I'm currently in the city of Derby. I use the word city pretty loosely. I've been to abandoned mining towns that are more lively. (It's this whole Cathedral business. If you put a Cathedral up next to an outhouse in the middle of endless tundra, the Queen would declare it a city) I walked the main road from end to end last night, and didn't see a single soul on the streets for the entire journey. It was downright eerie. I finally saw two punters in a Walkabout and, afraid I might have missed the Tsunami warning siren or something, I went in to see what was going on. I ordered a beer and a steak salad.

"So, ah, what do folks do in Derby, come a Wednesday night?"

"Come in here, generally."

"Where is everyone, then?"

He gestured to the two old men sucking their teeth at each other at the bar.

"There might be dancing later."

I consumed my salad with unhealthy speed and got out as quickly as possible. I then proceeded to get lost in Derby. I'm not entirely sure how I did this. My hotel was on the main road, the train station was on the main road, all the pubs were on the main road, and there really wasn't anything in the entire town other than the main road (which was amusingly called 'Orgasmaton Road'). Nonetheless I soon found myself on roads which were anything but main, desperately trying to find my way back to the main road.

At one point I found a dairy [convenience store] and went in to get directions.

"Hi, could you point me towards the train station?"

"No."

"Do you know where it is?"

"Ah... no."

How can citizens of the town not know where the train station is? There's only one road, and there's only four things on it. I guess if they knew where the station was, they wouldn't be here to ask where it was.

I hope I don't sound like an elitist Londoner complaining that there's nothing interesting outside of London. However after painstaking investigation I've concluded that there really is nothing interesting outside of London.

Just before my nephew was born, I went over to Dublin for my sister-in-law's baby shower. Part of the party (for which I was mostly wrecked on whiskey sours) was an empty book that was passed around, into which all present had to write a message to Felix (who was of course at the time both nameless and genderless) that he could read when he was older. I contributed two pages: One was Superbunny, a cartoon character I invented when I was eight or nine and sporadically write new episodes of; the other was a fable I'd heard when I was too young to remember how old I was:

A long time ago there was a King who, bored one day, decided to put a riddle to his court: He declared that he would renounce his kingdom and give it up to whoever could bring him a gift that would make him sad when he was happy, and happy when he was sad. He knew he would not lose his kingdom, for the riddle had no answer- he just wanted to be amused by what his courtiers bought to him.

As he predicted, many came and went, but none answered the riddle. Until one day, a beggar came to court, bearing a small brass ring, which he handed to the King. The King examined the ring, handed his crown and sceptre to the beggar, and wordlessly left his kingdom to walk the earth forever.

Inscribed on the ring were the words Gam zeh ya'avor.

'This too shall pass'

But now I'm thinking I should have written this, which I made up a few minutes ago:

Two men are lost in the desert- they've been walking for days and are dying of thirst.

One of the men sees a pool of brackish water, and starts running towards it. The other remembers hearing that unexplained pools of free-standing water found in this particular desert are usually highly contaminated and not potable. His friend is almost at the pool, so he yells out to say that the water could be poisonous.

His friend is far too thirsty to listen, or care, and stumbles into the pool and drinks greedily, washing his hands and face with the fetid fluid. He lies on back in the water, sated, with a huge grin on his face, his thirst temporarily sated. The second man wants very much to drink, but does not. He spends the night rubbing the back of the man who drank the water, who spends it vomiting, soiling himself, and generally in agony.

In the morning the man who drank from the pool awakens, horribly parched after a night of fluid loss and dehydration. He starts to drag himself towards the pool for some water. His friend wakes up and sees what he is about to do, grabs him and forces him away from the pool.

"What are you doing?!?" he asks in desperation: "Don't you remember what happened last night?"

"Yes," the man who drank from the pool answers, "but please... I'm so very thirsty."

or maybe this, which I came across last night whilst reading the remarkable novel Infinite Jest:

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually leap from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring to fall; it's the terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling "Don't!" and "Hang on!", can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

I think they'd both end up being a lot more useful to him.

Back by popular demand, it's another edition of the destruct\hour, garunteed to expand your musical horizons whilst simultaneously reducing your stress levels. This time with more music and (slightly) less giggling

It's last Sunday. I'm standing at a bar. I'm hungover, so I'm just kind of staring into space, waiting for my Bloody Mary. Two women come up to the bar. One of them turns to the other and says what I swear sounds to me like:

"What's a martini?"

The other cocks her head and looks up and to her left, in an expression of what I swear looks to me like bafflement.

I say:

"A martini is traditionally five parts dry gin, one part vermouth. However many people prefer a vodka martini, which is essentially the same thing, except with vodka instead of gin."

Cue about thirty extremely uncomfortable seconds of confusion in which it is slowly and painfully established that the woman had in fact turned to her friend and asked:

"Would you like a martini?"

If you listened to the show last week, you'll recall that at one point I joked that one of my fears regarding the London bombings was that there might be a 'militarization' of London's streets; that is to say, that people would start arming themselves and having firefights on buses. I was just kidding. It was an excuse to have Al Pacino say: "Say hello to my little friend!" and then loop some gunfire effects. Now an innocent man is dead, shot five times in the back of the head at point blank range. It's so sad my brain can't even look at the event directly. I keep seeing the edges of it, making out a gradual shape that I don't want to see.

The thing is, I can put myself in the head of both the parties involved. I'm a Brazilian immigrant, minding my own business. I leave my house. I'm wearing my overcoat because it's overcast and even on warm days I feel cold. Maybe it's at this point that I first notice someone is following me- probably not. I'm probably keeping my head down, thinking about what I'm doing this weekend. It's been a long week and I'm looking forward to seeing my friends. As I near the station, suddenly there's guys approaching me from all directions, telling me to stop. You know what I do when I'm suddenly surrounded by men in Stockwell? I run. I get the hell away from them. Stockwell is not the nicest neightbourhood in London, let me tell you. I run and maybe in a panic (I grew up in Brazil, after all) I ignore the cries of the station personnel trying to stop me and leap the barrier and I take three steps at a time down the escalator and thank fuck there's a tube on the platform so I leap into the carriage and at this point the plainclotheds have put on their caps marked POLICE and they're all screaming "Police! Get down!" and so I drop to the ground and moments later there's a man on top of me and half a second later my life comes to an end, and those last few seconds of panic and terror were the last moments I got.

And I can see the Police side of it, too. I've been staking out this house for days. A suspect leaves, I'm assigned to follow him, my head still ringing with the emergency protocols initiated after the first wave of bombings. They had an anti-terror expert in from Israel, saying the only effective way to stop a suicide bomber is to shoot them in the head. Anywhere else and there is still a very good chance they can detonate the bomb. This guy's wearing a jacket that's way too big for this weather. He's heading for the tube station. We get the call to stop him. We approach. He starts to run. Into the tube station. He leaps the barrier. Fuck he's running down to the platform. We all pile after him. Shit, there's a train on the platform- he's going to take it out right now. He trips at the door and falls down. I remember the news about the bomber from last night- he fell to the ground in a cruciform position, then his detonator went off and burned his back, and he just lay there, waiting for the bomb to go off, until a Londoner came up to him and said: "Are you alright, mate?"; then he ran off, his bomb unexploded. This guy's lying just like that. These could be the last seconds of everyone in this station. My gun's out. Five rounds. I'm not even thinking about it. It's training. It's him or me. It's protocol. I'm pulling back the trigger over and over. I just killed an innocent man. I won't know this until the next day, but finding no bomb on him would certainly spark off some suspicion at the time. I'll go home to my family. His will get a phonecall.

I don't think it's anyone's fault. Jean shouldn't have run. The Police should have checked their target before engaging him. Both are understandable mistakes that unknowingly led to a tragic accident. This is the situation the bombers have created- this is what they wanted to create. Fear. I want to say: "Screw them. The best way for me to fight them is to just keep going as I go. Don't let them change they way I live."

I'm the sort of guy who likes sprinting. Sometimes, I just have too much energy and I'm sick of walking or I'm too bored to wait to get to the end of the street/platform/corridor, and I'll just break into a run, for no outwardly apparent reason. I'll just run.

I don't think I'll be doing that any more.

As you may have heard, London's under attack again. Jeez, these terrorists just don't quit, do they?

Anyway, the alarming thing about this is that not only have they evacuated Warren Street tube (among others), they've made an enormous cordon around the station, which actually encompasses my entire building. We've just been told we're not allowed to leave until further notice. How am I going to get my 2.30 coke now? I'll get sleepy without my afternoon sugar rush!

In the tradition of lame-blog-style journanimalism, here's a photo of the view from my office, of live, exciting cordon-action.

update - More photo fun- on my way out of the building (they shortened the cordon slightly to let us out), I saw a police scooter. Which made me laugh. I don't know why.

Like many, I was initally extremely resistant when I heard that the new War of the Worlds movie was going to be set in contemporary America. This was mainly because no-one's ever made a decent version of the original story, set in Victorian england. I can see it so vividly in my head when I read it, I really wish someone would get as excited about it as I am and make a proper movie. The architecture and style of the Victorian era is so cool, I think it'd still work as a movie. Oh, okay, I just wanted to see the death of Thunderchild.

What changed my mind was a documentary about the history of the War of the Worlds and all it's various incarnations- it's a story that is re-invented for each generation, and adjusted according to its needs. It was originally written as a caution against hubris. At the end of the 19th century, Great Britain ruled the world. The sun never set on the British Empire. Wells saw the arrogance of Imperial domination, and wrote a story to say: "Don't get too cocky. As microbes are to us, we are to the churning of time." And, as the 20th century demonstrated so aptly, he was exactly right.

There's a character in the movie that says a line, more or less lifted directly from the book: "And they've made their footing good and crippled the greatest power in the world." Well, Britain isn't the greatest empire in the world anymore, America is. So I guess it does make sense that is where an invader would strike.

Apart from the setting, the film is actually suprisingly faithful to the book- many of the key events are echoed in the film with great faith. This includes the somewhat sudden ending, which many people find disconcerting. Yes, it's Deus Ex Machina, but I kind of like it. Just as we were microbes to the Martians, the only thing that could bring the Martians down were our microbes. You could hardly have a movie about human hubris if you finish it by having the Army 'take-down' the tripods, Independance Day-style. It's a disaster movie, and like all natural disasters, humans don't control how it begins or ends- they just try as hard as they can to stay alive.

Much like Batman, I more or less knew what was going to happen next at every moment- nothing really came as a huge suprise. I didn't mind that so much. It's an 'event' movie. It doesn't have much depth or point or intelligence beyond loads of cool stuff happening on the big screen. It looks cool (although I hated Spielberg for not letting us look over that hill), the effects and audio are great (I'm loving the retro design of the tripods), it's relentlessly paced, and I pretty much had a good time. I don't think I'll ever watch it again, but I'd definitely recommend checking it out while it's on the big screen.

Other (spoilery!) thoughts follow:

"In later years, he came to appreciate the fact that his role inspired thousands of students to pursue a career in Engineering, something for which the Milwaukee School of Engineering granted him an honorary degree in engineering."

The Descent will scare the shit out of you. Let's get that straight right off the bat. I jumped out of my seat at least three times, probably a lot more. The director definitely sat down and said, first and foremost, before anything else, let's give people a few good frights. It's some scary stuff. (You can always tell a good scary film when you're walking home from the cinema in the dark and you avoid dark patches in the street). And it's relentless. Aside from maybe ten minutes near the beginning of the film, it's almost constantly either ratcheting up the tension or releasing it in an orgiastic burst of violence.

But, frighteners aside, is it any good? I'd say...yes! There's a couple of plot holes, and some of the events seem a bit too conspicuously determined to move the plot in certain directions [for example, I enjoyed the fact that the creatures weren't particularly powerful (in fact, they were pretty much consistently beaten up by girls in any one-on-one fight), but their capabilities seemed kind of random- one minute they're slicing people's throats open with their claws, the next they're literally clawing at someone's back, but not doing any damage]. Oh, and the effects are occasionally ropey. But the overall arc of the film, the acting, the music, the pacing, it's all pretty top notch- I was never unentertained.

So, I definitely recommend it to horror fans. Don't go and see this if you scare easily. Or if you gross out easily- it's quite brutal at times. In fact I dare say this film is scarier and more gory than Alien. That's quite a feat.

d

spooooiiiiilers ahoy! (below)

This is Grande Cobra. If you've been listening to the show recently, you will have heard them and no doubt discovered how much they rock your balls off. You're probably itching to see them perform live. Feel that itch? It's time to scratch.

The Cobras are playing live this Saturday at your favourite pub and mine: The Spice of Life (6 Moor Street). Not only are they being supported by perfect prickly popsters Girlinky, they're also hosting legendary Hamiltron band the Dead Pan Rangers.

So, what I'm trying to say here is: You've got three massive, awesome, kick-your-ass-live bands playing right here in London, THIS SATURDAY. You should come! I'll buy drinks! It'll be like Uborka Fridays, but with ACTUAL drinks.

Right, see you there, then.