In recent years, a strange thing has happened to theatre: it's become popular... but not necessarily in the way the theatres themselves might prefer.
I refer, of course, to the trend for screening theatrical productions in cinemas. Initially, it seems like a ridiculous idea: why bother, when it's taking away one of the most important features of seeing a theatrical production - the very fact that you're right there with the performers? Upon reflection, though, the obvious answer presents itself: not everyone can afford theatre tickets (though cinemas seem to be hiking their prices up all the time) and, with some productions, not everyone can obtain theatre tickets before the run is sold out.
Such was the case with a production of A Streetcar Named Desire, put on at the Young Vic and starring the one and only Gillian Anderson. That is to say, it was one of those situations where the full run was basically sold out before my girlfriend and I even heard about it.
Amusingly, Gillian Anderson isn't the only reasonably famous name in the cast - there's also Ben Foster (Warren Worthington III in X-Men: The Last Stand, the slightly scary sidekick in the 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma) and the very versatile Corey Johnson (who turns up in so many things but, memorably for me, in the New Who series 1 episode 'Dalek'). Also amusingly, playing opposite Anderson's Blanche DuBois as her sister, Stella, was Vanessa Kirby, previously Estella to Anderson's Miss Havisham in the BBC's terrible 2011 3-part adaptation of Great Expectations (inferior in almost every way to their own 1999 TV movie, though Ray Winstone was a very good Magwitch).
The stage was set on a revolving rectangular platform in the centre of the theatre - the Young Vic does pride itself on innovative use of space - on which Stella and Stanley Kowalski's tiny apartment was represented by furniture and a couple of doors. The platform started moving the moment Blanche started drinking and, as far as I can tell, didn't stop for the rest of the show... Seeing it in the cinema, I couldn't be sure as the camera frequently moved along with the stage, and the audience weren't always easily visible.
If I had a gripe about the production, it would be over the use of loud (and sometimes quite incongruous) music during scene shifts. The shifts themselves were cleverly done, with the cast moving some things around and the stage hands others, but the first couple of musical interludes I could have done without, and had my girlfriend plugging her ears. She later suggested that the excessive volume could have been more the fault of the cinema than the stage production.
If I had a gripe about the experience of theatre at the cinema, it's that far too many people were talking pretty much throughout the performance, and one can only hope they wouldn't have done that had they been in the theatre. Granted it was complimentary (on one occasion when Blanche fell over, a guy behind me commented "She's a marvellous actress" and the woman next to him replied "Oooh, yes") but, seriously, this is the sort of shit you do when at home, watching a fucking DVD, not in the cinema where everyone around you has paid the same amount (roughly equivalent to a new DVD) to enjoy the production.
And the really annoying thing is that one might expect this sort of behaviour from children or teenagers... but virtually everyone in that screen was either my age or older... The teenagers and school groups were in the adjacent screen, watching the same thing. Many of the older members of the audience clearly had mobility issues (and hadn't brought aids like walking sticks) based on the shaky way many of them leaned down to the armrests as they teetered down the stairs to the exit in between acts and at the end of the presentation. Also worthy of mention was the old lady who whacked me about the head with her handbag, shuffling through the row behind to have a natter with a friend.
So, much as I like the idea of bringing theatre to the masses, making it more accessible in as many ways as possible, the utter snob in me would prefer to keep some people away from theatre, so that those of us who actually appreciate it (and stay to applaud the cast for their encores, rather than leaving as soon as the stage lights dim or the curtain falls for the first time) have a better chance of getting a ticket for a live performance.
(Addendum 20/9/14: special mention to the little piece in the intermission, presented by Emma Freud, talking about the production and the Young Vic generally, while patrons were milling around behind her. One guy paused, in just the wrong place, to glug down most of an entire pint of whatever beer he was drinking before dashing back into the theatre... How wonderful to have captured that moment on film... I do hope they now play that recording every time)
In other news, I have recently been working with one of the Editors on a side project... a little book we're publishing on behalf of a third party. It has been an interesting project, but the Editor in question really doesn't have a very good grasp of using computers to their best advantage. For example, I split the photos we'd been supplied into sections so they could be more easily sorted through to see what we actually wanted to use (originally they were all supplied in a single directory, all photos were named with DSC-numbers and weren't in any sensible order). When we started choosing images, she suggested making new directories for photos we might possibly use, when I'd already started making subfolders of images that just weren't worth using. The second time she wanted a whole new directory where one already existed, I pointed out a better way of sorting the files, and started to use it without awaiting her agreement.
Even before that, though, she started getting on my bad side by presuming that her time was more valuable than mine - telling me she was going to have a quick lunch, then shortly after telling me she was ready to start when my lunch hour (part of my employment contract I'm aiming to keep to, to avoid my workaholic tendencies as far as possible in this environment) was only halfway through. Granted she had a schedule to keep to... but then, so did I. Working with her that day kept me away from my regular magazine work.
She also has an interesting relationship with fractions. For whatever reason, despite using OpenType fonts for her main magazine, she prefers to create fractions manually (superscript the numerator, forward slash, reduce the point size of the denominator) and feels that the automatically-generated OpenType fractions aren't as "elegant" or as easy to read. When I related this to the two designers in our team, one actually did a double-take... and not ironically.
She also had a ridiculously long-winded way of explaining that the 'oe' part of a word in the text should have been a diphthong... and claimed that it was a function that Word could not perform, while InDesign could. I mean, OK, not everyone knows that PCs deal with most special characters using alt codes (œ, Œ), but surely one should not be afraid of using a word like 'diphthong' to describe the appropriate character..?
Out in the real world, my girlfriend is getting excited about her upcoming Open University work as more of her materials arrive. The latest packages were (literally) a box of rocks and the accompanying literature (including posters) for her Geology module. Considering she's been down in the dumps and very anxious recently, it's truly delightful to see her getting so enthusiastic and feeling so positive about things... Alongside her coursework, she proposes to volunteer for a local public service and recently met up with an old science contact about doing some freelance work on the side. My girl likes to keep busy.
I'm starting to feel the need to get off my arse and do something a bit more constructive with my evenings and weekends, but still struggle with motivation and, in the case of blogging in particular, subjects to write about. If I manage to squeeze out another post here this month, September will have been my most prolific month this year... with a total of only five posts.
There's also a fair bit of sketching I want to do... not least a cartoon version of someone else's original TransFormers character, requested as a result of another toon I did for myself.
Oh, and before I forget, the third series of Body of Proof started today... it's the first time I've watched it with my girlfriend, and we had a good time picking out all the ridiculous flaws in the presentation (not least, why does Megan never tie her hair back or wear a cap while cutting up corpses?) but, as implausible American television goes, it's still pretty good fun.
On a similar note, we watched Last Days on Mars last night... a strange Brit-Flick starring Liev Schrieber, Olivia Williams and Romola Garai. Its science is horrendously flawed and it features far too many horror movie clichés, but it was reasonably fun to watch. That said, space zombies are still, ultimately, just zombies... and I was rather hoping for a bit more Dead Space-style kerb-stomping...
Friday 19 September 2014
Sunday 14 September 2014
The Inevitable TV Roundup
Yes, it's about damned time I said something about things I've been watching on TV recently... I'm sure there's something I'm forgetting, but here's the most significant recent(ish) stuff...
Had I known before watching approximately half of the first episode of The 100 that it was based on another scintillating work of teen fiction, I probably wouldn't have bothered watching even that. There's just something about this sudden movement of 'Young Adult' writing, and particularly the way it keeps getting made into terrible movies and TV shows, that is deeply frustrating. I know TV/Movie adaptations aren't necessarily the best indicator of the original medium's quality, since most tend to go through at least one stage of stripping out everything that made them interesting and unique, and adapting whatever 'message' might be hidden in their pages so that it's obvious enough for couch potatoes, but the premise behind The 100 is so unpromising that it deserved to be left to gather dust in teenagers' bedrooms throughout the world.
Actually, maybe that's unfair... Some aspects of the premise are perfectly adequate: after some kind of nuclear holocaust, the few humans left alive are stuck on a conglomeration of international space stations (and yet are all, somehow, unapologetically American) which is slowly failing, and the government (because, naturally, any group of people larger than about 50 requires a government to tell it how to behave while stuck in a can out in the vacuum of space) is hiding that fact from them... gradually becoming more fascist, and ejecting any dissenters into space.
Where it gets stupid, and where it basically tries to retread the same ground as, for example, Lord of the Flies, is that this government decides that the best way to determine whether or not Earth has become habitable again (less than 100 years after the war) is to send down 100 of their criminals.
And all their criminals just happen to be... Teenagers...
So, naturally, the first thing they do when they alight upon the formerly scorched earth, after deciding that the air is safe to breath, is have a party. I wish I was kidding. Then they start removing the devices that tell the folks on the space station what condition they're in, health-wise. From there, it only goes downhill, because they all decide to blindly follow the loudest voice in the group, who also just happens to be a former member of the station security team.
My big problem with this is that we're meant to be rooting for the kids, but they're all such whiny, selfish, short-sighted idiots, I found myself getting more enthusiastic whenever one of them died. In fact, the most believable thing in the few episodes I could bring myself to watch was when a little girl (whose 'crime' I recall no mention of), having been told to 'fight her demons' (or somesuch... I don't recall the precise phrasing), decided that the most efficient thing to do was stab to death the son of the guy who killed her father (by having him chucked out of an airlock... which is, I'm sure you'll agree, a far more sensible punishment than simple imprisonment for any totalitarian society with a premium on living space and oxygen).
The adults, meanwhile, acted like people who didn't understand the concept of 'the big picture' - first sending 100 teenage 'criminals' down to a planet they felt was probably still inhospitable to human life (clearly the concept of radioactive half-life has been lost to history by this point), sending them down without any real equipment or means of survival beyond landing, and without any sensible means of communication, let alone any way of ensuring they do what they were supposed to do. The situation on the space station was such that, at one point, they had to 'accidentally' lose life support in one area of the station, killing a certain number of people, to ensure a temporary reprieve for the rest. All their 'solutions' are distinctly self-serving and short term, and the three main characters are the driven doctor, the indecisive politician and the power-hungry head of security - all very stereotypical, and enabling all sorts of illogical plot 'twists' that are obvious well in advance. I frequently found myself wondering how people like these actually found themselves on a space station in the first place - clearly none of them were Astronauts.
Naturally, life on Earth wasn't one big party... Everything from mutant animals to Lost-derivative yellow clouds of death to the 'shock revelation' that, actually, there were humans alive on Earth already, but they're sort of tribal-goth mutes. And just when things started settling down, one main character's girlfriend made the perilous journey to the surface, seemingly just to increase the tension, because he'd just slept with another main character.
Suffice it to say, I gave up on it as another lacklustre teen drama... It really does seem that nothing will ever get close to the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in terms of handling human drama in a mature and thoughtful way, while in a fantastical setting.
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I'd been told all about Murdoch Mysteries many years ago (probably when it debuted in the UK on one of the Sky satellite channels), and it sounded pretty good, so when I noticed it in a Freeview TV guide, I was keen to tune in. Based on a series of novels, it's essentially a Victorian era Canadian CSI, where a policeman uses pioneering (and anachronistic) investigative techniques to solve crimes, and meets 'celebrities' of his day, like Nikola Tesla and Arthur Conan Doyle. It also attempts to deal with 'issues' like gender equality, religious strife, domestic violence and even homosexuality, through the lens of Murdoch, who can be a little puzzling. For example, even his unreconstructed superior, Inspector Brackenreid, has a better attitude toward homosexuality than the strict Catholic Murdoch... but then, Brackenreid has become better developed as a character over the course of the first half of the series (not least the sudden revelation that he's a big theatre lover) than almost any other character, but particularly the titular character. In fact, I'd have to say that Brackenreid (played by Thomas Craig, formerly of lots of British television) is easily my favourite character of the lot. William Murdoch is a very straight-laced sort of guy, albeit one who is given to (very useful) flights of fancy when it comes to identifying and examining evidence. The thing is... he's virtually always right. In fact, the only significant time he was wrong, the matter involved his estranged father.
Granted, not everyone can have a Moriarty-style nemesis who's able to outwit them, or even offer a challenge, but there haven't really been any (convincing) false leads so far... and, aside from his very ignorance-of-the-time views on homosexuality, Murdoch is almost unfailingly nice to everyone he meets. There's also a very obvious (yet frustratingly slow) budding romance going on between Murdoch (a widower) and the completely anachronistic coroner/forensic pathologist, Dr Julia Ogden, who - despite being a mere woman (remember, this is the 1890s!) - is very well respected and well connected in her field. OK, perhaps Canada was more enlightened than the UK or the US at the time, but it still stretches credulity.
Then again, I don't think this series was ever really meant to be taken seriously, if only because Murdoch's long-suffering sidekick, Constable Crabtree, invariably gets involved in some rather embarrassing crime reconstructions to make up for getting just about all the comic stuff not already delivered by Brackenreid. It certainly makes a change from some of the more po-faced police procedurals out there, and is a welcome antidote to the CSI franchise, which quickly disappeared up its own backside as it branched out.
The fact that Murdoch has appeared on Freeview about six years after it made its original debut brings me some hope that the likes of The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne will eventually turn up on UK TV...
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Under the Dome returned to our screens with a spectacular lack of fanfare considering it's the second half (I hope) of the adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Trouble is, like The 100, its characters don't really behave like real people, just characters in a weird sci-fi/mystery series who are directed by the necessities of the plot. I may yet read the novel, but I've completely given up on the TV adaptation as it's bloated, dull and frequently feels quite pointless... And I'm not sure I even watched the whole of the first episode. It's incredibly frustrating to be watching something and constantly screaming "why would you do that?" to the characters...
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Quirky new British crime drama Chasing Shadows is a whole different kettle of fish. It functions on two levels: first and foremost, it's riding on the coat tails of The Bridge and giving us our own version of Saga Norén in the form of Detective Sean Stone, a socially inept but gifted investigator who is introduced to the viewer making a complete mess of an interview about the successful conclusion of a case, because he feels it wasn't successful enough. Rather than being immediately sacked, his enraged superior palms him off on Missing Persons, to be partnered with Ruth Hattersley, and the pair frequently run into Detective Inspector Carl Pryor over the course of the first two-part story, in which a killer is preying on missing, vulnerable teenagers. Its secondary function seems to be as a Doctor Who reunion, of sorts, with the awesome Don Warrington (several roles in Old Who) as Stone's superior, Alex Kingston (River Song) as Ruth, Adjoa Andoh (Martha Jones' mother) as her boss and Noel Clarke (Mickey Smith) as DI Pryor. Even Reese Shearsmith has a Who connection, having played Patrick Troughton in An Adventure in Space and Time, the drama based on the very beginnings of Doctor Who... I can't wait to see who they bring in next.
It lacks the bleak, subdued colour palette of The Bridge, as well as its Noir-ish elements, but it has all the smart - and frequently very funny - dialogue of its Swedish/Danish cousin. Stone isn't quite as prickly as Norén, but Hattersley is following Martin Rohde's example by very quickly jumping into bed with Prior, even after declaring that her terrible taste in men has included far too many police officers in the past.
It's very nice to see Noel Clarke in a role like this, where he plays a less stereotypical, more human character who actually gets to smile once in a while, but I can't help thinking that there's something missing in both Shearsmith's portrayal of Stone and Kingston's portrayal of Hattersley... but, until I figure out what that is, I'm really enjoying the show, and looking forward to more in future (the current series is only set for four episodes).
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When ITV broadcast its first original follow-up to its adaptation of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, I was rather dubious. Optimistic... but dubious. The trouble was, Whicher was something of a cypher in the book - we learned a few facts about his career, but his personality (other than his dogged determination) remained largely mysterious as it had no bearing on the events. Paddy Considine's portayal was good, but the original - much like the book - was ultimately unsatisfying because the case was never solved. A new mystery seemed rather pointless and ended up being more of an attempted exploration of everything we don't know about Whicher, and particularly how his sense of self tied into his work in the police force, with very little focus on the mystery. To say I wasn't impressed would be an understatement... but it was obviously received well enough that they commissioned another two original tales.
The first of them, broadcast last weekend as I write, felt fairly simplistic and didn't really seem to go anywhere. Whicher was employed - by the very man who had him cast out of the police force over the Road Hill House incident - to look into a man who seemed to be following and threatening his son. Hints were dropped about dark goings-on while the son was in India, but the whole production was really quite dull. Had it been any more interesting, I might have stuck out its two hour running time... as it was, I was more keen to get a full night's sleep... aided, somewhat, by such an enervating first half.
In many ways, the point of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher - both the book and the dramatisation - was that no-one knows what happened but, as one may gather from the title, Mr Whicher had his suspicions. The follow-ups have shown Whicher to be reasonably competent as an investigator, but chronically unsure of himself and consistently undermined by his comparatively low social status and the memory of that one unsolved case... And that doesn't work especially well as a repeating element in a continuing drama.
Needless to say, I haven't bothered with tonight's installment... it didn't sound especially interesting and, again, I'm more keen to get some sleep tonight.
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Of course, no round-up of my recent viewings would be complete without mentioning the return of Doctor Who with the new Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi. Part of me feels Capaldi is just that little bit too well-known for the role, but he seems to be settling into the role very nicely.
The first episode featured more clockwork robots (a deliberate reference to Moffat's New Who series 2 episode, The Girl in the Fireplace), a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the Thames, and a very tense conversation between Clara and Madam Vastra which was, on the surface, about Clara's reaction to The Doctor's regeneration but, underneath it all (I suspect) a very frank explanation of the previous casting choices, and a hint at where the show will be going in future. The opening episode - which my girlfriend and I went to see in the cinema (much to the disappointment of her mother, who felt it was a waste of money since it was shown for free on BBC1) - also introduced a character currently known only as Missy, who is now the subject of much speculation in the fandom: Is she The Master? The Rani? The Tardis? Is she 'rescuing' people who sacrifice themselves for The Doctor? And what is this 'Promised Land'?
The next episode was the first disappointment of the series... To me, it seemed unfinished - in the sense of being in need of a little extra work - and also somewhat of a retread of some elements of the sixth episode of the first series of the reboot, entitled 'Dalek'. The whole Dalek rampage bit could easily have been library footage for all the effect it had, and the concept (originally mooted for a tie-in computer game, according to Moffat) was actually pretty half-baked. The idea that 'the only good Dalek is a seriously damaged Dalek' had some potential, and the episode was very open-ended,
Episode three took an almost entirely new direction, popping in on Sherwood Forest and meeting the real Robin Hood. Of course The Doctor couldn't believe there was such a thing - Robin Hood is a famous British myth, after all... and so the episode tried to deal with the concept of a man who became a myth, thus referencing The Doctor himself. It was one of the sillier episodes, with The Doctor engaging in a sword fight with Robin while armed only with a spoon (and is it just me, or did anyone else think they saw Capaldi very subtly stick up his middle finger as he put on his glove?), bickering senselessly, and generally letting Clara do all the important stuff, like uncovering the Sheriff of Nottingham's devious scheme. Quite a good episode... but was anyone else disappointed that Gatiss didn't make the Sheriff's soldiers Cybermen?
The latest episode, screened yesterday, felt very odd... On the one hand, it was intended to be a chiller - more for the kids than for the adults in the audience, I feel, but that's a good thing - while also giving us more glimpses of a new character in the series, former soldier Danny (or Rupert) Pink. I wonder if the 'monster' is going to appear in later episodes, since we didn't actually see it ourselves.
Moffat is certainly continuing his fixation on the companions - having already shown us that Clara Oswald was instrumental in guiding The Doctor throughout his life as a wandering Time Lord, here 'the impossible girl' proved to have been very influential in The Doctor's early life... And, given his terse exchange with a soldier at the end of the second episode, I'm very curious as to how Danny Pink fits into the grand scheme of things.
While he remains a very divisive showrunner, I still have far more confidence in Moffat than I did during the majority of Russell T. Davies' tenure. In particular, some of his 'relationship' dialogue (prime examples being almost any verbal exchange between Clara and Danny thusfar) has been painfully good. There's a sense of toe-curling honesty to it that was completely lacking in Davies' melodramas, and it's helped immeasurably by the complete absence of David Tennant's gurning.
Had I known before watching approximately half of the first episode of The 100 that it was based on another scintillating work of teen fiction, I probably wouldn't have bothered watching even that. There's just something about this sudden movement of 'Young Adult' writing, and particularly the way it keeps getting made into terrible movies and TV shows, that is deeply frustrating. I know TV/Movie adaptations aren't necessarily the best indicator of the original medium's quality, since most tend to go through at least one stage of stripping out everything that made them interesting and unique, and adapting whatever 'message' might be hidden in their pages so that it's obvious enough for couch potatoes, but the premise behind The 100 is so unpromising that it deserved to be left to gather dust in teenagers' bedrooms throughout the world.
Actually, maybe that's unfair... Some aspects of the premise are perfectly adequate: after some kind of nuclear holocaust, the few humans left alive are stuck on a conglomeration of international space stations (and yet are all, somehow, unapologetically American) which is slowly failing, and the government (because, naturally, any group of people larger than about 50 requires a government to tell it how to behave while stuck in a can out in the vacuum of space) is hiding that fact from them... gradually becoming more fascist, and ejecting any dissenters into space.
Where it gets stupid, and where it basically tries to retread the same ground as, for example, Lord of the Flies, is that this government decides that the best way to determine whether or not Earth has become habitable again (less than 100 years after the war) is to send down 100 of their criminals.
And all their criminals just happen to be... Teenagers...
So, naturally, the first thing they do when they alight upon the formerly scorched earth, after deciding that the air is safe to breath, is have a party. I wish I was kidding. Then they start removing the devices that tell the folks on the space station what condition they're in, health-wise. From there, it only goes downhill, because they all decide to blindly follow the loudest voice in the group, who also just happens to be a former member of the station security team.
My big problem with this is that we're meant to be rooting for the kids, but they're all such whiny, selfish, short-sighted idiots, I found myself getting more enthusiastic whenever one of them died. In fact, the most believable thing in the few episodes I could bring myself to watch was when a little girl (whose 'crime' I recall no mention of), having been told to 'fight her demons' (or somesuch... I don't recall the precise phrasing), decided that the most efficient thing to do was stab to death the son of the guy who killed her father (by having him chucked out of an airlock... which is, I'm sure you'll agree, a far more sensible punishment than simple imprisonment for any totalitarian society with a premium on living space and oxygen).
The adults, meanwhile, acted like people who didn't understand the concept of 'the big picture' - first sending 100 teenage 'criminals' down to a planet they felt was probably still inhospitable to human life (clearly the concept of radioactive half-life has been lost to history by this point), sending them down without any real equipment or means of survival beyond landing, and without any sensible means of communication, let alone any way of ensuring they do what they were supposed to do. The situation on the space station was such that, at one point, they had to 'accidentally' lose life support in one area of the station, killing a certain number of people, to ensure a temporary reprieve for the rest. All their 'solutions' are distinctly self-serving and short term, and the three main characters are the driven doctor, the indecisive politician and the power-hungry head of security - all very stereotypical, and enabling all sorts of illogical plot 'twists' that are obvious well in advance. I frequently found myself wondering how people like these actually found themselves on a space station in the first place - clearly none of them were Astronauts.
Naturally, life on Earth wasn't one big party... Everything from mutant animals to Lost-derivative yellow clouds of death to the 'shock revelation' that, actually, there were humans alive on Earth already, but they're sort of tribal-goth mutes. And just when things started settling down, one main character's girlfriend made the perilous journey to the surface, seemingly just to increase the tension, because he'd just slept with another main character.
Suffice it to say, I gave up on it as another lacklustre teen drama... It really does seem that nothing will ever get close to the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in terms of handling human drama in a mature and thoughtful way, while in a fantastical setting.
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I'd been told all about Murdoch Mysteries many years ago (probably when it debuted in the UK on one of the Sky satellite channels), and it sounded pretty good, so when I noticed it in a Freeview TV guide, I was keen to tune in. Based on a series of novels, it's essentially a Victorian era Canadian CSI, where a policeman uses pioneering (and anachronistic) investigative techniques to solve crimes, and meets 'celebrities' of his day, like Nikola Tesla and Arthur Conan Doyle. It also attempts to deal with 'issues' like gender equality, religious strife, domestic violence and even homosexuality, through the lens of Murdoch, who can be a little puzzling. For example, even his unreconstructed superior, Inspector Brackenreid, has a better attitude toward homosexuality than the strict Catholic Murdoch... but then, Brackenreid has become better developed as a character over the course of the first half of the series (not least the sudden revelation that he's a big theatre lover) than almost any other character, but particularly the titular character. In fact, I'd have to say that Brackenreid (played by Thomas Craig, formerly of lots of British television) is easily my favourite character of the lot. William Murdoch is a very straight-laced sort of guy, albeit one who is given to (very useful) flights of fancy when it comes to identifying and examining evidence. The thing is... he's virtually always right. In fact, the only significant time he was wrong, the matter involved his estranged father.
Granted, not everyone can have a Moriarty-style nemesis who's able to outwit them, or even offer a challenge, but there haven't really been any (convincing) false leads so far... and, aside from his very ignorance-of-the-time views on homosexuality, Murdoch is almost unfailingly nice to everyone he meets. There's also a very obvious (yet frustratingly slow) budding romance going on between Murdoch (a widower) and the completely anachronistic coroner/forensic pathologist, Dr Julia Ogden, who - despite being a mere woman (remember, this is the 1890s!) - is very well respected and well connected in her field. OK, perhaps Canada was more enlightened than the UK or the US at the time, but it still stretches credulity.
Then again, I don't think this series was ever really meant to be taken seriously, if only because Murdoch's long-suffering sidekick, Constable Crabtree, invariably gets involved in some rather embarrassing crime reconstructions to make up for getting just about all the comic stuff not already delivered by Brackenreid. It certainly makes a change from some of the more po-faced police procedurals out there, and is a welcome antidote to the CSI franchise, which quickly disappeared up its own backside as it branched out.
The fact that Murdoch has appeared on Freeview about six years after it made its original debut brings me some hope that the likes of The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne will eventually turn up on UK TV...
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Under the Dome returned to our screens with a spectacular lack of fanfare considering it's the second half (I hope) of the adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Trouble is, like The 100, its characters don't really behave like real people, just characters in a weird sci-fi/mystery series who are directed by the necessities of the plot. I may yet read the novel, but I've completely given up on the TV adaptation as it's bloated, dull and frequently feels quite pointless... And I'm not sure I even watched the whole of the first episode. It's incredibly frustrating to be watching something and constantly screaming "why would you do that?" to the characters...
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Quirky new British crime drama Chasing Shadows is a whole different kettle of fish. It functions on two levels: first and foremost, it's riding on the coat tails of The Bridge and giving us our own version of Saga Norén in the form of Detective Sean Stone, a socially inept but gifted investigator who is introduced to the viewer making a complete mess of an interview about the successful conclusion of a case, because he feels it wasn't successful enough. Rather than being immediately sacked, his enraged superior palms him off on Missing Persons, to be partnered with Ruth Hattersley, and the pair frequently run into Detective Inspector Carl Pryor over the course of the first two-part story, in which a killer is preying on missing, vulnerable teenagers. Its secondary function seems to be as a Doctor Who reunion, of sorts, with the awesome Don Warrington (several roles in Old Who) as Stone's superior, Alex Kingston (River Song) as Ruth, Adjoa Andoh (Martha Jones' mother) as her boss and Noel Clarke (Mickey Smith) as DI Pryor. Even Reese Shearsmith has a Who connection, having played Patrick Troughton in An Adventure in Space and Time, the drama based on the very beginnings of Doctor Who... I can't wait to see who they bring in next.
It lacks the bleak, subdued colour palette of The Bridge, as well as its Noir-ish elements, but it has all the smart - and frequently very funny - dialogue of its Swedish/Danish cousin. Stone isn't quite as prickly as Norén, but Hattersley is following Martin Rohde's example by very quickly jumping into bed with Prior, even after declaring that her terrible taste in men has included far too many police officers in the past.
It's very nice to see Noel Clarke in a role like this, where he plays a less stereotypical, more human character who actually gets to smile once in a while, but I can't help thinking that there's something missing in both Shearsmith's portrayal of Stone and Kingston's portrayal of Hattersley... but, until I figure out what that is, I'm really enjoying the show, and looking forward to more in future (the current series is only set for four episodes).
---
When ITV broadcast its first original follow-up to its adaptation of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, I was rather dubious. Optimistic... but dubious. The trouble was, Whicher was something of a cypher in the book - we learned a few facts about his career, but his personality (other than his dogged determination) remained largely mysterious as it had no bearing on the events. Paddy Considine's portayal was good, but the original - much like the book - was ultimately unsatisfying because the case was never solved. A new mystery seemed rather pointless and ended up being more of an attempted exploration of everything we don't know about Whicher, and particularly how his sense of self tied into his work in the police force, with very little focus on the mystery. To say I wasn't impressed would be an understatement... but it was obviously received well enough that they commissioned another two original tales.
The first of them, broadcast last weekend as I write, felt fairly simplistic and didn't really seem to go anywhere. Whicher was employed - by the very man who had him cast out of the police force over the Road Hill House incident - to look into a man who seemed to be following and threatening his son. Hints were dropped about dark goings-on while the son was in India, but the whole production was really quite dull. Had it been any more interesting, I might have stuck out its two hour running time... as it was, I was more keen to get a full night's sleep... aided, somewhat, by such an enervating first half.
In many ways, the point of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher - both the book and the dramatisation - was that no-one knows what happened but, as one may gather from the title, Mr Whicher had his suspicions. The follow-ups have shown Whicher to be reasonably competent as an investigator, but chronically unsure of himself and consistently undermined by his comparatively low social status and the memory of that one unsolved case... And that doesn't work especially well as a repeating element in a continuing drama.
Needless to say, I haven't bothered with tonight's installment... it didn't sound especially interesting and, again, I'm more keen to get some sleep tonight.
---
Of course, no round-up of my recent viewings would be complete without mentioning the return of Doctor Who with the new Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi. Part of me feels Capaldi is just that little bit too well-known for the role, but he seems to be settling into the role very nicely.
The first episode featured more clockwork robots (a deliberate reference to Moffat's New Who series 2 episode, The Girl in the Fireplace), a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the Thames, and a very tense conversation between Clara and Madam Vastra which was, on the surface, about Clara's reaction to The Doctor's regeneration but, underneath it all (I suspect) a very frank explanation of the previous casting choices, and a hint at where the show will be going in future. The opening episode - which my girlfriend and I went to see in the cinema (much to the disappointment of her mother, who felt it was a waste of money since it was shown for free on BBC1) - also introduced a character currently known only as Missy, who is now the subject of much speculation in the fandom: Is she The Master? The Rani? The Tardis? Is she 'rescuing' people who sacrifice themselves for The Doctor? And what is this 'Promised Land'?
The next episode was the first disappointment of the series... To me, it seemed unfinished - in the sense of being in need of a little extra work - and also somewhat of a retread of some elements of the sixth episode of the first series of the reboot, entitled 'Dalek'. The whole Dalek rampage bit could easily have been library footage for all the effect it had, and the concept (originally mooted for a tie-in computer game, according to Moffat) was actually pretty half-baked. The idea that 'the only good Dalek is a seriously damaged Dalek' had some potential, and the episode was very open-ended,
Episode three took an almost entirely new direction, popping in on Sherwood Forest and meeting the real Robin Hood. Of course The Doctor couldn't believe there was such a thing - Robin Hood is a famous British myth, after all... and so the episode tried to deal with the concept of a man who became a myth, thus referencing The Doctor himself. It was one of the sillier episodes, with The Doctor engaging in a sword fight with Robin while armed only with a spoon (and is it just me, or did anyone else think they saw Capaldi very subtly stick up his middle finger as he put on his glove?), bickering senselessly, and generally letting Clara do all the important stuff, like uncovering the Sheriff of Nottingham's devious scheme. Quite a good episode... but was anyone else disappointed that Gatiss didn't make the Sheriff's soldiers Cybermen?
The latest episode, screened yesterday, felt very odd... On the one hand, it was intended to be a chiller - more for the kids than for the adults in the audience, I feel, but that's a good thing - while also giving us more glimpses of a new character in the series, former soldier Danny (or Rupert) Pink. I wonder if the 'monster' is going to appear in later episodes, since we didn't actually see it ourselves.
Moffat is certainly continuing his fixation on the companions - having already shown us that Clara Oswald was instrumental in guiding The Doctor throughout his life as a wandering Time Lord, here 'the impossible girl' proved to have been very influential in The Doctor's early life... And, given his terse exchange with a soldier at the end of the second episode, I'm very curious as to how Danny Pink fits into the grand scheme of things.
While he remains a very divisive showrunner, I still have far more confidence in Moffat than I did during the majority of Russell T. Davies' tenure. In particular, some of his 'relationship' dialogue (prime examples being almost any verbal exchange between Clara and Danny thusfar) has been painfully good. There's a sense of toe-curling honesty to it that was completely lacking in Davies' melodramas, and it's helped immeasurably by the complete absence of David Tennant's gurning.
Wednesday 10 September 2014
On Going Up A Size
I have noticed, over the last year or so, that some of my clothes - particularly some of my favourite shirts - have been getting tighter. With several, it has come to the point where they strain at the buttons when I sit down (and, thanks to their propensity to fold over along the line of buttons, reveal glimpses of my pasty, furry flesh that I might prefer they didn't).
The funny thing about this is that I hadn't noticed my waistline expanding significantly during this time... certainly, no-one else has mentioned it. In fact the last time anyone so much as asked if I'd put on weight since they last saw me (assuming it was a significant length of time) was probably over a decade ago.
I'm not sure I've ever suffered terribly from vanity. Due to a combination of being tormented as a child about being ugly/weird/fat/a long-haired hippy, I don't tend to worry too much about my appearance (though my now-shorter hair is a source of some frustration due to becoming unruly after a couple of months' growth and because it's slowly thinning on top), and there's a tendency for males in my family to get a little larger after the age of about 30. Middle-Age Spread doesn't concern me overly...
What it does mean, though, is that some of my older clothes - such as the aforementioned most prized shirts, a couple of which are, after all, more than a decade old themselves - will have to be replaced.
I'm sure there are some folks out there who just read that last line and though "What the actual fuck? This dude has been wearing some of the same shirts for ten years?"... To which I shall inevitably respond by referring them back to the opening sentence of the third paragraph, and add that the shirts in question are seriously fuckin' cool. I mean, one of them - which I commonly and very fondly refer to as "my gay cowboy shirt" was purchased while on holiday in New York, taking advantage of the discount card offered by Macy's to any tourist that walked in their door and visited the customer service desk. It was also my first ever designer shirt (Guess, if you must know :P), setting the precedent that has since allowed several other designer shirts into my wardrobe, after I spent my teens and early 20s pouring scorn on such foppery.
But I digress.
The problem with the idea of replacing some of these shirts is that the style is no longer en vogue (or, quite probably, in Vogue). I'd quite like to replace these shirts with something similar, but the kind of thing I was buying back then just doesn't seem to be as common these days. When I took my girlfriend shopping over the last weekend (neatly reversing the gender stereotypes by dragging her around Menswear departments throughout the many clothing shops in Uxbridge), I was more than a little disappointed to find that lumberjack shirts seem to be the in thing at the moment. That kind of thing is OK... but it's not the sort of thing I'd fill my wardrobe with.
Distressingly few shops, in fact, had anything I was especially interested in, let alone in the right size... but I have found - so far - that moving up from Small shirts to Medium makes them even more difficult to find in stock.
Amusingly, when I picked up a new pair of jeans - to replace a pair that had worn through between the legs (it's not exactly 'chub rub', but I certainly don't walk like a cowboy who's been too long in the saddle) - I decided to get the size larger than my usual because my previous usual now tends to be a little tight around the hips and (ahem) groin. The last time I bought a pair of jeans in the larger size, I had to hold them up the first day I wore them, and dive into a shop to buy a belt before getting to the office, lest they end up round my ankles at some awkward moment. This new pair can still be pulled off without unfastening, but they're a better fit overall. Kudos to Asda, I guess...
Also, on an entirely unrelated note, I've started purchasing boxer shorts as underwear to replace those that have become worn out (I don't think any of my pants are a decade old, but I honestly can't be certain). I used to dislike them as they offered no support and tended to ride up my legs during the day... but now, aside from finding certain parts of my anatomy hanging in unexpected ways, I find them far more comfortable. I'm buying them a size larger than I need to, since I'm clearly on the cusp between waist sizes now, and the fit is tolerable... and very airy.
So while I may no longer be the lithe figure of my youth, I'm not desperately unhappy about my current build. I can tell just by looking that the state of my waistline is due more to spending far too long sat down and, to be honest, slightly slouched (sedentary office work is clearly the scourge of modern life). I know I'm not completely unfit because I don't get desperately out of breath too easily. I know I'm not overeating because, while I'm working, at least, I don't get (or give myself) the opportunity.
In many ways, this is a follow up to - or a continuation of - the previous post: I like my life... and I'm pretty happy in my skin.
Who'd have thought?
As an aside, I noted a distinct upswing in visitors to this blog the day the new series of Doctor Who started. Apologies for not getting onto that (and other things) immediately... as you may have gathered, other things have been going on... Normal service will be resumed soon. Ish.
The funny thing about this is that I hadn't noticed my waistline expanding significantly during this time... certainly, no-one else has mentioned it. In fact the last time anyone so much as asked if I'd put on weight since they last saw me (assuming it was a significant length of time) was probably over a decade ago.
I'm not sure I've ever suffered terribly from vanity. Due to a combination of being tormented as a child about being ugly/weird/fat/a long-haired hippy, I don't tend to worry too much about my appearance (though my now-shorter hair is a source of some frustration due to becoming unruly after a couple of months' growth and because it's slowly thinning on top), and there's a tendency for males in my family to get a little larger after the age of about 30. Middle-Age Spread doesn't concern me overly...
What it does mean, though, is that some of my older clothes - such as the aforementioned most prized shirts, a couple of which are, after all, more than a decade old themselves - will have to be replaced.
I'm sure there are some folks out there who just read that last line and though "What the actual fuck? This dude has been wearing some of the same shirts for ten years?"... To which I shall inevitably respond by referring them back to the opening sentence of the third paragraph, and add that the shirts in question are seriously fuckin' cool. I mean, one of them - which I commonly and very fondly refer to as "my gay cowboy shirt" was purchased while on holiday in New York, taking advantage of the discount card offered by Macy's to any tourist that walked in their door and visited the customer service desk. It was also my first ever designer shirt (Guess, if you must know :P), setting the precedent that has since allowed several other designer shirts into my wardrobe, after I spent my teens and early 20s pouring scorn on such foppery.
But I digress.
The problem with the idea of replacing some of these shirts is that the style is no longer en vogue (or, quite probably, in Vogue). I'd quite like to replace these shirts with something similar, but the kind of thing I was buying back then just doesn't seem to be as common these days. When I took my girlfriend shopping over the last weekend (neatly reversing the gender stereotypes by dragging her around Menswear departments throughout the many clothing shops in Uxbridge), I was more than a little disappointed to find that lumberjack shirts seem to be the in thing at the moment. That kind of thing is OK... but it's not the sort of thing I'd fill my wardrobe with.
Distressingly few shops, in fact, had anything I was especially interested in, let alone in the right size... but I have found - so far - that moving up from Small shirts to Medium makes them even more difficult to find in stock.
Amusingly, when I picked up a new pair of jeans - to replace a pair that had worn through between the legs (it's not exactly 'chub rub', but I certainly don't walk like a cowboy who's been too long in the saddle) - I decided to get the size larger than my usual because my previous usual now tends to be a little tight around the hips and (ahem) groin. The last time I bought a pair of jeans in the larger size, I had to hold them up the first day I wore them, and dive into a shop to buy a belt before getting to the office, lest they end up round my ankles at some awkward moment. This new pair can still be pulled off without unfastening, but they're a better fit overall. Kudos to Asda, I guess...
Also, on an entirely unrelated note, I've started purchasing boxer shorts as underwear to replace those that have become worn out (I don't think any of my pants are a decade old, but I honestly can't be certain). I used to dislike them as they offered no support and tended to ride up my legs during the day... but now, aside from finding certain parts of my anatomy hanging in unexpected ways, I find them far more comfortable. I'm buying them a size larger than I need to, since I'm clearly on the cusp between waist sizes now, and the fit is tolerable... and very airy.
So while I may no longer be the lithe figure of my youth, I'm not desperately unhappy about my current build. I can tell just by looking that the state of my waistline is due more to spending far too long sat down and, to be honest, slightly slouched (sedentary office work is clearly the scourge of modern life). I know I'm not completely unfit because I don't get desperately out of breath too easily. I know I'm not overeating because, while I'm working, at least, I don't get (or give myself) the opportunity.
In many ways, this is a follow up to - or a continuation of - the previous post: I like my life... and I'm pretty happy in my skin.
Who'd have thought?
As an aside, I noted a distinct upswing in visitors to this blog the day the new series of Doctor Who started. Apologies for not getting onto that (and other things) immediately... as you may have gathered, other things have been going on... Normal service will be resumed soon. Ish.
Sunday 7 September 2014
I Like My Life
OK, I'm slipping again - over two months since my last post here... But, in a way, that's kind of a good thing.
Work has been a bit manic recently, August being one of two properly busy months in their calendar (the other, coincidentally, being December... and it all seems to be through exceptionally poor scheduling). When I say 'manic', what this amounts to is about an hour and a half of overtime spread over three days a couple of weeks ago... and I have only two deadlines this month. Compare and contrast to my last full-time job, which would keep me there till 6 or 7pm almost every night because there were six deadlines per team, per month, plus the minutia of keeping it all going.
My counterpart hasn't had it quite so easy, but it seems that his Sales teams just aren't as reliable or helpful as mine (for example one title manager was still selling on his press day, today, and giving advertisers till 5pm to get their copy in... amusingly, this led to one advertiser being very proud of himself for getting his copy in at 4pm - "an hour early!"). Even so, his overtime has been comparatively minimal, just a bit more frequent.
Making matters more interesting, our boss was on holiday during the busy period, and yet remained in just enough contact with the office to be irritating without being in the least bit helpful. Emails regularly flood in issuing edicts and stirring up trouble, but enquiries go unanswered.
The rest of the team are ticking along, getting stuff done, working late where necessary... I felt quite guilty walking at almost on time while things were 'manic', but I'm always up to date... and, with a week's holiday booked after the last deadline in August, I made a point of making a start on this month's work just after sending my last August magazine to press, just so I wasn't leaving anything for the others to do on my behalf while I'm away (quite unlike our boss, who ignored a couple of important marketing projects and moved one of her regular magazine press days so we had even more work to do during the busy period and while she was away. Classy).
But the thing is, I'm really enjoying it. The increased sense of urgency this month has made it - bizarrely - more fun. It's not hectic enough to trigger my workaholic tendencies, but it's certainly keeping me occupied.
When I got back to work after my holiday (another visit to my girlfriend's family) I found that things somehow managed to go horribly wrong in my absence. Based on what went wrong and how/why, I'm certain it would have gone wrong even if I was there, but it's an interesting echo of my last full-time job, not least because, following a short meeting, my counterpart and our boss decided (jokingly) that it was all my fault. I hadn't the heart to tell them that joke follows me around...
And, out in the real world, I'm slowly getting used to having my girlfriend living with me. After about five years of living on my own, in my own place, it felt a bit weird to begin with. Part of me kept sort-of expecting her to go back to her own place eventually (despite knowing full-well that, now she's quit university, 'her own place' would have to be her parents' home) and was inwardly bemoaning the lack of privacy (which, let's face it, was my motivation for buying a home of my own and moving out of my parents' house in the first place), but I can't deny the benefits of having her around.
It's not just the practical stuff - for example, she'll invariably have prepared dinner so that it's ready to serve when I get in from work. Despite being a bit of a loner (some would say 'hermit') by nature, it's nice to have company... someone to talk to in the evenings, someone with whom to share my favourite movies and TV shows (some of which we already had in common), someone to exchange hugs with, someone to snuggle up with in bed. I've never really felt that I'd be entirely comfortable sharing my life with someone to this extent, but it's been far easier than I'd expected. Having someone else around means I'm (slightly) less prone to wasting all my time doing nothing, and am generally a little less self-absorbed. We often come up with ideas of things to do together, but we're also doing our own thing occasionally, so everything seems that much more fulfilling. By the time the end of the day comes, both of us (usually) feel ready to get some kip in preparation for the next day.
That said, living with someone who suffers from Depression and anxiety isn't the simplest life one could imagine. Most of the time, things are fine... but there have been episodes were, having arranged to go out and meet friends, she's had an anxiety attack at the last minute (though, I suspect, they could have been brewing for days before they actually became evident to me) and either not gone out at all or come back within a few minutes. On one recent occasion, I actually caused a meltdown one evening. For almost of full 24 hours, she denied that anything I'd done was wrong and said that everything was her fault - pretty much the usual mantra when Depression takes hold. When I got home from work the following day, she could barely look at me or talk to me, and the hug that usually greets my arrival was delivered with elbows and clenched fists. Then, just when I started worrying that our visit to her family would end with me coming home alone, she seemed to just snap out of it... realising - she said - that the situation wasn't her 'fault' and that I could have been a bit more sensitive about things the night before.
And when I later mentioned my fear of her returning home, she actually laughed at the idea. "It's much better here."
Communication is at the heart of all relationships, and it's a constant learning process. Very little of my previous relationship experience is applicable to this one and, while my girlfriend and I are very similar in many ways - we may not finish each other's sentences, but we're often thinking of the same context-related joke - she's not quite at the point where she can comfortably ask for things (other than an occasional back-rub) or make suggestions or talk about all of the things that are bothering/worrying her... though that seems to be more to do with things in her past than it is anything in our current home environment.
And, by and large, she does seem to be in a better place these days - both geographically (home was always too quiet, with too little to do, compared to London) and emotionally. Having quit university earlier this year, she's quietly excited about her upcoming OU courses and, despite experiencing some writers' block on some additional, unrelated work, she's clearly raring to go.
Even better, she's getting involved in some voluntary work in one of her myriad areas of interest and speaking openly with her new GP about her illness. As a result, she is due to partake in some group therapy soon. While I'm not expecting to become involved in that, talking with other people should help our communication indirectly.
On a semi-related note, it could be argued that I'm the kiss of death for her sister's relationships. Each time I've met one of her boyfriends on our visits to the family home, they've broken up shortly after. The 'current' boyfriend broke up with her (again?) by phone, while we were there (literally in the next room, as it happened) but they've since got back together again (much to the displeasure of the parents) and are already arguing. Now, I know none of that is actually my fault - the younger sister's taste in boys could be charitably described as 'picking up strays' - but the timing has been uncanny...
It also highlights one of the other benefits of my current relationship: we don't argue. There are times that I sense some of my behaviour hasn't been received especially well... but it's evidently not bad enough to cause any significant problems and, despite my girlfriend constantly blaming herself for anything that goes wrong and describing herself as 'rubbish' and/or 'lazy', she's really anything but, and continues to be as positive an influence in my life as I hope to be in hers.
Work has been a bit manic recently, August being one of two properly busy months in their calendar (the other, coincidentally, being December... and it all seems to be through exceptionally poor scheduling). When I say 'manic', what this amounts to is about an hour and a half of overtime spread over three days a couple of weeks ago... and I have only two deadlines this month. Compare and contrast to my last full-time job, which would keep me there till 6 or 7pm almost every night because there were six deadlines per team, per month, plus the minutia of keeping it all going.
My counterpart hasn't had it quite so easy, but it seems that his Sales teams just aren't as reliable or helpful as mine (for example one title manager was still selling on his press day, today, and giving advertisers till 5pm to get their copy in... amusingly, this led to one advertiser being very proud of himself for getting his copy in at 4pm - "an hour early!"). Even so, his overtime has been comparatively minimal, just a bit more frequent.
Making matters more interesting, our boss was on holiday during the busy period, and yet remained in just enough contact with the office to be irritating without being in the least bit helpful. Emails regularly flood in issuing edicts and stirring up trouble, but enquiries go unanswered.
The rest of the team are ticking along, getting stuff done, working late where necessary... I felt quite guilty walking at almost on time while things were 'manic', but I'm always up to date... and, with a week's holiday booked after the last deadline in August, I made a point of making a start on this month's work just after sending my last August magazine to press, just so I wasn't leaving anything for the others to do on my behalf while I'm away (quite unlike our boss, who ignored a couple of important marketing projects and moved one of her regular magazine press days so we had even more work to do during the busy period and while she was away. Classy).
But the thing is, I'm really enjoying it. The increased sense of urgency this month has made it - bizarrely - more fun. It's not hectic enough to trigger my workaholic tendencies, but it's certainly keeping me occupied.
When I got back to work after my holiday (another visit to my girlfriend's family) I found that things somehow managed to go horribly wrong in my absence. Based on what went wrong and how/why, I'm certain it would have gone wrong even if I was there, but it's an interesting echo of my last full-time job, not least because, following a short meeting, my counterpart and our boss decided (jokingly) that it was all my fault. I hadn't the heart to tell them that joke follows me around...
And, out in the real world, I'm slowly getting used to having my girlfriend living with me. After about five years of living on my own, in my own place, it felt a bit weird to begin with. Part of me kept sort-of expecting her to go back to her own place eventually (despite knowing full-well that, now she's quit university, 'her own place' would have to be her parents' home) and was inwardly bemoaning the lack of privacy (which, let's face it, was my motivation for buying a home of my own and moving out of my parents' house in the first place), but I can't deny the benefits of having her around.
It's not just the practical stuff - for example, she'll invariably have prepared dinner so that it's ready to serve when I get in from work. Despite being a bit of a loner (some would say 'hermit') by nature, it's nice to have company... someone to talk to in the evenings, someone with whom to share my favourite movies and TV shows (some of which we already had in common), someone to exchange hugs with, someone to snuggle up with in bed. I've never really felt that I'd be entirely comfortable sharing my life with someone to this extent, but it's been far easier than I'd expected. Having someone else around means I'm (slightly) less prone to wasting all my time doing nothing, and am generally a little less self-absorbed. We often come up with ideas of things to do together, but we're also doing our own thing occasionally, so everything seems that much more fulfilling. By the time the end of the day comes, both of us (usually) feel ready to get some kip in preparation for the next day.
That said, living with someone who suffers from Depression and anxiety isn't the simplest life one could imagine. Most of the time, things are fine... but there have been episodes were, having arranged to go out and meet friends, she's had an anxiety attack at the last minute (though, I suspect, they could have been brewing for days before they actually became evident to me) and either not gone out at all or come back within a few minutes. On one recent occasion, I actually caused a meltdown one evening. For almost of full 24 hours, she denied that anything I'd done was wrong and said that everything was her fault - pretty much the usual mantra when Depression takes hold. When I got home from work the following day, she could barely look at me or talk to me, and the hug that usually greets my arrival was delivered with elbows and clenched fists. Then, just when I started worrying that our visit to her family would end with me coming home alone, she seemed to just snap out of it... realising - she said - that the situation wasn't her 'fault' and that I could have been a bit more sensitive about things the night before.
And when I later mentioned my fear of her returning home, she actually laughed at the idea. "It's much better here."
Communication is at the heart of all relationships, and it's a constant learning process. Very little of my previous relationship experience is applicable to this one and, while my girlfriend and I are very similar in many ways - we may not finish each other's sentences, but we're often thinking of the same context-related joke - she's not quite at the point where she can comfortably ask for things (other than an occasional back-rub) or make suggestions or talk about all of the things that are bothering/worrying her... though that seems to be more to do with things in her past than it is anything in our current home environment.
And, by and large, she does seem to be in a better place these days - both geographically (home was always too quiet, with too little to do, compared to London) and emotionally. Having quit university earlier this year, she's quietly excited about her upcoming OU courses and, despite experiencing some writers' block on some additional, unrelated work, she's clearly raring to go.
Even better, she's getting involved in some voluntary work in one of her myriad areas of interest and speaking openly with her new GP about her illness. As a result, she is due to partake in some group therapy soon. While I'm not expecting to become involved in that, talking with other people should help our communication indirectly.
On a semi-related note, it could be argued that I'm the kiss of death for her sister's relationships. Each time I've met one of her boyfriends on our visits to the family home, they've broken up shortly after. The 'current' boyfriend broke up with her (again?) by phone, while we were there (literally in the next room, as it happened) but they've since got back together again (much to the displeasure of the parents) and are already arguing. Now, I know none of that is actually my fault - the younger sister's taste in boys could be charitably described as 'picking up strays' - but the timing has been uncanny...
It also highlights one of the other benefits of my current relationship: we don't argue. There are times that I sense some of my behaviour hasn't been received especially well... but it's evidently not bad enough to cause any significant problems and, despite my girlfriend constantly blaming herself for anything that goes wrong and describing herself as 'rubbish' and/or 'lazy', she's really anything but, and continues to be as positive an influence in my life as I hope to be in hers.
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