Today

The evilest of ALL evil robots are...

2006-10-20T10:55:00.000+01:00

THE DALEKS

Yep, there's no denying it. When it comes to being down right evil these guys not only take first prize but they laser the other contestants, melt down the awards, burn the village hall to the ground, kill everyone nearby, and their families, and their friends, and their friends' families and then take off and nuke the entire village from orbit. They're bad. REALLY VERY BAD. They're also exceedingly awesome. They always scared the beeJesus out of me as a child and yet I was utterly mesmerised by them. What were they? What was inside them? Why were they so evil?

Genetically engineered to be free of any emotions except hate and obedience by Davros, chief scientist of the Kaled race, a Dalek is essentially a slimy, tentacled blob that's placed inside and symbiotically bonded to a powerful one-blobbed tank where they live out their psychopathic existence. It was back to this original idea that new Doctor Who executive producer Russel T. Davis & writer Robert Shearman looked when bringing the monsters back onto our television screens in 2005. There had been a long-running and very public battle between the BBC & the estate of Terry Nation (Terry had wisely set this up so that he could protect his beloved Daleks from becoming over-used and out of his control). Thankfully the BBC convinced the estate that they'd treat the Daleks with respect and Russel & Robert took the very brave decision not to change the Dalek's appearance and make him more modern but to rely on the essence of the thing and the story to make them terrifying again. And boy did they succeed. The episode's lone Dalek, when deprived of any contact with, or instructions from, other Daleks went on one hell of a major-league killing spree before committing suicide (in a surprisingly poignant scene) when faced with it's own loneliness.

You see that's what always made the Daleks so scary to me, it wasn't the design, that was always pretty basic and old-school, it was the their total disgust and contempt for anything that wasn't Dalek, anything that was different had to be destroyed. In the words of the 9th Doctor, Christopher Ecclestone, "They're the ultimate in racial cleansing."
Never was this better portrayed than in the series' finale when a squad of Daleks breaks off from the main body attacking the space station 'Satellite 5' to travel down to floor zero simply to massacre the assembled un-armed humans cowering there. They posed no threat and neither were they important but they were different and therefore had to die. Brutal.

These nightmarish wheelie-bins, with their death-ray, single eye stork, incongruous sink plunger and maniacal high-pitched, voice sent children the length and breadth of the country diving behind the sofa whenever they trundled out screaming and shouting for us to obey them or they'd exterminate us. And this was one of the things that make the Daleks so striking. Like the program that spawned them (and don't forget this show was aimed at kids) the Daleks are all about death. They shouted, schemed and killed. And they killed this a lot. One episode, Resurrection of the Daleks, (aired during Peter Davison's tenure as the doctor) has a higher body count than The Terminator with 7 people killed in the first minute of the first episode and a total of 60-76 dead by the close of the story. That's higher than all 5 Friday the 13th films combined! What made matters worse (or better - depending on your point of view) was that they were apparently indestructible. Just when it looked like the Doc had done away with them for good, up they'd pop again just as crazed and angry as before.

Davros in his travelling commode

Brainchild of Terry Nation, one of the writers of BBC's Doctor Who, the Daleks first appeared on our screens in 1963 to pit their wits against the first Doctor William Hartnell. They were an immediate success and consequently appeared again and again battling every incarnation of the Doctor (except Paul McGann's eighth) rapidly becoming his number one nemesis in the eyes of the nation. So much so, in fact, that Doctor Who without the Daleks became unimaginable. It'd be like fish without chips, C-3PO without R2-D2, Ant without Dec or Richard but not Judy. Such has been their impact on us here in the UK that they've managed something truly unique and moved beyond the television show and into popular culture to become recognisable even to those who have never seen Doctor Who. The name 'Dalek' entered the Oxford English dictionary and the Collins Dictionary defines it rather broadly as "any of a set of fictional robot-like creations that are aggressive, mobile, and produce rasping staccato speech". The name is also used in a metaphorical sense to describe people, usually figures in authority, who act like robots unable to break their programming. John Birt, the Director-General of the BBC from 1992 to 2000, was called a "croak-voiced Dalek" by playwright Dennis Potter in August 1993. They've been the subject of countless fan-films, have made appearances in adverts, starred in video games and even have many books and audio plays written about them. They even made it to the big screen. Twice.

So there you have it. The Daleks. The evilest robot of all.

Todays evil robot is...

2006-10-17T13:56:00.000+01:00

MEGATRON

YEAAAAAAAH! Now we're talking. This guy is just brilliant in every way. Leader of the evil Decepticons he was ruthless, dangerous, violent and, in a departure from the usual cartoon villains that populated our televisions at that time, he wasn't a cowardly custard. No hiding at the back for this guy whilst he sent his troops in, no siree Bob. Cavalier with the lives of his men he may have been but he too got right on in there and gave the Autobots a damn good slapping. With his signature massive gun attached to his arm, sneering glare, massive height and cool raspy voice, Megatron was a sight to behold to a small kid.

For those of you who don't know (and where in the Hell have you been - in a parallel world you freakazoids!) the Transformers were a robot race who could change their appearance and transform into something completely different. Normally this was some kind of vehicle such as a car or a plane, but occasionally, as was the case with Megatron here, it was something totally unrelated like a gun. The Decepticons had been engaged in a civil war on their home planet of Cybertron with the heroic Autobots (who were a kind of resistance movement) which had raged for years and somehow or other they'd crashed here on a pre-historic Earth in their space-vessel the Ark. There they lay in a dormant volcano until an eruption kick-started the ships computer which set about waking up it's inhabitants and altering them so that they could transform into Earth vehicles as a disguise. From this point on their war raged on our planet as both factions tried to rid themselves of the other, the Decepticons looking for a fuel source called Energon with which to destroy the Autobots and re-take Cybertron, the Autobots trying to protect us and vanquish the Decepticons. Brilliant.

The Transformers burst into my young, sugar-crazed, daydream-soaked life every Saturday morning as a brilliant piece of marketing disguised as a cartoon and marked the beginning of the whole merchandising thing that's everywhere now. It certainly worked and all over the country kids would save up their pennies and pester the living daylights out of their parents to buy them Optimus Prime, Starscream or some other fantastic robot that transformed into a vehicle. Later it became a comic both here and in the U.S. (though ours was better). It was this format that introduced me to the wonder of comics and I have deep, halcyon memories of a wee dark haired, fresh faced kid called Benji sitting on the bottom step staring at the letterbox willing with all my soul for the postman to deliver the latest edition of the comic into my day. I even had a drawing published in it once and won a Bumblebee mini-Autbot toy. I still have it and every time I see it, it helps me step back onto the bottom of our stairs to sit next to that happy little kid.

I, like everyone I knew, was far from immune to all this rampant marketing and couldn't wait to get my grubby little, chocolate-stained, mud-encrusted mitts on a new Transformer. They were always pretty much the only thing on my Birthday & Christmas lists. Consequently I built up quite a collection of the toys but ironically (given how much I revered him) Megatron was never amongst them.

You see Megatron was not the best Transformer, he suffered from an inherent flaw that as a kid I had great difficulty with. He turned into a gun. Here was a 50-foot high robot that could apparently transform himself into a weapon that was only 20+ cms long. Even as a kid I could see this was a bit daft. Sentient robots from outer space transforming into jets and cars required a leap of imagination, a willing suspension of disbelief if you like. But robots that could transform AND shrink... no. Unfortunately this terrible niggle also tainted my love of Soundwave (who I did own and thought to be the greatest of all my Transformers). He was an awesome and beautiful robot that turned into a cassette player. Killer robot with big gun and cool monotone voice = loads of fun. Cassette deck with tapes = no fun.
Despite this obvious flaw Megatron still ruled the cartoon and comic roost as far as I was concerned and I was secretly pleased when the manutacturers of the toys, Hasbro, changed the toy's alternate mode (and therefore his characters appearance in the cartoon & comic) from a gun to a tank. Much cooler and more realistic thank you Mr. Japanese Toy Manufacturer.

Galvatron

Now something very strange happened to Megatron back in 1986 with the release of the feature length animated film that was Transformers the Movie. Megatron was 'killed' by the leader of the Autobots Optimus Prime. However, after a run in with Orson Welles in the shape of the giant, planet-devouring Transformer Unicron, Megatron was re-tooled, re-designed, re-voiced and sent back to kick Auto-butt in the shape of Galvatron. Megatron the baddest Transformer had been transformed. Galvatron was good, he looked evil enough, turned into a big ol' laser cannon, and sounded just like Leonard Nimoy but he just wasn't as cool.

In the upcoming 'Transformers' film (not to be confused with the brilliant animated film) Megatron again reprises his role as the Decepticon leader though his appearance has been changed drastically. A recent leaked concept image showed Megatron to be some kind of spiky, alien, cable-robot. Not cool at all. Thankfully, Frank Welker (who voiced Megatron in the original cartoon and is back to provide the voice in the new film) has said that his head has now changed. There's been a lot of fandom-based rumour that this design will be a pre-Earth Megatron and his appearance will change later in the film. I certainly hope so.

Megatron, the coolest, baddest and best evil cartoon robot of all time.

Todays evil robot is...

2006-10-16T14:03:00.000+01:00

The Cybermen

These tin-plated, Doctor-worrying, gold-avoiding menaces are one of Doctor Who's most persistent enemies, turning up again and again to meddle with the universe, terrorise people, harass the Doc and generally bugger things up for all and sundry. I love these guys, they're damn near perfect in the evil-robot stakes and, again, as a child I would've swapped my entire Star Wars figure collection (except for Boba Fett, Chewie and that bum-faced one of course) to be one.
The Cybermen are in actuality a cyborg race originating from Earth's twin planet Mondas (left that one of the Guardian's free 'Our Solar System' wall chart didn't they) who were originally humanoid but took to 'upgrading' themselves by adding mechanical parts in a quest to reach perfection. Part of this upgrade was to ditch emotions and become fault-free. They then set about spanning the universe smashing anyone who got in their way, conquering whole worlds and upgrading their inhabitants. They'd march around screaming, "Resistance is futile." (Sound familiar to you Trekkies out there?)

The design of the Cybermen has changed throughout the years from a kind of mummified man with an accordion on his chest through to blokes in silver jump-suits with bit's of hoover attached to the legs, the '80s saw the Cybermen involved in pure bacofoil silliness (but with a cool helmet) but thankfully the recent redesign made them more mechanical, imposing and terrifying than ever before. Throughout all these changes the scariest thing about a Cyberman to me as a kid was always the uniformity. They all looked, sounded and acted the same. Sure the Cyber-leader always stood out in some minor way by having a big, see-through head showing his brain or black tubes on his helmet but they were essentially all equal and they acted like one vast machine army.

During the run of the original show, the Cybermen were pretty much indestructible but for one weakness, gold. Yep, like me, they hated gold. It clogged up their airways you see and they couldn't breathe. This started out all fine and dandy as a quirky Achilles-heel but then the '80s came along and (as always happened in the '80s) everything went a bit shit. Suddenly the Cybermen were being killed off left, right and centre by gold-tipped arrows, guns that fired gold powder and even gold coins. The vicious, evil, mechanical crazy men of the universe were even defeated by a weedy-maths-boffin-child when he scratched his gold medal against one's chest. (He died himself though when the spacecraft he was on crashed so it's not all bad.) It took Russel T. Davies' new Doctor Who to redress the balance and get them back to their arse-kicking glory days. Gone was the silly gold allergy, gone were the hoover based outfits but the robotic, nightmarish, all alike, kill-happy, emotion-free, freaky voiced monsters were back and well and truly kicking bottom. This time they were back to their scary selves, terrifying Earth in a parallel universe and then later in our universe where they even got to square up against the Daleks.
Awesome.

Todays evil robot is...

2006-10-13T08:13:00.000+01:00

The Terminator

Well, her certainly looks the most evil-roboty of all the evil robots so far doesn't he. He was a bit of a sod too when it came to butchering people. The Terminator is essentially a superior killing machine of great strength and durability encased in living flesh so that he can kill better. The resultant cyborg is sent back to the '80s by Skynet (a kind of man-made, computer, uber-intelligence that rules Earth in the future) to kill Sarah Connor who will eventually have a child that will lead the resistance to the machines back in the future. Still with me? Good, well hang on tight 'cos this is where it gets bumpy. Back in the future, John Connor (Sarah's son) learns that Arnie has been sent back to kill his mum before she has him and sends back a bloke to stop the Terminator. Now this bloke (Michael Biehn) is clearly not much of a match for the robot/Arnie death machine and he soon gets the chop but not before he's had a bit of nooky with Sarah Connor thus getting her preggers with the bloke who sends him back to protect her. Still there, well hold on...

Eventually Sarah traps Arnie and the film ends with the future looking rosy because her baby is fine and the Terminator got squashed flat. Or so it would seem...

In Terminator 2. Judgement Day it's revealed that Skynet (remember them) actually came about when the remains of the Terminator were found in the machine room where Sarah rather stupidly left him lying around for any well meaning but misguided, techno-genius to find. It also turns out that Skynet, knowing they'd failed, sent back the even more serious and fiersome T-1000 (who's a liquid metal terminator and can turn his arms into big, fuck-off knives and stuff) to do in John Connor in his bratty, American, teenage, motorcycle riding, parent-annoying years. John Connor in the future knows this however (by virtue of it being an historical fact to him) and sends back a second protector in the form of a captured and reprogrammed Arnie-style terminator. I don't know about you but just typing this load of old nonsense is doing my swede in.

Naturally old iron-balls Arnie wins and they manage to stop the creation of Skynet too which puts a smile on everyone's faces.

But hang on a minute. Who's that foxy, naked chick that's just materialised out of thin air in a ball of lightning and smoke? Why it's Terminator 3!

Now Skynet is clearly not a happpy puppy (computerised puppy) and he's knocked up this new experimental Terminator (the T-X to be precise) who can create proper weapons, like laser guns and flamethrowers, inside of herself and he's despatched her through time (must be choca-bloc in that ol' time macine room by now) to locate and kill John Connor, his future wife (who's now running about with him) and his lieutenants. But Arnie's back again to stop her. To add yet another wriggle to the crazy, melon-twisting plot Arnie has been sent back this time not by John, but by his wife! Arnie reveals this particular nugget of craziness to John Connor and then goes on to tell him that he was reprogrammed by his missus shortly after he himself killed Mr. Connor. It's all going to Hell in a handcart now isn't it.

In a rather melancholy end to the trilogy, John Connor is tricked by his bird's Dad (who's heading up the Skynet project) into trapping himself in a Cold War-era VIP fallout shelter called Crystal Peak, by making them believe that it is where the Skynet mainframe is located. The nukes fly and the trilogy ends with a glimmer of hope as John takes up the mantel of leader that destiny has marked for him.

Now, for anyone not in a coma, here's a little treat. It's the very first terminator as seen in T3. He's called the T1-8 and I kinda like him.

Todays evil robot is...

2006-10-12T08:10:00.000+01:00

RoboCop 2

When a deranged, junkie, gang-leader is killed in a shootout with the Police and RoboCop, the nefarious Omni Consumer Products (OCP) have his brain put inside their new prototype robot that they want to use to replace RoboCop. RoboCop2 was bigger, stronger and cooler than RoboCop, he had a huge fuck-off gun, big cutty-spikey hand things, a little grabby claw thing that he broke his bird's neck with, an adiction to drugs and a Jesus complex. This guy was B.A.D. He smashed up a scale model of the city (which must've taken some poor sod ages to build) and then went on a rampage blowing up all and sundry just to get to a canister of jelly (drugs apparently) whilst simultaneously kicking RoboCop six ways from Sunday when he got in the way.
RoboCop still beat him though. And ED-209 still looked cooler.

Todays evil robot is...

2006-10-11T14:01:00.000+01:00

The torture droid 8D8 from Star Wars Episode 6: The Return of the Jedi

This guy isn't very nice at all. I mean he tortured that poor little box-robot thing. You know the one, he said 'Kronk'... something or other and was in Star Wars in the Jawa's sand-boat-tank-crawler thing. Well anyway, he tortured him by burning the soles of his feet with what looks like an oven grill after he'd spun him around for a while. You could here him screaming and begging for mercy and everything. I felt so sorry for the wee little robot, the way the hot element came down on his metal feet and... hang on... isn't he a robot?

Todays evil robot is...

2006-10-10T08:15:00.000+01:00

The A.B.C Warrior from Judge Dredd the movie

Again technically not an 'evil' robot as he was merely a soldier robot created to serve in the army until Rico Dredd (who's Judge Dredd's evil twin with a slight beer-gut - though how your supposed to know this when he doesn't have the tell-tale goatee beard that all evil twins have I don't know) picks him up in Ian Drury's junk shop and activates him. It's pretty cool the way that the robot's pistons fire-up as he gradually starts to move, steam hissing out of his joints and eyes glowing. It's especially cool the way he asks for his status and then growls "WARRRR". Later in the film he machine guns a load of Judges in a street and tears the arms and legs off that bloke from 'Das Boot', Jurgen Prochnow. He got his cumupence though when the weedy comic-relief character pulled all the wires out of the back of his neck. (Out of the robot's neck, not the weedy comic bloke.) All in all, not a very nice 'bot. Though I love his lopsided jaw... kinda makes him look like he's chewing or maybe he's just had a stroke.

The A.B.C. Warriors first appeared in the U.K. comic 2000 A.D. and this particular bad-boy is a dead-ringer for the comic-strips lead character Hammerstein, (though this film version is missing his trademark hammer hand).

Todays evil robot is...

2006-10-09T07:56:00.000+01:00

Ash

Ash (played by Ian Holm) was the science officer aboard the Nostromo in Ridley Scott's Alien and was indirectly responsible for the deaths of all the crew except for warrant officer Ellen Ripley. Ash begins the film as a quiet and mild-mannered man though Ripley has her suspicions about his true intentions. Suspicions that turn out to be well founded when it's revealed, in a very graphic and shocking way, that Ash is in fact an android and that he sweats milk.

Up until this point things had been pretty plain-sailing for this happy-go-lucky space misfits bunch. Believing that 'Mother' (the ships computer) had awoken them from their hypersleep to carry out a routine check of an unidentified signal apparently eminating from a vessel on the surface of a nearby planet, they toddle off all smiley and curious to check it out. Then - BAM - it all goes tits up. John Hurt gets a squiggley, clawy moster on his face that lays and egg in him. John bursts whilst at dinner and a penis with teeth pops out of him and scuttles off. Sweet. The titular alien grows bigger and nastier deep in the bowels of the ship until he gets hungry and starts wolfing down the crew in some of the most tense and scariest scenes ever commited to film. I used to have nightmares about being stuck in an airshaft with the damned thing like Dallas.

Whilst all of this is going on Ripley discovers that Weyland-Yutani Corporation (yet another nefarious, evil mega-company that always crop up in this type of film) knew about the possible danger and instructed Ash to bring the creature back to Earth no matter the cost. Special Order 937 instructed Ash that all the crew were expendable, from that point on everything he did he did to protect the alien organism. Now the crew have an alien, a missing cat and a dodgy robot to deal with. It never rains eh...

One of the finest scenes in the film comes when Ripley discovers what Ash is up to and Ash tries to do away with her by giving her a good slapping and then, in a very Freudian gesture, tries to kill her by forcing a rolled up magazine down her throat. Luckily Lambert & Parker (two other members of the crew, not a passing accountancy firm) are on hand to help and Parker knocks Ash's block off revealing that his innards are in fact full of mayonnaise, spaghetti and fishing floats. Human he 'aint.
Ash rolling around the room vomiting white fluid whilst 'spazzing-out' and attacking Ripley, Parker & Lambert is one hell of a gruesome scene and when they switch him back on to question him about the alien's possible weakness, his evilness and lack of consideration for the crew become apparent when he calmly says "I can't lie to you about your chances, but (smirking) you have my sympathies." Brilliant.

Todays evil robot is...

2006-10-06T10:30:00.000+01:00

The Replicant Roy Batty from Bladerunner

In the gritty, neon-drenched, dirty, slightly knackered not-too-distant future vision of director Ridley Scott, Roy Batty was the leader of a group of Nexus-6 type replicants that escaped to Earth from the 'off-World colonies' to confront their creator Eldon Tyrell and force him to extend their lifespanbeyond the programmed 4 years. The replicants are artificial beings created to carry out dangerous or degrading work (one of the group is labeled a 'basic pleasure model') and their short lifespan is a failsafe against their developing unstable emotions.
You see replicants are illegal on Earth because of an earlier rebellion and so Bladerunners (part of a specialist Police unit) are used to track them down and 'retire' them. Harrison Ford is the Bladerunner Rick Deckard who's out to see off Roy and his gang. Bladerunner is truly a visually stunning film though it is a little 'weighty' and confused the Hell out of me the first time I saw it.

Rutger Hauer is perfectly cast here as Roy, I mean look at him - he's got the whole scary eye thousand-yard stare thing going on AND he's holding a dove (the symbol of peace) despite having just kicked the living-shit out of Mr. Ford. Despite being a crazy dude his plight is a very human one, he has four years of life and wants more, he has more to see, more to do who wouldn't want to live? His final words were so very moving, "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams, glitter in the dark near Tannhauser Gate. All those... moments will be lost... in time... like tears... in rain. Time... to die."

Bye Roy. I kinda liked you you crazy, cripple-killing, eye-ball playing, Head-squashing, Harrison-kicking madman you.

Todays evil robot is...

2006-10-05T08:58:00.000+01:00

K.A.R.R. from Knight Rider.

K.A.R.R, or Knight Automated Roving Robot, was created by Knight Industries and was the prototype for Michael Knight's vehicle K.I.T.T. but when his CPU was installed a progamming error made him nasty and intent only on self-preservation. He appeared in just two Knight Rider shows, though I only remember one particular piece of one show when K.I.T.T. & K.A.R.R. had a game of 'chicken' on a bridge resulting in K.A.R.R. swerving off said bridge and generally knackering himself up so only his CPU voicebox-come-graphic equaliser doodah remained winking away at the end of the show. I seem to remember K.A.R.R. being exactly the same vehicle as K.I.T.T. but slightly shinier. He also had a more funky voice box and a deeper (and therefore 'eviler' voice) than K.I.T.T. which was voiced by the brilliant Peter Cullen who also voiced Optimus Prime.
Here's a sample of his voice.
There was also an evil truck called Goliath in Knight Rider driven by an evil David Hasselhoff (God, can anyone dare imagine such a thing?) but I can't remember if there was anything special or computery about Goliath.

Open the pod bay doors HAL

2006-10-04T12:07:00.000+01:00

Just found this brilliant clip of HAL being stubborn and scary.

Todays evil robot is...

2006-10-04T08:31:00.000+01:00

HAL 9000

HAL 9000 needs no introduction really but for those of you who aren't familiar with this little wonder he was the super computer aboard the Discovery One in Stanley Kubrik's masterwork 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL was embued with human personality traits and a very soothing voice and for the most part was a kind of benign colleague of massive intelligence and friend to the other crewmembers Frank Poole & Dave Bowman. Unfortunately HAL wigs-out and starts bumping people off. What makes HAL's murderous streak so fascinating however is the fact that he's so lifeless in appearance (he's just a big red lens) yet his voice is so calm and soothing. HAL is so practical and methodical in his nastiness it's very disquieting. When he uses an empty EVA Pod to cut the oxygen tube on Frank Poole's spacesuit it's done in total silence and the image of Poole scrabbling around in desperation, trying to fix it before floating lifelessly off into space, has stayed with me ever since I first saw it.
Anyhow, Poole gone HAL now switches off the hibernation pods of the scientists on board and locks Dave Bowman out of the ship when he goes to retrieve Poole's body. Bowman forgot his helmet you see and therefore can't use the emergency airlock to get back in. Silly spaceman. He does get back in however by firing himself like a bullet into the airlock and bouncing around for a bit. After that he goes inside HAL to switch him off. Inside HAL is truly beautiful and one of the most memorable sets I've ever seen. He's all shiny and winkie-lighty inside and ickle Dave Bowman turns back and forth all floaty inside him buggering about with switches in a way that would definitely invalidate the warranty if it were my laptop for example. Apple 'aint gonna be taking HIM back now Dave that's for sure.
It's actually very moving as HAL 'dies' and reverts to his early programming singing Daisy Bell more and more slowly until. Pop. No more HAL. Bye HAL.

But wait a spacesuit popping, scientist killing, children's song singing minute, what's that coming over the horizon? Why it's that bloke from Jaws and Helen Mirren in 2010: Odyssey Two. There here to find out what happened to Dave Bowman & co. so they reboot HAL and it turns out HAL wasn't a naughty, naughty lens just a very confused one. You see his primary programming meant he had to divulge all important knowledge 'bout his mission to the crew but he'd been ordered to keep it quiet. This sent him into a bit of a lather and he'd reasoned (quite logically) that if there were no one to keep the secret from then everything would be alright. So he killed 'em. See, logical.

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

Todays evil robot is...

2006-10-03T07:33:00.000+01:00

Hector from Saturn 3

Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett (why is she named after some trousers?) on a space-base with a dog. Harvey Keitel in a space suit and helmet straps himself into a chair and opens a big space ceiling thingie and a bloke gets sucked out into space where he explodes(?) upon hitting some bars. Harvey fancies Farrah. Kirk doesn't like Harvey. Harvey builds Hector. Hector is strange and has binoculars for eyes. Hector stamps on dog. Harvey puts his brain in Hector. Hector fancies Farrah. Everyone rushes about a bit. Farrah looks skinny (presumably 'cos of all the running). Kirk tries to destroy robot with his chisel-like chin. Blah, blah blah. Load of ol' rubbish. Good robot though.

Todays evil robot is...

2006-10-01T13:14:00.000+01:00

Mark-13

This one is a little out of left-field I grant you as he's from a largely unseen British sci-fi/horror film called Hardware. Earth in the 21st Century is a desolate, pollution-choked, radioactive wasteland (isn't it always?) and a traveller with some kind of robot hand, finds some bits of old droid lying about the desert and take them home to his bird - as you do. (At this point I recall a cameo byLemmy from Motorhead as a river-cab driver, odd huh?) She's a sculptor you see and these bits o' dodgy looking robot (with a very scary head) would make a very nice ornament for the lounge wouldn't you agree? No, not really. They're all pointy and jagged and were clearly made to be up to no good not perching on a mantel piece. Anyhow missey the artist sets about painting the head, has a quickie in the shower with her fella and then pops off to bed while the obviously nasty robot sculpture sets about reconstructing itself utilising various household utensils. Surprise sur-bleedin-surprise.
It all gets nasty and MARK-13, as he's known, goes postal and it's original program activates. You see it's original job wasn't as a piece of crap artwork but a government built population control device designed to kill anything and anyone who gets in it's way. Nice. So, not being one to go against the grain, this is what it does. It chases the girl and butchers her pervy neighbour, then it does in her fella with the robot hand when he comes home. "Hi honey, I'm home. What's for NNNNNNNNNNNNYAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHH!" - Buzzzzzzzz, chop, kill, stab. Then it finishes someone off in a lift for good measure. Apart from that I can't really remember how it turned out. I'm pretty certain Jill (the sculptor) manages to escape but I've no recollection of how. All in all an odd film. Oh, and Iggy Pop was in it too apparently.

Todays evil robot is...

2006-09-29T19:55:00.000+01:00

GORT from The Day the Earth Stood Still

Technically speaking this fella isn't evil as he was merely the robot bodyguard of space traveller Klaatu who, in 1951, came to Earth in the kind of shiny, shiny flying saucer that bugs rednecks in the 'Deep South', flees the scene of cattle mutilations and drags unsuspecting American idiots inside it's shiny, shiny interior to be anally probed. He'd come with one mission, to warn us against continuing on the path we'd chosen as a species. We were savage, we were warlike and aggresive, we were destroying our very planet and we refused to wear Baco-foil jumpsuits and colanders on our heads. Most of which is particularly apposite at the moment.
Now Klaatu, being a dude from outer space an' all, clearly hadn't been watching much Earth TV 'cos when he stepped out of his saucer and announced to the US Army gathered around that he came in peace, he got shot the silly spaceman.
Anyhow, back to the awsome GORT. He never said anything he just stood there behind Klaatu like a giant armoured sentinel looking all cool and immovable - which he was, until that is, Klaatu got shot. Then he got all vaporisey on their collective arses and lasered all the soldiers' guns. He didn't kill any of them, he just destroyed the weapons. Even the tanks. Brilliant. A pacifist destructo-bot.
I always loved the way his visor opened revealing a slit that pulsed brighter and brighter until 'whummmm...phzzzz'. Everything gets vaporised. Awesome. Go GORT!

"Klaatu barada nikto"

Fantastic Maximillian clip.

2006-09-28T08:07:00.000+01:00

Refering back to my earlier 'Evil Robot' post about Maximillian from The Black Hole, I've found this brilliant clip of the tin-plated badass doing his drilly-death thing on Anthony Perkins.
Enjoy.

Todays evil robot is...

2006-09-25T20:39:00.000+01:00

The Cylons from Battlestar Galactica

These evil, malicious and ruthless beauties graced our screens back in the late '70s & early '80s. As the backbone of the Cylon Alliance they battled humanity and pursued the Galactica (and it's rag-tag fleet of ships) across space with nothing but destruction on their tin-plated minds. As a kid these bad-boys were just the absolute best and I would've given anything to be one. (I had very simple ambitions as a child, I just wanted to be an awesome robot and kick ass.) They were brilliant in their super-shiny armour with their one red eye sweeping from side to side like K.I.T.T. in Knight Rider and their jarring, metallic, monotone voices were plain scary. They flew the second best enemy spaceships (after the Tie-Fighter of course) and they were lead by some kind of bobbly headed monster thing who sat on a huge chair in a massive, featureless vault. Brilliant.

Nowadys in the new Battlestar Galactica they're VERY different. Now they've been adapted to look and act like us so they can infiltrate the Galactica crew. This poses a very difficult problem. On the one hand the old Cylons were just amazing in everyway and by rights every red-blooded male fan of the original show should be spitting feathers at the mere idea of changing 'em. Trouble is, they now look like this.

Do you see the dilemma?

"By your command."

Todays evil robot is...

2006-09-22T11:33:00.000+01:00

Box from Logan's Run.

For those of you out there that haven't seen Logan's Run it's essentially a film about mankind's future where we live enclosed in vast, domed cities. No-one is older than thirty (thanks to an accepted cull disguised as a spiritual ceremony of re-birth), but some seek to escape to the outside world and the mythical place known as 'Sanctuary' and these 'runners' are pursued by the Sandmen who police the city. Logan 5 (an ex-sandman) and Jessica 6 (Jenny Aguter) escape and run into Box in an ice cavern where food is frozen and stored for the city. Box is the robot who runs the 'freezer' and appears kindly at first. It soon becomes apparent however, that Box has malfunctioned and has been killing runners who come this way, he also wants to freeze Logan and Jenny into a permanent ice-sculpture for his collection. A fight ensues and Box is left trapped. Poor Box.

Todays evil robot is...

2006-09-20T10:13:00.000+01:00

Maximillian

To me the star of Disney's brilliant kids sci-fi film 'The Black Hole'. The silent, deadly killer loitered menacingly in the background of the mysterious space vessel the Cygnus until called upon by Dr. Hans Reinhardt to despatch Anthony Perkins with his spinning razor-claws. I'll never forget the way Perkins tries desperately to defend himself by holding his journals in front of him only for Maximillian to advance unhindered and drill through them, scattering shredded paper until Perkins screams and drops to the floor. Brilliant. The image of Reinhardt 'entombed' within the body of Maximillian standing in-front of a Hell-like, firey background is one of my favourite scenes from a sci-fi film.

August 2nd

2006-08-02T13:13:00.000+01:00

You may have noticed there were no pictures yesterday and today, that's because I intended to change my brief to myself every month and, as August is a new month, the 11:59 picture project has now ended. How did it go? Well I'm not sure, some of them I liked and others I thought were frankly dull. I guess that's the problem with imposing such a strict guideline on myself. Hey-ho. Anyhow, I've decided to lay off the daily blog this month as I'm hoping to keep busy with my journalism course but I hope I'll be back next month with another project. For now I'll be paying more attention to my other blog which can be found here.

TTFN.

July 31st

2006-07-31T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 31.

It's not often you get something free from a bank. It's even rarer for that something to be chocolate!

July 30th

2006-07-30T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 30.

Here's the view from Mabel (our car) on the way back from the wedding. Beth took this 'cos I was driving.

July 29th

2006-07-29T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 29.

We went to the wedding of Jo & Steven this weekend and it was a bloody good laugh. No shot for 11:59 a.m. today so here's a shot of people dancing at about 12 midnight.

July 28th

2006-07-28T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 28.

I discovered the panoramic setting on my camera today.

July 27th

2006-07-27T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 27.

Here's a special treat for you today, it's a wee little animation of some jugglers in Hoxton Square where I was working yesterday. Good huh?

July 26th

2006-07-26T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 26.

I was pretty slack today and forgot to take a picture so here's an oldie but a goodie.

July 25th

2006-07-25T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 25

When I popped out to run an errand this lunchtime I was momentarily taken aback by the presence of a seemingly abandoned baby chair outside my flat. I was even more shocked by how strongly Doolally Dog insisted that he should sit in it.

July 24th

2006-07-24T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 24.

Our new housemate. Doolally Dog.

July 23rd

2006-07-23T11:59:00.001+01:00

Picture 23.

My, what a lovely looking sandwich. (This blog is taking on a distinctly 'foodie' theme isn't it.

July 22nd

2006-07-22T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 22.

Some more cakes.

July 21st

2006-07-21T00:59:00.000+01:00

Picture(s) 21.

Beth had a day off today so we went to Bill's for a lovely lunch. Here's a pile of cakes.

And here's some shoes on a telephone wire.

July 20th

2006-07-20T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 20.

Some queer little Japanese things in a private home/gallery on the way to the station.

July 19th

2006-07-19T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 19.

My journalism course has turned up and it's pretty darned hefty. Better get stuck in I guess. Award winning insights into the National cultural psyche don't just write themselves you know.

July 18th

2006-07-18T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 18.

Robots & Roald Dahl.

July 17th

2006-07-17T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 17.

This could conceivably be the worst CD ever created could it not?

July 16th

2006-07-16T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 16.

Neil and his mate selling various medical glassware at Sunday market.

July 15th

2006-07-15T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 15.

This weekend we had our friends down for a big Friday night out. Here's Mike, Tam & Beth in Billie's Café on Saturday morning.

July 14th

2006-07-14T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 14.

My lunch.

July 13th

2006-07-13T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 13.

Today (at work) I was in my own little editing suite. Why, I don't know but it was fun being surrounded by loads of machines that did things I could only imagine.

July 12th

2006-07-12T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 12.

Due to the fact that I was so excited to have a few days work in London, I forgot to take my 11:59 picture today. Beth took this one for me when we got back to Hove station. It's some rather tired looking sandwiches in a fridge.

July 11th

2006-07-11T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 11.

A nice cup of tea and a biccie or two. Perfect.

July 10th

2006-07-10T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture(s) 10.

There's two pictures today oh lucky reader, because this weekend Beth & I did a highly grown-up thing and went to a garden centre to buy pots and some mud to re-pot our indoor plants (Dave is looking a little tired and Megan just won't stay up straight - I think she's been at my vodka). Whilst there we treated ourselves to some new herbs. We got some thyme, lemon thyme, chives, mint, bay and a wee lavendar plant 'cos it smells nice. So I was out on the ol' balco this morning around 12 making sure they're settling in to their new home.

Also this morning, my freebie Marmite recipe mats turned up and they turned out to be even greater than I'd expected as they turned out to be in a rather natty little sleeve that magnetises to the fridge!

July 9th

2006-07-09T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 9.

Beth & I were watching the wonderful Michael Palin on his 'Full Circle' expedition this morning. UKTV History shaow wall to wall Michael on Sundays, cool huh?

July 8th

2006-07-08T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 8.

Our lovely painting that Sarah did for us. Nice innit?

July 7th

2006-07-07T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 7.

Beth & I went to the garden centre today to buy some plants and plant pots. I became a flower pot man, (well my name is Ben).

July 6th

2006-07-06T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 6.

What a marvellous display of handles you have here Mr. Banfield.

July 5th

2006-07-05T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 5.

Some kind of huge sand sculpture near Brighton Marina. I was on the way to a meeting this morning when I saw it.

July 4th

2006-07-04T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 4.

A wee little shoot on Beth's umbrella plant. Looks like a little hand doesn't it?

July 3rd

2006-07-03T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 3.

Me writting this blog.

July 2nd

2006-07-02T11:59:00.000+01:00

Picture 2.

This is the view from our car's sunshine roof as we travelled to a lunch thingie thrown by Beth's Ma.

July 1st

2006-07-01T11:59:00.000+01:00

Well it's July now and I'm about to start a new thing this month. Last month I spoke of an idea I'd had for July and here it is, it's called the 11:59 project. I’m surrounded with photography machinery here, there’s one on my mobile telephone, I have a funky little digital Canon Ixus, we have a digital SLR and I have a Lomo LCA and two other 35mm cameras kicking about somewhere. With all this equipment around me I thought it would be interesting to take a photo of whatever it is I’m up to at 11:59 a.m. each day. Some have said the idea is a good one and others don’t seem too impressed (I’m a little worried, given my current lifestyle, that it may just turn out to be three weeks of ‘Homes Under the Hammer’ or repeated shots of the kettle) but it may be fun all the same.
So, without further ado, here’s Saturday’s snap and the first of 31.

Picture 1.

View from my balcony where I was supping on tea and listening to the seagulls.

June 30th

2006-06-30T23:23:00.000+01:00

Can’t really remember what happened today, I know I had a good productive day with many small goals ticked off of my list. I also know that Beth’s mate Sarah came down to see us and we christened my funky Muji barbeque by cooking some wonderful sausages in the square. Sarah also brought down the painting she’d been working on for me as payment for the website I’d designed for her. It’s a great painting and it’ll look brilliant on our wall.
(Bit of a lacklustre post to end June on this isn’t it? Sorry.)

Tea drunk: 4
Wonderful sossies eaten: 2
Wonderful sossies I wish I’d eaten: 6

June 29th

2006-06-29T21:46:00.000+01:00

This morning I awoke to disturbing news that some kid in a town called Cranleigh down here in the South, has successfully campaigned for a change in government policy because he damaged his eyes at school by looking at the Sun during a solar eclipse. His teachers warned him and the other kids of the dangers of looking directly at the Sun but the wee scamp believes the advice should have been more specific. Now I’m almost certainly going to get shot down in flames for what I’m going to say but this kind of thing worries me. He’s a sweet little 10 year old and (scientific medical advances not withstanding) he’s potentially damaged his eyesight for life, which is a terrible and tragic thing and I feel for him and his folks, but isn’t it his fault? If a teacher says to a child, “Now don’t look at the Sun because it’ll damage your eyes.”, and they go ahead and look then surely that’s down to them. We all make endless mistakes as kids and learning and pushing the boundaries is all part of the fun and adventure of being a child. Sometimes it goes wrong and it’s always a shame when something bad happens to a youngster but that’s life. We should accept responsibility for our own actions (to a point of course).
Now what worries me is what’s going to happen because of this kind of thinking. A while back one winter there were reports of a school where the Headmaster had banned the throwing of snowballs because of the attached danger. There was also outrage in the tabloid newspapers when a different school head outlawed the playing of that most traditional of schoolboys’ game conkers.
Both of these events were probably preceded by a child getting hurt and his parents complaining. I hope this new development doesn’t peel away another layer of childhood, I also hope young Connor gets his sight back and his parents let him go outside to play and make loads more mistakes.
There was also news that in the next ‘Harry Potter’ book there will be two main characters killed off. This has caused a landslide of speculation in the press and just about every named character has been thrown up as a possibility. Personally I reckon it’ll be Voldemort (surely a given) and someone like Snape or one of the ‘lesser’ main characters like Neville or Luna Lovegood. There is the possibility that it could be Harry himself as J. K. Rowling has said that she won’t be writing any more once the series has come to a close, neither does she like the idea of a raft of fan-written books appearing on the shelves. Rightly so I think, he’s her creation and she should decide what happens to him.
Another news article that caught my eye was that 2/3rds of credit cards in Europe are owned by us here in the UK. We owe over £56 billion on these cards and that here in Britain there are actually more credit cards in circulation than there are people and we’re the only country in the EU in which that’s the case. Scary huh?
Other than an interesting morning of news reading, not a great deal happened today. I found a handful of jobs on the website of one of the agencies I’m on the books of that I couldn’t work out why I’d not been put forward for and I watched ‘Aliens’ on DVD.

Tea drunk: 5
News stories sniffed and shaken my head at: 4
Free Guardian wall charts now owned: 6

June 28th

2006-06-28T18:34:00.000+01:00

Today was another terrifically dull one. I drunk some tea, had some quiche, solved a Flash problem that was keeping me awake, watched ‘The Quatermass Conclusion’, Eat some spaghetti, had my boiler looked at by a man and generally loafed around.

Tea drunk: 7
Washing loads done: 1
Freebies applied for: 1 (Marmite recipe mats)

June 27th

2006-06-27T20:47:00.000+01:00

I’ve had an idea for next month’s ‘Today’ blog. I won’t spoil the surprise (the surprise for the only two people who read this blog that is) but it’s along the lines of a photography experiment I’ve been thinking about performing.
This morning something terrible happened, something that shook me to my very core and has broken my trust in all that is good and pure in this World. Waitrose let me down. They did, they let me down. Despite claiming that gooseberries would be in stock yesterday they won’t be in for another couple of weeks. I went to Waitrose all excited and full of the thoughts of the gorgeous little bitter pods of niceness only to find the shelves devoid of the hairy green marvels. At first I refused to believe it, “They must be here, they must. I’ve just not seen them.” I thought to myself. But, as my searching became ever more frantic I began to realise the awful truth. I even stopped a shelf-filler to ask where they may have been hidden hoping that the whole thing had just been some terrible mistake and they had, in fact, been stacked somewhere completely inappropriate and that the stacker and I would laugh and joke about the silliness of the employee who’d put them there and then we’d go about our business happy and contented. He because he’d helped a customer and I because I could now make ‘gooseberry fool’ for Wifey.
The employee, seeing the angst and confusion written all over my face, called someone on those magic little phones they have on pillars that ring unanswered whilst you’re browsing the organic veg only to be told that they wouldn’t be in for another week or two. Disappointment welled in my heart but I fought back the tears and the urge to throw myself down beating the floor and launch a tirade at God for abandoning me so. Instead I bought some grapes.
At home my mood was lifted as I’d got some good news about the designs I’d sent to Lola at Ride Media. The company in question (The Natural Health Centre) liked them and Lola wanted me to take them further. It’s lovely when you’re work is appreciated and never more so when it involve making a new contact. I hope I can help Lola out more often.
This afternoon I settled down on the balcony with a cake & a cup of tea to read the prospectus of the journalism course I think I’m going to enrol on. A few people who have read one of my blogs have commented that I’m pretty good at this writing malarkey and that I should take a crack at writing professionally. It’s really the only thing I feel truly happy doing. I love design and designing, similarly cooking and reading (not together mind, that’d end up with loads of burnt books everywhere) but I’m already doing the design thing and I doubt I can just ‘become’ a World class chef in the same way that Brad Pitt seems to have ‘become’ an architect. Design is probably always going to feature heavily in my life and I’ll make a living out of it one way or another, be it in a company or freelance. It’s kind of a ‘driving passion’ of mine that I’m lucky enough to be able to earn money from. I love all design from graphics to architecture but writing is where I feel most confident.

Tea drunk: 8 (Too many, probably won’t sleep tonight)
Tantrums thrown in a supermarket: 0 (Though it was a near thing)
Episodes of ‘The Office’ watched: 2 (Bloody funny it is too)

June 26th

2006-06-26T18:43:00.000+01:00

Today was so unbelievably dull that I really can’t think of a single thing to write about. I abhor wasted space though so I’m going to console myself with copying out the list of ingredients from this can of Macaroni cheese.
Macaroni pasta (39%), Water, Skimmed milk, Red Leicester cheese (3%, contains colour – Annatto), Cornflour, Reduced fat cheese (2%, contains colour – Annatto), Flavourings, Modified cornflour, Vegetable oil, Mustard, Salt, Stabiliser – Polyphosphates and Sodium phosphates, Sugar, Colour – Paprika extract.
Macaroni pasta contains Water, Durum wheat semolina.

Tea drunk: Dunno
Dull things that have happened: Dunno
Amazing stuff that didn’t happen ‘cos today was too busy being dull: Dunno

June 25th

2006-06-25T21:56:00.000+01:00

This morning Beth was very ill, she claims she didn’t drink ‘that much’ but she was definitely pretty peaky so I popped out to get her Andrew’s liver salts which, bizarrely, made her vomit and meant that she couldn’t eat her lovely breakfast.
After Becky had gone home Beth disappeared beneath the duvet on the sofa and we watched Poirot on ITV3. I love all these extra channels. ITV3 shows ‘Poirot’, ‘Robin of Sherwood’ and the excellent ‘Sherlock Holmes’ series all of which are perfect hangover TV. There’s an ITV4 too, which has repeats of cult shows like ‘The Persuaders’, ‘Space 1999’ and ‘Monkey’. Beth fancied her breakfast during Poirot so I bunged it all in a pan and heated it up for her with a new egg on top. It was like one of those ‘All day breakfast’ things (the ones you get in a tin) but posher. It looked quite nice.
The footie was on today (En-Ger-Lund vs. Ecuador) and based on our recent form I wasn’t really that bothered about watching it, but we’d had an invite from Sophie & Simon to go watch it at theirs so that’s what we were planning on doing.
We had to change our plans though as Beth had forgotten that she wanted to try and get a few more pictures. They were very specific this time and she need an image of a Mini driving down a typical English road. It sounds easy but it’s actually a bit of an awkward picture to take. We drove off looking for suitable streets and stumbled upon a junction on a suitable road. No sooner had we positioned ourselves on this junction than a bloody Mini should show up. Beth racked off a load of piccies and we headed off to Sophie & Simon’s job done. The game was an absolute scorcher and we spent much of it literally on the edge of our seats except for Simon who kept getting up and down whilst making a variety of odd noises. Kind of like that bloke from the ‘Police Academy’ films but without making any discernable noise that sounded like anything in particular. After the footy we had ourselves a lovely roast chicken and watched a pretty exciting episode of LOST whilst cuddling up on the sofa.

Tea drunk: 5
Football matches aged during: 1
Turkish Delight’s eaten: 1 (Though I wanted many more)

June 24th

2006-06-24T22:56:00.000+01:00

This morning Beth & I had a nice bacon sarnie with some of my wonderful home made bread whilst we made our shopping list for the week. Ann (Beth’s Mum) was coming down for the day, she’d booked herself on to some kind of cheap coach affair that apparently picks her up from the end of her street, but I had some work I had to be getting on with. Lola, from Ride Media who Christine had put me in touch with, needed a hand knocking up a couple of designs for a natural health centre’s website and I’d said I’d help. Whilst Beth did our shop and picked Ann up I ploughed on with the work with my headphones in listening to Jonathon Ross on BBC2. The ideas came thick and fast and I churned out a couple of designs that I was really pleased with. Sometimes this happens I go through a dour time when the creative stream gets blocked behind a damn and others it just flows on unhindered. Today was an unhindered day.
During all this I was laughing away to myself in that highly annoying way that people wearing headphones and listening to something funny do. Michael Gambon was on and he was hilarious. I’m a big Gambon fan and I think he’s a superb actor to boot. I’ve seen him on various TV shows of late (Top Gear, Have I Got News For You) and he’s a very funny man with a tonne of great stories.
During all this mirth fired work Beth made some lovely Thai chicken dumpling soup. After this Beth & Ann headed out to get some more pictures for her work but unfortunately, due to Beth’s inability to be surreptitious, Beth got thrown out of Tesco. I’m so proud of her, I’m now going out with a local felon.
Walked down seafront to the Palace pier to get some doughnuts and walk Ann back to her coach. The pier is pretty cool in a boring sort of way but they do sell good doughnuts for too much money from stalls manned by Eastern Europeans who I can’t really understand.
Becky came down to stay and we used the last of my home made pizza bases, the one that looked a bit pony, to make dinner. After this we headed down to the Robin Hood pub where we chatted and drank too much.

Tea drunk: 3
Sites designed: 2
Doughnuts eaten: 2 (Beth nicked one even though she said she didn’t want one when I asked if she wanted some)

June 23rd

2006-06-23T22:57:00.000+01:00

Today I have had a very productive day indeed. Fridays always seem to be like that, it starts badly with a Monday and then picks up a little on Tuesday when I realise I’ve essentially wasted a whole day. Wednesday is always a bit of a rubbish day as everything I should’ve done on Monday (which carried over to Tuesday) catches up with me and buggers me about. Wednesday is also the day when I tend to have something else to do. Basically Wednesday’s can fuck off. Thursday is an all round decent day, things actually start to happen on a Thursday and there’s always the comfort that I still have one whole day left of the week with which to get things done. Friday rocks. By around 4 o’clock on a Friday I’ve achieved a great deal and I’m now a little sad that there’s not much time left to finish everything up. By this point I’m on a roll you see. My philosophy has always been to try to take each day as it comes but recently many days have taken to attacking me all at once.
So, today, today I dropped Beth off at the station and then headed home to find that my free sample of ‘Jelly Belly’ jelly beans had turned up. It was a mighty small bag but hey, it was free. I wolfed these shortly after polishing off my brekkie and my second cup of tea for the day. Once this repast was over I went to Waitrose and got myself all the ingredients needed to bake bread and tonight’s tea (pizza). I’ve only ever tried to bake my own bread once and I seem to remember it went pretty badly wrong and I ended up with something that more or less resembled a rugby ball in shape and texture. How I could get something so simple so badly wrong I don’t know, but then it’s always seemed to be that way with cooking and me. I can knock together all manner of complicated and experimental dishes but can I poach an egg? Can I bollocks. Actually that’s not entirely true, I can poach an egg like a pro but it’s never what I’d call ‘a given’ that it’s gonna come out right.
This time however the bread baking went excellently well despite the fact that the kitchen ended up looking like someone had lobbed a bag of flour in through the open window when I wasn’t looking. I did get rather stressed at one point and ended up laughing at myself ‘cos my hands were covered in sticky dough and I just couldn’t get the bloody stuff off. Everything I touched stuck to me, I began to feel like some kind of cartoon glue monster, I imagined my hands sticking to the work surface in that kind of ‘pizza cheese’ way and the comically transferring the goo to my shoes.
Whilst the dough was proving I finally wrote and typed up the pitch I’ve been trying to get done for a few days now. As I said before I’m not much good at pitching for work but this time I was quite pleased with the way it came out.
Anyhow, the dough was rapidly expanding and growing at an alarming rate (Jamie did say in his recipe that it needed three sachets of yeast so I used three) and I had visions of it growing exponentially and it consuming everything in the kitchen whilst I back away from it, terrified of the monster I’d created. I could see Beth coming home to find the flat bulging at the seams as the dough expands crushing me in the corner. (Thankfully, that didn’t happen.)
The bread came out very well and, once baked, I tested a wee slice with some plain ol’ butter. Fresh baked bread really is one of life’s luxuries as most of us most of the time just buy it from a supermarket. It was delicious. With the left over dough I made some pizza bases, two respectable ‘small’ ones and one large one that looked like it had been thrown around by a pizza chef who had really lost interest in his job. ‘Quirkily rustic’ I think is the only way it could be described, that or just plain old crap.
After my busy day I thought I deserved a pint so I went to meet Marc at the Tin Drum where Beth joined us fresh off the train. Later that night Beth & I made the pizza toppings of our choices and flaked out in front of the telly. All in all a very good day was had.

Tea drunk: 4
Pitches completed: 1
Kitchen’s floured: 1

June 22nd

2006-06-22T20:59:00.000+01:00

Sam left today so I’m back to swanning about in my pants, listening to music loudly and munching on delicious cakes, a Marlborough bun to be precise. It’s kind of like your standard bun but it’s got big ol’ chunks of deliciousness in it. It goes great with tea too so who am I to argue, I’d better go make one. There… now that’s much better isn’t it Ben? Yes it is Ben. You’re so wise in the way of tea and cake.
There’s been a fair bit of ruckus next door as they’re redecorating, sadly this meant my concentration has been a bit off today and I haven’t been as productive as I would’ve liked. Despite this I’ve managed to look over a job that’s been hanging about now for a while and I’ve also agreed to help out Laurence by coming up with a couple of ideas for a site. Not bad considering the bloke next door seems to be trying to perform the 1812 Overture using only a hammer.
Now before I go any further I’d like to remind you all of my thoughts on the strange absence of the humble gooseberry from the shelves of our supermarkets. I had a big old rant about the highly underrated fruit here on my other blog. You may wonder why I brought this up, well I’ll tell you dear, sweet-smelling reader, it’s because today I enquired in my local Waitrose (my spiritual home) as to the lack of the aforementioned fruit and guess what? They’re coming in to stock on Monday! WooHoo! Monday is gooseberry day. I can’t wait. And to celebrate here’s a wee gooseberry factoid to moisten your appetites. Gooseberries are in fact the only true berries. A berry is technically defined as containing more than one seed. The pivotal word here is ‘containing’. A cucumber is a berry but a strawberry is not. A Tomato is a berry but a raspberry is not. You get the picture, this factoid makes me very happy as it’s the first time my ol’ mate the gooseberry has been top of the pile. Go get ‘em Mr… er.. Gooseberry. (I think I need to go and have a stiff drink. I’m starting to weird even myself out.)
Changing the subject a bit I have a good friend called Simon who is (save for maybe Beth who is still my favourite) probably the number one list-maker extraordinaire. He makes lists like a glass blower blows glass, like a nanny cares for kids, like Santa delivers pressies. When he lists, he cares. So when I developed my list of my favourite retro British Sci-fi TV I naturally had to ask him if he’d listed anything of any note recently. He naturally had and was currently working on that pinnacle of lists, the top ten. In this case it was the elusive top ten albums. So, in his honour I have tried to repeat the exercise. So, Simon, here’s my current top 22 (too weak to go for the ‘big-boy’ top 10) albums. In no particular order I give you -

1: Ella Fitzgerald - The Cole Porter Song Book
2: Zero 7 - The Garden
3: Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works '85-'92
4: David Bowie - Hunky Dory
5: The Divine Comedy - Absent Friends
6: ELO - All Over The World
7: Everything but the Girl - Walking Wounded
8: The Go! Team - Thunder, Lightning, Strike
9: Goldfrapp - Supernature
10: Ibrahim Ferrer - Buena Vista Social Club Presents...
11: Jacqueline du Pré - A Lasting Inspiration
12: The Jam - The Sound of the Jam
13: Jimmy Cliff - The Harder They Come
14: Johnny Cash - American 4: The Man Comes Around
15: Terry Callier - Speak Your Peace
16: The Strokes - Is This It?
17: Massive Attack - Mezzanine
18: Nina Simone - Released
19: Orbital - In Sides
20: Orbital - Snivilisation
21: Penguin Café Orchestra - Preludes Aires and Yodels
22: Saint Etienne - Fox Base Alpha

And I should say that I currently can’t stop playing the new Keane & Divine Comedy albums.

Tea drunk: 7 (Big day)
Lists made: 2
Pregnant women given a lift to the station to: 1

June 21st

2006-06-21T23:40:00.000+01:00

This morning I had to head back to Redhill (where my folks live) to pay a visit to my GP. I won’t bore you with the reason for this trip, suffice to say it was a trip to the Doctors and they’re seldom for something good are they? I popped in to see my Ma and my lovely dog Pat and had a cup of tea whilst we caught up. We then headed into Redhill centre where I got Mabel washed and we had another cuppa (coffee this time) and a bit of cake. Later, back at my Ma’s place, I had another cup o’ tea and cleaned out the interior of Mabel. She now looks all nice and shiny. Ma & I went next door to the ‘Joshua Tree’, a rather fine pub conveniently situated right next door that does great food. Kevin the owner & chef used to work at the House of Commons you know. Fully feed and watered I headed home to Brighton only to find that the pitch I was supposed to be working on was now unnecessary as the client had e-mailed me to let me know that he’d received a very compelling design form one of the others. He said he’d let me know if I need go ahead with my pitch on Friday and apologised for dicking me about. I’m not sure I can take much more of this to be frank, I keep getting lumbered with the rubbish £300 jobs whilst constantly missing out on the good ones. Why is that? I wish I knew. It’s massively depressing. My foul mood was lightened slightly though with a call out of the blue from an agency asking if I was available for work, the agency had got my details from Laurence, who owns and runs the company I’m going to see next week in Old Street. Though I wasn’t suitable for that job (they wanted someone with a high level of actionscript skills and that ‘aint me sister) they did seem keen on taking me on to their books.
To celebrate I made French Onion soup for dinner and my lovely Beth & I had a rather nice cherry & raspberry beer each whilst watching ‘When Harry meet Sally’, which I rather enjoyed, despite being a man.

Tea drunk: Unknown but my bladder didn’t fall below the two-gallon level.
Huge burgers eaten: 1 (Though it felt like half a cow in truth)
New careers considered: All of them (Except… no, all of them)

June 20th

2006-06-20T22:39:00.000+01:00

Today saw a sudden rush of activity work-wise when a company approached me to pitch (along with two other designers) for a re-design of their existing site. The site in question was really rather good and my initial reaction was to think it about as good as it could get. Once I’d stopped to think things over a bit I began to see things I’d improve upon and change so I agreed to pitch. I’ll be honest, I don’t like pitching for work like this, I prefer to have some kind of direct contact with the client so I can get a more personalised idea of what they want. It’s so much easier if you can talk things over with them and get to know them a little. I find the whole ‘here’s a brief, come up with something’ approach far too impersonal and it makes me feel like an automaton. They actually had a decent budget too and you’ve no idea how much of an incentive that is for me, I’d give my left nut just to get a client with more than £400 to spend on a chuffin’ site. I mean how much do these people think these things cost. (I’m not gonna get into that argument now, I can rattle on about it until the cows come home.) Anyhow, I made a few notes and decided that I’d dedicate the next couple of days to it.
Whilst I eat my lunch I watched the episode of Doctor Who I’d recorded from Saturday night. Adam & Alex had told me it was really good but had also told me I may hate it as I’d expressed concern over the fact that the new series seems to be becoming increasingly ‘light’. I’m also not a big Peter Kay fan so I had my reservations as to what he may do to the episode (he played the villainous alien thing). Anyhow, I really enjoyed it and I thought it was great. It was camp, it was silly and it was the first show to hardly feature the Doctor or Rose at all. Instead it focused on how an encounter with the Doctor can affect your life and how his world can sometimes taint the world of those who become involved. It was really rather poignant. Even Peter Kay put in a great turn as the Absorbarov thing and made the alien funny in a good way. All in all, a better episode than I thought it’d be. Better than the shockingly disappointing Cyberman return anyhow.
Keeping on the subject of Sci-fi, I also added a few more shows to the list I started yesterday. Terry Nation, of Doctor Who fame, wrote three series of an amazing show called ‘Survivors’ which I’ve been trying to get hold of only to find that it’s been released on DVD. It’s one that I’ve not actually seen but the general consensus is that it’s a true classic. I also added ‘The Nightmare Man’, another I’ve not seen where a couple are terrorised in a lighthouse by some kind of monster. ‘The Stone Tape’ is another Nigel Kneale creation that’s widely perceived as one of the finer moments of British Sci-fi television. A group of scientists are gathered in an old mansion trying to perfect the next generation of recording medium unfortunately they record something much more sinister, something that seems to have lay dormant in the rocks of the mansion itself. Spooky huh? The BBC’s ‘The Changes’ is also a show I’m desperate to get hold of. It’s not yet on DVD so I’m reduced to scouring eBay in the hope that someone out there has popped ‘em on DVD and wants a fiver for ‘em. This post-apocalyptic children’s series shown in 1975 depicted the breakdown of society after people are compelled to reject and destroy technology. This violent reaction and people's subsequent desertion of the country is triggered by a sound seemingly emitted by electricity pylons. The show follows a young girl searching for her parents. Add to this ITV’s brilliant ‘The Last Train’ and I think I’ve got myself a pretty compelling list.

Tea drunk: 4
Job pitches avoided: 1 (In a way, I’ve still got to do it tomorrow)
Shows added to the list: 6

June 19th

2006-06-19T18:14:00.000+01:00

Last night I suffered from another bout of insomnia but this time, as Sam was kipping on our living room floor, there was nowhere I could go to settle or even to go grab a cuppa. To add insult to injury I couldn’t find Beth’s bedside clock and even if I did I still wouldn’t have been able to see the time ‘cos it has no light. Dear God things were bad that night. It was like the World was against me. Beth woke up at one point to find me making some kind of nest at the foot of the bed out of pillows whilst flashing our torch around trying to find the page I was at in my book. Naturally she told me to stop being a plum and get back in bed. I did and promptly fell asleep.
Once up I actually had quite a productive day despite being absolutely knackered. Beth had taken the day off and went out and about with Sam to take some pictures of exciting things like a house with a hedge and a car park so I was free to chug on with my even more exciting work. I got quite a lot done as it goes. Once Beth & Sam got home we went round to Beth's gran's where I cooked up sossies and mash and we sat around having the same conversation over and over again ‘Groundhog Day’ style.
During this fun-packed day I downloaded and listened to the new Keane album ‘Under the Iron Sea’ and I must say I’m impressed. The last album was pretty good, though I’m not a huge fan of guitar-less rock, but a little on the dour side. Their new offering seems to be more powerful and vibrant though hardly upbeat. I’ll wait and see how it goes after a few more plays before I make my final judgement though.
I also started to compile a list of all the films I wanted to see but had missed (mostly so the next time I go to the video shop I’ll know what to grab on DVD). This, strangely, began to turn into a list of all the classic British sci-fi & horror TV shows that I wanted to get hold of. I love all that kind of stuff, the palpable air of tension that these shows used to generate, the thrilling and frightening moments they created with so little in the way of special effects. Nowadays of course most films rely on high budget effects to scare you but with these babies it was all about the story and the acting.
Most people will be familiar with Nigel Kneale’s incredible Quatermass series of programs. First shown in 1953 the ‘Quatermass Experiment’ was the first live television drama ever broadcast and was recently remade starring current Doctor WHO David Tennant and Jason Flemyng. The premise of the show was that the first manned rocket launch (carried out by Professor Quatermass’ British Experimental Rocket Group) goes awry and only one crewman survives when the rocket crashes in Wimbledon. The scares build as the survivor gradually mutates into a fusion of man and plant. Two sequels were made in the 50’s, ‘Quatermass 2’ in which zombies infiltrate Earth and ‘Quatermass and the Pit (my personal favourite and one that scared the shite out of me when I saw it as a kiddie) where an alien spacecraft is discovered buried under the streets of London. In 1979 a final chapter was added, simply called ‘Quatermass’ and starring John Mills. This time, after the destruction of a new space station, young people find themselves mysteriously drawn to an ancient stone circle in England where they believe they’ll be taken to a better place by a higher power. Quatermass discovers that they are actually being harvested by an alien race and must find a way to stop them. If you’ve not seen these programs then I urge you to see them now. If you want to know more about Professor Bernard Quatermass and his madcap adventures then here is a pretty good place to start.
Along with Quatermass I added the BBC version of ‘The Day of the Triffids’ (one of the finest moments in British science fiction literature) which itself is worlds apart from the rubbish Howard Keel Hollywood version and ‘Sapphire & Steel’, the craziest and most ‘trippy’ television show ever.
A full days work I think.

Tea drunk: 7
New albums listened to: 1
Lists made: 3 (UK sci-fi retro TV, things to do tomorrow and ice-cream recipes to try out)

June 18th

2006-06-18T23:32:00.000+01:00

Unfortunately today wasn’t as nice a day as yesterday so we took a trip into town to see if I could locate a pair of these vegan Birkenstocks as they appear to be the only one’s they make in a size 11. Why is that? Do they only have cows up to a certain size from which they source their leather? We’d not been out and about shopping like this for a while and it was nice wandering through the lanes. There’s quite a few new shops and foodie places that appear to have sprung up whilst we were away and we could quite easily have come home two stone heavier had we popped into each one that took our fancy. On the way there we passed a bloke dressed as a hobo playing a violin whilst balancing on a tightrope. Now that’s very Brighton. He also performed a valuable public service and managed to distract people’s gaze from the guy who sells the collection of utterly woeful ‘art’. Art with a capital ‘F’ if you like.
The vegan shoe shop (I can’t even type that without smiling) was closed however so we just made do with checking out some of our other favourite shops. There were some cracking mirrors (no pun intended) in Lavender Rooms and Beth found many sets of underwear that she would’ve looked damn fine in.
Today was the London to Brighton bike ride and throughout town there was a liberal smattering of cycling shorts, gaily coloured latex tops and those odd little sucky bottles that only cyclists have. I have tremendous admiration for those that take part in this event, it’s a fair old trek in hot weather and at the end of it they have to face the final humiliation of being treated by Brighton Council like a bloody nuisance instead of a bunch of decent folk who want a nice day out and raise a bit of cash for charities. This year there were no bikes allowed on the trains at all. Surely there’s a mail-train or something somewhere they could’ve laid on so all these crazy bike kids could get home with ease after the exertion.
Beth had a list of pictures she wanted to get for the picture library so we headed out through some beautiful countryside to Horsham to take a few snaps of the utterly stunning and majorly posh Christ’s Hospital school. The buildings themselves and those that surround it are so amazingly charming in the old English style. All red brickwork, imposing chimneys and Virginia creeper. Given the wherewithal I would’ve happily lived out my days in any one of them. Sadly (though not unexpectedly) the school itself is set back in some pretty impressive private grounds so we couldn’t get close enough to get some decent snaps, still we’d had a lovely drive out into the country though.
We headed back home via the station to pick up the highly preggers Sam (Beth’s sis) and took her home. She turned up with a bag so big I thought she might very well be moving in. Whilst Beth & Sam caught up I went to our scheduled house meeting at Esme’s place. The meeting was pretty productive despite the fact that there were only representatives from three of the eight flats there.
That night Beth cooked some fantastic wild Alaskan salmon with wild rice and we watched LOST, which is getting crazier and crazier with each passing episode. I tried filling Sam in on what was going on but quickly gave up.

Tea drunk: 6
Posh schools visited: 1
Birkenstocks failed to purchase: 1 pair

June 17th

2006-06-17T22:31:00.000+01:00

Despite the fact that today was clearly going to be an absolute rip-roaring scorcher of a wonderfully glorious day, I decided that now would be the best time to wade in with our somewhat late Spring-cleaning session. This involved cleaning absolutely everything in the flat that didn’t move. I dismantled the fridge down to it’s component parts and cleaned each individual atom that they comprised, I de-scaled the kettle, buffed up the silverware, took the top layer of paint off the floor through over- vigorous scrubbing and even gave Beth a good polishing. It took for-bloody-ever and we missed the best day for ages. How dumb was that? (Don’t answer that.) To cheer us up during this crazed need to be clean we took five minutes out to watch a pony-tailed drunk staggering about in the street outside. He was cursing wildly and causing a ruckus with a big black fella with no apparent reason of motive. Things got a little bit tense when the drunk took a swipe at the black fella’s car with his digital camera. Now I never thought I’d see a Canon Ixus used in such a way I can tell you. The drunk then reverted to standard pissed behaviour and yelled unintelligibly at passing folk and then nodded off on his doorstep. Regretfully he went in after a few minutes so we were deprived of this particular piece of street theatre and had to go back to buffing the hell out of the kitchen cupboards.
That aftrenoon we popped down to the beach for a quick barbecue with Bryn, Amelia and some of their friends. One couple had a highly adorable 8 week old baby with them so naturally the women all turned into clucky, hormonal, broody baby-seeking missiles. (Now Beth will tell you that I did too but that’s just a huge fat fib. I never did. At all. Not once… Well okay, maybe for a bit.) After we’d over-cooked our sossies and I’d managed to get myslef suitably smokey we headed off to meet Adam, Alex, Zoe & Adam at the Crescent pub.

Tea drunk: Can’t recall. A few probably.
Scrubbies vaporised through vicious cleaning: 2
Sossies eaten: 2 (Nice ones too)

June 16th

2006-06-16T22:07:00.000+01:00

Marc got me out of the shower this morning to return my laptop adaptor so I spent half an hour drying the hallway carpet. It never ceases to amaze me that I can spend three hours sitting around on the sofa waiting for something to happen that never does, and yet as soon as I pop to the toilet or take a shower I get a phone call or visitor. My mother has an uncanny knack for this and for years I scoured the flat poking my nose into increasingly ridiculous nooks and crannies searching for the bugs & cameras she’d clearly installed so she’d be aware of the perfect time to call me to achieve optimum annoyance.
I spent the morning working and making myself laugh like a twat by listening to the almost sickeningly funny Rickey Gervais podcasts. If you’ve not heard ‘em then I strongly suggest you pick them up on mp3 off the iTunes music store. They’re without doubt the funniest things I’ve heard in a very long time. What makes them so special is the fact that the comedy revolves around a chap called Karl Pilkington and not Ricky Gervais or Steven Merchant.
Es & I had to attend two more meetings today and we headed off cursing the fact that it was turning out to be such a lovely day and we were about to spend it ensconced in dismal offices in conversation with two more prospective managing agents. To make matters worse we had misread the address of the first agent and went wandering up Western Road to his old address. Luckily a kindly chap in the building pointed us in the right direction. His new office was in fact smack at the bottom of our road. Grrrr! Anyhow we spoke with him for an hour but we weren’t very impressed, his office smelt of damp and was in a bit of a two and eight. If he can’t look after his own office then how could he be expected to look after our entire building.
After a brief respite at the Real Eating Co. (where I made a complete plum-duff of myself by enquiring after the name of the wonderful cake I’d just eaten only to be told by the waitress, with a very sweetly tolerant smile, that it was a cherry bakewell) Es & I headed off to our third meeting which was much more satisfactory.
I met Zoe at the Meeting Place Café for a quick cuppa after our last meeting and we chatted for a bit about stuff until Beth rang and said she was back from work at which point we moved on to the wonderful Robin Hood pub. It’s a ‘people’s pub’ you see which is the brainwave of a local entrepreneur. Basically all the profits (after covering costs and staff wages etc.) are donated to local charities, hence the name. It’s a great pub with a good mix of decent customers, comfy chairs and decent beer. If you live in Brighton and haven’t yet been then go along. It’s comforting to think that while you attempt to reach a stage of mental incompetence by the repeated consumption of fermented vegetable drinks you’re also helping out those less well off than you.

Tea drunk: Too much
Cakes eaten: 1 (it was a cherry bakewell you dufus!)
New beers discovered: 1 (Artois Bok – it’s very strong and has a caramel like taste)

June 15th

2006-06-15T22:05:00.000+01:00

I really can't remember much about what happened today but thankfully I make little 'notes to self' on my laptop. Despite this I still can't quite recall details so today I'm just gonna copy the notelet down.
Flash stuff
Petra's site
Lunch with Marc @ Coopers
Skype
Rubbish football

There...

June 14th

2006-06-14T23:52:00.000+01:00

I just don’t seem to be able to get enough sleep at the moment. Morpheous keeps fidgeting it would seem. Last night I dreamt I was working with Jack Bauer in bringing down some kind of Mafioso type but Jack made me wear these cuff-link style bugs, the problem being that I had to wear them through holes in the bottom of my jeans and I had to surreptitiously pop ‘em in whilst Jack spoke to the crook. Not easy, especially when they kept growing. Eventually I was found out and all hell broke lose. Jack, to preserve his cover, had to pretend he didn’t know I was a CTU agent and started shooting at me. I pegged it and managed to get away by climbing a tree. I woke up shortly after that to have a wee. When I dropped off again I was part of a parachute team testing a new type of system that comprised of nothing but an orange boiler suit, a crash helmet and a funky backpack type thing. There was no chute and it made you kind of float about. You could bob around in the air and then gently touch down on the ground, all you had to do then was launch yourself skyward to get back up. After dropping from the plane we hovered above the ground and started arsing about doing back-flips and comedy running & swimming movements until it was time to stop and go skiing.
Anyhow, back to reality. Today I struggled to come to terms with the simple fact that money is a very fluid concept for me these days. At the moment it seems I can stay in the flat perfectly still for a day and yet still spend money. It’s like that line in Blackadder, somedays I feel like a pelican. No matter which way I turn I’ve still got an enormous bill in front of me. Today was the turn of our mortgage broker and current managing agent. We’ve just re-mortgaged to pay off some debts and it seems to have turned into a bit of a money pit as over 10% of the money has gone on bloody fees. It’s just not worth it really.
Anyhow, my internet access had gone down for the afternoon so I popped to the post office to send the cheques and accidentally fell into the newsagent’s where I panicked and, completely by mistake you understand, bought a Milky Bar and a Caramac. Yum.
Today Es & I had the first of our meetings with prospective managing agents today and I gotta say it went rather well. Es was highly professional with her list of probing and in-depth questions whereas I just sat there sipping tea and making the room look nice. They seemed pretty good and certainly didn’t conform to the image I have of managing agents as being part-man, part-shark and all git. They were actually rather nice and certainly seemed like they’d be well and truly on the ball. Still, we have nothing to compare them to yet so we’ll just have to see how the other two companies fare on Friday.
After the meeting we wandered home and Es sat on my floor typing up the answers to circulate at our next meeting while Beth made asparagus risotto for our tea. It was delicious.
We sunk to an all time television low tonight however and actually watched an entire episode of Rosemary & Thyme with Pam Ferris Wheel and Felicity Kendall Mint Cake playing two detective gardeners. We laughed in equal measures at the ridiculous plot and our stupidity for watching it.

Tea drunk: 8
Old skool chocolate bars eaten: 2 (I’m going to try and find a ‘Drifter’ tomorrow)
Mafioso bosses killed in pursuit of the truth: 1 (I shot him whilst in a tree)

June 13th

2006-06-13T21:38:00.000+01:00

Today was D-U-L(L). I sent a cheque off to our mortgage advisor, tried to fix my wayward computer, pitched for a job, eat some pork scratchings, listened to a few un-listened to albums, discovered that half of my newly bought French toasts were broken in the packet, read up about optimizing a page for search engines and looked at VW camper vans on-line (my mate Dan has just bought one). I rounded things off by making chicken caesar salad and watching CSI. There’s room in my life for improvement, I think I’ll take up smoking.

Tea drunk: 5
Choc-ices eaten: 2
Tutorials I’ve utterly failed to grasp: 1 (That whole ‘search engines’ thing)

June 12th

2006-06-12T22:37:00.000+01:00

At 2:30 last night Beth & I were woken by a tremendous banging (insert ‘Carry On’ style snigger here) coming, somewhat scarily, from somewhere in the building. It was clearly inside the communal hall but what it was I had no idea. It was reverberating throughout the place. Being the hard-ball playing, dog whipping, take me as you find me kind of guy I am I popped on my bravery hat and jeans and went out to figure out what it was. It turned out to be 12 hardened crack addicts who’d been snowballing heroin all night. It turned ugly so I kicked off and they’re all now in hospital. Actually that didn’t happen.
The noise turned out to be coming from our downstairs neighbour. I found him more than several sheets to the wind, curled up like a little lamb outside his front door in just his pants. He was pretty coherent despite being clearly rather drunk. Apparently he’d locked himself out (no shit Sherlock) and was trying to raise the attention of his lady-friend inside. The fact that his lady-pal was obviously either a) not in b) as inebriated as he or c) dead - wasn’t deterring him from making his presence known. I pointed this out and asked if his lady-mate was in to which he replied “Dunno”. I then asked where she would be if she weren’t in, to which he replied “Dunno”. I also asked how he’d ended up outside his front door clad in nowt but his under-crackers. “Dunno”.
I popped upstairs and after recounting the tale to Beth through a fit of the giggles I grabbed him a blanket and a glass of water so he could settle himself down for the night. (Call me uncharitable but I wasn’t having his drunken form lolling all over my sofa now was I.) Then I gave him my phone so he could call his lady-colleague but her phone rang in his flat. Hmmm… interesting.
Eventually he hit on the plan of my lending him some pyjama trousers and a tee-shirt so he could go down the road to his brother’s. I obliged him and I’ll never forget the site of him toddling off down the deserted street barefoot and wearing my check pj’s.
I got back to sleep eventually chuckling away to myself.
The rest of the day was pretty uneventful and I spent the majority of the day learning how to make a php driven e-mail form in Flash to go on my portfolio site.
Rock and indeed, roll.

Tea drunk: 6
Neighbours laughed at 2: (I haven’t told Neil about the toilet roll on his shoe yet)
Pyjama trousers lost: 1

June 11th

2006-06-11T22:02:00.000+01:00

Another relaxed start saw us making an eggs benedict and taking things easy before we took a trip to lovely Lewes. The place is so beautiful and so damn close that I can’t quite work out why we’ve never been there before. It’s only down the road. It’s a great old town with a fair bit to see. The Harvey’s brewery is there for a start and there’s a funky little beer shop (sadly closed) that looked highly inviting and a great Harvey’s ale pub that we couldn’t frequent on account of having to drive and it being a little too early in the day to start drinking. There’s the original Bill’s food place too and I gotta say, it looked better than the newer one here in Brighton, I’d also imagine it’d be easier to get in to. The whole street is quaint in the way that only English villages can be and you can still see remnants of the old ways. Beth was taken by a wonderful old shop-front that still sported the original etched-glass sign ‘butter & creamery’. Brilliant. In fact I think her exact words were, “Let’s buy it, open a sweetshop and live upstairs.” You can see why I love her can’t you. There’s a merciful lack of a Starbucks or a Tesco (apparently it’s hidden away so as not to spoil the village) but there is a Waitrose, which immediately makes it a more habitable town in my view. Snob, moi? Hell yeah. They’ve even got a castle and two highly groovey looking churches, one with a spire straight out of a medieval documentary hosted by Tony Robinson and that bloke who gets all excited over Roman coins and stuff.
Naturally we looked in some estate agents’ windows and weighed up the pros & cons of a move out here. It’s a highly attractive proposition but maybe not just yet. I do so love living in Brighton and being near friends.
Back in Brighton we took our barbeque (the funky Muji one that looks like an executive attaché case and then transforms into a Barbie) and a crappy disposable one down to the beach where we cooked up sossies with Es, Neil & Katie. The sossies were grand, the company was lovely and I looked damn good with slightly singed eyebrows and a slightly smoked pallor.
That night Beth & I settled down to watch a fantastic episode of Doctor WHO and LOST. I had such a great weekend with my Beth, I’m so glad we’ve decided to allocate some of our time to us.

Tea drunk: 4
Properties mentally bought, decorated & lived in: 186 (The castle counts as 100)
Muji barbeques used: 0 (We used the crap disposable instead for some reason)

June 10th

2006-06-10T21:39:00.000+01:00

Over the last couple of years we’ve had so many family and friend related events to go to that this year Beth & I have decided to take more weekends to ourselves. It’s been tricky having to turn down things that ordinarily we would’ve done (sometimes more from a sense of duty than a desire to attend) and we’ve had to be pretty ruthless with our time and this weekend was to be our first ‘Beth & Ben’ weekend.
After last night we had a bit of a late start (I’m not sure I’ll be able to cope with these new late licensing laws) and spent a good hour or two sagging about in bed eventually hauling our carcasses out for a great fruit salad & one of my legendary smoothies. None of this mattered however as today was the start of England’s foray into the World Cup and we had ourselves a plan. I needed some new Birkenstocks after my old ones finally gave up the ghost in S.E. Asia but only a fool or a hero would attempt to shop in the centre of Brighton on an ordinary Saturday, but today would be different. One of the benefits of not being a footie fan is that you’re guaranteed (during the World Cup at least) a bit of relative public peace for two hours every so often and it’s this that we took advantage of. It was so quiet in town it was almost frightening, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it so calm.
Birkies bought Beth & I took the Saturday papers to the square where we got just under 15 minutes of peace until the football finished (apparently we won against a made up country) and groups of inebriated blokes descended upon us armed with footballs. They all bounced their balls a bit, did a few keepie-upies and made a determined effort to look all serious and footbally before deciding that an actual game probably wasn’t what they wanted afterall and that they’d rather settle down on the benches and shout at each. I know it sounds hideously pompous and self-righteous but I do get a bit angry the way the square fills with lads getting pished and burning the grass with their disposable barbeques. You end up running the gauntlet of Frisbees, footballs and cricket matches trying to find a space. I almost want it to be a London style private square for the residents. The down side of this would be that we wouldn’t be allowed to go there, not being residents an’ all.
Our good friends Sophie & Simon are though and Simon popped down on his way back from Lemmington to show off his recently repaired and re-sprayed TR6. He clearly loves this car and it’s easy to see why, it’s a beauty. It makes me wish I still had my TR 2000. I miss that car. We popped down to the Meeting Place café on the seafront and had some pop whilst Simon had a cheeky lasagne & chips, we were only gone 20 minutes but in that time some fuckers had walked over Simon’s car. On our way back we past the car and saw footprints on the boot. Another couple of residents who had also noticed them told us that their car suffered a similar indignity recently. Why for God’s sake? Why do shitty people do shitty things like this? People wonder why as a Brighton resident I sometimes get annoyed with pissed up tourists and the local yute and it’s things like this that do it. There were so many ‘kids’ in the square getting lagered and making a nuisance of themselves that it’s massively difficult not to revert to ‘angry from Hove’ mode and instinctively blame them or ‘kids’ in general. I can’t figure out why people have no respect, no respect for others or for themselves. Nyarrr! Rant over.
That night Beth & I turned down Es & Neil’s offer of Pimms and opted for a dvd and an early night.

Tea drunk: 3
Birkies bought and then discovered were too small: 2 (one per foot)
World Cup matches missed: 1 (but hey, I got to spend time with my lady)

June 9th

2006-06-09T21:57:00.000+01:00

Another lovely day and the painter arrived very early to touch-up the woodwork outside. Consequently I spent the morning avoiding the windows and peeping out from behind the curtains to see if he’d gone. In between bouts of this strange behaviour I managed to get my portfolio updated which made me feel better. It’s been sitting there for some time now like a neglected child, staring at me and making me feel awkward.
Es, my neighbour upstairs, was again working from home (she had some feeble excuse about the computers at work being spring-cleaned or something) so we had lunch together and made some appointments to go see prospective managing agents. We’ve bought the freehold to our building you see and now there seems to be a bloody-hell of a lot of work to do, work which until now our managing agent did. Now however, we seem to be doing it, I say we, I actually mean Es.
After Es left I sat out on the balcony for a bit in the sun and made a few lists of important things to do, number one of which was to make a few more holes in the new balcony covering. There are 16 now. Who says my days aren’t productive?
I met Beth at the station and we decided that we’d head down to the seafront, as it was such a wonderful day, and work our way through a bottle of white. We bought the wine but then made the fatal mistake of deciding to go home and have dinner first. I told Beth this was a bad idea but she wouldn’t listen. We drunk the wine at home with dinner as I thought we’d do and then made arrangements to meet Marc & Sophie in the pub down the road. So much for laying off the booze for a while eh?
It was great to catch-up with Marc, I’d not seen him for a while and, though I’m a little worried about him at the moment, he did seem on good form. We had a very pleasant night chatting about all manner of stuff and drinking more than we ought to when all of a sudden I realised that it was 12:30 and we were still there. You see I’d completely forgotten about the new late licensing laws, as these came into force whilst wifey & I had been away. Next time I shall endeavour to remember and maybe not panic-drink around 11 so much.

Tea drunk: 4
Balcony holes made: 4 more
Neighbours entertained: 1

June 8th

2006-06-08T22:23:00.000+01:00

Slept like a baby strapped to a lavender scented log last night and I didn’t even wake when Beth’s alarm went off. She, being the wonderfully caring girlfriend she is, tip-toed about and put her pillow in her place and my arm around it so I’d think it was her and carry on sleeping. She’s good to me you know.
I felt refreshed today but several things happened that were to take the shiny glow off of my mood that morning. I broke a glass, one of the wonderful Riedel beer glasses Beth bought me, whilst washing up and then, when I checked my e-mails, I learned an agency I was hoping to get on the books of had turned me down as I’d had no design agency experience. I also received an e-mail from the jewellery designer who contacted me yesterday apologising for having sent the job confirmation to the wrong guy. Not the best start to the day. I’m having such a hard time coming to terms with this way of working, I really don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I know a couple of other freelance designers and they all seem to have plenty of work on. I just wish I knew where and when it was that things went astray for me, it’s so bloody frustrating. The more I do this the more I realize I’m just not cut out for it. It was a big mistake on my part really and I should’ve listened to those who warned me against taking this particular route. I just don’t know enough you see, I have no real coding skills and it’s letting me down.
Anyhow, it was a lovely day today and Beth was off out to see her mate Berni so I thought I’d go for a pleasant evening drink with someone. Unfortunately no-one was about so, as I’ve not yet got to the stage where I’ll happily go sit at the bar by myself, I had to settle for a vodka & tonic on the balcony and the company of a book and the radio.
It’s pretty depressing when the sun is out and the evening is so glorious to find yourself sitting and drinking alone so I only had the one and settled in for the night.

Tea drunk: 7
Tantrums thrown over work: 1
Holes discovered in the new balcony covering: 12

June 7th

2006-06-07T21:11:00.000+01:00

Wednesday 7th June

Last night I suffered from a case of insomnia. Those that know me will tell you that I’m not a great sleeper but since we’ve been back from our trip, my sleeping has definitely improved. I’m not slipping into a mini coma every night or nodding off whilst standing up or anything like that, I’m just getting more sleep than usual. So I was pretty surprised to find myself wandering around the flat at 3 in the morning, wide-awake and drinking tea.
I kind of like being awake at this hour though, it’s somehow more personal. Everyone else is asleep and I’m awake. It’s as if everything outside my window exists only for me. The street is just so peaceful whereas ordinarily it’s pretty busy during the day. Drivers tend to use it to get off Western Road, there’s always some kids larking about and the seagulls provide a constant background squark, but at three in the morning it’s a whole different place.
Anyhow, I read a fair bit of ‘Watchmen’ and watched an episode of ‘Red Dwarf’ on dvd and then sat on the balcony (with yet another cuppa) watching the sky around my gradually lighten as if it had to be done slowly and without anyone noticing.
Once Beth had got herself up I popped myself back into bed and immediately dropped off. I awoke though after a few minutes as I had a very odd mini-dream as soon as I dropped off. There was a huge snail crawling across some clothes I’d discarded on the floor and when I tried to grab it the damn thing sped up in a very un-snail like way. All I could think about though was what would happen when it reached my linen shirt, and sure enough it got stuck. In the dream I knew that snails couldn’t move on cloth (something to do with the slime sticking too much and drying out) and I wanted to remove it before it got trapped. As soon as it hit the shirt it stalled and then proceeded to make some very ‘cartoony’ arching movements in an effort to free itself. I kept trying to grab it but it just wouldn’t stay still, it even started to break it’s own shell it was so desperate. I woke with a start and had to get up, the dream had left me feeling anxious.
One positive note for today, a jewellery designer from Brighton contacted me a while back asking me to quote on a site, I had to turn her down though as she wanted something built that I couldn’t do. I offered to design it for her though and then she could get the programming done elsewhere. I was surprised this morning to find that she’s accepted my proposal and had sent me an e-mail asking me to look over the images and design ideas she was sending me in the post. Looks like I may have some decent paying work after all.
Unsurprisingly I didn’t get much done today, it was very hard to concentrate on anything when my whole body was crying out for sleep. I tried to start my accounts but was unsuccessful so I popped on a dvd, lay on the sofa and drifted off until around 5.
Once up I shook myself together and went to the station to meet Beth.

Tea drunk: Lots
Snail dreams had: 1
Hours sleep: Not enough

June 6th

2006-06-06T22:17:00.000+01:00

The weather has been getting better and better down here, it feels almost like summer is upon us. To celebrate the fact I sat out on my nearly finished balcony with a cuppa and sat reading the brilliant graphic novel ‘Watchmen’ which I’d borrowed of Neil upstairs. I’d forgotten how great it is, it rightly deserves its reputation as the finest of all graphic novels and the one that altered peoples’ perceptions of comic books.
Unfortunately whilst sitting out on the balcony I realised that the new asphalt covering is actually a bit shit and that the stool had left an impression in it. It’s a bit of a crap covering if it isn’t capable of standing light wear & tear. I shall have to talk to Stuart Radley about this…
I also cleaned the bathroom today and did the laundry. I’m turning into a proper little house-husband and It won’t be long before I’m wearing a pinny all day and saying things like “What time do you call this?” to Beth when she comes in a bit tipsy from a few drinks after work. Dear God I need a job.

Tea drunk: 7
Bathrooms cleaned: 1 (I only have 1)
Balconies ruined: 1

June 5th

2006-06-05T21:55:00.000+01:00

Today was a slow start to the week and one of those days where you look back on at about five in the afternoon and realize that you can’t remember what you’ve actually done. I’ve never been much good at Monday’s to be honest, they always feel a little bit like a day of semi-consciousness with me drifting around in ‘em like a feather.
Anyhow, I did a bit of paperwork (I don’t how I seem to acquire so much) and started sorting out my accounts for Mr. Brown. I made some potato salad and got a load of food together to take to Beth’s grannie for dinner. She’s not looking great these days (Beth’s gran, not Beth) and she’s becoming quieter and more forgetful all the time. It’s terrible that this kind of deterioration has to happen to us all though hopefully not in this way. I guess we’re not designed to last that long 80+ is a ripe old age to reach and, if I’m to be the way Beth’s gran is, I’m not sure I’d want to last that long. I’m more scared of my mind going than anything else.

Tea drunk: 4
Potato salads made: 1
Percentage of paperwork organisation achieved: 60% (possibly)

June 4th

2006-06-04T22:30:00.000+01:00

Both Beth & I slept in a bit this morning as we’d both had a late night and after a wonderful brekkie we took a breath of air along the seafront. Beth wanted to take some pictures of the beach huts and then head along the pier to take more but, as the sun was out and it’s always difficult to do too much exercise in the sun, we didn’t get it all done. In fact we only got as far as a seafood stall on the promenade where we bought cockles and then a ‘99’ on the way back.
We’d had a hankering for roast chicken all week so we indulged ourselves that evening before getting ourselves ready to head off to see Zero 7 in concert at the Brighton Dome.
We needn’t have rushed though as the support act (Fink) didn’t come on ‘till 7 and Zero 7 themselves didn’t show until 9. With both of us fighting to keep our eyes open we could’ve used that extra time in a more productive manner and finished off the wine we’d opened with dinner and maybe squeezed in a wee nap.
Anyhow, Fink were okay but not great. Zero 7 however were brilliant. We’re both big fans of theirs and we’d missed them in concert last year as Beth was ill and we’d had to ditch our tickets. I’ve always thought of them as essentially ‘dinner party’ music with a bit of extra bite and this opinion was reinforced when as the realization slowly danwned on us that there were an awful lot of middle aged couples there. In fact, some were positively old. Their fan base really is young to old and I was really pleased to see a few representatives form the ‘Yute’ hanging about drinking ‘Smirnoff Ice’.
I’d always wondered how an ‘electronic’ band would perform live, would it just be like listening to the album on CD or would it be different? As it happens it’s very different, the very fact that we were able to ‘be with them’ whilst they were making the music makes it more exciting and, despite the fact that they were surrounded by computers and technical equipment, their set still had a very personal feel.
Obviously they mostly played tracks from the new album but they squeezed in a few choice tracks from the older ones, mostly ‘cos Sia was with them. The ever popular Sia voiced track ‘Distractions’ went down very well with the audience and she did manage to sing the entire track without using a single consonant which must be something of a first. She also belted out one of the tracks off her own album, ‘Breathe Me’ I think it was to great applause. She has a cracking voice and she put a hell of a lot of force behind it, which kind of surprised us as ordinarily (on cd anyway) she sings quite softly. I was also taken aback to find that she’s actually Australian and not Scandinavian as I’d previously thought.
She entertained the crowd with her ‘kooky’ dancing (and you know how much I loathe ‘kooky’) and her general high-spirits but she veered dangerously close to ‘stand-up’ territory at points, asking for dance style suggestions from the crowd.
Jose Gonzales on the other hand was in comparison a little dull. His voice is excellent and highly soulful but his demeanour is positively dour. The power of his vocal range and the gentleness of his tone though really shone through the tracks he performed, he also provided the obligatory cock-up when he launched into a song early. There was much merriment. All in all it was a fine old evening.

Tea drunk: 6
Concerts seen: 1
Women I thought were Scandinavian but are actually Australian: 1

June 3rd

2006-06-03T20:25:00.000+01:00

After a particularly lazy morning interrupted only by a visit to Waitrose for the week’s shopping, Beth & I took the papers down to Brunswick Square where we lay down on the grass in the sunshine and marveled at the amount of flesh on show. It wasn’t even that warm and yet the square was packed with folk who were clearly suffering from sunlight withdrawal and desperate to feel the warmth of the Sun on their pasty British skin. Maybe I’m being a bit harsh here after all as Beth & I did miss one of the worst winters on record apparently by being out of the country for four months.
We rendezvoused here with Es, Neil, Adam and Alex and their friends Anne & Nigel and headed en masse to the seafront to play Petanque. Oh how I’ve missed Petanque. It’s not so much the game I’ve missed more the chatting with friends, drinking pop, eating ice-cream and generally basking in the Summery-ness of living in a seaside town. I love it. There realy is nothing like it and it made me yearn for the Summer more than ever.

Anyhow, rules established, the Petanque began in earnest, we’d agreed in advance that talking was allowed but not to the detriment of the game. This decision however went right up the pictures and the next two hours were spent chatting, insulting Adam’s technique and generally taking part in a rather half-arsed manner. It was this lack-lustre playing that enabled Es to sneak ahead with three games under her belt. Es, of course, would swear she’s just a better player but I know it was because everyone else was playing so badly. Bitter moi? Of course I’m not.

After Petanque it was time for Pimms in the square. This has become something of a tradition amongst our friends and one that signals (to us at least) the start of the Summer sun. Alex & Es dived into Waitrose and bought a hundred-weight of baked ham along with many other fine foods and we picnicked in the glow of the afternoon sunset. Steve, an old college colleague of mine, also popped along to join us and, once the food had gone and the Pimms had run dry, we took our party (minus Beth, she’d gone to a hen-do) along to the Coopers where we whiled away the night playing the Marshall’s new game ‘Slug or Snail’. Essentially you ask a question with an ‘either / or’ answer and everyone answers it without justification. It didn’t sound like much of a game to me but I quickly found myself hooked. The answers tell you a lot about your friends and it’s kinda fun building up a mental ‘blueprint’ of their psyche.

Tea drunk: 5
Petanque games won: 1
Glasses of Pimms drunk: Several

June 2nd

2006-06-02T20:23:00.000+01:00

This morning I awoke to the sudden realisation that I’d not renewed our parking permit. For those of you who don’t know, parking down here in Brighton & Hove is the number one nightmare for residents and visitors alike. It’s rubbish on all fronts. There’s so little of it (though that’s equally the fault of people who seem to insist on buying car after car) and what there is pretty pricey. Our parking permit for a year costs £80, and even then it can be difficult to find a space in our designated zone. Thankfully the parking office is only down the road so, after a pleasant morning walk, the matter was resolved.
Our good friends Adam & Alex popped in on their way into town for a cuppa, it’s always good to see ‘em, and we discussed the important, sociological issues of the day like the missing arm from Alex’s Lego Darth Vader key-ring and what our three wishes would be.
It’s a tricky one the three wishes thing especially if you work on the provision that you can’t choose the obvious things like ‘World peace’ or ‘another thousand wishes’. It warrants a bit of thought you know. Naturally Adam had broken his wishes down into components and had thought through the minutiae of his ‘World’s Greatest Football Player’ wish breaking it down into whom he’d like to dribble, pass and strike like and whether or not it’d be better to wake up as the World’s Greatest Striker’ with all the attendant fame & trappings, or to have to earn the title by scoring a goal in every match he’d play in. (It’s never been done apparently.)
Today was my Ma’s birthday so she popped down for the day with a couple of cakes. To be precise they were a Victoria sponge and a marvelous Waitrose double chocolate cake with ganache, which prompted a fifteen minute conversation about just what the hell ganache actually is. We took tea and cake and chatted at length about the state of the property next door to them that they’ve just bought, what Peewee & Dad were up to and how Pat was doing. Then we headed off to Marks & Spencer so Ma could buy herself some frocks. Instead of buying stuff for herself however I somehow managed to walk away with six pairs of pants, some sossies and a lovely, leather overnight bag, the latter of which Mum paid for.

Once Ma had headed home I went to meet Beth from the station, it’s always a joy to see her smiley little face amongst all those dour looking commuters. As it was Friday, we made a beeline for the Cooper’s Cask and had a couple of beers whilst filling each other in about our respective day. From there we headed home for sossies & mash.

Tea drunk: 7
Wishes decided upon: 1
Birthdays: Ma
June 3rd

June 1st

2006-06-01T20:20:00.000+01:00

Today so I was woken (as is now the routine) at 6:20 by two alarms working in unison to irritate us. Once Beth had wobbled off to work I dragged myself out of bed to start my day. Our mortgage should've switched today so, after tea and a light brekkie of muesli & juice, I checked out my on-line banking (how did we ever survive before this marvelous invention) only to find that the cocking Chelsea had taken the payment and not the Halifax. I experienced the sinking feeling that occurs when faced with the prospect of dealing with the incompetence of financial institutions. As it happened it was pretty easy to sort out, though an unnecessary diversion from my mornings’ activities.

Banking sorted I turned my attention to the real matter at hand, my dog’s birthday. He’s 17 you know! 17. That’s bloody old for a dog but he is a terrier and they’re renowned for being stubborn, feisty little buggers who hang on in there for a while. Not like these soppy, personality free dogs that just seem to give up at 12. He’s been taken ill a few times (he had a cancerous lump removed from his jaw recently) and we’re not expecting him to make his next birthday which makes me indescribably sad.
He’s been an absolute joy from the moment we bought him home from XXXXX in 19XX. He’s my mate. I love him and I’ll miss him so when he goes, but he does have to go and frankly at what works out as close to 119 in ‘dog age’ I don’t think we could really expect him to last much longer. He still jumps about like a puppy sometimes but nowadays he needs a kip afterward.

The balcony’ is coming on well and it shouldn’t be long before It’s finished and fully useable. Sitting out on my balcony watching the World go by, gazing at the changeable sea and listening to the crack-heads across the road argue is one of the high points of my Summers.

Today is also my mate Dan’s birthday so I boarded a train to London to go meet him in Hoxton Square for a few beers. The journey into London was mercifully free of incident though I’d forgotten how expensive it is. At £18 for a return it does make a trip to London a bit of a bore. It was a great night though and it was wonderful to see my mates again after our four months away, though Beth & I did get rather excitable when relating our tales.

Tea drunk: 7 mugs
Films watched: Land of the Dead
Birthdays: Pat & Dan

This month

2006-06-01T07:38:00.000+01:00

So what's all this about then eh? Well I'll tell you. In an effort to stave off the boredom of job-hunting and as an ego-driven experiment of sorts I've decided to keep a (b)log of what I get up to this month. It's almost certainly of no interest to anyone but me but then most things aren't. If you are reading this however, then welcome. It's good to have you with me. So without further ado, on we go.