It's Not All Walking

New Year's Day is now well and truly over, as is 2009, we'll never see it's like again. Thank fuck. I spent my New Year's Eve in the company of Dave, Linzi, Jon, Joolia, Richard and Wendy and we proceeded to get as drunk as ants, whilst shouting about various things like being raped by bottle nosed porpoises. Which is nowhere near as bad as getting raped by a shark, but there you go. There was a pitiful display of fireworks from the rest of the estate, but being in the poorer part of the village, what can one expect? As the evening got later and we got drunker the music got louder until Dave was blasting Metallica at a level that was enough to makes one's ears bleed. I'd hate to live next door to that stupid hippy.

A Marine Sexual Predator

Along with the New Year Decibel madness my parents have hosted two parties, the first for my mother's rambler's club. They all left at five o'clock ON THE DOT, lest they turn into pumpkins or something. The next evening was the lot from the local boozers, now this was a much more boisterous affair, being that they can take their booze due to having had good practise in the pub. Bob also came down from North Allerton, which is a lot further than Cow Rakes Lane, where Ninjasaurus Rex was hiding, although he had been repeatedly invited, least of all by my drunken mother on Christ's Mess Eve. Bob won my father's quiz, another shaming in the brainy stakes for me. She took home a picture of Whiston Manorial Barn, to be proudly displayed on her work desk at Archaeology South East, no doubt.

I coulda been a contender Charlie...

I have spent the rest of the holiday period quietly contemplating my navel and I have actually watched a massive amount of TV (for me) recently. The other night I settled down to watch 'The Turn of the Screw'. It was new BBC adaptation of the Henry James novella. The book is excellent, not much happens but the suspense it builds up is immense until the cataclysmic finale. This latest adaptation I could only watch for half an hour due to the cack-handed nature of the script. Coupled with bad acting, this was one of the worst things I've watched for a long time. It started off badly with one of the opening lines 'Tell me what terrible things happened in that beautiful house'. How clumsy are those lines? It's like holding up cue cards for the audience because the writers believe we are all so busy sucking on our own feet that we have no idea what is going on around us. It got worse, the governess was shown crossing a street in Victorian London with the voice over of the psychiatrist saying 'You were young, pretty and excited about you new job'. LET THE ACTOR SHOW IT TOO ME, I DON'T NEED TELLING! Those lines should be in the script but as a description of the character, not the voice over. The interview of the Governess was a wincingly awful scene with a really bad flirtation that would have never have happened in Victorian Britain. I turned off after twenty five minutes into an hour and a half program. It suffered as all dramas on TV, namely the people writing them are not good enough to write film scripts so they smash their way through classic writing like bulls in china shops. As usual TV treats us like idiots believing we are not up to the challenge of working things out for ourselves. I HATE IT, I HATE IT, I HATE IT!

Ext: Ghostly figure walks out of door

VO: This is a ghost. It is not a person, it is a Ghost.