Random Flowers

When I first moved into my flat, there was a small plant pot outside which seemed to have been used most frequently as a receptacle for cigarette butts. Over the years I've lived here, I've never actually done anything with it, but it has been supplemented by a hanging 'herb' basket by the kitchen window and a rather more ornate 'strawberry' planter out on the balcony.

Those words are in quotes because I never got round to using any herbs so, after the original set died out, the basket went wild pretty quickly, and because the strawberry planter never actually produced any strawberries and - guess what - went wild as soon as the strawberry plant died.

Friends and family have nagged me every so often to get rid of the weeds and replant them all with something sensible but, each year, I get a different selection of flora appearing on my doorstep. Here's the current line-up:

This may get replanted, but I don't have thyme right now...

It's like an explosion of grasses

OK, so the former strawberry planter and herb basket are displaying nothing more than a selection of various grasses, but the main pot has had different flowers every year so far, without me ever planting a single seed or putting in any effort whatsoever. Granted, this will probably end with a crop of Triffids but, for the moment, I'm quite content to let nature take its course.

My girlfriend is quite keen to properly replant the herb basket and, since that's potentially useful, it's quite likely to happen at some point in the future... but I'd never describe myself as having a green thumb, so the other two can quite happily remain gloriously wild, and add some seasonal colour to the place.

The One About Television

This will have to be a quick (for me) round-up, since has to cover shows spread over several months now, and I can't remember much about some of the telly I was watching before Christmas...

Sherlock: I've had mixed feelings about Gatiss & Moffat's interpretation of Doyle's consulting detective since the beginning and the third (and possibly final, despite the cliffhanger ending) series pretty much resolved any doubts I had. In and of itself, it's a decent series, but Cumberbatch's performance is largely unsympathetic, the show's definition of "high functioning sociopath" is quite wide of the mark, and Martin Freeman's Watson continued to fail to come across as former military until the very last episode, at which point he almost pulled it off. The show takes Doyle's creation and asks the question "who would Sherlock Holmes be if he existed in the present day?" then answers it by presenting him as an arrogant dickhead. Granted, it's entirely possible that someone like Holmes, existing in the world today, would become the abomination portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch... but that ain't Sherlock Holmes anymore. The very premise of the show is it's central flaw. Another flaw was its internal inconsistency, exemplified by the revelation, in the final episode, of Holmes' alleged history of substance abuse when, back when the series made its debut, they weren't allowed to have him smoking, let along shooting up with cocaine, and had to make do with covering him with nicotine patches.

The Musketeers: I loved the book, by Alexandre Dumas, so I'm constantly baffled by the way each adaptation plays so fast and loose with the story. Cardinal Richelieu is never so obvious in his scheming in the book. In fact, it's Richelieu who eventually signs D'Artagnan's commission into the Musketeers. The BBC's adaptation follows the pattern of their take on Robin Hood and Merlin. It's flashy, stylish, has a reasonable cast... but, ultimately, it's genre television in period costume. The Musketeers is little more than a police procedural in a leather doublet and, like most adaptations of Dumas' most famous work, there's rarely a musket in sight. Even so, the cast actually makes it fairly watchable, even though the characters' clichéd backstories are easily predictable. Most criminally, they haven't brought Rochefort into the series.

The Bridge II: the continuing adventures of Martin Rohde and Saga Norén were every bit as complex, intriguing, touching and occasionally outright funny as the first series. It's a damning indictment of British and American television that such series get remade (see The Killing and The Tunnel) more often than they are used as a template for original drama. Duplicating the dynamic with new characters and a barely altered storyline highlights how rare it is to find writers of the quality of those who created The Bridge. Again it was a grand, multi-layered story with a comparatively small, personal, almost mundane core... and, again, it ended with Saga doing her interpretation of 'the right thing', at Martin's expense. I'm sure they'll make another... but I'm worried Martin will end up killing Saga.

Salamander: started out quite intriguing, with a very targetted robbery in a bank vault... however, by the end of the second or third episode, I started thinking that it was all rather far-fetched and, frankly, not very interesting. The main character and the situation he found himself in just didn't grab me the way other European series have. I confess that, despite recording the remainder of the series, I didn't feel like catching up and deleted them all this morning.

Falling Skies: sci-fi tends not to get a good deal out of episodic television, with low budgets making everything look a bit cheap and rubbish. There's also the habit for it to focus more on the human element and descend quickly into cliché, than it does on the sci-fi, leading to such travesties as Star Trek: Enterprise and it's weekly adolescent whining and arguing which frequently proved the Vulcans' point that Humanity wasn't ready to explore the universe. Granted, the best science fiction tends to say a lot about the human race in the here-and-now... but when you're telling a story about humanity fighting back in the wake of a successful alien invasion, you need to do more than rehash old US Civil War storylines and reuse the 'warring bands of survivors' schtick that's been used in almost every season of The Walking Dead. There's also the matter of scale. This is the aftermath of an alien invasion of the planet Earth, yet we're stuck in a small American backwater with the most unlikely band of survivors one can imagine. I've been told the series improves as it continues, so I'm sticking with it for the moment... but it's not even throwing in any especially new or interesting philosophical arguments (and, yes, I've got past the 'revelation' about the harnesses and the Skitters), and the all-too-frequent historical quotations in season one are quite grating. Edutainment it ain't.

Helix: this appears to be what happens when someone thinks "Hey, The Thing was an awesome movie... and there was that 'prequel' recently... I wonder if it could be made into a TV series...". Thusfar, it's been very compelling, marred only by a couple of slightly wooden supporting actors and a couple of clichés... which is why it's very strange that it suffered an early mid-season break and will be returning to UK screens on a different channel. One of my favourite aspects of the show is the jarring incongruity of the burst of elevator musak in the title sequence - it's so ridiculously upbeat compared to the rest of the show. This is one I plan to stick with, since it's a very different slice of television sci-fi. Shame they killed off the mouthy and cynical Dr. Doreen Boyle - her dialogue in particular was a real highlight of the show...

The Tomorrow People: take a teen drama, then add 'paranormal' powers (because you're not allowed to call them 'mutants') and you've an adolescent rehash of Mutant X and Alphas that owes an enormous debt to popular 'Young Adult' fiction, particularly Jumper. Like far too many teen series that have been broadcast in the wake of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's full of mid-20-something actors playing teen rage/angst and just looking silly. I guess I'm a little fatigued with the 'Chosen One' plot device and 'teenagers' with the awesome power to mope constantly and the staggering inability to emote unless it's writ large and loud. Gave up on it after two episodes.

Hostages: the concept - top surgeon's family held hostage to force her to kill the US President in the operating theatre - sounded perfectly interesting... for a movie or a 2-part mini-series. Spreading it over ten episodes could only have been accomplished by padding it out, and some of that seemed predictable enough. The first episode was padded out with hints at the dodgy goings-on of every other member of the family, and the moment Dylan McDermott growls "don't get involved", you know that they're going to 'reluctantly' solve the family's problems as the series progresses, and they'll all be better people by the end. Sadly, the first episode was filled with so much melodrama, I didn't bother with the rest.

Now, of course, Agents of SHIELD is back from its mid-season break... and I'm still enjoying it. It's not perfect, but it makes better use of its genre television budget than almost any of the above and, while it's not Marvel's Avengers - The TV Series, it does a very good job of presenting a side-story to the larger-than-live antics on the big screen. That, and Clark Gregg is awesome. Seriously, his presence in almost anything makes it that little bit better.

Also returning, we have Suits (which suffers from as much adolescent bickering as many other US TV shows, but dresses it up with far snappier dialogue and features the consistently brilliant Sarah Rafferty as the consistently brilliant Donna, as well as the truly stunning Gina Torres as the power-dressing head of a legal firm, which - individually - more than make up for any shortcomings) and The Mentalist. I stopped watching that about halfway through the second season because it just got so samey, but when they announced that this latest season would conclude the Red John arc, I got back into it... Sadly, after its mid-season break, it's slipping back into its old routine, even in the new setting of the FBI... but it's occasionally diverting.

Of course, no round up of Christmas period television would be complete without some mention of the Doctor Who special. I found it adequate... not quite so epic as the 50th Anniversary episode, and the way they keep shoehorning Christmas into the story is becoming a little tiresome (this year setting it on the planet Christmas), but it was a good final episode for Matt Smith. My only concerns were the offhand way they slipped through about 300 years of alien invasion, and the extended regeneration sequence. Still nothing like as mawkish as David Tennant's positively emetic farewell 'epic', but it really would have been more interesting to have the actual changeover between Smith and Capaldi happen within the story, rather than as the 'cliffhanger' ending... and do we really have a new Doctor who's so disoriented, he doesn't know how to pilot the TARDIS?

Well... we still have a few months to go before we find out...

Not The Traditional Family Christmas

The middle of March might be a strange time to (finally) get round to writing about Christmas but bear with me... it relates to something that happened more recently, which I'll get to later.

Whereas every Christmas I've experienced up until 2012 (yep, even after I moved out of my parents' home) was spent with a selection of my immediate family, with visits from grandparents and/or great uncles and aunts becoming gradually rarer as they did, and contact with my uncle being limited to the occasional "hello" as he dropped his mother off with us on not-quite-alternate years, Christmas 2013 was something very different... because, when my girlfriend asked if I'd like to spend Christmas with her family, it's entirely possible I was a little too eager to respond in the affirmative.

I can still remember one rather dramatic Christmas - even though it was at least fifteen years ago - that I had a bit of a meltdown because each year had been becoming eerily, if not depressingly similar around that time. One or both of the grandmothers would come round and tolerate each other, my father would argue with his mother, my mother would be radiating stress with every fibre of her being, and there would be lots of long, awkward silences. When my sister and I were nippers, we'd wake up around 2am and raid our stockings in a vain attempt to pass the time before we could rip open our real presents stacked under the tree (starting out with a small, artificial one which later gave way to a real tree until my mother got fed up with them shedding needles on the carpet and brought the small, artificial one out of its exile in the loft), and the structured approach to presents only really came in when we were older and not quite so hyperactive. In fact, it possibly coincided with our development of the ability to sleep through Christmas Eve to a reasonable hour on Christmas morning. Attain that level of patience, and you can probably wait for your bigger presents.

But anyway... the routine nature of Christmas really got to me one year, and I found myself unable to get out of bed and face the day, because I knew exactly how it would play out. My mother, under enough stress already, took this as me being merely uncooperative, and started getting quite angry about it. Eventually, she sent my sister up to fetch me, and I whined for a while about being unable to deal with "another choreographed Christmas" (a little unfair, in retrospect, since they were never really planned to any degree beyond 'lunch will be at X o'clock'). After a few minutes, she talked me into getting out of bed... but then I started hyperventilating and she remarked that it looked as if I was having a panic attack and, observing that she was probably right, I burst out crying.

As an aside, this was probably my first ever panic attack - of that kind, at least - but I had several similar ones a good few years later in a completely different context.

Once I'd settled down, we both went downstairs. My mother tried to behave as if nothing untoward had happened, that I'd simply slept late, but the strain was writ large on her face and there was a definite sense that I'd be pushing my luck if I caused any other trouble for the next week or so. After that, though, the day went OK... Predictable, but OK. That was probably the worst Christmas I've ever had, and nothing has been as bad since, so I guess that was all the catharsis I needed.

In more recent years, with one grandmother dead and the other permanently in a nursing home due to Alzheimer's, Christmas tends to be a smaller, quieter affair. That said, with a young niece paying a visit either on Christmas Day or Boxing Day (alternating between my side of the family and my brother-in-law's), things tend to be a bit more interesting, if only because there's never the opportunity for any long, awkward silences anymore. Even so, it's still pretty much the same sort of Christmas as it's been for the last few years: we get together, we have a big Christmas lunch, we open our presents, we watch some telly and, eventually, those of us who aren't staying will head home (cadging a lift where possible).

Then we come to 2013. I'm in a relationship, just past the first year milestone, I've met my girlfriend's parents a number of times, and stayed at their place for a couple of weekends over the summer while she was home from university. It wasn't a great surprise to be invited over for Christmas because they've been so friendly and positive toward me so, feeling a little daring (not to mention reluctant to have another holiday season almost identical to last year's), I happily accepted. I headed down a few days before Christmas without any set idea of when I - or rather, we - would be returning, except that it would ideally be before New Year so we could celebrate the arrival of 2014 'properly, as a couple'. The only worry was whether or not we'd end up getting snowed in.

It was an odd experience both being away from home and being away from my family, but my girlfriend's family are very welcoming, so I've felt like part of their family since the first time I visited them. Even so, when I first arrived and started thinking about how many days there were before Christmas, I started wondering if I'd mistimed my arrival. With the nearest large town still being small enough that much of it starts slowing down and closing up when London would be getting ready for the evening's entertainment, many of the options that had been available during the summer were no longer available and, in any case, the town became gradually more crowded in the few days running up to Christmas. Nevertheless, as it turned out, I could probably have made use of another couple of days if I'd arrived earlier.

Christmas Day was a very different family affair than I'm used to. My girlfriend's family tend to interact with each other rather more, if only because of the way the house is laid out and the way, for example, breakfast isn't 'a family meal' as such, but people are walking in, out and through the kitchen quite frequently at that time of day. It was only really after lunchtime that we actually gathered in the lounge and started unwrapping presents, and that's where one of the major differences in our families came to light.

I've always been accustomed to short 'wish lists' and the idea of everyone buying each other a single present. Here, I found that my girlfriend's family, collectively, had bought about half the items on my wish list, then picked up a few additional bits and bobs just for fun. My girlfriend had gone entirely off-list and picked up a couple of awesome new recipe books for my kitchen, one of which I wasn't even aware of before I unwrapped it. But it wasn't just me that had been inundated with amazing gifts - everyone had a large pile to get through... which left me feeling a little inadequate because I'd kept to my own family tradition of getting single presents for each of them. So when my girlfriend's mother provided a list of books she wanted, for example, I'd bought one of them... and my girlfriend bought all the others. Even my girlfriend's sister's boyfriend had bought presents for everyone, when neither my girlfriend nor I had thought to pick up anything for him. I spent a good long while on Christmas day feeling guilty and quite miserly because, comparatively, I hadn't been very generous... but then, I'd been out of work - bar a few days here and there - since the middle of the year, so I tried not to feel too bad about it... Nobody complained, so I guess it was OK...

Later on in the day, there was a game of Monopoly that almost traumatised my girlfriend - had I fully understood how competitive board games can get between her family, I may not have insisted on joining the game... Not even my girlfriend's sudden silence and timidity clued me in, and it only became clear when she very nearly curled up into the foetal position when it got a bit shouty. Once the game was over - following a bitter dispute between father and youngest daughter - we returned to the quiet, safety and relative normalcy of my girlfriend's room, but she didn't quite recover from the experience until the next day.

On those days when we could, we popped out - usually just into town - but the family also paid a couple of visits to one of the more elderly and infirm members of the family in his care home. He's in a similar situation to my grandmother and, while my folks (or my mother, at least) visit her quite regularly, I only see her once in a blue moon... which is a little embarrassing. I can't remember with any certainty, but I suspect that during 2013 I saw more of my girlfriend's grandfather than I did of my own grandmother.

We came back a couple of days before New Year's Eve (avoiding some maintenance works on the direct route between there and London) and ended up not going out for the festivities or even staying up much after midnight, but it was amazingly cool to be back in my own flat with my girlfriend for that momentous occasion - after our first Christmas together as a couple, our first New Year together... Her coursework permitting, we've been spending the weekends together since and are making plans and provisions for her to move in with me this summer.

As an aside, here, it's worth mentioning that, when my girlfriend first discussed this nascent plan with her parents, they were not only overwhelmingly positive, but they expressed surprise that we hadn't done it already. My folks were rather more subdued - as always - but still positive.

More recently, my girlfriend invited me to one of two family events. There was a wedding and a birthday occurring on the same day and the birthday seemed to be the preferred option. I gladly accepted because I'm very keen to be her 'plus one' at any family event where I'm welcome (which seems to be all of them, so far). The idea was that we'd get the train to the nearest station, then get picked up by her folks in their car. Just for a change, it was an incredibly smooth journey (apart from one fraught moment at the interchange station when we initially couldn't find an information board - I mean, seriously, eight platforms and only one information board listing all departures? - but still managed to catch our connection with a few minutes to spare.

As it turned out, the event was a surprise birthday party, in that lots of family and friends had been invited, but the person whose birthday it was (my girlfriend's Godmother) had been expecting only a small event with the few members of family and friend who were either already there, visiting, or living nearby.

They were all just as friendly and welcoming as my girlfriend's family, and a lot of the time we were there, I was being gently quizzed about the usual things people ask about in these situations when they're meeting the significant other of someone they've known for years for the first time. I found myself inwardly squirming whenever someone asked about work because I'm still currently 'between jobs'. The best I could offer was a brief summary of the kind of work I normally do and the news that I was a candidate for a job at a rather prestigious newspaper. I felt quite flattered that everyone who asked presumed that I'd met my girlfriend at her college, since that allowed me to infer that I must look younger than I am (putting that in perspective, though, while out shopping recently, the staff on a supermarket checkout asked who would be paying because we'd picked up a selection of alcoholic drinks. My girlfriend pointed in my direction, and the staffmember asked her "is that your dad?")

Yet again, I was amazed by now natural it felt to be in the company of all these people I didn't know, simply because they were all very friendly and welcoming, and I was there as my girlfriend's significant other.

I guess the point of this post is that I'm beginning to see how weird my family are from an outsider's perspective and, possibly, my girlfriend is beginning to see how nice her family are from an outsider's perspective. When I first met her parents, her mother had brought along loads of old photos so, when my girlfriend first met my parents, my mother did the same... but wouldn't have done unless I'd mentioned it. The first time my girlfriend visited my parents' home, the only reason she didn't start thinking they disliked her was because I'd forewarned her that long, awkward silences are the norm in that household. I strongly suspect that neither set of parents really knows what to do with grown-up children, but my girlfriend's parents are more active in trying to remain relevant and important in their children's lives. While my folks are very much "here when you need us", they're not in such frequent and close contact.