nuGoogle

I don't know why Google is trying to make all these changes to its user interface. Gmail looks awful with it on, Google Documents is worse, and now Blogger is uniform to that. I don't like it. I'm just not a fan. We'll see how it goes, eh?

guilt trip

One of the perks of my job is when I visit a school I get an allowance for dinner.

It's a simple enough perk; go grab some food, hand the receipts in at work and get the money back. It's not much, but it's nice, so why not?

I visited a school in Birmingham last Tuesday, but it took so long that I didn't get to eat anything when I was there. It was a great meeting, got a lot of stuff done, and the school were really enthusiastic and open to what we were talking about.

I got back into Leicester close to four, and I thought... I should probably eat something. I had missed breakfast, I had only been given a school dinner dessert at the school, and I was jonesing for something to pick me up. I wandered down Granby Street in Leicester, because I hoped to grab a baguette from a little place near the train station but unlucky for me, it was closed, so I kept walking.

I wandered in and out of some cafes but nothing really appealed. On my way into the centre I found this odd little place that was self service: you chose what you wanted to eat, weighed your plate, and then paid at the till.

The problem?

I was the only potential customer there. The two people that were working there, a man and a woman, leapt to attention when I walked in. And I hated it. I hated it because the onus was suddenly put on me to be the customer. When you go into a place that looks like it does well, you don't mind leaving, but this place... it had the look of being recently set up. Anyway, the man behind the till was Asian, the woman who approached me was Polish and she was 'the host'. Her grasp of the English language was great, but her ability to pronounce words was severely lacking ("vegg-e-tab-uls") so my heart dropped. Don't get me wrong, she was nice enough, she walked me through the food that was on offer and the two of them took the lids off all that was offered, and they were genuinely nice about the whole thing.

To be honest, the place was a bit depressing, but something in my head clicked and I felt awful about the whole thing, this place, open in the middle of the day but empty, the look of a place that was more than likely always empty, and I had wandered in, and they were so pleasant. So I sat down, ladled some cruddy looking good onto a plate, and paid.

The food was passable. But I've had this gnawing guilt in my chest since, I've felt bad for not enjoying it, I've felt bad that they're not doing too well, I've felt bad because I was the only person in there. Shit, I only paid £4-odd pounds and they had prepared all that food... and I don't understand why this is affecting me so much. I feel really bad and I don't know how to exorcise those feelings.

But this always happens. If I see an elderly person struggling to walk down the street I feel bad. When I see people alone I feel bad. I don't talk to someone for a couple of days, I feel bad. I cut people who have caused me pain out of my life and I feel bad.

Why am I the person who feels bad constantly? Why is my life one constant guilt trip? I don't understand. I don't know how to get on with things. And anything and everything eats away at me.

Pah. I don't know.

get down, make love

I have Chapter Seventy Six of my novel floating in my inbox, waiting to be attacked. It demands a massive rewrite. Just need to find the right time. I have this niggling want to incorporate a sex scene but it strikes me as potentially ill-placed... But then it makes the earlier sex scene a weird punctuation point, without a thread of thematic/stylistic continuance in the novel.
Problems problems.

nightmare fuel?

I'm listening to Nine Inch Nail's cover of Queen's Get Down, Make Love and the intro is pure nightmare fuel.

Amazingly, brutally haunting.

Thanks Trent :l

Lolita

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."

I'm reading Nabokov's Lolita for the first time and I can't help but feel that it is only-- nothing more-- than a "romanticisation"-- a defence-- of paedophilia. It is quite up front of it's taking of the wrong side of the argument and the 'foreword' is clearly disgusted with the subject matter, but it is three hundred pages of rationalising a perversion.

I'll keep reading but I doubt this is going to turn around for me. It already feels like a trawl of pseudo-poetic/pretentious literature.

I'm not doubting the skill and finesse of the writing, don't get me wrong, but I am simply struggling to get over the simple fact that Lolita is about a man's love of a child who is in turn seducing him.

It's an awkward position to be in as a reader. I want to respect and enjoy this 'classic' but something in my brain is preventing all those things.

1960s

There's something about the aestheric of the 60s, The Avengers, The Champions, Department S, etc, that really piques my interest. The look of the characters, the way they act, you can't get away with the stories you told then if you put them in a modern setting. Makes you think what you could do with those haircuts, those fashions, those characters, if you wrote something along those lines now.

1960s and all.

Maybe I'll find out?

Island of Terror: Department S

Island of Terror: Department S:

Of all the ITC action series, ‘Department S’ is my favourite. It is helped immeasurably by introducing the immortal Jason King, of course, but it is also tautly scripted, superbly acted and well written.

The central idea, that Department S are brought in when Interpol are baffled, was a fairly familiar one, but this show did something with it, relishing in portraying bizarre cases with equally odd conclusions. Storylines included an airliner touching down without either passengers or crew, the assassination of a dummy, the murder of a man with a clown’s mask glued to his face, and an astronaut who appears on a busy London street and suffocates inside his suit before anyone can help him.

Jason King, the novelist playboy with a sad past, would be a memorable character under any circumstances, but the casting of Peter Wyngarde in the role is pure genius. It’s easy to like Jason King because he’s camp and silly and has fantastic hair but there’s more to him than that: yes, Wyngarde occasionally plays it for laughs, but he gives a nuanced, complex performance that transcends his moustache and trousers and shorty dressing gowns. He’s a marvellous creation and only Wyngarde could have made the character so interesting. He’s one of my heroes.

From the very interesting and absorbing Island of Terror blog, reposted here for inspiration's sake.