a starter and continued with a Monkfish Machli, which was excellent.
The Ugly One and I were deep in conversation about notable lines from Tennessee Williams films, and were stuck on the name of a film.
‘It’s ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’’ said the young man on the next table.
We thanked him and let him and his young lady get on with their dinner. It wasn’t until I sneaked out for a cigarette and got a good look at him that I realised it was the man who played the gay black footballer in ‘Footballers’ Wives’.
Oooh. Celebrity Omen! I thought. What could this portend?

Monday 4 August 2008

Thankfully, Duilia was very pleased with her portrait.
‘Oooh! It’s me!’ she squealed, on opening the brown paper in which I’d wrapped it.
‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘Who else would it be? Bella Emberg?’
‘Who?’
‘Never mind!’
The Ugly One went off to see ‘Gone With the Wind’ at our local cinema. I passed on that, and spent the evening with two cornish pasties, a bottle of wine and ‘Days of Our Lives’.

Tuesday 5 August 2008

Sunday 3 August 2008

My portrait of Duilia is finally finished, complete with Van Gogh sunflowers and iridescent orange hair.
there was a marvellous documentary on TV tonight about two seemingly rather prim WI ladies who are part of a campaign to decriminalise prostitution in order that working women may lead safer lives.
As research they travelled with a camera crew to Amsterdam, Nevada and New Zealand, to try and find a model for a legalised British brothel.
In a New Zealand sex shop the ladies were at first bemused by the range of sexual devices on sale.
‘Can you tell me something about ‘The Arse Midget’?’ one of them enquired of an amused shopkeeper.
‘Yes lady,’ he replied. ‘It’s for sticking up your arse!’
Despite the comic moments, the programme had a serious purpose in trying to persuade the wider country at large of an issue of pure common sense. Were brothels to be legalised, the practice could be regulated, and women who, for whatever reason, find themselves working as prostitutes would be protected by employment rights, security and a clean environment in which to carry out their job.
The WI have to be applauded for their attitude and their stand on this, and the Rational Party supports them all the way.
Go WI!
This programme cheered me, having had to sit through an hour of Rex and Nicole on Big Brother. Nicole, for those of you who do not know, is the girlfriend that Rex has been banging on about for the last mythical-god-knows-how-many weeks and who has now been placed in the House as a permanent housemate.
She’s done nothing but whine ever since, while Rex holds her tight, saying things like ‘What’s wrong, Princess?’.
It would appear that Big Brother has withheld her suitcase as punishment for her jumping over the divide from Hell into Heaven. Most housemates would have taken this in their stride, but poor Nicole is bereft.
‘I’m High Maintenance!’ she keeps wailing. ‘I want my suitcase!’
When it arrives I hope someone locks her in it and posts her back to Chelsea.

Saturday 2 August 2008

Zezi Ifore, of whom it has been said ‘Everyone has a right to be ugly, but some people just abuse the privilege’ is, I think, the new Jeremy Spake.
Some people may remember Jeremy, who had a decent enough job as an Airport employee, speaking Russian to Soviet visitors on ‘Airline’. Following his popularity as the subject of a documentary series he tried his hand as a TV presenter, following which his popularity plummeted like a Lockerby suitcase.
He was then seen desperately advertising fridges in the slots between June Whitfield demonstrating stairlifts and fat people trying to get one to sign up with Ocean Finance. Jeremy was last heard of presenting ‘The Good Old Days’ in Maidstone.
Now that The Gormless Shoe Tree has been banished to the equivalent of the BBLB attic, one can only hope that we’ll next see her whizzing about on a forklift, shouting out the price of a Zanussi.
I do feel sorry for Maidstone, but as the last step on the road to obscurity, the good people of Maidstone must take heart from the fact that they are playing an important role. Please go and see Zezi in whatever end-of-the-pier slot they have planned. We must ensure she’s sent off to anonymity with a warm hand on her exit.
Once our Tesco delivery had arrived today we went off to see ‘The Dark Knight’ which was excellent, if a little extended. Heath Ledger was superb as a Joker who seemed truly disturbed and schizophrenic. I know this because I see a lot of Jokers outside the Pound Shop on Brixton Road.

Monday 4 August 2008

Friday 31 July 2008

As we predicted (to be fair it has been the most predictable Big Brother ever) Luke was voted out of the Big Brother House. I would have preferred Dale to go.
Dale worries me since his entire vocabulary seems to be constructed around the concept of the penis. Last week, when nominating Mohamed (who seems to be only nominated because people consider him greedy. I think there’s some borderline racism going on here, as I don’t see a huge amount of people nominating Rex because he’s a pompous git, with far worse sins than greediness) his reasons for nominating him were ‘He’s a dick, a knob, a cock, a tool and a tit.’
This obsession with penis epithets can’t be healthy. I suspect part of Dale’s problem in the House is that he has no thesaurus in which to look up the word ‘penis’ and thereby find fresh new words to describe his favourite thing in the world.
Later, we watched a film called ‘Some Things Never Die’ (I think) which starred James Doohan and George Takei (Scotty and Sulu, Hoorah!). Doohan is the sheriff of a small mid-west town plagued with mysterious deaths and Takei is a mad Japanese scientist who has been campaigning for years against a new form of pesticide.
It’s an enjoyable bit of low budget hokum, although none of it makes any scientific sense at all. A new mutated species of cockroach (which metamorphoses from a worm that comes out of a lake) has been killing people all over town, and the local vet, George Takei and two teenagers try to solve the mystery and save the town.
There’s also a giant sized ‘mother’ cockroach, and they’re all living (a little predictably) up in the old mine.
I loved it.

Thursday 31 July 2008

On our DVD rental list was a film called ‘Bug’ which we imagined might be some low-budget horror about man-eating insects rampaging through a motel and destroying all in their path. After half-an-hour of nothing much happening (the lead character is an abused woman who works in the local lesbian bar and makes friends with a man her friend brought back with her. Harry Connick Jr popped in as the abusing ex-husband and popped out again.
It turned out not to be a monster-bug film at all, but a Lynch-esque exploration (based on a stage-play) of psychological control and one woman’s spiralling descent into madness.
It’s actually very good in parts but sometimes veers off into moments that seem to be either parody or comedy, although strangely, there are very few laughs in it.
Still, I felt cheated. I wanted man-eating bugs tearing down walls and roaring or hissing or clicking (which is what movie-makers seem to think giant bugs sound like).