Slight Return

Back to the normal, boring, live-from-our-Derby-studio blogs, after another four-and-a-half-hour train journey. Places really should be closer together. Still, it's comforting to know that the two of us are still good friends, that I still lose two out of three chess games and three out of three pool games on average and that it really isn't possible to run out of things to say about Doctor Who.

Also nice to know that one of the videos I found over the weekend doesn't have "Hollywood Steps Out" on it, claims on the packaging to the contrary, but does have "Have You Got Any Castles", which I also needed to find. I officially now have more videos than can fit in a single pile on top of the boiler cupboard. Well, I could stack them a bit higher, but then I wouldn't be able to reach the top row without a stepladder (as opposed to climbing on top of my computer like I do now). I also have many more books than can be safely piled on top of the cupboard in my bedroom, and almost too many to coat the floor of the room like they're doing at the moment. I need a bookcase. Several bookcases, in fact. And another flat to store them all in.

X Marks the spot

Something I could have mentioned yesterday, had I not felt that the joke about EastEnders was so much more important, was that during this Scottish sojourn I've been introduced to the wonders of geocaching.

It's a strange hobby involving tracking down hidden 'caches' by means of given co-ordinates and a GPS device. So this is a pastime combining healthy outdoor exercise with the latest in modern technology, and as such is something that I wholeheartedly approve of. On Saturday, we went to the extremely picturesque little town of South Queensferry to find three hidden containers - one of them we had to go on an educational treasure hunt to piece together the co-ordinates from dates on buildings and information boards; another, hidden near the Forth Rail Bridge, was a box containing not only the obligatory log book for everyone who finds it to sign, but various trinkets to swap and 'geocoins' to exchange. We had a delicious lunch in an extremely picturesque little cafe in between hunts, got lots of sea air and walking, and then came home to find that a brand new cache had just been hidden not far down the road, so had to rush out again to be the first to find it.

There's a whole huge community of people who hide and seek these little tupperware containers and the things inside them. Now that's the kind of subculture they should be making documentaries about! I find it fascinating, anyway, and I might just have to splash out on the technology and go treasure hunting around Derby when I get home.

The fruit bowl

EastEnders is so unrealistic sometimes. I've seen the last couple of episodes, for the first time in ages, and the conversation between Martin and Sonia really should have gone like this:

Sonia: Yeah, sorry, Martin, I did sort of kill your mother. My mistake.

Martin: Oh, that's okay. If memory serves, I killed your boyfriend a few years ago before we got married, so this makes us even.

I mean, why don't soap opera people just forgive and forget every now and then? It's no wonder they're so unhappy.

Tom Walton's Schooldays

As is probably compulsory for old school friends getting together, we've been reminiscing about the people we knew, teachers we liked and disliked, nationally famous comedians who we didn't really technically know so much as admire when he did brilliant comedy routines in assemblies and school shows but was three years above me so we weren't actually friends or anything, memorable chess competitions in Scunthorpe where it took Dr Chambers three hours to find the school, us twenty minutes to be soundly thrashed in all our games and the rest of the evening to find the way home again.

It occurs to me that all our school friends who we might want to look up on Google have spectacularly unexceptional names. How do you search for Tom Walton, James Richardson and Richard Taylor? Why can't people retroactively have the decency to have unusual surnames like Pridmore or Bickerdyke-Throgmorton? It probably wouldn't take too much work to find them, to be perfectly honest - Jimmy at least is on Friends Reunited, so it would just be a matter of paying however much they charge, sending him a message and hoping he gets it. Tom was last heard of joining the army, so it would be simple enough to declare war on everyone and everything and insisting on surrendering personally to him when the tanks roll up. And while we know nothing about Slosh's career after he left school, I definitely remember him having a pet cat, so we would just have to learn to speak cat-language and track him down through the global feline network. All cats know each other.

North of the border, down Edinburgh way

Live from Scotland! What other blog brings you that? Probably no other blog in the whole universe. I'm in Dave's living room, sharing my sleeping accommodations with Dylan the rabbit and a tank full of little fish. Which I'm assuming will be quieter than Crispy and Sleepy's hamsters, but you never know. Perhaps they're the kind of fish who have wild parties when the lights go off.

I haven't seen Dave, formerly known as Noddy, for something like six years, and he very unfairly hasn't physically changed even a tiny bit in that time, whereas I've gone all bald and bearded. We've spent the evening playing chess - normal chess, rifle chess, chess with grasshoppers instead of queens, five-leapers instead of knights and reflecting bishops - just like we used to waste our schooldays. It all comes flooding back. It's like we're stuck in a time loop, a never-ending time loop (that's an in-joke that only the two of us would get, so why I'm publishing it in this blog without explanation I can't imagine).

And tomorrow I'm going to explore the big city while Dave and Abi are at work, and see what kind of cartoon videos the charity shops of Edinburgh have to offer. And I only feel a tiny bit guilty about taking a break from the memory training/book writing routine after three days.

Over my shoulder a piano falls

I had a long phone conversation today with a TV producer - yet another prospective Channel 4 documentary about memory competitions. Still, one of them's sure to come to fruition one of these days, and this one sounds quite hopeful. We were talking for more than an hour, I think, although that's probably more of a testimony to my ability to waffle on and on about nothing than anything else.

Anyway, I'm off north of the border tomorrow, visiting my long-lost friend Dave who I haven't seen for years and years. So I probably won't post anything here till I come home next Monday (I don't know why I feel the need to mention that here, I just have visions of disappointed legions of fans tuning in to see my latest words of wisdom every day). I haven't been to Scotland since new year 2001, I think it was. I've only been to Wales once, and that was an accident. I need to broaden my horizons a bit more, I know.

Another one for the gallery

It's a strange time of year for people to be giving ancient cartoon videos to charity shops. Unwanted Christmas presents from 2006, yes, but this one I found today surely wasn't a recent gift. Or maybe it was, and the generous giver seriously misjudged the recipient. Still, for whatever reason, this wonderful Marc-illustrated masterpiece turned up in the Oxfam shop here in Derby at some point in the last couple of weeks, and I quickly snaffled it up. Another 'Vidage' release, and since this one is volume three, it's possible that there are others out there. I'll have to keep an eye open. It's bad art, even by Marc's standards, I have to say. I know that sounds nasty, but I honestly do admire him really.

And if you think I've been doing nothing but collecting cartoons in 2007 so far, shame on you. I've done a heck of a lot of memory training the last two days. I've got a pretty exhausting schedule, but if I keep it up until the world championships, I'll walk it. I've also been writing the book, and that's going quite well too. I'm almost doing as much work as I intended to do, which is a good start.

Although I am going to take a well-deserved holiday on Thursday when I go up to Edinburgh for a long weekend. That's the good thing about being unemployed.

013457689014658757562987032105-5

Didja see it? Huh? Did you? The climax of "The Sarah Jane Adventures" tonight hinged on memorising a big long number! Who says this whole memory thing has no real-life applications? If not for memory skills, the whole planet would have been taken over by aliens! Hey, do you think they stole the idea from my movie synopsis the other month?

Of course, if we're going to be just a tiny bit picky, I could point out that the number Luke mutters to himself while typing it into the communicator wasn't the same one that he heard earlier in the show, so technically the Bane should have killed them all and gone on to subvert the human race, but never mind. I liked this. A lot. I think it's going to be a very fun series. Elisabeth Sladen is brilliant in the Doctor role as the eccentric investigator, and she has good support from the young co-stars (although Porsha Lawrence-Mavour, playing the least important of the three kids' roles, seems to be the best actor by some distance - they're all quite acceptable, though).

Hopefully for the series proper they'll ease off on stories where almost the whole Earth's population fall under the mental control of the aliens, because we've had quite a lot of those just lately. Also it would be nice if they'd ease off on the CGI monsters - tonight's episode had one infuriating little moment when the alien chases our heroes up the stairs and runs right over a hat hanging on the bannister without moving it at all. That's just sloppy. Besides, I like to see a guy in a monster suit - the actors seem to react better when they can see what they're supposed to be reacting to. And while I'm criticising, Sarah Jane goes to great lengths to investigate the mystery drink, even getting scientist friends to analyse it for her, but never thinks to point her alien-life-detector watch at it!

Enough nit-picking. Like I said, I really liked this, and I think it might be a big success. But then, I like Torchwood, and that seems to be getting very mixed reviews. I'll have to try to redress the balance by raving about it after tonight's final two episodes. Well, I'll wait until they've been on BBC2 on Wednesday in case any of my devoted and non-Sky-having readers are still watching.

The most powerful man in the universe!

The whole New Year thing, as well as Auld Lang Syne, fireworks and Jools's Annual Hootenanny, means the annual World's Strongest Man competition on telly. The first heat was tonight, and I was watching it avidly as usual. In many ways, you know, strong man contests are very like memory championships - they have a small core of regular competitors who all seem to be good friends, they involve a range of specific disciplines that the competitors have to train for and that aren't just about pure strength, and the British competitors never win it nowadays. Yes, I just compared myself to Geoff Capes.

It came as something of a surprise to me to see that Mariusz Pudzianowski is 29 years old. I hadn't realised it until I saw the statistic on screen, but I instinctively think of strong men as being older than me. Probably because they're generally a foot taller and twice as heavy as I am, making me automatically think of them as grown-ups. I don't know if that's a universal syndrome, or just something for those like me who have difficulty remembering they're actually adults.

And incidentally, if I see one more advert for Barbie's dog Tanner with genuine excreting action (seriously), I'm going to have to stop watching the cartoon channels quite so much, or possibly just keep a brick handy to throw at the TV screen. Which seems like a good note to end the year on. Happy 2007!

The Persistence of Memory

I was practicing memory today before I was fully awake (I'm turning into a very late riser just recently - with not working, I seem to be shifting into a 25-hour day pattern and not getting tired until later and later at night), and getting on quite well - slightly slower than my best times in memorising, but recall much closer to 100% than usual without needing to think about it. After finishing with numbers and binary, I had a go at some speed cards, and only as I got to the end of the pack did I get a slight sense of deja vu. The last six cards were two fives, two sevens and two tens, and I thought to myself "didn't I memorise another pack a while ago that ended like that?"

Thinking back over the past minute or so, I suddenly realised that I'd picked up the pack of cards from the pile on the right-hand corner of my desk, where I keep the cards I've used in previous memorising sessions but haven't got round to shuffling yet, rather than the pile on the left of shuffled and ready-to-memorise packs. How can I remember the sequence of a pack of cards without too much effort, but forget an instinctive thing like picking up the pack from the left side (which is how I've ALWAYS kept my cards)?

Makes me wonder if I've done that before without even noticing it. As a side-effect of learning to memorise cards, I've developed the ability to instantly forget them after I don't need to recall them any more (so that I can reuse the mental journey they were on), and it was only that distinctive run of cards right at the end that rang a bell. Perhaps I'm actually just a big giant fraud, and whenever I think I've memorised a pack of cards in training, it was actually just the same pack over and over again.

Go stop

Neopets have just added their version of godori to their extensive library of games. It's one of those games that I've heard of before but never played, but there's something insanely addictive about it. I think I might have a gambling problem.

Neopets, all in all, is an amazingly good website - the only website I know that has its own functioning economy, although there are probably plenty of others out there somewhere. But Neopets is so overwhelmingly vast, unashamedly cute and unexpectedly clever that I can spend hours or days on end wandering around it when I'm in the mood. The rest of the time I neglect my poor pets, of course, and feel terribly guilty about it.

Clip show

It's nearly the end of the year. There's nothing on telly but shows about what's happened in 2006, nothing in the blogosphere but posts about what people have posted about in 2006, and on top of this I've spent the day writing emails, writing an article for the British Othello Federation newsletter that I suddenly remembered promising to write, not writing my book, and writing a big blog post tonight seems like more tap-tapping of keys than my fingers can cope with.

So in the spirit of doing something a bit different, here's something I found while dredging the depths of my huge cardboard box that contains all my important paperwork, looking for my CIMA registration number. It's an exciting story that I wrote on a particularly boring long plane journey a long time ago, and at first I thought it might be a good idea to type it up and put it on the blog. Then I realised that that would be even more work than actually writing a big long blog post, so I thought it would be even better to scan it and post it in that way. Hope it's more or less legible. I can read it, but then I'm used to my handwriting. There should be more handwritten blogs, don't you think?

Piper of poppy

I've just been watching "The Ruby In The Smoke" on BBC1. It was very well done, but there's just too much plot in the Philip Pullman book for a 90-minute TV adaptation. Even having read the book, it was hard to keep track of what was going on on screen. What happened to the days when the BBC would make this kind of book into six half-hour episodes or more, and show it as a serial? That kind of treatment would work much better for the Sally Lockhart books, because we need a bit of downtime here and there to show her, for example, settling in with the Garlands and becoming part of the family and business. To cram everything into the feature-length adaptation, they had to cut out all the scenes that didn't have a direct bearing on the multiple intertwined plot threads.

That said, Billie Piper was surprisingly brilliant as Sally. I really have to get over my prejudice against her, I know, but when I first heard about it I thought something along the lines of 'tchoh, why do the BBC insist on believing she can pass for a teenager?' And she very nearly did, this time! Not just from the makeup, but her acting too. I was impressed. The makeup was a bit excessive in one case at least - David Harewood plays both Bedwell twins, and yet they didn't look anything like each other, despite what the script said. And it was an interesting decision to cast black actors in a couple of parts, at least one of whom is required by the plot to blend in with the people in the Victorian London streets - but then, historical accuracy tends to just get in the way if you take it too seriously, and they never get it entirely right however hard they try.

I'm looking forward to the others - apparently they're planning to do at least the other two Sally books, which has to be a good thing. And here's another claim to fame of mine - Philip Pullman, before he was famous, was my good friend Fat Andy's English teacher. Apparently he was really great, too. Perhaps if I'd had him instead of Mrs Slater, my own writing career might not have been quite so entirely unsuccessful...

Big black horse and a cherry tree

I love that song. I wanted to come up with a good excuse to use it as a blog title, but couldn't, so I decided to just let it be a non sequitur. Anyway, Christmas is over, the goose is getting digested, penny for the thoughts under the famous black hat? Well, I've got Plans for what I'm going to do with my time from now on. Maybe not quite big enough Plans to really merit the capital P, but I like to make things sound important. I've got a proper schedule of book-writing, memory-training, working on this memory performance, learning to play that darn piano, things like that. I've got another TV producer to talk to, and I'll make an effort to see that this one goes somewhere. All in all, I want to make sure I'm busy enough to justify not working. If I ever confess here that I've been doing nothing all day, everyone reading this has to shout at me.

Absent friends

I'm really going to miss my dad phoning at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning, incoherently drunk already, to wish me a happy Christmas.

Hope everyone out there in internet land and beyond has a magical day! Happy Christmas, merry wishbone, happy Holiday, pleasant Festivus, anything else you might care to celebrate, do it with style.

Ain't it thrilling, though your nose gets a chilling

There are few things on Earth quite as inspiring and comradely as turning out to watch your team of underdogs get a well-deserved draw against the league leaders in freezing temperatures two days before Christmas. The result doesn't flatter us at all - there really was nothing to choose between the two teams, and we could easily have won. What's more, it was a clean, sporting kind of game, with no Boston players booked, for only the second of their 23 league games this season! Although Andy Marriott did his best to tempt the referee with some ludicrous time-wasting near the end.

With our new star striker Drewe Broughton suspended again after his second red card in his six games for the Pilgrims so far (to be fair, they were both reportedly very dubious decisions), Dany N'Guessan got into the starting lineup, and after a first half full of half-chances for both sides, opened the scoring on 55 minutes by catching the Walsall defence napping and classily tapping it past their goalie. It looked for a while like we might hold on for a win, but they equalised from a corner. Still, in between goals there was plenty of time for our fans to launch into the most popular Boston Utd chant - "We're shit, and we're one-nil up!" The Walsall fans didn't seem to have heard this one before, and took a minute to confer before retaliating with "you're fat and you're Chelsea fans". In fact, the banter between fans was very good-natured all through the game, it must have been the Christmas spirit at work.

This leaves us with a very symbolic 24 points from 23 games at the half-way point of the season, and the dizzy heights of 19th place in League Two. It's definitely starting to look like we might survive another year in the league at this rate. It's the local derby at Lincoln on Boxing Day, and I think we're well capable of winning it, although there'll be riots if we do. But to be fair, there are always riots after Boston-Lincoln games.

There were notices at Nottingham station to warn passengers that all Central Trains services on Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day have been cancelled due to strike action. I mean, come on, conductors. You could at least pretend that there's some motive to the strike other than wanting the holidays off work! Since I'm not going anywhere, I admire their cheek.

We now return to Force Five

As promised, this is part two of the gallery of Krypton Force video covers. You can see part one with a simple click here, but if you can't be bothered, these are 1980s collections of American translations of Japanese cartoons from the 1970s, with wonderful artwork by the maestro "Marc". Without further ado, let's begin the show:

This is the one I just acquired recently - volume one of Krypton Force's Videotoons series, with lots of KF's hallmarks on it. There's the baffling tendency to describe Bugs Bunny as "the double B", the guesswork as to what the cartoons' titles should be ("The Chemist" is the classic "Bottles"), and of course an unusually atmospheric Marc cover, in which he has a creditable stab at drawing Bugs and Daffy but doesn't quite make them recognisable.


This is volume 1 of "The Protectors", which was Krypton Force's name for GaiKing. And, probably by coincidence, it contains the first two episodes of the series. Krypton Force's approach to volume numbers was delightfully random, as you'll see if you have the patience to read through this entry, so it was probably just by luck that it worked out like this. The cover features a particularly bad Marc rendition of the GaiKing robot - look how misshapen the lion mask chest piece is, in particular (there are plenty of screenshots to be found on the internet for comparison). And Darius (the red-faced bad guy) has his mouth (it's on his forehead, because he's an alien) drawn much too small, so it just looks like a little blemish of some kind. The futuristic city in the background is probably stolen from somewhere else, I doubt it's Marc's own work.


One thing I'd forgotten, with my brother having all three of the Protectors tapes in our joint collection, was that they have a sort of link-fence background pattern instead of the usual Krypton Force hexagons. Also of interest on this one is the first screenshot on the back cover - it's the head of the GaiKing robot, upside-down. They haven't actually stuck the picture on the box the wrong way up, it's a freeze-frame of a moment where the robot loops-the-loop and flies towards the camera that way up. It's still a strange choice for a picture, though, as are the others - a frame of annoying kid sidekick Bobby drinking a glass of juice, and a close-up of the baddie's head. Couldn't they have used a scene from one of the big robot fights or explosions? The first episode on this tape also contains the truly wonderful line "Our enemy has applied the reverse space cross theory to some sort of space bazooka." I admire the actor who had to deliver that statement in a fake Scottish accent, with a straight face.


One more Protectors tape (this is volume 3, but the sequence of KF volumes bears no relation to the order the episodes were originally broadcast. A Marc cover with fewer disembodied heads than usual, and a pretty decent stab at the Skylar robot and dinosaur.


Part one of "Sci-Bots the movie", as described in my previous post. The front cover is a classic Marc collage of poses swiped from the episode and stuck together with no regard for scale. And on the back, we have two more exciting scenes cut from a Ladybird Transformers book. The white flash you can see of the one of Galvatron actually contained the title of the story it illustrated. The blurb on the back also demonstrates the first of two spellings of the name of the first bad guy the Spaceketeers encounter - he's Tri-Ax-Con on this one, but Tryax Khan on other video boxes.


Back to the full-length episodes of Sci-Bots/Spaceketeers here. You've got to love the way they title the video "Snark & The Diamonds" and then write on the back cover about "Dr Snork".


The packaging doesn't mention it, but this tape is described onscreen as Sci-Bots volume 6. Sci-Bots, unlike the other series, has long continuing storylines, so you can follow the heroes' adventures from one tape to the next, as long as you're not watching them in Krypton Force's sequence. The story in this one continues into volume 3, and then the next part is volume 9. Tryax/Tri-Ax is the big blue and white furry guy on this cover, by the way. Check out his hand - I think that's swiped by Marc from a different source, possibly a Transformers comic, because Tryax wears black gloves in the cartoon and they're not shaped like that.


The decision to write the back cover in pink lettering on a purple background was a slightly strange one - it makes this very difficult to read. But just to take a break from poking fun at Krypton Force's packaging (I think it's great really, as I'm sure you know), this tape contains a good example of the American translators' occasional attempts to make the Japanese originals a bit more child-friendly, usually by pretending that nobody dies. The big purple leopard man shown on the cover here collapses at one point, Porkos checks for a pulse, shakes his head and says "He'll be okay." And that's the last we see of him. The 'movie' version of the saga is a lot less inclined to do this kind of thing, interestingly enough, but this scene is one of the many chopped out of the movie entirely.


The last Sci-Bots, and I've exhausted everything I can say on the subject. But what does "No surrender no return" mean?


You may recall me saying that I'd only ever seen one Orion Quest/Grandizer tape. Turns out I was lying - I'd forgotten all about this one, which if memory serves I actually bought for my brother years ago. More flying-saucer-based fun and excitement, yay. Actually, for one reason or another, this is the Force Five series I'm least in to. It might be the bad voice acting by the American cast as much as anything else - it's set in a rural area, so the characters have sort of yokel accents which get on the nerves a little bit.


On to the Formators or Starvengers, and isn't this a classic Marc picture? I think he preferred heads to bodies, and he's especially unwilling to draw legs, as this cover clearly shows.


Quite a few of Marc's earlier cover pictures don't take account of the caption flash in the top right corner. Although it's difficult to put them into date order, the kind of problem we see here does seem to have been avoided in the later works. Also, that dog is a darn good drawing. Did Marc really do that? The colour scheme is wrong and it seems a bit hairier than the dogs in the episode - possibly it was stolen from somewhere else and had a horn drawn on its head (all the bad guys have horns in Starvengers, even their dogs).


Now this is a classic. To add to the excitement value of the cover, we have, up in the top left corner, two Transformers, copied from the comic (Highbrow and another one whose name escapes me at the moment), and down in the bottom right another stolen comic scene, with Divebomb lying on the floor and Grimlock towering over him with rock in hand - but the top half of Grimlock's body has been replaced by an approximation of the robot from this tape's contents. Cut and paste some explosions and clouds, add a few of those famous floating heads in the air, and you've got the Marc formula for a great cover!


And this one's possibly even better. It's the box art for the Transformer Hun-Grr, expertly traced by Marc without the aid of a ruler, and the Dragon formation Starvenger robot's head drawn on top. The robot on the video looks nothing like the one drawn here, obviously. And yes, this is Formators volume 2, but it contains the first episodes in the series. Volume 1 was the final episodes of another series entirely - see my first post on this fascinating subject.

This one comes in two parts, because it's a cheap cardboard cover rather than a plastic one with removable paper inlay. Not so easy to photocopy. It's also the only Danguard Ace episodes I've ever seen with the Krypton Force label, and the first two episodes in the series. I suspect this was the last Force Five series they turned their attention to, and only started releasing it when they'd almost entirely run out of money. But maybe I'm wrong - the exact details of KF's business is something I'm completely ignorant of, much as I'd like to know what they were all about. The comic-strip approach to the back cover is also something unique in my experience, but the front cover, although unsigned, is classic Marc.

And that's that. I would love to find some more Krypton Force tapes out there, but as I said before, it's years since I came across a new one. I have it on good authority that there are at least a few more of them out there somewhere, so you never know.

Mmfrfl

I've basically spent the whole day in bed today. You should all consider yourselves very lucky that I've dragged myself out of bed to write this, really. Actually, I'm feeling a lot better this evening than I was earlier on, although I'm still all bunged up in a not at all appropriate for Christmas kind of way. Wow, and there was just an advert on TV for 'Sudafed vapour plug', which apparently you plug into the mains and it releases soothing vapours at you. Frankly, I find that thing kind of scary. I'm sure there are cold remedies that don't need electricity.

Anyway, tomorrow, assuming I feel better, I'll have the long-awaited part two of my illustrated guide to Krypton Force videos - I've got my brother's collection here now, and I just need to scan them. And watch them again because I haven't seen a lot of them for a while. Which, come to think of it, might be something I don't get round to for a while, so promising to do this tomorrow might be a bit on the optimistic side. Still, I'm confident (despite a complete and total lack of evidence supporting this belief) that there are hundreds of readers out there who are really looking forward to this, so I'll do my best.

But the wind blows right through you, it's no place for the old

It's turned really freezing cold around here overnight, just in time for Christmas. I've also had a really rotten cold for the last few days, so any messages of sympathy will be gratefully received. Achoo. Sniffle.

But in fact, I'm in a wonderfully happy mood, because I've just watched 'My Neighbour Totoro'. It's an absolutely fantastically good film. Admittedly I'm a sucker for anything that suggests there's magic just round the corner, but even looked at objectively, this is a masterpiece. I would advise everyone to see it, it's a real feelgood movie, and it's got a catbus. I should look at the Film 4 schedules more often, I only noticed it by chance today.

Also in the news, I think I should record that Boston Utd are on a winning streak at the moment - they've just won an absolutely crucial relegation six-pointer away at Torquay, even though there's still talk of the players not being paid this month and it was only through a generous local businessman that they could afford a hotel down there (Fawlty Towers, probably). They've got a home game on Saturday against the league leaders Walsall, who are having a bad run of form just lately. I might go down and see it, if the weather's not too bad. They need support. And money.

Grunch

Sorry for not posting anything last night and not mentioning why. I was at Ed's 25th birthday party, disguised as a horrific demon from the darkest depths. Coming in disguise was compulsory, you see, so I wore sharp and stylish clothes rather than my usual slobby stuff - my funeral trousers and jacket together with a black turtleneck like some kind of beatnik, plus the new and extremely uncomfortable shoes - along with the Brazilian Mystery Cloak and my fantastic full-head-covering rubber horror mask of a monster with a mohican. I've had said mask since I was 15 or 16, it was a birthday present and I recall my schoolmates not being nearly as impressed with it as they should have been. This was only about the fourth time I've ever worn it for any period of time, and it rather started to fall apart by the end of the party. It was definitely a big hit, though.

Getting there was half the fun. I got the train down to Oxford in the afternoon without too much difficulty, and met Jenny there. But the electronic displays at Oxford station didn't so much as mention the 7:24 train that was supposed to take us to Hanborough, ten minutes down the line. I asked someone at the station about it and he assured me that the train was running, the screens just weren't showing it for some reason. Immediately after this, it did appear on the screens with the information that it had been cancelled. They had to announce repeatedly over the tannoy that the train was in fact running normally. You'd think a big place like Oxford would run its own electronic displays, but obviously not.

Anyway, I got into costume before getting on the train, just so as to conceal my identity properly. Jenny also put on her butterfly mask, so we made an interesting couple. Then another train pulled into the platform and about 25 Santa Clauses got off. It was all rather surreal. A few people on the train were convinced that Death was stalking them when I got on, but I refrained from claiming anyone's soul, seeing as it was Christmas. Then it was simply a matter of getting from the station to Ed's place. Which you'd think wouldn't be a problem - we even had directions.

There were five more costumed partygoers on the train, so we all got together to follow Ed's instructions - his suggested route involved crossing the railway track, climbing an embankment, getting over a barbed wire fence, and trudging across two very muddy fields in pitch darkness. We ended up phoning him to say "we're in a field, and there's a hedge. How do we get to your place from here?" It turned out that another alternate route would have been to walk along the road from the station, but the assault course approach at least served as a nice ice-breaker. Three of Ed's friends among our group all assumed that I was someone called Bill. Apparently we have exactly the same voice. I find this quite intriguing - obviously my fellow Flowerpot Man is out there somewhere, and I've just never met him.

Anyway, we made it in the end to the Cooke family home, which covers roughly three-quarters of Oxfordshire. The extremely cool and enormous house had been further enhanced by being converted into a series of tunnels made of sheets, cushions and tables. With Ed's sisters on makeup duty with orders to forcibly disguise anyone who turned up looking recognisable, Ed himself greeting the guests dressed as a buxom woman, and large vats of sangria available, a merry time was had by all. From the memory world, the party had also attracted Josh, as Captain America, and Lukas, as a nineteenth-century swashbuckler, plus a huge range of Ed's friends, acquaintances and complete stranger gatecrashers. There was a whole sheep roasting merrily on the bonfire outside.

Josh (to a prep-school friend of Ed's): Ed seems to still be friends with a surprising number of people he was at school with.
Me: Oh, that's how these public-school types are. Sorry, I'm a northerner with working-class pretensions.

I do tend to feel a little bit self-consciously proud-to-be-common when I'm in the vicinity of the upper classes. I was all prepared to be secretly contemptuous and scathing when faced with drawled anecdotes about people's fathers and the troubles they had with the big chunks of western Europe they owned and the wealthy and influential people they associated with, but it turned out that Ed's friends, like Ed himself, are a great bunch of guys. They did come out with a few anecdotes like that between them, though.

After a feast of mutton, pheasant and chicken which turned out to be not only edible but actually quite nice, Ed announced that since we had in attendance two of the world's best speed-card memorisers, there was going to be a challenge of me against Lukas, everyone had to pick a side to back and the losers had to go out and build up the bonfire. Lukas in particular was unwilling to do it, since he hadn't memorised a pack of cards for more than a year, but despite our insisting that we'd only do it if Ed could remember the names of everybody in the room, the challenge went ahead. People picked a side based largely on which side of the room they happened to be sitting on, and Ed gave us a minute each to memorise a pack. Lukas announced that he couldn't do it, so it ended up as me against Ed instead. And, to my deep shame, I couldn't remember the 17th card in my pack, so Ed's side won. I passed it off as a birthday present.

We adjourned outside for fireworks and dancing around the bonfire (I refrained from joining in - I have a history of knee injuries in Oxford, and didn't fancy mud-frolicking), then people scattered around the extensive house and estates. I was dozing on a beanbag in front of one of the two log fires when the lure of brilliantly-played guitar and piano music from upstairs overcame any tiredness, so I went and joined in a singalong around the grand piano. Ed's friend Ross is one of those staggeringly-talented pianists who can play anything you care to hum to him, and I'm wildly envious of people like that. When he had finally been allowed to stop playing, and after Ed had responded to the suggestion of a cup of tea by insisting that we compose theme tunes for each variety of tea that might be available, we played increasingly surreal games around the kitchen table, ending with 'amusing binary numbers', before I went off to get an hour or so's sleep at six in the morning, somewhere without too many people in sleeping bags scattered around.

When I got up again around eight, Jenny (who never goes to bed at this kind of party) was tidying up the kitchen with Ed's mum. If upper-class contemporaries inspire peasants'-revolt kind of feelings in me, upper-class parents just terrify me. I always feel like some kind of intruder, sitting in the kitchen under false pretences when I should be out tending to the livestock or sleeping in the barn or something. They've got an aga and a teapot and go out to feed the hens in the morning. Still, we had a friendly chat and listened to the cricket on the radio as people started to emerge.

I'm probably confusing things more than necessary by calling Jenny Jenny here, seeing as everyone at the party knew her as Katy (it's her real name, after all), except for Ed's parents who thought she was called Beth. Anyway, Ed's dad gave us a lift down to the station, where we eventually got the train - it had been delayed by striking a bird and cracking its windscreen, forcing it to be taken out of service at Oxford. My connecting train up to Derby also wasn't appearing on the screens, but it turned out that it genuinely had been cancelled and I had to get a rail-replacement bus to Banbury. But apart from that, I made it back to Derby safe and sound. Now I just need to catch up on some sleep and go to the supermarket and tidy up the flat before my brother comes round tomorrow. Hectic social life.

Oh, and 'Grunch' is the name of the horror mask.