KITCHEN AD

Hokay. Time to go on for slightly too long about an advert. I can’t even remember what the company is, other than it seems they really want people to buy new kitchens.

So presumably they sell new kitchens.

Anyway, our heroes are an ordinary couple, and they’re drinking tea in their kitchen while on zoom with their pals. The kitchen has seen better days we see, as the camera pans by dripping taps and broken cupboards.

“Anyway, great news,” cackle the sunny couple on the laptop screen, “We’re coming to you for our hols!”

“Oh er, great…” says our heroine, nervously looking around. Her husband gives a little shrug.

Next we cut to scenes of smooth lined drawers in battleship grey and a shiny double fridge. A voiceover tells us where to go to get a brand new kitchen just like this, and we close our thirty-second-story with the two couples now happily chatting in the newly fitted luxury kitchen. Hooray!

Who in the world invites themselves to come and stay like that? It’s almost the least British thing I can think of. I literally don’t know anyone, family or friend  to whom I could declare, “Great news… I’m coming to live in your house for a week!” and get away with it. I mean what kind of friends are they?

“Um, it’s not great news actually. It’s impertinent and offensive news and you can get lost with it.”

I think this is a toxic friendship at best. One couple are clearly pushing the other couple around. Even if they acquiesce and agree to host them, why in the world should they care about doing up the kitchen for them? It’s on you isn’t it, if you book a holiday - you pay your money and take your choice. I’d be saying these jokers have to just lump it and muddle through with the broken taps and noisy old fridge. Tough! But that’s the deal, especially if you’ve had the audacity to invite yourself. 

But of course, this advert is trying to get us to believe that this is exactly what friends do. And I don’t think friends who judge us by our kitchens are friends at all! This couple are dangerously manipulative, and I think that’s reason enough to just close the laptop and listen to the beauty of the dripping tap on the pile of unwashed dishes stacked in the sink.

I admit. My kitchen is nothing to write into Ideal Homes about. It’s barely big enough for two people, for one thing. Nevertheless, I’m not so embarrassed about it that I have to have it rebuilt next time anyone comes over for coffee! They can take me and my kitchen as we are, and if they can’t cope with that, then frankly, they can go somewhere else. Like a Travelodge or something.

Told you I’d go on too long about it. What I’m saying is that you should get a new kitchen for you, if you want one. And if anyone invites themselves over for their ‘hols’ without asking, you can always stick them in a tent in the garden. I reckon they’d be even thankful for an embarrassing kitchen if you made them up a z-bed under the stars for a week. Chancers.

THE SKY IS HEAVY WITH SNOW

I carried on looking out of the window. It was that time of day, that winter twilight that seems so deep; not quite night, no longer day. It looked very much as though it was about to snow, so I sketched out a quick poem about how I was feeling about it.

The Sky is Heavy With Snow

The sky is heavy with snow tonight

A dark and brooding grey

The wintry trees are caught in the light

Of the heavier end of the day

The birds are so still and the air is so cold

And the sun has bowed her head

The clouds are thick where the billows unfold

With purple and with red

We wait for the blanket of snow to fall

The flurries of delicate white

But the sky still carries the weight of it all

As onward comes the night

And I am heavy with something tonight

A deep and heavy array

For a blanketed world of wonder and white

To fall at the end of my day

THE BRAVE LITTLE HOOVER

There was a great story the other day about one of those robot vacuum cleaners that somehow escaped from a Travelodge. I really love the idea of it nipping through the glass doors and trundling free down the concrete ramp.

I like the thought of it happily scooting across the car park, inhaling the cold air of freedom, rattling over the stones. It’s a sort of Armitage Shanks Redemption; the Brave Little Hoover or something. Freedom! I guess it was found in the end and brought home to its comfort/incarceration.

Funny. Those two things can look the same if we’re not careful. Prison can be cosy, especially when we don’t realise what it is. The vacuum cleaner had only known a world of hotel carpets after all. Perhaps it had no clue that it had been locked in slave labour, or that while it whirred happily around the corridors, it was really serving its unseen masters by keeping their carpets clean. And out there, beyond the abstract fruit and Corby trouser press, there was a real world.

Poor little thing. It was probably never quite the same again. It had seen trees and headlamps! It had heard birds tweeting and the sound of traffic on the flyover. It had been free under the deep blue sky and had felt cool tarmac under its wheels! It had had the smell of freedom in its nostrils, rather than the smell of lint and woven fibre. Who needs pine fresh when you knew that out there, there was such a thing as fresh pine?

“How’s work going?” asked someone today. I caught myself looking out of the window at the trees and the sky.

THE LOOPHOLE-FRIENDLY ADVERB

What does ‘categorically’ mean? It must be a legal thing; it only ever seems to be used by people in trouble who feel the need to firmly deny something happened.

I guess categorical means ‘in a way that can be completely categorised’ - for example, a haddock is a category of fish, elephants fall into the category of large mammals, and politicians in a democracy categorically represent their constituents. Or at least, they’re supposed to.

Today, the Prime Minister ‘categorically’ denies knowing about a party that happened in the place he’s in charge of, at a time when such parties were made categorically illegal - lockdown, of course. It looks like there were several of these events over the course of the pandemic, and so the Prime Minister is probably trying to distance himself as categorically as possible from them all - even though he was actually present at at least two of them and there are photographs to prove it. Hmm.

Then there’s a much-entitled member of the Royal Family, Prince Andrew, who ‘categorically’ denies doing something far worse. I recently re-watched the interview he gave a couple of years ago, where he shook his head like a naughty little boy getting told off, and we all cringed behind the sofa while he feigned shock and furrowed his royal brow. Clearly he was trying his best to establish that he belonged to that world where he was ‘not the ‘party’ prince’… as though the assertion from his Mum’s fancy dining room would be enough to settle the matter, categorically.

It’s an interesting word then. It means ‘absolutely certain’, ‘100% true’, ‘beyond any question of any doubt’. It is categorical - written down in the Big Book of Categories, where That (they tell us) Should Be That.

But I’ve started to wonder why they can’t just say it like that; why do they feel the need to use the word categorical all the time?

Is it a slightly ambiguous term in legalese?  Is it a loophole-friendly adverb that somehow gives them wriggle-room in that inevitable law-court or independent investigation that's coming their way? Does it have protected status somehow?

That’s ironic isn’t it. A word that's traditionally used to communicate absolute certainty is the exact word that does the opposite when it has to. What other legal words are out there, used to communicate a certain truth to the public? Do these powerful party-goers get trained on how to use them? How is it that the language of the law (which matters a great deal when it comes to uncovering the truth) has diverted so far from the language of the public, that a word that we think means one thing, actually gives room for the opposite?

It’s not for me to say what actually happened in either case. In a sense, the legal process will determine the story, and the public figures at the centre of these situations know full-well how to play the game - of which stating something ‘categorically’ is merely a gambit. What I think, and find hugely interesting, is that while PMs and Princes might try it, our biology never lies - you can read some people like a book from just their body language, and, what's more, the words we choose tell a story all of their own. So it’s usually worth watching and listening.

Maybe I just wish I'd had it in my vocab when I was younger. I categorically deny stealing extra biscuits from the biscuit tin. I categorically deny sitting halfway up the stairs with the remote control and scaring my sister by messing around with the TV. I deny categorically clambering over the roundabout and playing on the garage rooftops with my friend Chris pretending we were Jedi!

Yeah. I think my Mum would have seen right through it.

POETRY FINAL

It sounds like the kind of thing that only happens in a game of Monopoly, but honestly, I won second prize in a poetry competition.

There was no real prize, as such - just a round of hearty applause. And even the guy who won went home with a mug, such is the nature of these amateur things.

He was really good actually. He did some serious spoken-word stuff about being a teenager, about waking up next to someone, and about a defibrillator outside a funeral home and why it might have been there. Plus he did it all from absolute memory. It was almost like rapping. I wish I could be that cool.

Instead I got up and read poems about oversized vegetables and drinking a cup of tea at a bus stop. I’ve no idea what Eminem at the back there might have made of my silliness, but people laughed, so that’s probably a win.

I’ve really enjoyed the experience of the poetry slam. It started online in the first lockdown, when I nervously logged into a zoom. It carried on in person when I finally went to a live one last month. This ‘final’ felt like the end of a particular story arc, in which I’d made a few new friends.

There were some funny moments too. At one point, three unusual people and a dog bustled in and started making a fuss. The room was polite enough to let them in. They shuffled in and sat by me, crowded around my little wooden table. Well, actually the dog didn’t; the dog was lovely. She just crept under the piano stool and curled up.

I smiled at one of the ladies from behind my mask. She beamed back from under her wispy white hair and beret. The guy, dressed like an aged roadworker from the 70s, flopped into the chair with his back to me, and rested one squeaky Doc Marten on top of the other. It wasn’t long before he was standing up and commanding the room with his request to say something. He could not say just something though - but rather lots of things that weren’t connected with anything really at all. I felt a surge of compassion for him; clearly not everything was connected properly.

The third of the trio was a Caribbean lady who seemed to be all mask and hair. She had twinkly eyes and a high-vis jacket. She mumbled through, gently patting the arm of the old lady, and Billy Bragg's shoulder. The dog, I assumed was with her, though I couldn’t really tell as the animal had found the piano long before they’d found their seats.

He tried to get get up to read a poem again but got lost in his own thoughts and had to sit down.

In the end of course, they left. I think the host might have been slightly relieved. I remember once he had to deal with being zoom-bombed by randomers, and he seemed quite flustered. I remember thinking that growing up in church, and being a youth-worker had given me my fair share of awkward meetings and how to deal with them, though I would still have struggled. It makes me laugh now to think of all the preachers who had to stop mid-sentence to decide whether they would entertain a heckle from the local alcoholic. You know, in a way, I’m kind of sad that that doesn’t seem to happen any more.

Anyway. The poetry slammers, in their city-centre, flakey old pub, quickly returned to the bonhomie of a friendly poetry competition. Blue flashing lights sped by past the frosted windows, horns beeped from somewhere, the tea lights flickered coldly on the tables and the poets spilled their hearts out.

A little while later, I turned to the guy next to me, just beyond the chair where the Caribbean lady had been sitting. I’d been wanting to complement his brown shoes and bright blue laces, but something more pressing had just occurred to me.

“Have they gone?” I asked him. He nodded and told me that he thought so.

“Only…” I said, “They seem to have left their dog behind.”

Indeed, curled up under the piano stool, breathing softly on the hard wooden floor, the small Alsatian hadn’t seemed to notice her trio of unusual shepherds had left her there. The guy peered round me, and laughed into his sleeve.

“I suppose you could write a funny poem about this!” he said, chuckling.

Young Eminem at the back there, looked over sullenly from beneath his square American baseball cap. I smiled back.

Maybe I could, I thought.

TERRIBLE MOVIE REVIEWS #2: THE WEDDING SINGER

I don't like rom-coms very much. I think they paint a cartoonized version of something deep and beautiful. However, I do appreciate that some people like them, and that, I say, is fair enough.

Even those people though, must expect their rom coms to be at least romantic and/or funny. I mean, they're probably looking for a movie with genuine heart and relatable laughs by definition. Take out either of those things and what you're left with is either something vulgar (all com, no rom) or something so cheesy it may as well have fallen out of Mills' and Boon's reject bin (all rom, and yes, no com).

Take them both out, throw in an Adam Sandler type character vomitting up the 1980s, and you've got yourself The Wedding Singer.

Oh my gosh. It's so unfunny, I actually found myself looking for where I thought the jokes should have been. And even then I couldn't tell. Was I supposed to laugh at the horrific best man speech? What about the rapping old lady? I was baffled. And until the last ten minutes or so, this pot noodle of a movie just made me furious instead of romantic, exhausted instead of amused.

The film is set relentlessly in 1985. You can't forget. Every scene forces it on you - with its blasts of 80s music, awful awful clothes, and block-shaped cars. The colour-palette seems permanently set to bring out the pinks, yellows, and electric blues of a time fashion forgot. Sandler comes out crooning with a Kevin-Keegan perm (presumably the first scripted gag) and from that point onwards, the 80s references come thick and fast, as though someone's throwing cheese and pineapple sticks at you from a foil hedgehog.

Haha, says the movie, wanting us to laugh at the fashion-sense and culture. Weren't the Eighties the silliest? Yeah maybe, but not as silly as the 90 minutes of nauseous nostalgia you're inflicting on us by going on about them.

Anyway, don't let me bore you with the plot; it's very weary. Sandler, the eponymous wedding singer, falls in love with a waitress, who is getting married to a big city banker, who has the morals and form of a suitcase. Sandler himself has been jilted at the altar by another horrible person, and he reacts to this event a bit like Bruce Banner trying to hold down the Hulk using only his face.

The usual story arc unfolds: confusions, crossed-wires, quirky side-characters, last-minute dashes to the airport, and an insipid finale you could have predicted long before he took the mic. Yada yada yada.

Sandler is wearisome too. We're supposed to feel sorry for him, but he just whinges and screws up his face and makes noises as though someone has told him that's how to 'do acting'. During his 'Hulk' phase (post-jilting), he goes on the rampage, and destroys someone's wedding by shouting into a microphone about the futility of love. Then he punches the father of the bride in the face. That is monstrous, isn't it? Fast forward a couple of scenes and he's cheering on randy pensioners at a Bar Mitzvah. Our goofball hero, ladies and gents.

Not only does he paint himself like a child in an anxiety dream, but he paints the dream itself with bold, horrific brushstrokes too. There's an old woman who talks about sex and pays for her singing lessons with meatballs because, I don't know, age, kooky onset-dementia? There's the creepy friend who chats up women, not to mention the cadre of awful jocks who follow suitcase-man around, high-fiving him for his sleazeball ways. Then there's the slutty sister who's been with everyone, the random old guy who has one inappropriate outburst-line. Kids who are buttgrabbers, a Boy George impersonator who can only sing one song, a rival wedding singer who's basically a cheese-string in a plastic suit, and a whole host of forgettable pastiches from the 80s. At one point, a character pulls up in a DeLorien and its iconic wing-door swooshes open. If Doc Brown had beckoned me in for a trip to Biff's 'alternate' 1985, I'd have been punching the co-ordinates into the time-circuits before the wing door had clicked shut again.

I can only think that this cavalcade of cartoonish characters is there to let Drew Barrymore shine as Julia, the main love interest. She is the best thing about The Wedding Singer, and I think it's because she's the only one with a human haircut. Surrounded by these hallucinations of Adam Sandler's 1980s dreams, she sticks out a country mile as the only likeable, only normal person in this whole garish mess.

I think Sandler recreated a version of the 1980s he thinks he remembers as a kid. This is not the 80s of The Breakfast Club or Beverley Hills Cop. It's not even the 80s of a Duran Duran video. Sandler's spewed up his own memories here, assumed that everyone saw that decade the same way he thinks he did, and condensed the result down into an hour and a half of putrid nostalgia. His character is basically a petulant child, living in a sunlit version of 1985 he thought we'd all love and fondly remember.

Bring round the DeLorien, Doc. Sometimes we should just leave the past alone.

PRIMAVERA

I went on an afternoon walk yesterday. You know what? I think I saw the first signs of Spring! Whisper it carefully though; there are still days of thick frost and frozen rain to come, for certain.

But at the moment, the sky is bright and blue and hopeful. The sun lights the trees, and there are little robins hopping around in the branches. I really like the way the shadows look so clean, under the eaves of the houses, diagonal cut lines across the grass, throwing those wintry trunks into shade. The houses look bright and fresh in this kind of light too. It’s almost as though the Spring in the air is itself, a glimpse of the summer seaside yet to come.

I’m getting married in the Spring. It all feels a bit real now, and weirdly complicated. As many of you know, a wedding is a very different thing when you’re on the inside of it, when it’s happening to you. It’s a disconcerting mix of joy, hopefulness, apprehension and worry. It’s all a good thing though - in lots of ways I’m looking forward to being married, much more than getting married, and I suppose that is really how it should be. And the sky is showing me that the first day of that is soon, and that’s exciting.

The Italians and the Spanish call it ‘Primavera’ which comes from the Latin for ‘first spring’ - I really like this. The first opening, or leaping of life, bursting from the wintry soil! We’re not quite there yet; I’ve not seen the snowdrops, let alone the crocuses and daffodils, but the weather is whispering to us, ‘It’s on its way’…

I’d like to write more about how the pandemic has changed my brain. The metaphor is winter - forcing us into isolation and depression like the White Witch in the wardrobe. I think I’ll save it for another time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if future studies show that our way of thinking - about everything - was altered as a species, perhaps far more than we realised at the time. 

If I might stretch the metaphor then: to see the ice drip from the sunlit trees and to smell the grass and see the blue sky, is a reminder that, well… that Aslan is on the move. And hope is stirring.

FOUR WAYS TO TALK ABOUT WHERE YOUR BOTTOM WAS IN THE PAST

I sit.

You sit.

He sits.

We sit.

They sit.

That’s what happens in the present tense. We take our behinds and place them on all manner of things from sofas to thrones, from cardboard boxes to advisory boards. Each version of sitting in the present is ‘sit’ except for he, she, it, and (for the Queen) one, when it’s got an S on the end.

It’s the same for standing.

I stand.

You stand.

She stands.

We stand.

They stand.

He, she, it, and the Queen stands; the rest of us stand. It’s only proper after all.

I know this is obvious. You learned this early, so did I. Stick with me though...

In the past, things are simpler still.

I sat.

You sat.

One sat.

We sat.

They sat.

See? No S on the end, even for Her Majesty. Same rules for standing in the simple past tense of course:

I stood.

You stood.

She stood.

We stood.

They stood.

So far, the rules are quite straightforward then. You stand up after you sat down. You stood up when the music played.

There are other forms of the past though, aren’t there? 

There’s what we call the past continuous - for things we were doing over a longer period of time.

• I was sitting.
• You were standing.

Then there’s the past perfect - for things we did once, and then stopped doing, usually because something else was about to happen.

• She had stood up.
• He had sat down.

And then finally, there’s the tense for things we were doing over a period of time, and then stopped doing: the past perfect continuous.

• They had been sitting there, but I had been standing.

So there are four ways to talk about where your bottom was in the past:

• I sat on the chair (simple)
• You were sitting on the carpet (past continuous)
• She had sat on the throne (past perfect)
• We had been standing in the wrong place (past perfect continuous)

So where, tell me, is the form, “I was sat”?

It doesn’t make any sense does it? Where did it come from? How did it make its way into the language, this hybrid of the past tenses? You hear it all the time:

• "So, I was sat at the bus stop when…"
• "Were you stood by the bus stop the whole time?"
• "Don’t tell me the actual Queen was sat on the throne when you barged in!"

Well. I’m guilty of it too. I listened back to a couple of talks I did and yes, I heard myself use this peculiar construction to describe where I had been sitting in a funny (it wasn't that funny) anecdote.

Here’s my theory:

It’s a British thing that’s been woven into our tendency to be awkward, bashful, and polite. We distance ourselves from saying things directly; we use the passive voice to talk about things that happened to us, rather than the active voice to talk about things that we actually did.

That’s led to some ambiguity then about who actually did the standing and the sitting when it comes to ourselves. Let me explain.

It’s dinner time and in my impatience I’ve been playing around with my cutlery at the table. I’ve taken a fork and balanced it against a wine glass, right in the centre of the table. Then my Mum comes out with the main course and sees the artful arrangement.

“Who stood that fork up against that wine glass?” she asks, crossly. I immediately get to my feet to reach across the table.

So there you go. Not only have I stood up, I’ve also stood the fork against the wine glass. Hopefully, you can see that the same verb here is being used in two different ways.

We're out on the town one night and we spy a lone traffic cone, right next to a statue of King Edward VII. He needs cheering up we think, so my friends and I give each other a boost-up, and then, rather neatly, my nimble pal scrambles up his majesty’s torso, and sits the traffic cone squarely on his head! Then we scarper.

Here, we’ve used the verb to sit in the same active and transitive way: we’ve done the sitting to something else. The fork and the traffic cones are both objects of the verb, where we (the instigators of the pranks) are clearly the subjects. In other words:

• I [stand] the fork against the glass.
• My friend [sits] the cone on the statue.
• The Subject [verbs] an object.

But when you do a thing to yourself, you are both the subject and the object. So when you sit yourself down at the table, or stand yourself on the plinth, you’re using the verb reflexively. You are the object of your own actions. And being British, we like to distance ourselves from directness about us, preferring to think of ourselves as object of an action, rather than the instigator.

Who was sat down? = who sat themselves down and is now the result of the action of sitting?

We were stood by the door = we had stood ourselves by the door and we were then positioned by the door, by ourselves.

I can’t help thinking it’s much easier just to be direct about it, to ask who had been sat down, or was standing by the door. I know a lot of people don’t care about subtle differences like this - sure, I probably will do it all again myself!

Perhaps even English is evolving to accommodate this widespread mangle of tenses! That’s okay if it is - it’s always a mistake to try to keep this beautiful language static. It flows like the Thames, twisting and turning through the ages - and you can’t freeze it over.

What I like is the subtlety of our nature that grammatical foibles like this illuminate. What is the thing that makes us talk like this, when Americans, or South Africans, or Australians just don’t use the same construction?

We are people who embarrass easily about where we stood, where we were sitting, and where we had been standing, and so of course we subconsciously think of ourselves having been put in those positions by someone else! Listen out for it. Next time you hear it, ask yourself what kind of situation the person who said it was in, and how they felt at the time. I think it’s really interesting.

And when you hear me do it, you pull me up on it! Even if it's common-usage-correct now to say 'I was stood' or 'I was sat', I absolutely want to make sure my bottom is in the right place.

THE END OF THE CANDLE

What me? Right now? Oh you know, burning the bottom of the end of the advent candle in an empty wrapper of a chocolate orange.

After Christmas Eve there was a stub of candle left so before it got stuck inside the candle holder, I wedged it out and slowly burned it down. Candles get drippy and waxy towards the end, so I stood it in the empty wrapper, lit the wick, and watched Christmas disappear with a dancing flame.

It’s getting on for a translucent pool. The flame is tall and orange, billowing around a long strand of blackened wick. It’s rising out of the red wax like the last tree on a doomed planet. Soon that long flame will flicker, puff its last gasps into the air and then collapse into the wax with curling wisps of smoke.

I’m not deliberately maudlin today. There’s no metaphor to draw, and I don’t think it would help me anyway. I’m just fascinated by the little things I notice, and it just so happens that the end of a candle is one of them.

There was another one today too. I wondered if there was room in the meteorologist’s vocab book for precipitation that’s somewhere between rain and sleet. I thought maybe it should be called reet.

I was out at the time, taking in fresh air before the dark afternoon fell. The reet was soaking me through, though it was almost invisible. I think reet would be cold rain that gets into your skin, but it isn’t quite frozen enough, or determined enough to count as sleet or hail. Still makes you wet though.

I burned this candle at both ends.

I know. That phrase means both ends of the day, not both ends of the candle. Nonetheless, I started it at the top, at the beginning of December and watched it flicker and fade until it’s just a pool of wax in a makeshift foil dish. The wick smoulders, the flame consumes the last energy of its carbon thread and flashes into the foil. It’s burned at that end too then.

I guess it’s time for me to go to bed.

TERRIBLE MOVIE REVIEWS #1: OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN

Cinema can be magic. Some films can change you as a person, make you weep with the joy of humanity, or connect your soul with deep emotion and memory. Some can make you laugh until your belly hurts, or cause you to wonder, and be moved with the rolling of the stars and the adventure of life we all take beneath them.

Then there are movies where the White House gets blown up and the world is saved by a guy who awkwardly jams F-words into sentences as though they were magazines into semi-automatic rifles... from inside the rubble of the Oval Office.

It’s 2013. Gerard Butler, a disillusioned secret service agent springs into action while a cadre of high-kicking, tech-prepped North Koreans kidnaps the President and takes over the White House. Olympus it seems, Has Fallen.

Gruber - sorry, I mean ‘Kang’ - takes off his eeevil glasses in the Nakatomi suite - sorry, I mean the ‘President’s bunker’ - as the music swells into an eeevil crescendo and the camera zooms in on his eeevil face. He’s a bad guy alright. I laughed out loud. It was like cinematography-by-numbers, with every beat clearly thumped out for children.

It’s not for children though. Bruce Willis, sorry, Gerard Butler, our lone gruff hero, is effing and jeffing his way through the West Wing and sticking knives into people’s heads. There are hokey explosions and gasps from TV reporters. There’s a situation room with a panicked table of politicians and grizzled army types who want to blow everything up. But there always is, isn’t there? There’s more...

There’s our hero’s wife who is an ace doctor in a nearby hospital. There’s a foolhardy attempt to... ‘send in the seals general, we’re going through the roof’ which Bruce, sorry Butler, warns them not to ‘effing’ do but they ‘effing’ do anyway. There’s a last minute nuclear countdown, there’s a helicopter fuelled and ready, there are defiant hostages and secret codes they’ll never ever give up (start your stopwatches) and there’s even a resourceful kid outsmarting the patrolling terrorists by hiding in the walls.

Even Morgan Freeman, demoted from playing God and Deep Impact President, and here just plain old ‘speaker of the house’, is looking perplexed in the situation room. He decides quite quickly I thought, to sacrifice millions of lives in order to save the actual President’s life in his role as acting Commander-in-Chief. I was amazed that nobody had told him about the continuity of command, especially given that he himself was sitting in the hot seat! The whole point is that the presidency goes on, surely? Perhaps he just really didn’t want the job.

And anyway, in movie-land, POTUS is some sort of deity that the USA will crumble without. But then, it is 2013 and they’re yet to discover what it’s like to have one who recommends drinking bleach.

The music slows, the sun glints over DC as the gunfire-shredded Stars and Stripes is lowered from the flag pole in sombre slow-mo. The North Koreans toss the flag carelessly from the roof as a French horn pipes dolefully from the score.

I guess in the end, I just found Olympus Has Fallen very boring. If you’ve seen 24, or you’ve seen Die Hard, if you’ve seen... any action movie actually, you’ve probably seen everything, every single thing this film has to offer. It even came out at the same time as White House Down: the same story, told in the next screen over at your local multiplex.

At one point, Butler smashes the bust of Abraham Lincoln over the head of a North Korean terrorist in the Oval Office. When I think about it, that absurd and unlikely sentence just about sums it up, I reckon. Olympus Has Fallen, sure. But good old Abe’ll never crack in the hands of Butler and Team America.

HAPPY ORTHODOX CHRISTMAS

Well, Happy Orthodox Christmas everyone. Thanks to the discrepancy between the Julian and Gregorian Calendars, millions of people in Eastern Europe celebrate Christmas in early January.

I’ve got no idea how Santa manages this. Twelve days into resting, a belly full of mince pies and sloshy whisky to burn off, and he’s out again on what must feel like the most miserable time of the year for him. It must be a bit like having to drive to London three hours after your night shift.

I jest. I don’t think they have Ortho-Santa. I think they light candles, eat sweetbreads, and bake apples with their families instead of longing for presents. Actually it sounds pretty good to me - I’d take that today; Christmas, Western Christmas, feels like it was ages ago.

It was also Epiphany yesterday, which is the celebration of the Three Kings arriving at the birth of Jesus. The tradition is of course that they arrived on Twelfth Night and gave their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. The confusion is that it’s also 12 days that separate the calendars, and so the Orthdoxers appear to be celebrating Epiphany today, which they’re actually not.

I know. There’s lots of confusion. There weren’t three of them either, and they weren’t kings. In fact, I’m not even sure they got there in the same year, let alone the same fortnight. But I don’t want to upset anyone. I’ll still happily sing We Three Kings next year, and I won’t even blink when Christmas cards arrive, showing their splendid arrival on painted camels.

Working with Eastern Europeans too, gives us a bit of a mishmash of availability today - a curious divide between East and West. The Armenians are in, the Ukrainians are not. The Belarusians and the Russians are definitely not in, but the Polish are. For the Brits it’s just a very normal Friday. A very normal, ongoing, Capitalist Friday in the West.

I guess polarisation isn’t anything new. For three hundred years, countries had to decide which calendar they’d adopt, which way of life would suit them best, which side of the world to align with. Russia for example, didn’t switch to the Gregorian system until the beginning of the 1900s! 

Long before that, the Western Roman Empire stuck with Latin for its church services, while the Eastern Orthodox plumped for Greek. And before that, society in Europe had to pick between paganism and Christianity, old heathenism or the new ways of doing things. And the Church had to pick when Christmas was! It won’t surprise you to know that sheep aren’t out in the fields in December or January, any more than the midwinter was likely to be bleak. But it probably won’t surprise you either to note that Saturnalia, the midwinter festival that Christmas replaced, was for merriment, gift-giving, frivolity and charitable deeds.

Anyway. Happy Orthodox Christmas to anyone and everyone who celebrates it. Long may your breads be sweet and your families be healthy. May your apples be well-baked, and your candles be beacons of hope in a world of darkness. Oh, and if you’re wondering who’s got the real Christmas - don’t worry. It’s almost certainly in September.

UNSPECTACULAR HEROES

We finally got round to watching the Christmas Lectures. This year they were all about viruses and vaccines, how it all works and how scientists have powered through the last two years to save as many people as possible. With the help of special guests, Jonathan Van-Tam (soon to be Sir Jonathan Van-Tam I understand) explained the science to a lecture-room filled with children, at the Royal Institution.

I love that they do this. In the same space where Faraday demonstrated electromagnetic induction, where Jenner explained immunisation, and Carl Sagan sent a boy’s recorded ‘Hello’ signal echoing across the solar system, notable scientists have been inspiring and educating at the RI since 1825.

“Everyone should watch this,” I said, choking up. The experts were delving into exactly how mRNA vaccines work, with plastic models and balloons. Out they came, one after the other - someone who worked night and day on the AstaZeneca programme, another who used data modelling and mathematics to create detailed predictions, still another who devoted their life to sequencing and replication. I was a bit teary by the end of it.

These are our heroes. They aren’t the Avengers or Justice League. They weren’t caped in supernatural powers or endowed with alien strength; they were just ordinary people - scientists with jumpers and glasses, hair clips, smart-shoes,  They were awkward, unfamiliar with presenting, unconfident in some regards with how to bottle down their research for children. There was nothing spectacular about any of them.

And yet, each one has played a significant part in a global team-game of saving the planet. It’s jaw-dropping to think that they managed to create vaccines in less than 400 days. It’s mind-boggling to think of the numbers of people their work has undoubtedly saved. I was, not for the first time, kind of starstruck with the humility of science and its quest to help humanity.

I appreciate, I’m on dangerous ground with some of you here. There are reasons to be sceptical, and I’m not clever enough to convince you that this is not some massive conspiracy. All I can say is that these lectures are worth a watch - if only for your own balanced research. Read up about the science, about the development of the vaccines from people like Sarah Gilbert, Cath Noakes, or yes even JVT, who have selflessly worked this stuff out for us. It makes a lot of sense to me.

I miss being involved in science. It was hard in the end, and I wasn’t really cut out for the world of laser physics or high-intensity plasma research, but I do miss the idea that we could have saved the world. These days, we’re all looking to do something meaningful and memorable, and in a way, as difficult as it is, science is a way to do that. If a worldwide crisis had come along that could only be solved by nickel-sputtering on tiny targets, or by angling YAG lasers around a beam chamber, I’d have been one of those heroes myself.

The children were wide-eyed in their seats at the Royal Institution. I don’t blame them - this stuff is really cool. I imagined they’d been handpicked somehow as kids who were already really interested in science, and not the kids who were going to throw paper darts around at the back of the class. There was a hopefulness in the air, that this, maybe this could be the thing that inspires some of them to get involved and push the team-game forward in the next generations.

That has to be a good thing. 

HOT-WATER BOTTLE NIGHT

It’s a hot-water-bottle night tonight. Clear, starry skies and layers of sparkling frost already on the cars and rooftops.

I’ve not been out of the house today. I was going to, but changed my mind and stayed indoors. Work of course, kept me inside too.

I really miss the glum shuffle into the office. The plasma bulbs in the ceiling had a sort of stark, bright quality, matched only by the weak sun looming through the Venetian blinds. Bleary eyed, rucksacks over one shoulder, we’d amble to our desks via the kitchen, each of us avoiding the task of taking down the tinsel.

“How was your Christmas?” would ask someone inevitably, stirring a mug with a chinking spoon.

“Oh nice and quiet,” would answer someone else from the vending machine.

“Happy New Year,” chimes in a third person, a fraction too enthusiastically if you ask me.

“And to you,” I’d say back.

I used to moan about the chit-chat. I missed it today. I missed having people to make life feel more normal. Instead I simply logged on to my first meeting of the day and found myself head-first into a discussion about JavaScript and virtual machines. Head-first. No banter, no yawning or shared humour, or friendly welcomes-back; JavaScript and virtual machines. I looked out across the street, glazing over. I guess I do this now, I thought to myself. I work from home.

I suppose it’s not much better for my old colleagues. They’re at home too, almost two years after we first got that email. The PC times seem so long ago, so different. The world really changed, didn’t it? Only now if there were an office for those ex-colleagues to go back to and chit chat through, I’m not going with them.

Anyway, here I am, settling in with my hot-water bottle, ready to sleep. It’s very warm on my tummy, just where it needs to be today like a warm hug around the middle. We all need that from time-to-time.

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE

Five past eleven. Next door have moved on to Rage Against The Machine. I know I’m old. I know I’m a bit of a square, but how’s that going to settle anyone down on a Sunday night? It’s just angry boys shouting.

Now. If you’re a teenager, there’s something deeply empathic about angry boys shouting - it’s how you feel inside half the time, and it’s nice to have people who rage like you do, and know how to express it. But when you’re old, when you’ve lived through all that, and your hormones stabilised themselves decades ago, and when you want to go to sleep because your body aches… that angst is honestly a lot less welcome.

Oh it’s somewhat noble, I’ll grant you. Since the 1990s the boys have been 'raging against the machine' - venting their fury about global capitalism with their sweary lyrics. It is noble to stand up for what you believe in. It’s even noble to get vocal about it, maybe even chuck a few sabots into the cogs from time-to-time to right the wrongs, and raise a fist against the injustice of it all. Crumbs, the last couple of years have shown us that there are generations of people who are very empowered to do exactly that, rightly or wrongly.

I just don’t think there’s any desperate need for it after 11pm. I really need to sell this flat soon.

It got me wondering what machines I could rage about. Self-service checkouts? Call-centre switchboards? Printers? The machine that determines which estate agent to put you through to? Actually I’m pretty easy-going about most machines these days.

There’s only really one I could rage at, and unfortunately that particular machine is currently next door blasting loud angry pop through my trembling walls. Gosh, I need to get better at forgiveness. Or maybe get some earplugs.