Lubin Odana: Est. 2002

2012-05-30T20:31:00.002Z

Finding Doggerland

For my 40th birthday, my fella got me an unusual present - DNA testing kits for both of us from the private company 23andme. We both had to spit into a testtube, which was then collected by courier and whisked off to a lab in America, where it was then analysed to reveal information about our ancestory, traits and health.

We were emailed that our results were in, this morning, so logged on to the website to find some interesting information, and in 20 minutes everything and nothing changed.

I first looked at my ancestory. My maternal lineage is Haplogroup H1a1 (a haplogroup is a combination of DNA sequences which are passed down from parents). People from H1a1 are mainly from Scandinavia, although they're also found in Western Europe, especially Spain (we always thought my mother's mother had Spanish heritage). My paternal lineage is R1b1b2a1a1*. This tends to be focussed more around the North Sea, especially England, Germany and the Netherlands. Apparently some of both my maternal and paternal ancestors lived in Doggerland (named after Dogger Bank), a land mass that joined England to Europe and eventually vanished when the sea rose about 9000 years ago - it's like a real-life Atlantis. Weapons and bones are regularly found in the North Sea, dating back to when Doggerland existed. Here's a map that someone speculatively created of what it could have looked like

So I'm from a country that until this morning I didn't even know existed, and it doesn't even exist any more. That's pretty mind-blowing. It's not like I can go back there on an ancestral pilgrimage.

The analysis also tells you what percentage of your DNA is neanderthal or caveman. Apparently the average Northern European has 2.6% caveman DNA. Mine is 2.8% which is in the 80th percentile - so I'm more caveman than most people around me. Maybe that explains my heavy eyebrow ridge and big nose (apparently for it's for protection from cold air).

I then moved on to look at health. Your DNA is examined to see if you are a carrier of dozens of different hereditary illnesses and other traits that may or may not end up being expressed as actual diseases. The bad news is that I'm twice as likely as the average person to develop Alzheimer's Disease - the average risk is 7.2% - mine is 14.2%. I also have an increased risk of a range of other nasties, including high blood pressure, stomach cancer, throat cancer, aneurysm and osteoarthritis, although the risks of these things are actually very very low anyway - so even though my risk of stomach cancer is double the average - it's still only 0.4%. I can live with that (probably). And I have a decreased risk of lots of other things including diabetes, melanoma, rheunmatoid arthritis, gout and migraines. I'm quite a bit less likely to have heart disease or Parkinsons. So, you win some, you lose some.

In terms of traits rather than diseases, I discovered that I should never try heroin or cigarettes (I'm likely to get very addicted to both). I also have a genetic marker for low tolerance of pain (which reminded me of yelling out when pulling off a plaster yesterday - at least I can blame my genes for being a softy). The analysis correctly predicted my hair and eye colour, and that my wee would smell funny if I had asparagus. Apparently, I don't metabolise caffeine very well, I'm likely to sneeze in bright sunlight and I don't have a gene that gives me enhanced athletic performance, although I do respond normally to exercise and diet by losing weight (so I have no-one to blame if I get fat but myself - in fact there were a couple of other genes which said I shouldn't really be fat at all - so I'll really be to blame if I get fat). I was also relieved to see that I have substantially decreased odds of going bald - which kind of fits with what I'd suspected. And I have one of the markers for HIV resistance - apparently 1% of people have two markers and are very unlikely to become HIV+, whereas 10-14% of Europeans have one of the markers, which means that if they are infected, there's a good chance that the disease will take a long time to show up. Weirdly, my fella has that same marker as well.

It's fascinating stuff, but as I said, it changes everything and nothing. I'm not too bothered about my increased potential to develop Alzheimer's, though I think I will start having more decaff drinks. Of all the information, what really affected me was the Doggerland stuff, though I suspect most Europeans could probably trace ancestors back there. Still, as birthday presents go, this beats a pair of socks!

Guilty pleasure

2012-05-14T21:48:00.000Z

My parents went on "honeymoon" (a year after they married) on a package holiday to Spain, in 1973 and hated it. They won't talk about it, but it was enough to put them off "abroad" until I was all grown up and forced them to come with me to Rome, many many years later. My father, who is 65 at the end of the month, announced on Saturday that he never intends to go on holiday again as he can't bear "waiting around for trains and planes" and they're quite happy staying at home.

I would never go on a package holiday to Spain either - though it is more due to middle-class snobbishness rather than a general dislike of travel and "foreign things". But I have recently discovered the ITV series Benidorm, which, while revelling in the awfulness of such holidays and the people who go on them, ends up making you like them.

Benidorm feels like a natural inheritor of the British Carry-on films and seaside postcards. It has a regular cast consisting of British stereotypes and eccentrics, lots of rude jokes, class-based humour, bizarre visual jokes and a faintly moralising sentimental ethos. The establishing shots show Benidorm as hideously built-up with miles of brutal-looking tower-blocks dominating the skyline, while the opening credits show Britons at their worst. The series is set in the Solana Hotel, an "all-inclusive" resort which resembles a hospital built in the 1990s, where guests have to wear a yellow-arm-band to get the free food and drinks, and the specially laid-on entertainment largely consists of karaoke in a large hall (self-entertainment in other words). Many of the holiday-makers bring no money with them and never bother to venture out of the hotel grounds, instead preferring to fester by the pool, getting drunk, being unpleasant to one another and eating.

The central "common" family, the Garveys, is headed by leathery-skinned gnome-matriarch Madge, who is never without a cigarette and sits resplendent on her disabled mobility scooter - the punchline being that she can walk perfectly well - but she's on holiday and doesn't see why she should have to use her legs. Madge has never been troubled by a kind thought in her life, and her many daughters have mostly disowned her, except for affable Janice - who is played by Siobhan Finneran who also plays evil O'Brien in Downton Abbey (as well as Rita from cult 80s film Rita, Sue and Bob too!). Janice is married to lazy Mick (League of Gentleman's Steve Pemberton), a typical benefit scrounger so beloved of the tabloids. Like an infestation, the family keep returning back to the Solana year after year, encountering other holiday-recidivists like Donald and Jacqueline (dim swingers), Kate and Martin (disgruntled middle-class couple there by mistake and Kafka-doomed to keep coming back despite their efforts to escape) and delusional overweight quiz champion Geoff and his slow-witted mother/PA Noreen. As the years progress, newer, ever more flamboyant characters emerge.

There is a lot of flabby, aged, wrinkly or otherwise oddly-shaped flesh on display, and while we are encouraged to laugh at the gluttony, petty criminality, idleness and poor taste of the working-classes, nobody comes off well in Benidorm - the "posh" characters are exposed as inauthentic (like Martin's mother played by Una Stubbs), stuck-up (like Kate) or deluded and weak (Martin). The message is that the working-classes may be vulgar, but at least they know how to enjoy themselves with simple pleasures like a burger, a lie-down by a pool or a good singalong.

Similarly, sexuality of any sort is made fun of. There is a stereotypical gay couple called Troy and Gavin (one is fat and camp who uses a black fan with a flourish as a prop, the other is tall and thin and slightly less camp). They are accepted by the other holiday-makers, as are the swingers - who are always genuinely sorry when they inevitably mistake someone as being from their sauna back home or misread an innocent suggestion as a sexual come-on. A gruff transvestite played by Tim Healy, while the butt of visual jokes is reasonably sympathetically treated, and "normal" heterosexual desire is punished - Martin's lust for a con-woman results in him losing his passport and money, while Janice's brief dalliance with a much younger man brings her no happiness (and he ends up locked in the boot of a car).

While there are brief glimpses of Spanish culture and countryside, the series hasn't managed to tempt me to venture onto an EasyJet flight. I'm happy to enjoy Benidorm at a distance.

Half-moved

2012-05-08T13:11:00.001Z

My fella and me have a year's sabbatical starting in August, which means we can live anywhere we like. This has been the subject of much discussion and planning over the past couple of years, and the original plan was to rent out our house and spend three months in each of the following locations: New York, London, Sydney and Brighton. However, the practicalities of such a globe-trotting year quickly meant that we had to reduce our plans quite a bit. We have an elderly, high-maintenance cat who, on the one occasion when I left him with a live-in cat-sitter for a month, went into a deep depression and took to sitting in a corner of the living room with his back to the wall. Taking the cat abroad would also be unfeasible due to quarantine restrictions. So instead, we are spending a fortnight in August travelling across from Chicago to San Francisco by train, followed by a week in Brighton.

The other issue which brought us back down to earth is cost - I thought flats in London were quite reasonable initially, but then I realised I was looking at the price per week rather than per month. So the capital city was out (and anway, it's so unfriendly and competitive). Eventually it came down to a competition between Brighton, Bristol or Newcastle-upon Tyne. I like all three places, but ultimately it was the bonus of having friends and family in Newcastle which was the deciding factor. My fella, very kindly let me make the final decision, although he stipulated he wanted to be in "walking distance of a Waitrose".

So we've found a nice apartment (near a Waitrose), overlooking a park, in a fancy Georgian terrace. And this weekend, we moved in half our furniture. My fella bravely drove a van across. I caught a cold earlier in the week, so it wasn't the best timing - and our efforts to move the bulky sofa were worthy of a Laurel and Hardy film. Lots of comedy accidents. And we have to do it all again in July when we move the rest of the stuff.

We thought the boiler was broken, but just as we were phoning British gas we realised that the strange box in the kitchen cupboard with a credit card sticking out of it was a pay as you go meter - put in because the previous tenant didn't seem to like paying any of his bills. We hadn't seen one before so I'd just kind of ignored it as irrelevant. So we had to get the card "topped up" at a newsagents. There were lots of "final demand" letters for the last tenant, including some from bailiffs and an £800 phone bill. He sounds charming. There were all sorts of weird little things we had to resolve over the weekend - I had to buy a new toilet seat because the one they had didn't stay up (why? how?) At least it gave us an excuse to go to John Lewis a lot.

Oddly enough I don't think we'll use that Waitrose much. There's a huge Marks and Spencer next door to it - the food hall is about 8 times bigger than the one in Lancaster - and it has things we've never seen before like Luxury Garlic Bread - Lancaster only has the regular sort. I feel so cheated - like one of those Russian diplomat's wives who went insane on first seeing a British supermarket in the 1980s.

So between now and August we'll be living in two places, echoing that period in 2006-7 when I lived in Bristol and commuted back to Lancaster. I have strong and fond memories of Newcastle - I used to go shopping there in my childhood, although the enduring memory is of never having any money and doing a lot of enviously staring in shop windows wishing I could buy stuff. I recall going to an all-night showing of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Evil Dead films at one of the cinemas, and when I was a student, I visited my friend Kathryn (who still lives there), and we used to spend a lot of time going around the charity shops (it was the early 1990s - grunge was just coming in), and watching foreign films at the Tyneside Cinema (we thought we were so sophisticated). During the summer of 1992 I discovered Newcastle's gay scene - in those days there were a lot of men wearing check shirts with moustaches, and I had a brief relationship with a chap who was high up in the civil service and wanted to take me to Egypt.

Geordies only seem to have two vowels ("a" and "oo"), so I'm sure in a year's time I will be incomprehensible all over again.

2012-04-23T16:30:00.002Z

Memories of My Spectrum

The ZX Spectrum, arguably Britain's first famous home computer, is 30 today. I have fond memories of my 48K Spectrum, and its big sister, the 128K which came later on. Using the Spectrum was often a frustrating experience. There was no screen - you plugged it directly into a tv (in my case an ancient black and white thing in the dining room). It had a tendency to overheat and reset itself, and it ran programs from a tape recorder - so you'd have to wait up to 10 minutes to play a game, again with the random tendency for the uploading of data to get to the end and then just reset. The keys were rubbery, a bit unpleasant to touch, and you had to make copious use of combinations of different keys in order to get it to display certain commands like "POKE" (which I never really understood - it was very different from poking in social media).

Quickly, my weekly comics (Jackpot and Buster) were replaced by ZX Spectrum magazines, and I would spend hours typing in programs in order to play a very basic-looking game that probably had a typo in it and wouldn't work anyway. I suppose it helped me with my keyboard skills, and kept me off the streets if nothing else.

On the rare occasions when I got a Spectrum game to actually work, the experience of playing the game itself was often just as frustrating. Games were not meant to be actually won, so programmers tended to make them as difficult as possible to complete. Sometimes they would have weird bugs, like "The Hobbit" which always froze when I got to the cellar of the wood elves. It was usually impossible to save data, so if you died, you had to go all the way back to the start and do it again. But many of those games are indelibly marked in my memory. Here are my favourite ones.

The Hobbit

The aforementioned Hobbit was one of my favourite "adventure" textual games. I loved text adventures more than any other type of game because it was like reading a book with endless possibilities and you had to use your imagination to supplement the lack of fantastic graphics. There was the feeling with these games that you could go anyway and say anything, even though in reality most of what you typed in would be ignored unless it fit a very specific set of instructions relevant to only one point of the game. But I loved how The Hobbit took a great novel and let you play through it. I loved that there were TWO mazes in it (which I spent hours getting lost in and trying to map). I loved that you could talk to Thorin and Gandalf (even though they didn't have much to say), and I loved the graphics - which at the time appeared to be amazingly sophisticated and complex.

Jet Set Willy

A truly amazing platform-based game which had the shocking innovation of allowing the player to wander between different screens, each one a room in a giant mansion. As the tune "If I Were A Rich Man" played on a loop, you had to jump, run and avoid weird moving objects, and collect strange sparkling ones. Occasionally, if you went through the wrong hole, you'd get stuck in a weird infinity loop and lose all your lives in an instant. It wasn't fair and I'm sure it was impossible to compete without resorting to cheats.

Pimania

This was one of the first games I ever played when I got my computer, and the whole family spent Christmas Day in awed shock. Someone appeared to have used a very weird drug trip as the premise for a computer game. It asked me for my name and then later on referred to me by it - as we were unfamilar with what computers were capable of, we half-believed that this game was somehow watching us and responding to our movements. It was a text adventure, which involved moving by typing in numbers and collecting various strange objects like a hula hoop, valium and a pork pie. The B side of the cassette contained a surreal pop song, and the game was actually a real-life competition - you had to play it to discover clues to where an actual golden sundial was hidden somewhere in the UK.

Sabre Wulf

This was my favourite game from the successful Ultimate stable. You were an explorer in a huge jungle maze, and you had to collect four pieces of an amulet to escape, and also avoid a wolf whose territory extended over several screens and could run very fast. There were different coloured orchids and if you picked them it would result in various effects (blue made you run faster, yellow sent you to sleep etc). It was deliciously garish.

Knight Lore

Another "Ultimate" game which brought the innovation of 3D graphics - this was mind-blowing when it came out, and inspired dozens of copy-cats. Unfortunately the game itself was a bit boring and also difficult. You were the same explorer from Sabre Wulf, but this time you turned into a werewolf occasionally, and you were trapped in a castle, having to collect objects and move blocks around to get past obstacles. I always seemed to get killed by falling metal spikey balls :(

Spellbound

A graphical 2D room-based adventure featuring a knight who had to move around, collecting objects and giving them to various people or casting spells in order to open up new bits of a castle. What made this game interesting was its use of "Windimation" - a system where menus would open up and you selected an option from one of several. This was a somewhat more forgiving game in that it didn't kill you off at a moment's notice but allowed you to think through how to do things.

The Trap Door

A crazy, colourful game based on the children's animation series, this game was fiendishly difficult - you had to make various recipes by gathering weird objects and putting them in a cauldron. Quite often, the objects were alive (like worms) and would run around trying to escape from you, while a spider would also chase after them trying to eat them. Playing this cute looking game often induced feelings of panic in me as time ran out.

2012-04-18T11:59:00.001Z

Broke Back Gym

Well, I am 40 in slightly over a month. This blog, which I began almost 10 years ago chronicles all of my 30s (at least the stuff I'm prepared to share with the whole world and several people who know me in real life). Prior to that, the private diaries I kept in my teens and 20s give a much more introspective and confessional account of my life.

I don't think I look too bad for 40. I still have all my hair, and most of it is still brown, save a few grey ones. There is only one permanent line on my forehead. The dark circles under my eyes make me perpetually look tired, but I blame them on genetics. I get plenty of sleep - more than anyone else I know. At the gym last month, I had my annual "check-up" which meant I was taken into a cupboard and measured by one of the receptionists. She told me that I'd gained 5 cms around my shoulders and lost 5cm around my waist. It's true that I've gone back to 32 inch trousers, which I last wore around the age of 25. And there are funny bumpy bits in my back and shoulders that didn't used to be there. I've cut out crisps, orange juice and "healthy" smoothies from my diet, so that's probably helped.

But there's been a price to pay for getting back my mid-20s body. For a year, several times a week I went to circuit classes at my gym, organised by a man I refer to as "THe PE teacher". The classes involved lots of high intensity running, jumping, bending, stretching and lifting weights. The PE teacher shouts a lot (it's motivational), and also decides how heavy the weights should be that you lift. It gets results, but has also left me with back problems which started before Christmas and ensured that I spent most of Easter on painkillers. Worryingly, my father is 25 years ahead of me with his own bad back, and had an operation last month as he was barely able to walk at Christmas. He used to work on a farm as a teenager, and lug around 9 stone bags of concrete all day, so no wonder he's broke his back. I only have vanity to blame for my situation. And also poor work habits. Twice a week, I usually work from home. I like to boast that I don't need an "office" like some of my colleagues who claim they can't work unless they have a south-facing room over-looking a brook with no traffic noise, and lavish bookshelves etc. Having being brought up in a little council house where the tv was never turned off, I view such sentiments about people needing workspace as precious and excuses for laziness. So my "office" is my sofa, and there I can sit, for up to six hours a day, laptop on lap, only minimally moving to get a cup of tea. This set-up used to work fine, but now I've damaged myself through exercise, my body doesn't like to sit in that position any more. So I've relocated to the dining room table. Quite a few people I know have bad backs at the moment - so maybe it's the fault of laptops making us all put ourselves in slouchy postures.

My doctor gave me a pamphlet about bad backs based on the latest research. I was expecting it to contain lots of weird exercises to do and descriptions of scans you can have done on the NHS. Instead it simply said - don't take to your bed - keep moving around, do exercise, go walking. Take painkillers to manage the pain. Don't be pessimistic, expect things to get better and they probably will. So fingers crossed.

The other sign of middle/old age that I'm experiencing is weird memory issues. My fella accuses me several times a week of forgetting conversations we've had. He says my memory is ruthless in excising information it doesn't want to keep - and he's right there. But I think it's getting worse. I sent an email to a work colleague yesterday, asking her to help me with a task. But then realised I'd sent her the exact same email before Easter. But when I tried to find that first email, I couldn't find it. It never existed - I just convinced myself I'd sent it, when I hadn't. Not only am I forgetting things, but I'm inserting in new false memories of things that never happened in the first place. At least eventually, I won't even be able to remember that I've lost all my faculties... Happy 40th!

2012-04-12T15:40:00.003Z

Finding Madame

My new favourite obsession is Madame, a sassy-talking old lady puppet from the 1970s and 1980s. Madame was the brainchild of Wayland Flowers, who was a skilled puppeteer rather than a ventriloquist - something which he had Madame say at the start of their routine "Wayland's no ventriloquist and I'm no fuckin' dummy!" However, once Madame started talking, all eyes quickly fell on her, and Flowers became almost invisible. Bedecked in her "fuzzy" (a boa with a life of its own) and her summer diamonds ("some are diamonds, some are not"), Madame's party piece was to let down her hair from the bun it was tied up in, halfway through the act, in a bizarre display of frenzied shaking and contorting. As I said, Wayland Flowers was a skilled puppeteer.

In the 1970s and 1980s gay men were largely absent from American mainstream culture, although gay humour will always find a way - and one way that this was achieved was to have women standing in for gay men - particularly older women who were no longer attractive (although they still saw themselves as desirable and were insatiably desirous of men). The Golden Girls were a good example of this, and here's Madame with Bea Arthur (another Madame), singing "A good man is hard to find" while exchanging potshots with one another (and fighting over Rock Hudson - naturally).

Madame's larger-than-life personality was based on campy movie stars like Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, Gloria Swanson and particularly Rosalind Russell in Aunt Mame. Much later, Karen from Will and Grace also channelled Madame (and in one episode where she catches sight of her aged face in the mirror, Karen retorts that she should have Wayland Flowers' hand up her ass). Madame was a wise-cracking mistress of the double entendre, and while her tv appearances were reasonably "clean", her stage shows cheerfully threw around four-letter words for shock effect. The 1980s were perhaps the last decade of "light entertainment", where audiences would still politely sit through puppet performances - and I recall many variety shows on Saturday afternoons with Keith Harris and Orville (although I'd much have preferred Madame). Even with a puppet as sharp and "adult" as Madame, I'd be surprised if she'd be allowed to entertain today's more demanding audiences on tv.

When Paul Lynde left the panel show Hollywood Squares, Flowers and Madame set up residence in the centre square - the place reserved for the celebrity with the wittiest barbs. Sample question: "Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Strauss lived in the same place. Where was it?" Madame's answer: "At the YMCA!"

Madame also appeared as a regular on 1980s pop show Solid Gold, interviewing, insulting (and at times flirting outrageously) with singers and providing the links between ad breaks: "We'll be right back with more great music so don't you dare move. I'm not moving either because, well... I think I'm having a STROKE!" Here's a typical escalating exchange she had with Marty Harty:

"Hindenberg nose!"
"Chicken lips!"
"Chicken legs!"
"Chicken eyes!"
"Chicken neck!"

In 1982 Madame appeared in her own sitcom "Madame's Place" which starred a young Corey Feldman and was notable for featuring a "talkshow" portion where Madame interviewed the likes of William Shatner. She also featured along with several other of Wayland's puppets in a tv special called Madame in Manhattan. This included Crazy Mary (special skill - getting herself stuck to the floor in a most unusual way), Shirley (Madame's dresser) and Jiffy (a prostitute from Harlem). The show features much of the stage act, but then goes slightly surreal as Madame and Wayland start waltzing around Battery Park together (on a very windy day), and finally there's a sequence where Wayland tucks Madame up in bed and tells her that she's very special to him: "I was teased a lot as a child, I was different, I was sensitive. But I had a grandmother who raised me, protected me, and taught me to believe in dreams. She died when I was young. I cried a lot. By myself. Then one day, there you were, needing me just as much as I needed you." Then he sings "Someone to watch over me" to her. It's a rare moment of Wayland taking centre stage, and it could have come across as schmaltzy and silly, but somehow it doesn't. A camp outlook on life is often developed as part of a coping strategy, because life can be very cruel to those of us who are "different and sensitive". Camp allows you to make a joke out of less than desirable circumstances, being passed over, getting old, being bullied or laughed at. Wayland's coping strategy just became externalised more than most - he laughed first and laughed loudest and longest.

Wayland died of AIDS-related complications in 1988, aged only 48. And I know Madame was with him all the way to the end.

2012-04-07T15:14:00.007Z

Prisoner Cell Block Lancaster

Lancaster Castle (one of the world's oldest prisons) closed down last year and today, for the first time in 50 years, the prison grounds were open to the public. My house looks on to the castle gates and I've often wondered what's behind the walls. So I grabbed my camera - and here are some views that previously you only could have seen if you'd committed a crime.

The castle dates back to the 11th century and has been used as a prison since 1196. There are marks made by musket fire around the gates when Royalists attempted to take it back from Parliamentarians during the civil war. It held the Pendle Witches who were subsquently hanged, and its court was used for the trial of the Birmingham Six.

The Pendle witches apparently cursed anyone who visited Lancaster to have to keep returning there for the rest of their lives.

Hangings were done in public, ostensibly as a deterrent, although in reality hangings garnered large crowds and there was something of a carnival atmosphere, with people selling food and the local schoolboys getting half a day off. The vicar of the overlooking priory church sold tickets so people could get a better view from the ramparts of the church and avoid pickpockets below.

Some prisoners ended up having to stay on in prison for up to three years as they were unable to pay for the gaoler for their "upkeep" at the end of their sentence.

The Duchy of Lancaster, who owns the castle, is currently consulting on what to do with it. It would make an interesting, if rather claustrophobic hotel. (After only a few minutes of wandering around the enclosed court-yard spaces I was starting to feel a bit nervy.) It could also be a good performance space. But I hope it becomes a museum - not only would it bring a lot of tourist trade to Lancaster, but its rich and varied history is fascinating and deserves to be shared with as many people as possible.

2012-03-25T20:04:00.003Z

Do you have the stomach for The Hunger Games?

"This isn't going to be one of those torture splatter films?" asked my fella on Friday as I invited him to accompany me to an early showing of The Hunger Games. I assured him it was a 12A rating, but in describing him the bare bones of the plot "It's about this game show where children kill each other", I doubted whether I would ever allow my imaginary 12 year old child or the 12 year old version of myself see such a film.

In the early 1980s, when I was 11, my father took me to "the pictures" to see Conan The Barbarian. It had a 15 rating, and I did not look 11, let alone 15. But my father has a somewhat intimidating and confident personality and so he announced to the ticket lady "This is my son, he's 15 alright?" and we were waved through. I recall nothing in the film which warranted a 15 rating, and when I caught it again a couple of weeks ago on ITV3 or ITV4, the only thing that was scary about it was Grace Jones, and the only thing corrupting about it was Arnold Schwarzenegger's decolletage. Standards of what it is acceptable to expose children to have certainly changed.

In order to get the 12A rating, the child deaths in The Hunger Games are not dwelt on or shown in graphic detail. Many of them happen off-screen - a dull "boom" sound announcing them to the other contestants and us. When they do occur, the camera-work is so quick and jerky that it's almost impossible to make out what's going on. The camera-work is the worst thing about The Hunger Games - it reminds me of the first time I used a video camera on holiday. And when we watched it back, my fella went upstairs and threw up.

But while there isn't any gore in The Hunger Games, it's the ideas themselves which should have earned it a higher age rating. Not only is this a contest where children have to kill themselves, it's one which is televised for entertainment, and it's part of a punishment inflicted on a once rebellious and now starving populace. The children are selected via lottery, and you can enter multiple times in order to receive food.

I remember the first time I read dystopic fiction - at 15 I read George Orwell's 1984. The book's hopeless ending threw me into a deep depression - around the same time I dyed my hair black - and turned into a proto-emo. I wasn't used to unhappy endings, and had thought that somehow Winston Smith would have grown a pair of biceps, got hold of broadsword and hacked Big Brother into bits, Arnie-style. But instead, after being captured, tortured with rats, screaming "Do it to Julia", and then mentally destroyed, the book ends with Big Brother triumphant. Forever.

The Hunger Games is one of a trilogy, and it remains to be seen whether in the later books, the silly blue-pompadour wearing elite of The Capital will be overthrown. As we left the cinema, my fella observed that it was a "1970s ending". With messages about the cruelty of reality tv and growing inequality in societies, The Hunger Games is the sort of film which young people should be watching - if only to ensure that they will treat the likes of me more kindly when we're in our 80s and they're in power and can decide what our taxable income should be and whether we get winter fuel allowances...

As of next year, the school-leaving age goes up to 17, then 18 in a couple more years time. We expect children to stay in school for longer and longer, yet we also expect them to grow up much more quickly. I hope they have the stomach for both.

2012-03-18T16:22:00.003Z

...although I do like the interweb really

After that last post, where I warned of the dangers of engaging too much in online life, I should really balance things out with a nicer post about it. As someone who enjoys watching old films, particularly low budget bad films, the last few years have seen an embarrassment of riches being placed online and for free. In the past, I would have to go to the now closed Virgin Mega Store in Times Square or Kim's Videos on St Marks Place (also NYC) to and browse their vast collection of cult DVDs (or back in the day, videos) in order to find trash classics like The Baby, She Devils on Wheels or Sticks and Stones. Back in the 1990s I built up a large cupboard of video cassettes, which were stacked on top of each other and which was always at risk of toppling over and crushing me (imagine being trapped under hundreds of cult movie videos forever!) Once DVD took off, I started buying disks online from places like somethingweird.com, and storing the disks in wallets (alphabetically because I'm a bit Type A), which saved space, but even so, I can still see myself running out of space eventually.

Fortunately, plenty of the sorts of films that only a very tiny minority of the population of the world would ever seriously consider paying actual money for, are now available on youtube... for free. The picture quality isn't that great, and sometimes you have to watch them in little 10 minute chunks. But there are so many long-lost friends and "new" (I mean old but I've never seen them before) films that I've discovered recently. Here are a few, with my comments. If you ever find yourself with cancelled plans on a Saturday night, or suffering from a debilitating illness which means you can't go out at all, you could do a lot worse.

If you watch any of these films, let me know what you think of them, or feel free to recommend your own youtube grindhouse favourites...

Devil Times Five

A bus full of deranged children from a mental hospital crashes on an isolated road, and the little ~~darlings~~ monsters escape to a winter cabin where they encounter six bickering adults who all act like they're in a bad soap opera. The adults take pity on the children, not realising that this isn't going to turn out well for them. There are some inventive death scenes (if you like that sort of thing), such as putting piranha fish in the bath. One of the men is supposed to be the "looker" so he's naked for some of the film (standards of male beauty weren't as exacting as they are now - he's no Channing Tatum). One of the male children is implied to have gender-dymorphism issues, although this plot doesn't seem to go anywhere, but it's kind of interesting it was there in the first place.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death

The titular Jessica is recovering from mental illness and has retreated to a countryside farmhouse location with her husband and another friend. They're a bit weird (they drive a hearse and like to take rubbings from gravestones) and the locals don't really take to them. But then weird things start to happen, and Jessica can't decide whether she's going mad, or the victim of some sort of wicked conspiracy to make her think she's going mad, or whether she's just dreaming the whole thing, or whether the weird things are actually real. It has one of those 1970s endings and afterwards you'll wonder whether you dreamt the whole thing yourself. Really, with a title like that though, I'd have watched this even if it had been the most rubbish, boring awful film ever made.

Hell Night

Link to full film

A group of teenagers have to spend the night in a spooky old house as part of an initiation into their silly fraternity. But the planned adolescent tricks on them are nothing in comparison to the real psychopath who lives in a series of underground tunnels under the house and doesn't like unwanted guests. The film morphs from an episode of Scooby Doo into something much more disturbing, and it particularly picks up in the last third, with a couple of genuine scares. Linda Blair (from The Exorcist) follows in the footsteps of Jamie Lee Curtis and Sigourney Weaver and gets to play the Final Girl - the slightly asexual one who gets left to last, while the pretty blonde girls are all bumped off first as a punishment for having sex (1980s morality is so complicated). Even though the characters should have been one-dimensional and annoying, there are attempts to make them likeable and rounded (in an early bit Linda's character says she's learned how to fix cars, and it's actually turns out to be relevant to the plot!)

Messiah of Evil

In a very HP Lovecraft-inspired tale, Marianna Hill (one of the weirdo sisters from The Baby) is looking for her missing artist father in a small Californian beach town. Her father's house is full of his disturbing giagantic art installations, making for an interesting film set. She teams up with an odd trio who are implied to be in a threesome relationship (Michael Greer who was more well-known for playing outrageous gay characters in films like Fortune and Men's Eyes, the rather unsubtly named Joy Bang and B Movie stalwart Anitra Ford (from classics like The Big Bird Cage and Invasion of the Bee Girls). But gradually, the heroes are overwhelmed by the zombie-like residents of the town. There are two stand-out scenes in a supermarket and a cinema, which start off normal and gradually descend into horror. A bit like "Jessica", this has a nightmarish quality to it where the characters question what is real.

The House that Screamed

An isloated French boarding school for wayward girls is full of shennanignans, including peeping toms in the shower-room, lesbian initiation games in the cellar and a kind of weekly sex-lottery with the man who delivers the wood. But girls keep "running away", although actually they're not running away at all. While this film was made in 1969, it has more of the feel of a 1979 film, and a lot in common with a later movie Suspira. It's also notable for featuring John Moulder-Brown, who plays the main role in the weird bath-house film Deep End.

2012-03-16T18:39:00.003Z

The many unintended consequences of technology

Do you feel sorry for Dharun Ravi, who was today found guilty on 15 counts, including bias intimidation? Ravi used his computer webcam to spy on his college room-mate, and boasted about it on his public Twitter account: "Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.” The room-mate, Tyler Clementi, committed suicide a few days later. Ravi could go to prison for up to ten years, where, thanks to a collective American view that prisoners deserve to get raped, he may get first-hand experience of the sorts of activities he was spying on. This very detailed article by the New Yorker reveals a world, which despite my blogging and Facebooking, is alien to me - a world where online interactions appear to have much more value that face-to-face ones, yet at the same time, that value was still hugely under-estimated by those involved.

The two prospective roommates researched each other even before they had met - with Ravi disapproving of Clementi because he might have been poor, and finding out that he was gay through finding out about Clementi's participation in the gay porn forum Justusboys. Even the fact that Clementi had a yahoo email account rather than a gmail account was judged as uncool and therefore unacceptable. Clementi also researched Ravi, and was rather sniffy about Ravi's parents - “sooo Indian first gen americanish,” adding that they “defs owna dunkin”. (Dunkin' Donuts franchise).

By the time they had met, the two room-mates knew enough about each other to form opinions that would be hard to shake. While they had each other's mobile phone numbers (Clementi texted Ravi to ask for access to the room when he was meeting his boyfriend) - face-to-face interaction appears to have been much less frequent or important, the two don't seem to have discussed Clementi's sexuality for example.

Having checked Ravi's Twitter account countless times on the last two days of his life, Clementi went to the George Washington Bridge, downloaded the Facebook app to his phone and then posted a final, awful update "“Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” Ravi sent him two text messages, trying to apologise, but when he realised what had happened, he tried to alter his earlier, damning Twitter messages. Weirdly, Clementi's body was found by a gay man called Jim Swimm who is a member of Swish, a group dedicated to LGBT rights.

Ravi's trial was based on invasion of privacy, bias indimitation and tampering with evidence rather than driving someone to suicide. He had been previously offered a plea-bargain offer - no jail time, no deportation to India and 600 hours of community service if he pleaded guilty. He refused it, in hindsight a mistake - and perhaps another example of someone who does not really understand the consequences of his decisions.

This is not a pleasant story and the response on internet forums has not been pleasant either - with many people writing "send him back to India". The defence case was that Ravi was an immature 18-year old (a tautology) rather than a homophobic bully. The charge of immaturity isn't really at issue here - I don't think he was particularly immature for 18 - but was just acting like a typical 18 year old - with very little consideration for others or for the consequences of his own actions. When I think of some of the stupid things I did at 18, I still blush with humiliation. But at least when I was 18, the internet was no more than a bunch of computers connecting a handful of universities together, so none of my teenage stupidity and poor decision-making was both recorded for all posterity and shared around the world.

Young people tend to adapt to new technologies very quickly (my 8 year old nephew has recently worked out how to use "series record" and has filled up his mother's DVR with episodes of Loony Tunes and Star Wars Clone Wars). Although familiarity with technology can hide a grasp of its real-world consequences. And I worry that there are so many ways that young people in particular can have their lives ruined by the technology that is so ubiquitous. Another example is the #ToMyUnbornChild Twitter trend. It only takes one person on Twitter to post something dripping in nihilism and hatred like "ToMyUnbornChild i'll kill you if you were gay!", and before long, everyone's doing it. Looking at the faces of those who've posted up such messages, it's a gallery of mostly young people, who, in their own little peer groups will probably gain a measure of validation and hetero-credibility for their take-no-prisoners stance. And if such comments had stayed in their little social circle, probably very little damage would be done to themselves. But now the world is watching... always watching. And such tweets can come back to haunt you any time - raising their ugly heads at your next job application...

Perhaps there will come a tipping point in a few years, when almost everyone has an embarrassing drunk, half-naked picture of themselves online or an offensive tweet - and so it will all get cancelled out and not matter any more. Perhaps I am of the last generation that will ever view privacy as normal and necessary. The consequences of these new technologies are still emerging, and appear to be speeding up rather than slowing down. Future generations may be instinctively more savvy when it comes to what they decide to share. The web still feels like the Wild West in many ways, with very few rules and no sense of global etiquette. An interesting time to be online. But not necessarily a safe time either.

2012-03-04T16:04:00.006Z

The strange homosociability of Geordies

Visiting Newcastle at the weekend. I am not a Geordie, although grew up about 30 miles away from Newcastle and the city was my only taste of "urban sophistication" for many years. I am able to bore companions by saying things like "This used to be a Bainbridges/Dillons in the 80s..."

As someone who has lived away from the area though for 20 years, I always return in "ethnographer" mode. A big van had set up shop in the town centre yesterday, as filming for the BBC3 series Snog, Marry, Avoid was taking place. This rather cruel show takes people (usually young women, but sometimes gay men) who wear too much make-up and attempts to give them a "make-under". We get to laugh at them, and they get to be on tv, so theoretically everyone wins.

As we were walking past, a female researcher who had a Standard English accent rushed up to a young girl who was pushing a pram and said "Excuse me, we're filming for Snog, Marry, Avoid and looking for trendy young mums to take part..." I didn't hear how the "trendy young mum" replied, but I suspect she had been chosen because she was one of the over-made up horrors that the program likes to mock.

Despite having grown up there, the north-east of England often feels like another country to me. It is geographically, economically, culturally and socially isolated from the rest of the UK, and as a result has a very strong dialect/accent, along with values that I sometimes find remarkable. Despite it being a cold March day, many of the people I saw over the weekend were not wearing coats, and I felt looked-down-upon for my light jacket (which still left me feeling cold). There is a frankness about Newcastle that can be both disarming and annoying (my parents have it, which about once year leads to unnecessary misunderstandings and hurt feelings). I find it most apparent among women, who, when they are attracted to a man, simply stare at him in a way which I've only directly experienced in cities that have large gay male populations. To be sized up and down and given a cruisy, interested stare that makes you look away and blush by young women, some of them whom I suspect I'm old enough to be their Dad, was both flattering and disturbing. To complain about it not being "ladylike" behaviour would be sexist - and despite the fact that Geordie culture is very gendered in their own ways, there are also aspects of it that are could be seen as empowering for women.

The homosocial aspect of Geordie culture is another thing that I am always struck by. We ate at "Ask" (a respectable mid-market Italian chain restaurant), and were the only same-sex couple in the place. Every other table either contained a male-female couple or a large same-sex group whose behaviour sometimes bordered on what was socially acceptable in terms of rowdiness.

It's very common to see groups of 10-15 men or 10-15 women walking around Newcastle (especially the Bigg Market area), all dressed identically (but no coats). Encountering these groups can be a bit intimidating, and I suspect that it is this "safety in numbers" aspect, like a flock of birds or a shoal of fish, that is one of the motivations for them. I also suspect it might be partially to do with traditions based around working-men's clubs, which have lingered longer in the north-east than other places. And it is also likely to be a function of the Geordie obsession with football - with many of the large male groups on their way to or from the stadium. Stag and hen parties also play a large role (people are big on fancy dress, especially if it is sexually revealing or involves cross-dressing, and the only place where I've seen a similar sexual split is in Blackpool.

The same-sex groupings also help to remove any threat of sexual rivalry or jealously, and I suspect that they enable simple hiearchies to be formed, based around who is the "best" at being a man or a woman. At the restaurant, on a nearby table, it was a single very loud (alpha) male who contributed to 95% of the conversation, with the others simply letting him talk. After they had paid, they got one of the waitresses to take their photograph, and they posed together at the front of the restaurant, with their arms around each other. While I doubt that any of these men were gay, and they'd probably be horrified (to the point of reacting violently) if it was ever suggested, I would bet that the most important relationships in their lives are with other men.

2012-03-04T15:19:00.003Z

Talking About My Generation

A recent study by Comedy Central looked at Millenials (commonly born between 1982-2000) who are now one of the most important "target demographics" of advertisers. The study found that Millenials tend to find humour to be of central importance to their lives, more so than sports and more so than music, which was much more the provenance of my generation (Generation X). I remember so well the unbearable snobbiness of many of my fellow students, who segregated themselves into little tribes, based on which music they liked. The dance-floors of student nightclubs would be a constantly changing parade of styles as there'd be a "metal" set, followed by some Kylie, followed by some indie, followed by some retro, followed by house music. After each song, everyone who had been dancing would pull a disgusted face at the new song and rush off the dance floor, while others would be pushing past them to take their place. I spent a lot of 1991 unsuccessfully trying to find common ground with the boyfriends of my female housemates, who liked and looked like Nirvana or Faith No More, and naturally disliked me because I didn't.

The fact that this study was conduced by Comedy Central (and found that comedy was important) raises questions about its validity, but it is an attractive theory, and when I listen to popular music these days, it sounds over-processed and based more around what the singers look like, rather than their ability to sing. A lot of it comes across as quite grim, and voices appear robotic as poor singing just gets auto-tuned. There is no "buzz" around the top 40 any more, and Top of the Pops only exists in our collective memory on BBC4. Even the music channels like VH1 and MTV don't play music videos any more. If younger people no longer define themselves primarily by their music tastes it is because the music aimed at them just isn't very good any more. Thank you Simon Cowell et al.

Generation X is seen as a rather dour generation, eschewing hilarity in favour of irony and sarcasm. Our comedic pin-up was Daria...

...and a lot of 1990s humour was based on making fun of earlier generations - particularly the excessses of our parents who came of age in the flamboyant 60s and 70s, and left behind a wealth of loopy fashions for us to mock. The Brady Bunch movie is a good example of this - with the characters of a wholesome 1970s sitcom, transported to the present day (1995 in this case) with hilarious consequences. In this sketch, they perform a musical number called Keep on Moving (which is almost identical to the original episode), the only difference being that comedy comes from the non-plussed reactions from the modern-day audience.

That superior 1990s sneering at primary-colour, monotone, spangly outfits, upbeat happy music, naive, syncronised dance sequences, big hair and "niceness" is contrasted by what the "cool" teeenage audience are wearing: down-beat casual wear, heavily featuring navy blues, greys and blacks, topped off by gelled-down hair cuts that make everyone look like young Republicans. Ironically, of course, those teens now look just as naff to us as the unknowing Bradys (one is in a backwards baseball cap even!)

And it is perhaps no wonder, that all of this sneering led to some of us embracing those despised fashions of yesterday - hence "retro". Although even this (which I loved), became another kind of snobbery.

Keep on Moving...

2012-02-29T19:18:00.003Z

Grade 3 anxiety

My grandfather used to play the piano around various working men's clubs in the mining villages where I grew up. In 1980, on his way to one of those clubs, he walked out in front of a bus, was hit by a car and killed instantly. He was one of the reasons why I wanted to learn to play the piano, and so I pressured my parents to give me lessons. Eventually, a teacher was produced and I went on to have weekly lessons for the rest of my childhood. My younger sister also had lessons, and we made sure we both did 20 minutes of practice a day, timed to precision with an electronic timer.

I was never sure where my perpetually cash-strapped parents found the money for those lessons, and I never once thought to ask how much they were costing them. But it's a credit to them that we got them and were never made to feel guilty about it.

My teacher, Mrs Terry was the poshest person my family had ever encountered, and I never got over my fear of her and was able to relax in her presence. I still have all of the piano books I learnt from, with her neat cursive handwriting in the corner of each page, marking dates from 1983. Although Mrs Terry was never big on praise (and she didn't seem to like putting children in for exams), apparently my sister and I were held up as exemplary students because we practiced 20 minutes daily, and our electronic timer was used to torture less motivated students. We did not realise it at the time, but we later found out that we were hated by other pupils who had never met us.

I took Grade 1 piano in 1985 and then Grade 2 in 1987. Then my parents decided I needed to concentrate on my GCSEs, so lessons stopped. I hid upstairs guiltily on the day when she was told her services were no longer needed, so I never got to say goodbye and thankyou. And of course, she died years ago, so that's a wrong I'll never get to put right.

I continued playing the piano, and even had a brief job as a student playing in a small restaurant on Friday nights. I still have a piano - a £2000 electric upright variety that sounds and feels just as good as the real thing and never needs tuning. But I don't play it every day any more.

However, when my fella caught glandular fever last October, and was stuck at home for three months, he decided to take it upon himself to learn to play the piano. He's much more of an alpha-male type than me, and within a few weeks had figured out the basics and was whizzing through my old tuition books at the rate of about one a month (it had taken me about one year to get through each one). And, because he's so goal-driven, he's decided to take Grade 1, and has also persuaded me to take Grade 3. I'm sure the 25 year gap won't matter too much.

So I've bought the pieces and am practising them, along with horrible sets of scales. Playing a piece to perfection is horrible, I continually make stupid mistakes, and after my nightly practice sessions I normally feel hot and slightly nauseous, leaving the keyboard with a pounding heart and shaking hands. I've even had bad dreams about the exam. It's a very long time since I've sat any form of exam (I suppose my PhD viva counts as the last one, and that was 11 years ago). I normally set exams. My fella is much more relaxed about the whole thing, he LOVES learning scales and is already planning his Grade 2 exam in December.

I have until June to work out the awful scales. And somewhere, in Piano Heaven, I can imagine Mrs Terry shaking her head disappointedly, and tapping the page with her (always sharp) pencil. Maybe it's time to dust off the electronic timer.

2012-02-19T14:18:00.000Z

You know You're Old When....

Another thing I did last weekend was visit an Abercrombie and Fitch store. My friend Kathryn finds them outrageous because of an incident involving a woman with one arm who got a job there and then claimed that she was bullied out of her job. She refuses to let her husband go in, but she went in with me so we could have "a look". I think it was as close as I'll ever get to cheating with a married woman.

Once we had walked through the fake frontage which is designed to make you feel like you are entering an exclusive beach club in the Hamptons you are plunged into a disorienting world where all of your senses are simultaneously assaulted. First it is dark - very dark - nightclub dark. Let's just say that people with cataracts are not welcome. Then there is the blaring music which I (of course) didn't recognise because I am over the age of 21. And there is the smells. Once our eyes had adjusted to the gloom we made out a 14 year old shop assistant who was spraying everything with scent. She welcomed us by using an Americanism like "Hi ya'll" which sounded ill-fitting on her Geordie accent. My fella, who has to hurry past the ground floor of any department store with a hanky over his nose due to allergies, would have not been able to cope.

There were clothes for sale, but on the walls were pictures of young men who weren't wearing any clothes at all. It's like going to a supermarket and seeing pictures of empty plates everywhere.

We lasted about two minutes before it was too much. On the way out another 14 year old said goodbye in American-speak to us. We staggered out, squinting at the light and slightly deaf.

"You do realise that we were the oldest people in there," I said. "The assistants were probably laughing at us and calling us the pensioner couple and saying we smelled of Santogen."

I read today that Abercrombie and Fitch are closing down quite a few of their stores. Perhaps they might want to consider expanding their market to say, people under 25.

2012-02-13T13:12:00.005Z

Back to the 80s

In 1989, when I was 17, my friend Kathryn phoned me excitedly to tell me that she had been rooting through her elder sister's wardrobe and found a Readers Digest boxed set of "The Sensational 70s" LPs. We listened, amazed at how awful yet great they were, and suddenly turned into Generation Xers - ironically appreciating older cultural offerings.

This was just the start. Before the year was out, we were holding 1970s parties, dragooning our friends along and demanding that they wear their parents' old clothes and even wigs. We stuck pictures of ankhs on the walls of our bedrooms, put in a red light bulb and freaked out to disco and the Wombles. One party ended up with us all wandering around Peterlee town centre late at night, posing with shopping trolleys in our 1970s costumes (we actually weren't that different to what anyone else was wearing, but I'd hoped that we might have bumped into a lone drunk and convinced him that he'd travelled back in time).

Now, retro is everywhere - there are even 1990s bars (and I still live in the 1990s). But we at least have the satisfaction that we were ahead of a trend. I'm sure if we'd been living in London, rather than the backwaters of nowhere, we'd have been "spotted" and given our own youth tv programme to present. Ah well.

Kathryn and me are still friends, although we don't live close by any more. At the weekend, I visited her, and thought it would be even more ironic to hold a 1980s party. How unaware we were at the time of holding our 1970s parties, that one day we'd be remincising about the very decade we were trying to escape from! How's that for Generation X!
Starter" - Ritz crackers and soft cheese, festooned with nuts and bits of pineapple. I was already feeling slightly naseous by the end of this course.

For the "main" - potato waffles and Findus Crispy Pancakes (cheese flavour). When I used to eat these in the actual 1980s, one of my meaner friends said "Oh Paul, get a class lift." You don't have to chew any of this. It just sliiiiides down. And it tastes of nothing. I like how one of the crispy pancakes has vomitted out its contents.

Sunday lunch time in our house between 1984 and 1988 was always ended by Vienetta, as Britain made an early attempt to emulate Italian living. Strangely, the ice-cream tasted exactly the same as potato waffles but the innovation was in the use of crunchy layers of chocolate to add texture - something largely absent from 80s dining.

And here it is. Once the silver/grey wrapping it came in had been removed (a bit like a giant choc ice wrapper), it is resplendent.

"I'LL have a Babycham". It tastes of yeast infection. Hangover guaranteed, even if you only have one. I had two.

2012-02-10T17:53:00.001Z

A special lady

Man on perfume counter in Kendalls department store, Manchester today: "Can I ask you a question sir. Do you have a special lady in your life?" Me: "No, I'm gay." And that killed it. I love it when coming out means you avoid a hard-sell sales encounter.

2012-01-28T17:04:00.003Z

Move Over Magnolia Bakery

I had put aside today to make cupcakes. Having not baked since I was 12 and my mother used to say each Friday night "Make us a Swiss Roll our Paul", I was excited to try it out again, and I wanted to capture some of the Bleecker Street glamour of the cupcake craze (which is now officially dead as I've got on board). What next Bleecker Street?

I got up early, consulted the book of cupcakes which I'd bought on Thursday (£20), and made a list. Luckily, Sainsburys had all the ingredients (£30), even orange blossom water (!). I didn't even mind when I got halfway home and realised I'd forgotten the icing sugar.

My recipe book was full of helpful hints like "weigh out the exact measurements - any deviation will result in disaster etc." so I was glad I had an electronic scale which gets measurements to the nearest micron. However, the batteries weren't working, so that was another trip out. "They cost £9 each," said the man in the jeweller's, rather shamefaced. I had to buy two (£18). Then I realised I'd need some tupperware to put them all in, so made the trip to a kitchen shop, where a special cup-cake holder thing was only £27.

I got home, feeling a bit lighter in the wallet, and by now slightly glum. However, I realised I didn't have one of those special cupcake baking trays. At this point, my fella, seeing my thunderous face, kindly offered to go out to the kitchen shop and buy me one (£11).

After that, it went quite well. I made a batch of banana/chocolate ones, and another batch of orange ones. Here's what the finished product looks like.

They're rather different from the picture in the recipe book. But at least they're edible.

And at roughly £30 a cupcake, they must be of good quality.

2012-01-23T13:32:00.002Z

Born under a bad (street) sign

My mother directed me to a local news story - the boy who lived next door but one to us has just been imprisoned for four years over his involvement in the drug-related death of a young woman. He's not a boy now of course, but that's the way I remember him. Carrying out internet searches of the street where I grew up always makes me miserable - apart from the ultra low cost of houses there (the three bedroom, two bathroom home I grew up in recently sold for £75,000), there are news stories of gang violence, attempted rape and people being set on fire. I can only feel glad that when I left for university in 1990, I vowed never to go back.

It wasn't always like that. My parents, who moved there in the early 1970s, had to pass an interview with the local council. My mother said that being allocated the brand new council house was like "winning the lottery". Next door to us was a manager at the local Fine Fayre supermarket. Across the street was a teacher. Everyone worked. There was a high proportion of young married couples with kids. All of the children played happily in the street together - old-fashioned games like hopscotch and hide and seek. It was idyllic.

Then it went wrong - the unions instigated a series of particularly nasty strikes in the 1970s, resulting in power cuts, bodies not being buried and piles of litter in the streets. The rest of the country had had enough, voted in the Tories and Margaret Thatcher took the tough approach, instigating a number of changes, some which appeared to have the intentional goal of hurting working class people, others which had unintended consequences. The poor got less attention and help - "on your bike" said Norman Tebbit - and if you had the wherewithall to do so, there were opportunities out there. But for those people who found it more difficult to help themselves, their situation worsened.

People lost their jobs, the local miners went on strike for over a year, parents started getting divorced and car crimes and house robberies started to occur (it's depressing how many crimes on council estates often involve poor people robbing other poor people). Removal vans appeared in the street with increasing regularity - the manager and the teacher quietly moved away to buy houses in nicer neighbourhoods, rather than rent in an area that was going downhill. We never saw or heard from them again. And in their place - an increasing number of "problem families" - large numbers of children - some with behavioural difficulties, and different men going in and out. It's always harder to keep relationships going when you don't have any money or any hope.

My parents suffered. My Dad, who worked as a full-time bus-driver found that his pay couldn't keep up with price increases, despite his increasing hours spent doing overtime. So we sold the car and my mother carefully budgeted every meal. His pay became so pitiful that we had to have government assistance, only coming off it when my mother also got a full-time job. The days of mothers staying at home and looking after the children were becoming a fantasy for working-class families.

And then the drug trade appeared. By the 1990s, a policeman was posted at the gates of my old school, to stop the drug dealers from getting to the children. The girl next door used to say that she could get drugs at school any time she wanted. Living on a council estate started to feel less like winning the lottery and more like a prison sentence. So it's not really surprising that my street now comes across as a dystopian nightmare in the news. Thanks Maggie.

2012-01-22T14:25:00.002Z

Six Year Olds Won't Go To Rebab

My fella's niece takes dance classes so last weekend we went over to St Helens to see her (and several hundred other people) performing at their local theatre. It was nice to see so many young people (all girls) involved in "the arts", rather than getting pregnant (which was the main hobby of the girls I went to school with), though it was a shame there were no boys involved. Billy Elliot is still very much the exception. Although towards the end, some of the Dads put on a (comedy) performance. They'd wisely put the little good-looking one front centre. And I'm ashasmed to say that that was my favourite bit.

Who'd be a parent these days - it's so expensive. As well as paying for the weekly classes, all the constumes (some quite complex) had to be paid for, and there were announcements banning photography and mobile phones during the performance, presumably so that professionally done photos could be purchased by family members afterwards. The man sitting next to me had his phone out and ushers asked him twice to turn it off - both times he just hid it under his coat for 10 seconds. (I considered it a personal triumph that I didn't scream "JUST TURN IT OFF!!" at him.) But worryingly, he did not return to his seat for the second half. Maybe the ushers decided to beat him up in the interval, or perhaps he'd had enough.

Whilst the performances were good, some of the song choices were slightly odd. Some of the youngest girls - aged I'm guessing about 6-7, did an Amy Winehouse tribute. This involved them all dressed as Amy Winehouse, complete with huge beehive wigs, and singing "They tried to make me go to rehab, I said 'no, no, no.'" Not exactly age-appropriate. Me and my fella had to restrain laughter during that number. We have been trying to think of good follow-ups for next time - perhaps they could do Sister Morphine or Frankie Says Relax.

There was also liberal (and unnecessary) use of dry ice - one unfortunate ballet dancer was positioned right next to the ice machine and every now and again during one number, a big gust of dry ice would emerge from between her legs, with the machine making a mocking parping sound. Again - we were both jamming our hands into mouths for that dance.

There was a group of older (40+) women who did a few dance numbers. My eldest sister-in-law, who was present, thought they were great and talked about joining them next year. That was until my fella (rather cruelly) referred to them as the Baby Janes. She's gone off the idea now.

I'm not sure we'll be invited back next year.

2012-01-08T20:36:00.002Z

Girls will (now always) be Girls

I've written about my love of Lego, stemming back to my childhood, on this blog before. And this Christmas I enjoyed building Lego spaceships ~~with~~ for my nephews. Every couple of months I receive the Lego catalogue, although this month was a bit surprised to see that there was a pink pull-out section in the middle which was aimed squarely at girls.

This new range, called Lego Friends, features female lego figures who are more shapely, with breasts, big hair and curvy bodies. Each one has a set of interests - one's into animals, another likes singing and dancing, and another one like organising parties. You get the idea. Apart from the one who is a bit of a science geek, they're all stereotypically feminine characters, and the sets come in soft pastel colours. There are no boy figures. But as Lego has been marketed mainly as a boys' toy for years, boys can buy the pirate ships, the space ships, the fire engines and tractors and digggers and so on...

Not everyone wants to be friends with the Lego Friends though. A petition at change.org against Lego Friends currently has just over 3000 signatures. But there are also a lot of people who love the Lego Friends. This blog, called Feminists Freak Out Over Lego Friends, is dedicated to "shedding light on their omissions, skewed facts and images." And at Gizmodo, a cool and very butch-looking space-ship is built out of the Lego Friends blocks. The site claims that "feminists criticising the new Lego Friends sets just don’t get it."

People against Lego Friends argue that the set is restrictive, both to boys and girls. Girls are encouraged to confirm to feminine stereotypes, whereas it would be very difficult for any self-respecting boy to want to play with such a girly Lego set (personally, I would have loved some of the Lego Friends sets when I was a child, as long as there had been male figures to play with as well as the female ones). By narrowly defining what boys and girls are supposed to find interesting and the way they're supposed to play, the Lego Friends set ultimately limit possibilities for children - and potentially will result in a generation of very narrowly gender-defined adults who will have very conservative views about how men and women should act. God forbid it you don't "fit in".

I didn't fit in when I was growing up. I sometimes played with my sister's dolls (and when the two boys I hung out with at school found out, they refused to play with me ever again). I read far too many Enid Blyton books about upper-class girls' schools, and I played ballet music on the piano. I wasn't totally girly - I also had a lot of boy-geek interests - I had books about how to be a spy or detective, I liked reading about the solar system, I had a microscope, and I was into Dungeons and Dragons and writing my own computer games on my Spectrum 48K. And I played with Lego a lot. In the 70s/80s, Lego was still pretty gender neutral - you just bought blocks and created what you wanted. This advert, from the early 80s, shows how Lego wasn't seen as a boys' toy.

So while I did occasionally encounter hostility for not being the most masculine of boys, on the whole, my parents and peers didn't make too much of a big deal about it. I would hate to be a child again in 2012 - because even if you have very accepting parents, society expects boys and girls to act in very different ways from a much earlier age - and it's harder to get away with being gender-neutral or liking things marketed to the opposite sex. I've noticed it myself when shopping for my nephews - most toys are segregated into boys/girls sections in toyshops - and my nephews seemed able from quite an early age to figure out which ones were for them.

In some ways this seems surprising - especially considering that there have been moves to reduce sexism and gender stereotyping in wider society. I don't view the 1970s as a time of sexual equality. I think about sneaking downstairs at night-time to watch the Benny Hill Show and Miss World, and the mad housewife on the Shake and Vac Advert.

Actually though, 2012 doesn't seem to have improved that much.

The sexism and stereotyping of women is still there - for several reasons. First - it's validated by a jokey "lads", ironic stance. Second, men are objectified too (though not as much as women), so that makes it OK apparently. Yay equality!

Third, the left-wing political imperative to reduce sexism, is trumped again and again by capitalism and advertising. Having spent the last week in New York - the home of aggressive advertising, I saw even more adverts featuring idealised, stereotyped male and female bodies than I do in the UK. I always leave NYC feeling a bit inadequate - and part of that is due to the relentless advertising which is designed to make you feel miserable about yourself so you'll buy stuff.

The makers of Lego Friends have argued that the new set is based on anthropological research which examined how boys and girls play - and that they're giving children what they want. Defenders of Lego Friends have also pointed to other toys like Bratz, and My Little Pony - which have a similar aesthetic and are popular with girls. In fact girls' toys
in general have been redesigned to become more girly over time. So it's perhaps not surprising that girls like the Lego Friends - those girls are already growing up in a world where the concepts associated with Lego Friends are already marketed at them, and normalised for them. Imagine that for seven years you mocked a child every time they ate vanilla ice-cream and praised them every time they ate chocolate ice-cream, and then gave them a choice of a vanilla or a chocolate biscuit. Which would they chose?

And market forces dicate that you should sell stuff to people that they will buy. So it's very easy to simply go with the flow - and keep churning out increasingly girly, pink stuff for girls, and violent action figures and spaceships for boys.

I don't believe that children are completely blank slates and we can turn them into anything - I've noticed that my nephews tended to be very interested in trains, diggers and dinosaurs even before they could speak. They are typical little boys. I suspect most children do tend towards gender stereotypes - although I believe that they aren't as far towards the stereotypes as the toymakers would have us believe. My nephews also engaged in less masculine behaviour at various points when they were younger. But most kids generally go with the stereotyped toys, just because it's easier. It's like being ambidextrous or bisexual - you just end up being right-handed or living a heterosexual life - because it's easier that way, and most of us go with the flow.

How do I feel about the Lego Friends? When I saw the Lego Friends set in my catalogue, I thought "Oh Lego, why have you betrayed me!" But my fella (who always plays a great devil's advocate) pointed out that I'd quite happily bought the Star Wars Lego sets for my nephews this Christmas and hadn't complained about gender stereotyping there. My (rather poor) response was that stereotyping when it's done on boys isn't as bad because boys' toys tend to emphasise power - so that'll help to prime them to get powerful positions in society.

But he's right. If I'm going to get annoyed about Lego Friends, I should also be annoyed about all other toys, including the way that the other Lego sets are marketed at boys.

Anyway, I've signed the petition. I doubt it'll change anything. Feminists have such a bad PR these days that even the word "feminist" seems to evoke visions of angry, irrational, man-hating lesbians.

What the Lego Friends represents to me then - is a kind of final rejection of feminism - and a triumph of the New World Order - where men are men, and women are women.

Can I be your friend?

2012-01-06T15:59:00.008Z

Back in the 1990s/early 2000s, before I had a blog, I used to have a website where I posted up reviews of some of my favourite tv programs and films - the trashier and campier the better. The website is long gone, but I still have those reviews on my computer. Here's a review of my favourite Andy Warhol film, Women in Revolt.

Women in Revolt

"This incest has gone on long enough! We've been living in sin darling. And I'm sick of it. Sick and fed up. Of you. And ALL MEN! How do you like THEM apples?"

In 1967 damaged, disenfranchised, groovy, Valerie Solanis wrote the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, and for, her next trick went on to shoot Andy Warhol, thereby earning a lot more than those cliched 15 minutes of fame. The central thesis of the book was that the male is a "biological accident..an incomplete female...a walking abortion". And with the invention of sperm banks, there is no longer any need for men. Valerie gave a copy of her Manifesto (and her play Up Your Ass) to Warhol's crowd of vampires, who had a good laugh and then made sure that she was firmly, irrevocably socially excluded. People have been shot for a lot less.

Three years later, we have "Andy Warhol presents a film by Paul Morrissey", entitled "Women In Revolt". The titular women are actually Warhol's "super-stars" who started life as men: Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn. In the film, the three women are pivotal players in a women's movement, who decide to give up men, become lesbians and abandon their careers. Their group is called PIG (Politically Involved Girls). I have a feeling that this film owes a LOT to the SCUM Manifesto and poor Valerie.

Like all the other Warhol/Morrissey films, it's badly put together, badly acted, with poor sound and film quality. Actually, "acting" is probably an unfair word to use as many of these films seem to have improvised dialogue - which isn't neccesarily a bad thing, when done properly (it isn't here though). In many ways this film is almost unwatchable, especially the first time you view it. But give it a chance, make judicious use of "fast-forward" and you'll be rewarded.

What is it about plotlines that feature three camp women (and my tendency to review them)? First it was Valley of the Dolls, then Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. I even based my own soap opera, Doll Soup around three females. So it seems only fitting that Candy, Jackie and Holly should be featured here. Candy is my favourite. She plays a classy, jaded Long Island socialite who wears a sleek black turban-hat in many of her scenes, and seems to be the only one who is actually acting. (At least she has good diction, meaning that most of her words are easy to understand.) Candy has a strong jawline and perfect poise. She's beautiful. Her tired, laid-back style is perfect, and apart from the scene where she is sexually compromised by a film agent, her scenes are the most fun to watch. Whether it's berating her incestuous brother, lording it over the other members of PIG, or modelling as a "blonde on a bum trip" (or even a bum on a blonde trip as one cast member succinctly puts it), she's the ultimate scene stealer. I love her.

Jackie plays a "frigid, middle-class" woman, with frizzy unattractive hair (long before the invention of conditioner), a habit of talking out of the corner of her mouth, and an earnest, confused way of speaking. She's the lynch-pin of PIG, and eventually the one who will betray them all (by using PIG money to have sex with male prositutes). My favourite Jackie scene is near the beginning of the film where she disgustedly sprays air-freshener onto the arm-pits, crotch and bottom areas of her naked male "slave".

I'm afraid I wasn't too impressed with the trashy character played by Holly Woodlawn, who actually scared me several times. However, her contribution to the film is severely marred by the fact that she is playing a nymphomaniac who often disrupts scenes by attempting to have sex with other characters. Her delivery seems to be full of screamed lines which are hard to understand and apt to induce a headache. When she ended up as a drunken street-person, urinating in doorways and falling over in the snow, I was applauding.

The idea of getting men to play the revolting (in both senses of the word) women is interesting. Like so many of these "art-house" films, the "message", if indeed there is one, is never very clear. Was Warhol having a little joke at the expense of the Women's Movement (the same could even be argued of Solanis)? Or was he subverting the concept of "women" or "the oppressed" by having transvestites (traditionally one of the most oppressed identities in our lovely western society) play the lead roles? There's a scene early on where Jackie tries (unsuccessfully) to explain the "movement" to one of the many anonymous, passive men who litter the film. The camera goes for a close-up and it's a big mistake as everything goes out of focus. Was this merely a case of bad camera work and lazy editing, or it the temporary poor focus supposed to be a commentary on Jackie's ability to make sense of the women's movement? Am I trying to read too much into these things again? I think the answer to all these questions is "yes".

Not a lot actually seems to happen in the film, apart from the women sitting around, complaining about men and exchanging horror stories along the lines of "I was raped when I was two!", "A policeman invaded my house and sucked my toes!" etc. Their most direct protest occurs when two of their group take to the streets and attempt to administer an unwanted enema to a man who's digging up the road. The inevitable comparisons to John Waters always ensue...

I particularly liked Jackie's scene with "Mr America", a muscle-bound young man. When, in the middle of a painful, humiliating sexual encounter Mr America asks if she is coming, Jackie comes back with "I think I'm going". Also amusing is the final sequence with Jackie screaming abuse at her baby, Holly as a falling-down drunk, and Candy, finally having made it all the way to Hollywood, where she gets a grilling from a newspaper reporter which ends in them both scuffling on the floor.

Great Lines
Jackie pulls Candy's hair
Candy: Ow! That is not a wig!

Holly: But women will be FREE!

Candy: So don't tell me where I go and what I do. I'll go to each and every meeting I want to. You've made me old before my time!

Holly: They're gonna think we're lesbians!
Jackie: No! They're not gonna think we're lesbians Holly! A school-teacher and a model? Those are lesbians?

The girls are trying to get a reluctant Candy to join the cause.
Betty: Do you know what happened to me?
Candy: Well, how would I know?

Jackie: Well women's lib says that we should have our say too!
Mr America: Fuck you. That's the whole trouble with you broads. You don't stop talking.

Jackie: Women's Liberation has shown me just WHO I AM and just what I can be!

Holly: Mother-fucker! I hate you! I'm tired of looking at you. Tired! Arsehole! Men! I hate men! You! I hate you!

Candy: I'm young. I want to live. We're rich. We're famous. We're beautiful....and miserable!

2012-01-05T16:14:00.007Z

1930s hats are the next big thing apparently

Back in Lancaster again, which always looks and feels a lot smaller after NYC. Ironically, because Lancaster (population 46,000) has a cathedral, it's a city, whereas Greenwich Village - which has towering residential apartments of many floors, gets to be a village. Everyone wants to be something they ain't.

One disconcerting aspect of being in America for me is that people talk louder than they do in the UK. When my fella and I are out in public, we mumble to each other so that nobody within a mile's distance will be able to hear our conversation and realise how weird we are. Unfortunately, this frequently means that even we can't hear each other, so if anybody did successfully eavsedrop on us, all they'd hear would be "what?"

On the other hand, whenever we hear anybody else say anything audible in public, we quietly make fun of them. NYC is therefore an endless source of opportunity, as everybody is so articulate and interesting - and they all do everything bigger, as if they're in a play and want to ensure that even the people in the back row get their money's worth. They like the attention, and really, it would be churlish of me not to give it to them.

What is weird though is the practice of talking or thinking aloud, which appears to mark out a large difference between British and American people. We passed a man searching for something in his wallet. "Where's my damn money!!" he shouted out loudly, voicing his thoughts. And when my fella was innocently crossing the road, another man shouted "You're all walking into the path of death!" So, sometimes, I felt like I had wandered into an episode of the Twilight Zone having temporarily being granted the ability to hear everybody's thoughts. (One channel was showing a Twilight Zone marathon over the New Year period, and that was actually an episode.)

We spent a lot of time on this holiday walking up and down Bleeker Street, which is full of interesting little shops. I had wanted to see the Magnolia Bakery - which is credited as kicking off the "cupcake craze" which has even got to Lancaster. I was a bit disappointed to see that it looked a bit shabby from the outside - and had net curtains that made it look like a rundown cafe in a British seaside resort.

Another cupcake place called Molly's was nicer - although every time we went in, we had to get take-out as it was so busy (and we went in a lot). And the lady serving kept validating our choices "that's my favourite one!", which is a bit much when all you're buying is a cupcake.

I noticed several shops on Bleeker Street that were selling 1930s style hats, so I suspect that once this trend works it way round the block, that's what I'll be wearing in 2015. Despite liking the hats, I didn't buy one because had I done so, I would have immediately killed the trend.

This sinful billboard was right by where we were staying.

Not of God! Not Christian! Dark-sided!

I saw it and was instantly morally corrupted. I think I saw those two chaps at the gym I used while I was there. In fact, everyone looked like that at my gym (except me). The effect was even more demoralising than usual.

But when I got home I had an email from someone who had seen me in a cafe in Chelsea and recognised me from this blog.

It wasn't Andersen Cooper. But I'm still pleased.

2011-12-30T22:19:00.002Z

Uncruised

I walked past CNN's Anderson Cooper today in the very gay area of Chelsea and he didn't even give me a second look.

2011-12-28T23:19:00.003Z

Little Dogs

I am having my annual post-Christmas in New York week. Rather than staying in a 40 storey hotel in Times Square, we are in an apartment in Greenwich Village. It costs $2000 a week and is basically a corridor with furniture. You could only use the bath if you were appearing in the Wizard of Oz as a Munchkin. No cats will ever be swung in it. It is a very old building and between 5am and 10pm the pipes cry out as if continuously in pain. But it is only a few doors away from the Stonewall Tavern - so I like the feeling that I am walking down the same streets where angry drag queens defiantly did chorus-line kicks and set the birth of Gay Liberation in motion (in America at least - in the UK, it all happened anyway, and with a lot less fuss and excitement, but that's one of the many differences between the two countries).

New York no longer feels unfamilar - this must be my 15th or so trip here, but it always feels different. And one of the things about visiting a place every 12 months, is that it is different slightly from the last time I was here. There was one year when all the men had beards. That fad seems to have died out thankfully (they're so scratchy), but the latest fashion appears to be little dogs. I saw about 10 this morning, most of them being walked by 30 and 40 something gay men.

I hate little dogs - while I like dogs generally, if I was ever to have one, it would have to be capable of killing someone or at least maiming them. All that little dogs can do is annoy and wee themselves with excitement every ten minutes or so. But it's sort of heartening that the gay men of Greenwich Village have all taken it upon themselves to make a commitment to something other than their pectoral muscles. I have a theory that people who get little dogs actually want to have children and settle down. The little dogs are like those little stablising wheels on bikes that children have. And the next stage will be actual long term relationships and real children. So my prediction is that in two years time I'll be coming here and seeing lots of gay men with pushchairs (or strollers in their language).

And there'll be a sad dog pound somewhere in Brooklyn which will reverebrate with the sound of a thousand abandoned little dogs.

2011-12-17T21:41:00.002Z

My first Stephen King novel (in about 20 years)

When I was 13 I joined one of those mail-order book clubs, where you got books at a slightly discounted price, as long as you committed to purchasing 6 a year. The book club sold mystery and horror books, so for the next few years, I fed on a diet of VC Andrews, James Herbert and Stephen King.

Stephen King was my favourite author - speed-reading was my normal pace, so his enormous books kept me busy for at the best part of a weekend. Although I remember one particularly wet Sunday when I hadn't been outside all day, but had read about 400 pages in one sitting. I went into the kitchen to get a drink, then opened my eyes to realise I was lying on the floor. I'd passed out without realising. It was probably a blood pressure thing, and it's the only time that's happened.

The first book I read by him was The Mist - a brilliant, spooky, doomed novella - similar to an HP Lovecraft story, where a group of small-town Americans get trapped in a supermarket when a weird mist full of monsters from another dimension descends over the them. The horror within the supermarket was more disturbing than the horror outside - with the microcosm of society breaking down pretty quickly as the frightened shoppers fell under the thrall of religious fundamentalist Mrs Carmody - who starts demanding EXPIATION! and blood sacrifices. King's talent is in writing about ordinary, recognisable people who are put in bizarre situations. The Mist was made as a film a few years ago - and is one of my top 10 films.

I also enjoyed King's novels that he'd written under the name Richard Bachmann - particularly two that were set in futuristic dystopias and involved game shows where the contestants die (this was the 80s and while we're not there yet, King definitely was onto someting). One was made into an awful film (The Running Man), the other (The Long Walk), probably can't ever be filmed - it's a totally depressing story anyway.

I largely abandoned Stephen King when I went to university. His novels seemed a bit too folksy, at times verging on syrupy, and I didn't have time to read anything but Psychology journal articles anwyay. But I was intrigued by his latest novel 11.22.63 - which is about a man who time travels from the present day to the 1950s - with the aim of preventing the assassination of JFK. It's another massive doorstep of a book (or it would be had I not bought the online version), and it took me a good week to finish. For longstanding King fans, there's a cameo from two characters from one of his most well-known books: It. The story is less horror, but more suspense with a love story, as the hero ends up falling in love with a woman from the 50s. The past is painted as almost idyllic place - apart from the racism and sexism - where cars are better and people are friendlier. The time travel plot device is interesting - it is possible to go back and forward in time through a portal, although every time you return to the 1950s, everything has been reset and you appear at exactly the same moment as before. There's also a weird tramp-like man who seems aware of the time traveller in a way that other people are not. Another interesting aspect of time travel is that the past is "obdurate" - it does not like to be changed, and the more you try to change it, the more events will appear to randomly conspire to stop you. (The past is a bit like my 39 year old body - it wants to be a certain shape and size and will conspire against me if I try to change it too much.)

The hero is further hampered by the conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination. He can't just kill Lee Harvey Oswald at any point, because he may not have been acting alone. So he has to wait until just a few weeks beforehand, living in the past for 5 years until he can be certain he's got the right man. Of course, as we don't know for certain what happened, we have to suspend our disbelief and go along with King's version as being the right one. But if you can buy time travel, then you may as well go along with the rest of it.

Time travel is not a new concept (and King draws on the Ray Bradbury short story "A Sound of Thunder" - where the idea of the "butterfly effect" comes from), but I liked what King did with it. And now I might even give "Under the Dome" a go.