Until New Year's Eve, then...

It seems the nutjobs were indeed wrong, since the world did not end at 11.35am today.  However, today is the last time I’ll have guaranteed access to the internet until December 31^st.  So, the continuation of history notwithstanding, this is probably my sign-off for 2012. 

If the world does end today, just a little later than predicted, it’s going out on a high of sorts for me.  The sun is shining, the temperature is above zero, I saw a jogger dressed as Father Christmas this morning (complete with heart-rate monitor), the trees on Brentford Eyot are gleaming in their winter bark colours of red-gold and olive- green, there’s a lovely dog running about on the Green, I have coffee and nougat and sesame biscuits in the office, I’ve revised and typed up to the end of chapter two of “Gold Hawk” and am happy with it so far, and I have the next nine days off work.  And last night I met TCI and G for a pre-Christmas beer-and-nachos at the Prince’s Head in Richmond, and a cute chap a couple of tables away kept making eyes at me.  Think a balding Jason Isaacs crossed with a balding Liev Schreiber; i.e. seriously attractive, despite the follicular issues (the nachos at the Prince’s Head are excellent, too, but that's not my photo, just one I swiped off the internet.  Our Nachos had lots more cheese, plus lashings of guacamole and sour cream, and the beers should be Fuller's Organic Honeydew, not whatever that is [looks like a Guinness and a pint of orange squash, actually]).

Got home, a little tipsy and very cheerful, packed my bags for Christmas, discovered I had not posted K’s present – boll*cks! – put it to take to the post office in my lunch break today, and actually got myself to bed at a reasonable hour.  I then dreamed I was hiking in the snow in the Cairngorms with a certain JL Renner.  When we stopped for lunch he made hot chocolate over a campfire for me.  Good man! 

That makes three really delightful hunk-dreams in the last few days; I am now married to William Houston, RDJ drives my removal van, and Mr Renner makes me hot choc.  It seems my subconscious is on a high of sorts as well.

Solstice Greetings, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year to you!

Last day before Christmas great escape.

Last night I actually came home on time, straight from work, ran the washing machine, cleaned my room, packed my bag, went out and got a bottle of perry and a takeaway from Usha's on the Uxbridge Road, and was able to settle down and watch a movie I'd been looking forward to all day, and then go to bed at a reasonable hour. It was the first time I've gotten to bed at a sane time for absolutely ages. It's just a pity the film was such a tangled muddle.

It was Terry Gilliam's "The Brothers Grimm", and I had never seen any reviews when it came out, but Gilliam is an interesting - and staggeringly imaginative - film-maker and I thought it should be a great evening's entertainment. Instead of which it was - well, great fun, certainly, but total chaos, rambling and badly plotted, at times really badly edited (which was unexpected) and almost an outright waste of the very capable leads. The plot was a close echo of Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow" (a film which has the added benefit of total coherence [& Johnny Depp at his most hauntedly beautiful!]) with a lot of baroque trimmings flung on top, scattershot, in classic Gilliam "more is more" style. It had wonderful moments, and I liked the genuinely tough (rather than Hollywood "feisty") heroine. Heath Ledger and Matt Damon did their level best with underwritten and undermotivated parts, and both produced very creditable english accents. The set and production design was of course absolutely terrific. But it was an odd mixture, overall, of Gilliam-lite and what looked frankly like amateur pastiche Gilliam. As in "If we have a vaguely literary-referenced script and a real mess of a narrative everyone will think 'O, a Terry Gilliam movie', and we'll get away with it lacking the very real depth of ideas that a REAL Terry Gilliam movie has."

I think what pissed me off the most was a little moment near the end, when Jonathan Pryce's cardboard cut-out villainous french general is killed and his dying words are "All I wanted was a little order..." And I thought, Oh, Mr Gilliam, cheap shot!

Anyone who likes Terry Gilliam's work knows he is seriously into chaos; it is meat and drink to him, and I think in his book order is very probably toxic, inimical to life. But order is NOT inimical to life. It is inherent in all life, just as much as chaos. It's a fallacy, not to mention shooting at an an easy target, to say "Order is BAD, only chaos promotes life and growth!". Are the cells in a beehive disorderly? Are the petals on a dahlia, the scales on a pinecone, disorderly? No. But that is No and simultaneously Yes! And yes only because no, if you get my drift. In nature the two coexist, and cannot but do so. Order works because chaos breaks in; chaos works because it disrupts and revivifies order. As my favourite baritone is fond of saying, it's all about subtleties, nuances and laminations. I know that this praise of the multi-layeredness of the universe is itself a grotesque oversimplification of the complexity and subtlety of this interplay between forces, and my apologies for those who would articulate it better than I.

I was on the Tube a few nights ago next to a guy who had clearly come from the USA that evening - he had a huge suitcase with a tag from NYC, and was reading the New York Times. I looked over his shoulder at one point and saw an advert whose headline was "No-one was ever reassured by complexity". And I wanted to shout "Speak for yourself, you lack-wit advertising copywriter, you!". Because I, personally, am enormously reassured by complexity and almost invariably am dubious about, or even alarmed by, simplicity. Simplicity, in my experience, too frequently means active and deliberate over-simplification. Long live the complex, the intertwined and the nuanced, and the interplay and tension between tangled forces! Long live frenziedly busy weeks of rushing about, drinking rather too much, dancing, seeing friends and family, getting to bed late, singing in public, smiling at the choirmaster, and having fully-decorated christmas trees fall on me, as well...

Probably won't get to write any more until after christmas, so on that perhaps apprpriately chaotic note, Merry Christmas, everyone, and a happy new year to you all.