An Apology.

I've been going about this blog all wrong recently. I've been treating you like kids and mollycoddling you, telling you nice little tales of trips I've been on like some kindly, boring uncle.

Bollocks to that, I was sat in traffic lights today behind some dithering, middle-aged bag of fear when the lights turned green. By the time the driver in front of me had put the car back in gear, released the handbrake and gently pressed the accelarator there was only time to get his stupid, bastard Volvo through before the lights went red again.

Thanks for that, mate, next time keep your car in gear, your pedals on biting point and your eyes on the traffic lights so you can go as soon as they change and give the drivers behind you a chance.

I didn't beep my horn, gesticulate or swear, I was involved in a road rage incident a few years ago which showed me the futility and foolishness of acting this way and I was going to recount this story to you.

But that would make me a sanctimonious, preaching know-all, you are adults and don't need me teling you how to drive.

I've got a blog where I can say all the things that I don't say to people's faces as I don't want to cause them offence or end up trading blows at the side of the road over my perception of someone else's driving ability.

This is why Tony Van Helsing exists, he says the things that I don't say to people because I am a sensitive softy and he is one of those people who says what he thinks. Which makes him an fog horning, sociopathic clod who doesn't care how he will be perceived by others.

All hail Van Helsing.

Day of the Glowing Heads.

There is a seven mile walk around the grounds of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park so we thought we’d go and have a wander around earlier this year.

However, on the day we arrived the entire North Sea had evaporated into one enormous cloud, trundled over to the Sculpture Park and then proceeded to unload all over the place. This put the blocks on our walk so we decided to look at the galleries inside the buildings.

Now I’m not university educated and never know quite what I should be looking at or saying when I visit art galleries so what I usually end up saying is stuff like ‘I like/don’t like that’ or ‘What the hell is it’?
One of the exhibitions pandered to my knee-jerk, reactionary attitude to modern art by basically looking like a rubbish dump.

Bits of torn up cardboard glued to a wall and an old mattress shoved through a window frame don’t say anything to me other than ‘Shit, I’d better get something ready for that art exhibition tomorrow. I know, I’ll drag some old crap out of the bin and give it a name that makes it sound meaningful.

However the next gallery was excellent, a room full of giant heads in a white room, bedded in white stones and lit from the inside so the entire thing glowed.

It was like being in an old 1970’s science fiction film. One where people in the future all walk around in floaty clothes looking all serious and communicating by touching each others palms while listening to synthesiser music.

I don’t know what this installation was called and to be honest I don’t really care. All I know is that I got to run around pretending I was in Logan’s Run for awhile and hiding from the Sandmen.

Simple pleasures.

Alec Guiness in a Dressing Gown

This was going to be a post about humanity hitting the 7 billion mark however after
reading through what I had just written I have realised that you must never see this.

It is so relentlessly grim, self-righteous and judgemental that you would never look at me in the same way again. It would damage this fragile, beautiful thing that has grown between us and I can’t bear the thought of losing you.

So I locked this post away in the darkest recesses of my laptop and instead decided to re-post of the very first things I ever put on this blog, back when I had 0 followers.

And let’s never speak of this again.

When I was ten years old my parents took me to see Star Wars when it was first released. They made a special occasion of it and we got the train to Bradford and went to the Odeon, this was an impressive structure back then but like so many city centre cinemas it is now it is boarded up and has trees growing out of it’s roof.

Just before the film started the cinema went dark and a spotlight shone on a glitterball hanging from the ceiling, filling the auditorium with rectangles of light. Then the deep, mahogany voice of James Earl Jones boomed out ‘May the Force be With You’.
This was going to be special.

And it was. I spent the next couple of hours with my jaw hanging open, watching something I had never seen the like of before.

Jump forward 20 years and I am in another cinema with my girlfriend watching the digitally re-mastered version of Star Wars with new added lizards and shiny bits.
About half way through I realised that I was mentally compiling the weeks shopping list and yawning. Star Wars was boring.

When it was first released back in the 70’s the special effects were ground breaking and blew everyone away and George Lucas said he wanted to recreate the Saturday morning kids shows like Flash Gordon.

I enjoyed those shows as well when I was kid and that’s my point, I was a kid.
After the wow factor of seeing planet-sized spaceships the faults start to show, like the one dimensional characters and the massive coincidences such as half the main characters being related to each other like a bunch of space rednecks.

Or the teeth grindingly annoying ‘comedy’ characters like See Threepio or that frog thing with the ears, who talk in amusing foreign accents, bicker with each other then fall over then sit up looking dazed with something stuck on their heads at a funny angle.

As for Darth Vader, apart from looking fairly cool he isn’t much of a villain. He swishes about in his cape, wheezing like an asthmatic and making mild threats. At one point he stabs Alec Guniness’s dressing gown so I suppose that’s criminal damage. Other than that he is just a big bloke in a helmet.

Getting annoyed about Star Wars is as pointless as sitting here writing about it. It is a multi-billion dollar industry that will steam roller on. Millions will go to watch the films even though most of them seem to come away feeling disappointed as though they thought they might re-capture their youth but instead watched a two hour commercial for Star Wars merchandise.

I won’t be joining them.