Largely Random Observations

Or, What I'd Be Blogging About If Only I Had The Time

1. I must stop mentioning the weather in my Surefish column. When this month's number goes live it's going to start "Gosh, isn't it marvellous that summer's finally started after all that miserable rain we were having earlier?" Aargh.

2. B. and I have been married for eight years as of today. Hurrah for us! Eight years is Sodium, if I recall correctly.

3. Thanks to the aforementioned balmy summer weather, I spent today wandering about the office in:

• wet trousers.
  
• a wet shirt.
  
• a wet tie.
  
• wet underpants.
  
• no shoes, because they were wet.
  
• dry socks, because I keep a pair at work.

It's amazing how much difference dry socks make to your comfort levels. I'm beginning to think I should keep a pair of pants at work too, and possibly an entire spare bedroom.

4. Trisyllabic words that should rhyme but don't: "kilobyte" and "trilobite".

5. When I was growing up in Worthing, my parents had a lean-to shed which they referred to -- in an act of 70s middle-class pretension which Margo Leadbeatter would have baulked at -- as "our loggia". It was only when I read A Room with a View that I realised that what I'd always heard as "losure" was an Italian word, rather than being short for "enclosure".

6. Heroes is -- so far, at least, which from our point of view synchronises with BBC3's advance showings but not with The Sci-Fi Channel -- pretty great.

7. Cryptic crosswords are surprisingly difficult, though. I've been making a vague effort to start doing them regularly, given that sources as diverse as B.'s granny and Toby off The West Wing inform me that they keep your brain supple well into old age. I'm finding the bastards almost impossible, though, suggesting that I've already descended too far into senility for any non-miraculous intervention to be effective. Oh well.

8. I can't work out quite why anyone would want to visit Ashton Court for the Bristol Balloon Fiesta, given that there are better places across Bristol's multiple hills for watching the launches and flights. On Saturday our preferred vantage point (and that of around 2,000 other people, most of them under the age of six) was up the cliffs near Clifton Observatory, where the balloons pass pretty much overhead. (Sometimes they dip right down into the Avon Gorge first, which apparently is Just Showing Off.) It seems particularly perverse to drive to Ashton Court just as some godblighted football match is finishing at Ashton Gate Stadium, which is what the entire population of Southern England bar those 2,000 were doing an hour or so before the launch.

9. The other day I read an ancient Dilbert strip which included the words "Now I have to hug this guy so it won't seem awkward." Five minutes later I had "Purple Haze" going through my head.

10. After nearly nine years of very occasionally killing mice or other small vertebrates, then sitting and watching the corpses in the forlorn hope that they'll start moving again, Mulder has finally worked out what being a predator is actually about. Or so the mouse B. found on the living-room floor last Wednesday would suggest... if it had any front half left to squeak the news with.

The Great Rock'n'Roll Dwindle

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may have noticed that I almost never write about music. Up to this point, I haven't even had a tag for it.

This is partly because music is a rather marginal art-form in my life, compared with my preferred media of TV and books (then cinema, then whatever we're supposed to call actual art to distinguish it from other types of art, then probably comics.) It's partly also because I can rarely afford to buy CDs, let alone attend concerts -- except at Greenbelt every year, where I occasionally find myself essaying momentary music criticism in my reportage for Surefish.

Doing so makes me uncomfortable because -- and this is the main reason why I usually never blog about anything remotely related to this -- my taste in popular music is notoriously dreadful, lacking any kind of coherence, sophistication or class. I'm partial to -- among miscellaneous other things -- '80s syth-pop and glam rock, a certain amount of strenuously heavy metal, Simon and Garfunkel, Tom Lehrer, Dire Straits and Celtic folk-rock. These are not the preferences of someone whose opinion -- let alone whose CD collection -- anybody else wants to listen to at all.

Which brings me with crashing inevitability to last night, when B. and I attended the latest engagement in Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell III tour, just up the road from us at Ashton Gate.

(It was smaller than I expected. I always imagine football stadia as being bloody huge, but this one was almost cosy.)

The last time I attended a Meat Loaf concert was, not altogether coincidentally, also the last time I attended any kind of popular concert whatsoever, except for the free ones at Greenbelt. This was back in the early 1990s[1]: I was young, happy, in love (well, kind of, ish), and Mr Loaf, already in his mid-forties, sang like a portly, ill-kempt angel. His transports of cheap, theatrical sentiment, self-mocking yet so very sincere, spoke evocatively to the fierce romantic joy so recently and unexpectedly released in my buttoned-up public-school soul.

This time round I was fifteen years tireder. My back, legs and bladder ached from all the standing, and the gentlemen standing directly in front of me kept backing into my personal space, treating the quiet romantic passages as opportunities to chat loudly with one another or their mobile phones (with which they also filmed the more spectacular visual effects, thus impeding my view of same), and treating the loud apocalyptic passages as opportunities to do the same only VERY MUCH LOUDER.

Admittedly I'm still in love (and on a much more permanent and reliable basis than with my fondly-remembered companion from that concert half a lifetime ago), but otherwise it was a lot more difficult to lose myself in the moment, and the music.

I'm not the only one who's older, either. The problem with a rock icon nearly as old as your Dad[2] is that, however dedicated he is to touring, by the time you're wanting to recapture your lost youth he's bound to be getting on a bit. Meat Loaf has lost none of his enthusiasm, but his voice is a lot older and has trouble with the high notes: what was once an endearing shambling slouch when performing has become a bizarre bent-double posture as he strains to recreate the passion and power of his youthful lungs. To be honest, he looked a lot of the time as if he was in pain, which given his health issues did worry me a bit. But he's a trooper, and he soldiered on.

That said, the first half of the concert, a reprise of some of the songs from Bats Out of Hell I and II, seemed strangely enervated, as if even Loaf's heart wasn't really in it. I noticed that a lot of the songs had been arranged or abridged to allow for a reduced input from him, giving a lot of the lyrics to his (very good, and very nicely-shaped) female backing vocalists and playing up the role of the instrumentals.

Things picked up a lot when he moved onto the new material from Bat Out of Hell III.

I'm still undecided about the album, which I only got around to buying recently -- there's some excellent stuff on it, but it's a lesser album than Bats I and II to the precise extent that Jim Steinman was less involved in it. Meat Loaf without Steinman is a showman without a show; Steinman without Meat Loaf is "Total Eclipse of the Heart". Given that the original Bat Out of Hell only had seven songs on it, I don't see why Bat III couldn't have worked with just the Steinman songs and nothing else... but these days people like to feel they're paying for quantity rather than just quality. As it is, a good third of the album is irksomely bland and could be dispensed with.

Be that as it may, the performances of "Bad for Good", "If It Ain't Broke, Break It" and the astonishing "In the Land of the Pig, the Butcher is King" had all the violence and verve that had been missing from the first half of the concert (and which aren't nearly so apparent on the CD, either)[3]. And the finale -- a straight-down-the-line, album-template rendition of "Bat Out of Hell" itself -- was as gloriously, headbangingly rousing as it ever has been.

Afterwards we walked home aching, and were too tired to interact sensibly, and went to bed. As far as recapturing my aforementioned youth went, it was probably less of a success for me than it was for Mr Loaf. But I had fun anyway.

In spirit he's as magnificent as he was when I was twenty, and in my memory he always will be. But I can't help hoping I don't manage to dilute that memory further by seeing him perform in person again.


[1] My life appears to have developed a continuity error at this point: for my personal chronology to work out properly, I must have attended this concert in 1990 or 1991. But I could have sworn that Bat Out of Hell II, released in 1993, was on sale at the venue, along with its related T-shirts. Did I perhaps go to more than one Meat Loaf concert in the early '90s? It's unlikely, but possible. At this remove, however, my brain remains confused on the matter.

[2] In fact he's eight years younger. But Debbie Harry actually is as old as my Mum, which I find disturbing to contemplate.

[3] Are these songs written for Loaf's new vocal range? It's possible, but I don't know nearly enough about how these things work to say.

You're It

Ooh look, I've got tags.

[Edit: Although tagging all my past posts is going to take quite some time, I, er, seem to have done the first year's worth this afternoon. The novelty's beginning to wear off now.]

I gather from the stony silence which met my last post that I'm the only one who finds that video link amusing as well as offensive. Oh well.

I'm still embroiled in novella writing, so I'm still not getting much time to update the blog [Edit: Not that you'd think it from the way I've just spent my afternoon, but never mind]. I can't say much about the book before at least a blurb is publicised, hence the succession of rather dull wordcount figures I've been subjecting you all to recently. I can, however, reveal that the last chapter I completed contained the words "crabmeat", "volcanic", and "quarterstaff", plus explicit depictions of caffeine consumption.

Other than that -- and a certain amount of what we used to call "mindless absorption of pop culture" when I was at Oxford, but which would probably now have to be described using the words "product" and "consumer" -- it's mostly been work of one kind or another.

Pleasant exceptions have included a couple of brunches out with B. (which we deserve, this being the busiest time of her working year as well as mine so far) and the anticipation of Bristol Beer Festival this coming Saturday. Unpleasant things have included being told "I'm sorry, I thought you were young," by someone in her twenties, who went on to imply that I looked over forty. Bah.

Middle of the Road

Well, I've now more or less recovered from my 35th birthday party at the weekend, which celebrated the halfway point in my biblically mandated lifespan with appropriate gravity. I'm still rather pleased with the grim and forbidding invitation I designed for the occasion, so I've webbed it here for those of you who haven't seen it already.

In practice, of course, the day was happy, fun and thoroughly enjoyable. Lunch at Zerodegrees (in my case caramelised pear and gorgonzola pizza, accompanied by black lager and pale ale) was followed by a cake which B. had bought and iced for the occasion. We then led a party to Bristol Zoo to observe the various fine animals on display there.

It was the first time I'd visited the new Monkey Jungle, where red-ruffed lemurs scamper freely around the visitors' paths and handrails without intervening bars or glass. The lions, penguins and gorillas were as entertaining as ever, although for some reason the capybara were nowhere to be seen.

In the evening we went on to the Portwall Tavern, which had kindly reserved us all space and got a chef in specially to provide Pieminister pies. They sold us Doombar, Barnstormer and various other beers that I was having too good a time to pay sufficently close attention to.

B. had kindly ensured that it wouldn't matter if I got drunk and embarrassed myself by assembling an activity that would provide a whole different order of embarrassment: a pub quiz based on my life, which she'd compiled by consulting friends, relatives and, apparently, pretty much everyone I'd ever met.

Subjects ranged from my first words and reaction to the birth of my baby brother, to my recent writing and participation in mailing-list controversies. The final round looked like this (click for enlarged image):









and involved identifying the contents of my DVD and video shelves.

My wife's devotion, and her creativity, never cease to amaze me. I'm so very lucky to have her.

It was lovely to see the nearly 40 people from different eras and aspects of my life, including university contemporaries, fellow authors, sisters-in-law, friends' children including my goddaughter, and various teenage and childhood companions, including some who've known me getting on for three decades now.

Too many of these are people I don't see nearly often enough these days, so it was wonderful to catch up with so many of them. People drifted in and out during the different phases of the day, but still there were only a few who I didn't manage to chat to properly.

Thanks to the extreme generosity of family and friends, I now have altogether more new books than I'm likely to get around to reading, which is just the way I like it. Titles I was particularly happy to be given included:

• The Prisoner Scripts Volume 1 from B.;
  
• Fragile Things and Watching the English from the aforementioned baby brother and his wife;
  
• Persian Fire, Collapse and (tokenistically) Promethea Book 5 and King Rat from my parents-in-law;
  
• Never the Bride and Accelerando from other relatives, again through the magic of book tokens;
  
• and River of Gods, Iron Council, 100% and Dying Planet from various friends.

If I haven't listed your present, it's not because I don't appreciate it, just because I have altogether too many to list without becoming boring.

Other rather splendid things from generous people included the DVDs of Mirrormask (from B. again) and the 3-disc edition of The Wicker Man, a case of fair trade wine and a similar number of bottles of exciting beer, and (from goddaughter E. and family) the adoption papers for a two-toed sloth.

It was the kind of weekend which leaves you replete, slightly hungover, full of love for humanity in general and your friends in particular, and mildly dazed by the sensory overload of it all. In short, utterly lovely.

It's just a shame I can't justify having another one until I'm halfway to 80.

Cognitive Dissonance Update

I spend way too much time on this computer. After B. and I painted our bedroom back in July, I kept worrying that someone would accidentally click "Undo" and rever the colour of the walls to sickly green.

Now I find myself attempting to highlight words on a piece of paper by tapping them twice briefly with my fluorescent pen.

Rheumatic Puns

Much of today was spent aggravating my periodical back issues, by carrying around heavy boxes of periodical back-issues.

Well, I thought it was ironic.