Favourite photo - August 2006

Of course, I should have really put this up on the 25th, but better late than never eh?

LazyTown

Molly's favourite TV show has been LazyTown (link, wiki)for some time now.

It's a decidedly strange TV show. The creator of the show Magnus Scheving (who also plays Sportacus, the bizarrely moustached blue thing in the picture above) is an athlete, entertainer and writer in his native Iceland. What started out as a book and a lifestyle philosophy for kids, advocating healthy eating and exercise, has turned into a hugely successful TV show.

Now, aside from the continual re-enforcement of the healthy eating messadge which can get a little wearing after a while and the slightly dubious Stephanie - Sportacus dynamic going on, LazyTown is great fun.

It's also completely insane.

Like all great children's TV shows there's something distinctly strange and surreal about it. But LazyTown takes it to an all time high. The program is all about being healthy, being energetic and having fun, sweets are bad, fruit is "sports-candy" and most of the characters whizz around like budgies on speed. The three main characters include Sportacus - the super-fit superhero, dressed in blue, dodgy moustache, bizarre accent. Bear in mind this is a US series - how weird is it to hear an Icelandic accent from the main character? Stephanie - pink hair (I'm guessing it's not her own), high pitched singing, meant to be 8, obviously isn't, hence the slightly dubious nature of the Stephanie / Sportacus dynamic.* And finally Robbie Rotten - the villain of the piece, committed to promoting laziness and lethargy at all times. Strangely enough Robbie tries to accomplish this by being hyperactive, constantly plotting, tricking, dancing, jumping and generally not being very lazy at all.

One of the main things that Molly latched onto are the funky, ridiculously infectious euro-disco songs. So for Molly's birthday we got her the Lazytown cd featuring songs from the show. It's been on heavy rotation in the car every day so far and it's a firm family favourite. One of those cds where we all end up singing along and having a great time.

So if you happen to pull up alongside us at lights don't be surprised to see us doing all the actions to such classics as Spooky Song, Cooking by the Book or current fave Lazy Scouts. (click on the links for samples of the sort of infectious euro-beat nonsense we've been listening to for days).

It's utter trash, but it's pretty good utter trash. Or is it just that my brains have been leaking out of my ears after hours of this stuff?

* The whole Sportacus / Stephanie dynamic is very strange, but Sportacus is obviously not alone. I know of at least one dad (you know who you are) who can't watch LazyTown because he just looking at Stephanie on screen slightly uncomfortable.

Your monthly upcoming gig update.......

Because I care,
& because you need to get out more
& because I need to get out more as well,

I offer up these forthcoming gigs for your perusal.

Gigs I'm going to:

Sat 21st Oct @ Barfly Birmingham - Misty's Big Adventure

Thurs 7th Dec @ Academy Birmingham - The Wonder Stuff

This is the annual Christmas gig, feel free to grab tickets and say hi.
We'll be the people at the bar or leaning on the pillars trying not to be so bloody old.

Weds 13th Dec @ M.A.C. Birmingham - Mark Thomas


But please, suggest some others........

V For Vendetta

V for Vendetta (Amazon Link - The Graphic Novel)
V for Vendetta [2006](Amazon link - dvd)

Finally managed to get time to see this on dvd. It really wasn't as bad as I was expecting.

(Of course, seeing as how late it is now and how tired I am, don't expect the world's greatest film review.)

Obviously, given that V for Vendetta is one of my favourite Alan Moore stories, and given that he's had absolutely nothing to do with this adaptation, I knew it would never be as good as the graphic novel, but even so, not bad for a movie.

Thank god they didn't take too many liabilities with the plot and story. Of course, they dropped a lot of the detail and characterisation, but unless they made the thing a 16 hour tv movie they were never going to be able to get too deeply into Alan Moore's brilliantly structured back story and could never hope to portray the complex and troubled emotions of the main characters.

Oh well, not great then, but not bad, not bad at all.

Baby or Puppy?

For some reason, we found ourselves asking Molly yesterday

"Molly, would you like a puppy or a new baby"

She looks up, thinks hard for a moment and then answers:

"Puppy"
"You can have more fun with a puppy"

Which is fair enough i suppose. But before you ask, we're getting neither.

The things people will complain about....

As some of you may know, I'm the rather reluctant volunteer director of our local Estate management Company. This came about pretty much by default since Louise and I were the only really interested residents on the estate a while ago and when one of the previous directors left I was rather pressured into stepping in.

First a quick potted history, then the weirdest complaint I've heard so far......

We live in a lovely bit of inner city Birmingham. Our road was redeveloped in the 80s, to preserve the 1890 Victorian 3 storey and 2 storey terraces. We have a management company that looks after the estate and the communal areas (car parks, alleyways, paths etc.) For this we charge an annual fee. Recently we've done loads of work, redeveloping car parks, hiring gardeners and estate cleaners, new signs, new gates and lots more.
The estate's in better shape now than it has been at any point since we moved in.

But does this matter to certain residents?
Does it hell.

Our Managing Agents (they that collect the fees and do the administration stuff) received a complaint from a resident (we shall call them Resident X) this week.
It appears that a resident (we shall call them Resident Y) opposite keeps their windows open and Resident X can hear certain noises "coming from the bedroom" as the managing agent managed to put it so delightfully to me.
Resident X wants me, as a Director, to talk to Resident Y.

& say what exactly?
I've instructed our managing agents to politely refuse and tell resident X to get in touch with Environmental Services to file a noise complaint if it bothers them that much.

I didn't sign up for this shit

The return of Journalista!

A couple of years ago Dirk Deppey set up a Comics Journal Weblog, called Journalista, it tracked the daily comings and goings of the comics medium with wit, facts and great writing.
It stopped with Dirk's promotion to editor of the Comics Journal proper.

The good news is.....
It's back.
It's here.
Go and look.

Grant Morrison Batman Interview.

Following up from my review of the fantastic new Grant Morrison Batman series, Newsarama have got an interview with the great man on that very subject. (via LinkMachineGo).

Go read.

Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again - Frank Miller

I thought this was really awful at the time it came out and never actually finished the series to find out how it ended.
But on a whim, I picked it up again to give it another go.

Dark Knight Returns was one of the first books I read when I started work at Nostalgia and Comics. Along with Watchmen, coming out at the same time, it managed to create an incredible excitement around the comics industry. For those of you who haven't read it I'll not give anything away here.
DKR is the classic Batman as a pensioner story.
It's the future, superheroes have been banned, the aging Bruce Wayne has given up being Batman and is watching his world and his precious city go completely mad. It doesn't take long to get him back in the costume. He beats things up.
DKR is still a great book. Well structured, economical in the use of the big name Superheroes, brilliant in the use of the villains. A noir futurist story with slick, crafted artwork.

Dark Knight Strikes Again is very few of those things.
It's not as bad as I remember, but that doesn't mean it's all that good.

The main problem is the feeling one gets whilst reading that Miller's just doing this for the money (a reputed million plus) and that his story when he started writing it was a skeleton at best. Throughout the book characters and situations are just tossed into the mix without warning or reason, by the end it's just a mess of conflicting storylines and a couple of very lazy deux ex machinas to quickly finish the book.

The story is pretty much DKR all over again. Bruce Wayne has been quiet, training his army, watching the world go to hell yet again. Superman's working for the government still, heroes are banned still.
And the artwork is equally rushed - scratchy is okay sometimes but Miller takes it to a complete new level here - we get to abstract expressionism at some points.

This isn't to say it's completely without merit. The story bounces along and it's readable, just not great and it's very existence on the shelves next to DKR merely serves to diminish the brilliance of the original.

Happy Birthday Molly part 2

After tiptoe-ing to bed last night at 2:30am to gently deposit one present on the end of her bed as she requested, it came a a bit of a shock to be woken up at 4am by her excited shouts after she got up to go to the toilet.
Have you ever tried to put an excited 7 year old to bed at 4am when she's already sneaked a look into the lounge and seen the rest of her presents?
I wouldn't recommend it.

Anyway, after two and a half hours of trying to convince her that she needed the sleep we frankly gave up.
So at half past six this morning, with barely 3 hours of unbroken sleep, we were opening birthday presents.
Very tired now.
But had a lovely day.
With a lovely daughter.
Happy Birthday Molly.

Happy Birthday Molly.

Molly's birthday is on August 25th. This means many things.
It means from mid May she watches the TV adverts on channel 5 and asking if she can put that on her birthday list.
It means that we seem to end up having 3 parties (school, family and friends+kids).
It means that she saved us nearly £5000 in nursery fees by being born just before the cut off date of 1st September for her school year.
It means we've spent ages looking in the argos catalog with her pointing at stuff and then us trying to talk her out of things.

but most of all it means the end of August is a lovely time for us all.
Happy Birthday darling. 7 already. wow.

Life gets in the way........

A few weeks ago I did say something about getting some Sunday afternoon gatherings in the park organised this summer, partly to meet up and partly to get a new set of softball games started.

Well, guess what?

Yep. Life happened all through summer. And hence, no softball.
Oops. Sorry folks.
But like the title says...... Life does indeed get in the way.

Gin. is good.

I have rediscovered a love for a good old fashioned G&T.

Now, for the last few years, since finding out that I drink the stuff my wonderful parents have been buying me a litre of Gin for every Christmas.
And for the last three years I've been putting the bottles up on the shelf in the pantry and leaving them there.

But for some reason, I decided to pack a bottle in the car when we went away to Anglesey.
And I haven't looked back since.
The only problem is that old chestnut of the home measure.
In a pub 1 G&T = 1 measure.
At Bruton mansions 1 G&T = something between 3 and 5 measures of Gin.

Heh.

Q: What do you call a drunk in the West Bridgford area of Nottingham?

A: adult street drinkers

Another one from Lou's best friend Del.
In the streets of West Bridgford (Nottingham's equivalent to Harbourne) the level of pretentiousness has reached an all time high.

Apparently they have a few local homeless drunks that hang around the place. But they're not drunks. Heaven forbid we call the alcoholic on the street a drunk, that would be far too offensive. No, the wonderfully concerned people of West Bridgford want them to be known as Adult Street Drinkers.

For God's sake. How stupid are these bloody people.
If he looks like a drunk, talks like a drunk and smells like a drunk, perhaps we should just call him a drunk?
Bless Del for managing not to join in with this and bless her more for tolerating these idiots.

New Cure Reissues - a Cure fan and his money etc etc...

Blue Sunshine - Deluxe Edition (Amazon Link - The Glove)
The Head on the Door: Deluxe Edition (Amazon Link - The Cure)


This was going to be part of a series of posts entitled "my favourite bands - ever", but I haven't gotten around to doing that yet and wanted to talk about these instead.

As you may know, I've adored the Cure since a young age, so the deluxe remastered series is exactly the sort of thing a saddo like me is going to end up buying. Now bearing in mind I've already got all the cds in question and the second discs are of varying quality, why, you may ask, have I shelled out another £10 each for them?

Because they're Cure cds, with stuff I haven't got on them, that's why.

For example, the last set of reissues, 17 Seconds, Faith & Pornography had at least two songs on each extra cd that I'd have paid money for ages ago on bootlegs. But they've just not been available before now, so like any addict, I had to buy the cds all over again.

This series of 4 reissues, The Top, The Head on the Door, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and the Robert Smith / Steve Severin side-project The Glove - Blue Sunshine isn't as laden with great extras as the original series, but what the hell.

At least the Glove second disc has all of Robert Smith's vocal versions of the songs (he was contractually not allowed to sing on the whole album originally). The Top & Head on the Door at least have a couple of unreleased things, but Kiss Me is just studio demos of the album and a couple of live tracks.

But I had to have them anyway. And if you really have to ask why then you've never loved a band the way I loved the Cure. In fact, I've still got quite a thing going for them even now when we're both getting a little long in the tooth.

A disastrous start to the football season for AFC Fictions.....

Well, it's finally started.
The football season is here, and with it comes my annual attempt to play along in a fantasy football league game.
My game of choice is Fantasy League (link).
Each year I diligently pick my teams, poring over the form sheets and news articles, the reports of new players, who's hot and who's not.
Each year I present my best team for my budget and by the end of the first week I usually make half a teams worth of changes because the first week's results aren't great.

Not this year though.
This year has been a disaster. After the first weekend I am in 22,541st place with a total of 1 point. Awful.
Wholesale changes have been made.
Obviously I can put some of the blame at the foot of the stressy thing that cannot be named.
(Oooh, the mystery)
But mostly it's because I am rubbish.

Batman 655 - Grant Morrison & Andy Kubert.

This is the first of the new Grant Morrison run on Batman. We were expecting great things from this, just like we did on Grant Morrison's All Star Superman and yet again, he doesn't disappoint in any way.

This is a fantastic comic. What Grant does which is so special is write really sparse stories, where so much happens between panels or even within the action of one panel. He does it so skillfully, so effortlessly that you don't really notice what's going on until you sit and try to work out exactly what made the 22 pages you just read so great.

He's promised that this is going to be a return to a 70's playboy Batman, more Neal Adams than Frank Miller. And on the evidence here it's going to be a spectacular success.

He's obviously having a ball writing the dialogue:
For example; Alfred to Bruce Wayne:

"I hope you don't mind my saying so, sir,
but..... that growl in your voice --
the one you used to have to practice before you went out as Batman..............
You're doing it all the time sir".

"So let's try one more time shall we sir?
Repeat after me....
Ah, Good evening ladies"

Wonderful, can't wait for the next issue.
First JLA, then X-Men, then Superman, now Batman.

There's two sides to my thinking about this, one is that it's great to be able to read these wonderful comics. The second is that doing superheroes means Grant has less time to devote to his non-superhero stuff, things like the Invisibles and the Filth.
Personally I'd give up all the superhero stuff in an instant for another series on a par with the Invisibles.
But while he does choose to carry on re-inventing each icon, I'll be enjoying them.

Restoration - spare some change for the rich people guv'nor?

Restoration (the BBC series) is on again this summer. (link)
This is the one where Griff Rhys Jones wanders around the country looking for important buildings to be put up for a public vote Big Brother style to decide which one is given money to restore.
The first series concentrated on genuinely interesting and important buildings, including eventual winner, a public baths in Manchester (link) which was a stunning example of old fashioned public building, all beautiful detailing and intricate designs.

I watched the first episode of the new series. It's now called Restoration Village. Which gives you a clue about how it's focus has changed.
Instead of focusing on the important and fascinating buildings featured in the first series, they've gone much smaller and focused on a series of smaller buildings. And because they started in the South West of England around the home counties all the projects featured are in the sorts of villages where the average income of the villagers is at least a small telephone number.

Which is why I found myself swearing at the TV and complaining bitterly about the pompous, arrogant, moneyed public school types asking us for a handout to do up their bloody village.

A bit like me asking the local Big Issue seller for money to get my bathroom done really.

Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly

Seven Ancient Wonders (Amazon Link)

Like I said here, Matthew reilly is my guilty secret author. His work is incredibly fast, undeniably trashy, deliberately designed to be read as a blockbuster movie rather than a book. His plots are always pretty easy to layout.
Hero (or small team) vs Villains (lots of them, usually French, but in this one they're American or European). Hero is either trapped somewhere and has to get out or looking for something and has to travel the globe to find it. And it always takes place in a sealed environment (Antarctic base, Ancient Temple, Sealed Building etc etc).
Indeed he even goes so far as to put loads of maps and diagrams in so the reader can follow exactly where the hero and bad guys are in the latest high velocity running battle.
And I just lap them up.

In Seven Ancient Wonders the hero is a rugged, Indiana Jones type with a small multinational team, fighting on behalf of a group of smaller nations to save the world from the massed ranks of the Americans and the Europeans by stopping the secret of the seven ancient wonders falling into the wrong hands. The ancient capstone of the great pyramid was secretly removed and split into seven pieces by the ancients and hidden in the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.

Cue round the world dash, lots of racing through caverns, tombs and catacombs (all with little diagrams and maps for us readers), lots of action, the occasional attempt at dialogue, action, guns, lots of traps, action, fast vehicles, chases, a teensy bit of characterisation and then more and more impossible scenarios and action.

Seven Ancient Wonders did test my patience slightly. Normally he really just throws you in straight away, no bother with characterisation or any of that nonsense, straight into the chase and get the guns blazing.
But it was over a hundred pages before he really got going and over 300 pages before he did the thing that all of his books do at some point. He always writes something in his books that is so impossible, so unbelievable that you have to just give in to it, laugh at the wonder of the set-up and go with it all the way to the end (often in one sitting from this point on).
In Seven Ancient Wonders it was the part where the hero, on the run in Paris, manages to roll the bus he and his team are escaping on, through 360 degrees and continue their escape.
I know.
Fantastically unlikely isn't it.

Like I said, guilty secret author, I make no defense for it, except that it's fun for a while.

Louise's Birthday.

Today was Louise's birthday.
No, you don't get to find out how old she is.............. that would be rude.

And we've had a lovely day.

Of course, being a Saturday, we still had to get up far to early to take Molly for her 8am swimming lesson. But after that the day was ours to relax and enjoy.

Presents included a couple of Peter Kay dvds, Pride & Predjudice and jewellery.

But as usual, no matter what I got, it was outshone by Molly's presents.

Pictured above are the special picture frame now attached to our fridge and the specially painted glass plant pot.We spent a couple of frantic mornings before King's Camp last week getting the painting done. You can't really see, but the four sides are:

"Happy Birthday Mommy"

"Love you mommy"

"Love Molly"

and a lovely picture of the sun.

Perfect present.

Kid of the Camp!

Molly's last day at King's Camp for another year.

She's had a fantastic time and I'd heartily recommend it to anyone wanting to farm their kids off to total strangers either due to work commitments or sanity commitments.

And we were as proud as parents can be when we were there to see her being awarded the "Kid of the Camp" certificate. As well as the certificate she got a fantastic prize of........ a pineapple

(weird, I know, but it's a sports camp after all, they can hardly hand out sweets can they?)

Ketamine for depression. Where do I sign up?

I found this via WarrenEllis.com

In which researchers have found out that in clinical trials Ketamine had an almost immediate effect as a treatment for depression.
Sounds like good news to me.
Although the researches do put the following proviso in:

"The team says ketamine, in its current form, would not be appropriate for medication because of side-effects at higher doses, which include hallucinations and euphoria."

Is it just me or does anyone else think that people suffering from depression might appreciate a bit of hallucination and euphoria?

Steven Wells - What is this, fucking Kafka?

Steven Wells - maybe you remember him, he used to write for the NME as Swells.
He now lives in the US as a freelance journalist. He was recently diagnosed with cancer, this is the article he wrote about it.
Very, very funny. But terrifying at the same time.

What is this, fucking Kafka?

via pete ashton

Osteopath - session 1

(always sounds vaguely threatening that - psychopath, sociopath, osteopath)

Today I had the first session with the osteopath to try and sort out the ongoing pain in my lower back which has been really bad recently.

Having never been to an osteopath I had no idea what to expect, but I have to say it wasn't bad at all. His surgery was lovely, all comfortable (yet firm!) seats, essential oils, aromatherapy smells and subdued lighting.

As I expected there was lots of moving limbs, applying pressure and vigorous popping and cracking noises coming from my back.
As bad as that all sounds, I have to say it works. The pop or crack is accompanied by a burst of pain but after that your body relaxes and it feels much better.

It appears I have a twisted pelvis, most likely causing all the problems I've had over the years.
Lovely.

The session ended with a very relaxing cranial type manipulation & massage.

I walked out of there feeling lots better.
Of course, by the time I did some shopping and wandered round Birmingham,all the pain was back, but I shouldn't expect miracles after just one session I suppose.
Next session in a weeks time. All the advice I've had so far says it usually takes 3-4 sessions to feel an effect. I do hope so.

New Adventures of Hitler scans

New Adventures of Hitler was a fantastically bonkers comic.

Grant Morrison simply took the germ of an idea based in fact - that Adolf Hitler had come to Liverpool to visit family sometime in his youth and constructed a surreal, wonderful, bizarre story around it.

It was first published is some Scottish arts mag, which also had Pat Kane of Hue & Cry writing for it. Pat Kane decided it was a disgrace and promptly resigned in protest (I don't imagine the reading figures went down all that much). Eventually it was reprinted in Crisis magazine but it has never been reprinted and remains one of Grant Morrison's lost works.

Anyway, the point of this post - the scans for it appeared here (via here) and you should really go and have a look.
(New Adventures of Hitler wiki )

Blogger Beta - oh hell......

Today I upgraded Fictions to Blogger Beta.
I really should have known better.

Now those of you following this long and frankly dull story of my adventures in weblogging (see the category page on weblogging for details - here) will realise that I've spent far too much time on messing around with the structure of the blog already.

Nothing has eaten away at my time more than the search to get Categories onto my bloody blog.
The basic idea is that every post has a topic / category / tag / label. You can then search using these categories. So if you want to read everything I have to say about comics you'll be able to click on the comics category and see them all.

Blogger originally didn't do categories.
Which was a real pain.
So many people have developed many hacks and codes to get round this.
I tried using Blog search. Didn't work properly.
So then I stumbled upon the brilliant method I use now where I manually put all the posts onto a cross referenced categories page.
It works for me. (I got it from here and here, thanks guys.)

So all my categories are now on the sidebar, looking lovely and working well.

But Blogger Beta offers inbuilt categories. It calls them labels, but they are categories proper.
It was just too tempting.
So I changed over.

What they didn't tell you was that to use Labels in Blogger Beta, you have to use Layout in Blogger Beta. And to use Layout you can't use your CSS / HTML Template.
I've spent ages getting the template just right, tweaking everything until the blog looks bloody lovely and does everything I want it to.

So, after all that work, I'm not prepared to ditch my template.
So I'm going to use Blogger Beta, but I'm not going to be using labels, I'll be using the manual method and updating my template by hand.
Blogger are promising that you will be able to edit you template directly AND use labels at some point - But when??????

You can all wake up now.

The things you do for your girl......

No, she's not been hurt, today was "Injury day" at King's camp.

For some reason the teams this week are all named after hospitals, so it's been a week packed with medical stuff. We trekked into Harbourne last night after picking Molly up and got bandages and slings.
This morning it was up early to get ready, red pen, bandages and sling.
We were all pretty pleased with it really.

Alan Moore Interview

New Alan Moore interview from the AV Club. Link here.

The interview is mostly about Lost Girls (my blog thoughts on that one here & here & here & here) and his reaction to the simmering furore over it. As usual, being Alan Moore, it's well reasoned, interesting, thoughful, intelligent and funny.

It was interesting, given my recent post (here) that got on to talking about the increasing sexualisation of children, to read this little bit by Moore:

"Look at Britney Spears and her sexy schoolgirl imitation. What is that actually
saying, and how many apparently normal men is it saying it to? We are
sexualizing our children at an increasingly young age. Exposure to The Spice
Girls seems to have doomed us to a Western world where every 10-year-old wants a
belly-button ring and a "Porn Star" T-shirt. And we just think it's cute! "Ah,
look at them! They're acting like little whores!"

Exactly what I was trying to say. Cheers Alan.

The other great stuff comes out in quotes like this:

"I've never really cared that much about money. I've got enough to live on. And
it's not like I live in a fancy house, it's not like I own a car, and it's not
like I ever go on holiday. For this past 18 months, I've been blissfully
involved with writing my next novel, Jerusalem, which will probably take
me another couple of years to finish and edit. It's going to be over a
half-million words, probably about 1,500 pages or something. As big as a book
can be, if not bigger. I've not got a deal for this book, nor am I seeking one.
I haven't gotten an advance for it. I haven't earned any money for the past 18
months. I haven't done any paying work. But I'm not greatly inconvenienced.
There's royalties still coming in."

Lovely for two reasons, first the very simplicity of the man's life, his love of just being able to sit and write and secondly the fact that his next books going to be half a million bloody words.

Workmen, pah and pah again.....

I know I've said this already (here)
but who the hell do these workmen think they are?
Are they really so stupid as to turn work down without giving reasons?

The estate management group I belong to where we live wants to get some work done. Quite a big job, good money, etc etc.
Phoned 6 companies.
Only 1 was good enough to say they were too busy at the moment, didn't want to string us along and hoped we'd think of them next time. That's exactly what I want, truth and reason.
Of the rest, 4 said they'd ring back (they haven't yet, 3 days later) and 1 was meant to be here an hour ago.

Workmen, pah, pah!

Molly's musical education continued.......

That post about Top of the Pops and talking about Molly's musical education made me start to think about what sort of music we've managed to get her into.

To qualify she has to be able to sing along with it and not complain loudly every time it comes on.

So far we're not doing too badly.
So far we've got her into songs by the following:
Blur, Beach Boys, Beatles, the Cure, Depeche Mode, Fatboy Slim, Flaming Lips, KT Tunstall, Polyphonic Spree, Radiohead, S Club 7 (my own fault, letting Louise bring that one into the car), Steve Wynn, They Might Be Giants and as many good football songs as we could throw at her.

Of course, she's still managed to develop her own tastes as well, so recently in the car we've had the collected works of Hi-5, a disney themes cd, the Grease soundtrack and the Sound of Music soundtrack (yes, the last two were Louise again. curses).

But I'm still fairly happy with what we've managed so far.
The most successful has definitely been the Polyphonic Spree. She loves most of what they've done and we nearly took her along with us when we went to see them in 2005 at the Academy.
I'm definitely getting her a ticket next time around. It was a joyous show and I really think she'd love it.

Of course, the long term plan is to be the sad sort of dad who goes along to gigs with his child. And then we really need to sort out the Glastonbury idea I've got where a whole load of us go with kids in tow. But first of all I've got to get round Louise's reluctance (something about over my dead body i think it was).

Top of the Pops & Molly's musical education......

While we were away in Anglesey it was the last ever Top of the Pops and Louise and I started thinking about the complete lack of music on TV for Molly nowadays.

We're quite unusual in that we don't have cable, satellite or even Freeview. We don't have enough time to watch even the best of the TV on just the 5 terrestrial channels as it is and we certainly don't want to get sucked into the cycle of non-stop C-Beebies and C-BBC for Molly to watch.

As for music, the problem with MTV and the like is that it's full of stuff that's dubious at best for Molly to watch. Before you start taking me to task for being too conservative over this, just sit down and watch a couple of hours of it around 5-7pm each night. Then ask yourself if you'd really want your 6 year old watching some of the stuff you've just seen.

It's all part of the increasing sexualisation of our children. All the stuff they're increasingly subjected to just projects the adult world onto them at an earlier and earlier age.

Just looking at the sort of things you're presented with at kids clothes shops as suitable for a child to wear should start the alarm bells ringing. & of course it's just the sort of parent who screams loudest about the Paedophile threat who ends up dressing little Courtney in stuff your average prostitute would consider a bit tarty.

It's really difficult to bring up a little girl to be a little girl. Even at this age all the media pressure, all the peer pressure, all the influences are doing everything possible to create teenagers from the age of 7.

And we try our very hardest to not buy into this.
Which brings us back to the music problem.

There just isn't anything to take the place of Top of the Pops as Molly's first exposure to pop music. Which is a real shame.
So I guess it's down to me to be the major musical influence.
God help her.

Mangaphobia

Paul Gravett has posted this great article on his website:

Mangaphobia: Manga for people who hate manga

This sort of includes me as well.
Although I certainly don't hate manga, I haven't read as much of it as I'd have liked to. But time, as ever, is against me. There's isn't enough time to read all the things I want to at the moment and putting a completely new selection of manga titles in the mix as well would probably tip me over the edge completely.

Sure, I've read Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Adolf, 2001 Nights and thought them all great, but I just don't have the time to read more than I do and manga gets relegated to the position of "I would if I had more time".

So, unless someone comes up with a 28 hour day or a way for me to survive on less sleep than I already do I think I'll just rely on Nostalgia & Comics' resident Manga-phile Cat to point me in the right direction of a few books. After all, one should really make an effort to keep up with what the kids are reading nowadays!

Old Bastard - official

On Thursday I will officially become an old man.

I'm off to the Osteopath about my back.
It's been acting up for ages, aching after standing, walking, sitting (anything really). I get sudden sharp pains & very painful but mercifully infrequent back spasms in a morning.

The spasms caused one great phone call to work. I had just tried to get out of bed and collapsed, screaming, onto the floor. It took 10 minutes of slow moving agony to get back into bed and another ten minutes to phone in sick.
Then, being super-dad I managed to get Molly to school. Superman may save the world but I'd like to see him drive a car when every little movement feels like someone's sticking a knife into your spine.

But I digress,
Since coming back from the holiday I've been in regular pain and sitting here, doing this doesn't much help.
So I'm off to the Osteopath to see if he can help at all.

Someone get me a cane.
If I have to grow old at least let me have something to hit all the young bastards with.

What's your guilty secret author?

I have an admission to make.
I'm addicted to a trashy action adventure thriller writer.
Every time he writes a book, I have to read it.
It usually takes me only a couple of days.

His name is Matthew Reilly
So far he's written Contest, Temple, Ice Station, Area 7, Scarecrow, Hover Car Racer & his latest (currently waiting for me to go upstairs and start it) is Seven Ancient Wonders.

I know he's writing books deliberately to be like movies.
I know it's page after page of action and big fight scenes worthy of a Bond film.
I know that there is barely a page per book with a modicum of characterisation in it.
And I don't care.
The books are just plain fun. I even find myself laughing at the impossibility of it all at times. But I keep turning the pages. And the pages turn very, very fast. The pace of his books is truly breathtaking.
It's really the perfect throwaway quick read and I often find it difficult to put the book down once statred. Usually I take a couple of nights to read one, but occasionaly I've just sat up and read straight through.

links - wiki, author's website, amazon page

So, what's your guilty secret author?
I'm off up to bed to share some time with mine.

Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumey.

Mobius Dick (Amazon link)

A while ago (link) I wrote about how I didn't know whether it was me our the book at fault when I found myself losing interest in Mobius Dick.

Well I finished it on holiday in Anglesey and I've decided it's definitely the book at fault.
It was meant to be a:

"dazzlingly inventive story that blends techno-thriller, historical fantasy,
philosophy and farce"

It was actually non of these things.
It was a big mess of badly constructed ideas & all of these badly constructed ideas were then pretty poorly executed. I was really hoping for great things from this and I was bloody disappointed.
The basic idea was that John Ringer receives a mysterious text message which then takes him in search of a woman he used to know. On the way we journey through the work of Schrodinger, Mann, Schumann, Melville and more. Until the end, where the quantum theories and parallel world theories come crashing down to end the story in a deeply disappointing manner.
I've read countless comic book explanations of this sort of thing and even the worst of them was better than this.

Ho hum, onwards to a bit of Martin Amis now....

(Update - the Amis will have to wait, 50 pages in. It's Matthew Reilly time!)

Converse for me, Converse for Molly

On holiday in Llandudno we popped into Adams to see if we could pick up some new T-shirts and ended up picking up this pair of Converse-esque trainers for Molly.

She walked out of Adams as the happiest child in the world because she looked just like Daddy.

Daddy has worn Converse All-Star Hi-tops (black) for the last 15 years and loves them.

It's both better and worse now they're actually popular and widely available.

Better because I can now get hold of size 12s easily (I used to squeeze into size 11s for ages before being able to get 12s) and worse because I get sick of other people wearing my bloody trainers and I get sick of other people thinking I'm just trying to look trendy.
But I'll kep wearing them and when they're no longer in vogue I'll get my size 12s from a little specialist shoe shop on the internet if needs be.

I also get sick of people asking me if I don't want them in some other colour apart from black. It's like asking Jonny Cash if he fancies a nice bermuda shirt.
I don't want them in terracota, I don't want them with checks, I don't want them in green and purple stripes, with go faster stripes, in leather, distressed or any other stupid combination of things.

Black is fine thanks very much

Not getting an I-pod this month either........

Yet again, no I-pod in July, no I-pod this month either.
Like I've said before (link) all I really need is one month with a clear credit card and then the Amazon order goes in.

So, what's the reason for July & August for not getting the I-pod?
July's reason was the holiday.
August I need to get the car serviced and MOT'd .
So yet again, the shiny new I-pod is still sitting there in the Apple store. Maybe September?

At least the car service isn't as bad as it used to be. The joy of owning a relatively new car is getting that bill at the end of a service and not feeling physically sick on getting the bill.

The worst I've ever had was when I owned an old Vauxhall Nova. It was at least 5 years past the point of economic viability.
Took it in for a service and got the usual phone call from the garage to tell me what was needed to get it through it's MOT.
The mechanic actually apologised at the very start for the length of the list of faults.
He then rattled off a list that just kept going and going and going.
Then he paused, at which point I made a joke about never realising so much was wrong with the old car.
Then of course he pointed out that he was only halfway through the list.
Bollocks thought I.

It was this service that convinced me of the merits of changing a car regularly.

Cars - Movie Review

Cars (2006 - Disney/Pixar) (Amazon Link)


As a treat we all popped along to see Cars on Weds night. We've been seeing trailers for this for a year now and we were all expecting great things.

We thought it was a fantastic hour and a bit long movie.
Which is a problem because the actual film is 121 minutes long.
(Compare this with Toy Story - a brilliant 80 minutes).

Louise fell asleep in the middle, I started thinking about how good the Incredibles was compared to this, and even Molly started to get a little restless.
(and she sat through the bloody Spongebob Squarepants movie.)
Now, please don't misunderstand, it's good. But Pixar's problem is one of an incredibly high quality threshold. Any new Pixar film has to be compared against the standards set by Toy Story 1 & 2, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc and the Incredibles. And it just fails.
The characters are nice, the animation is every bit as stunning as we've come to expect and there are some lovely gags all the way through.
It's just let down by the story. Incredibly predictable, even down to being able to not only guess the exact ending, but being able to guess exactly what happens to get to the ending.
Now this is great for standard cartoon movie fare. But what has been so incredible about Pixar so far is that their movies transcended the cartoon genre and became great movies in their own right.
Cars isn't. To be honest, it's not even a really great cartoon movie. It's fun, entertaining and a great afternoon out, but compared to what's come before, it's a monumental failure.

Subscribe to Fictions blog

Forgot to mention to you all:
I've set up the RSS feed to the weblog,
so I thought I should let you know and walk you through it.

Essentially it lets you subscribe to my weblog and via a web based reader you can check on the new content on the blog.

All you have to do is click on this little orange icon here or in the sidebar:
This will take you to the feedburner page for Fictions.
Once here you just need to click on the relevant web based reader to subscribe.
If you haven't got a web based reader I'd suggest Bloglines.
(Just go to the Bloglines page, set up an account and add my blog.)

The end result of this is that your Bloglines page will show my blog and list all of the posts since the last time you checked into bloglines to look at my blog.

Or, if all this seems too much trouble, just keep checking in every few days and reading as normal.
You all know the drill by now, I usually post a couple of entries every day.

Weblogging

Blogging obsession or What I did today.......

Have spent most of yesterday and today tinkering with the blog.
(Because I have a little spare time during the day with Molly at King's Camp and I wouldn't want to actually waste it by doing something as inconsequential as relaxing)

Adjusted the archive listings, had an aborted attempt at putting Categories in a drop down list box like the Archive one but just didn't like it.
May go back to it when the Categories list becomes too long.

But most of the time has been spent messing about with all the fonts.
Originally the idea was to simply use a new font for the blog to make it slightly more easy on the eye and more readable.
But of course, once you select a new font, all the other stuff needs adjusting as well. So I spent ages today sorting out and learning about relative font sizes, line spacing, padding, margins and much more.
So much of this afternoon and evening consisted of me adjusting a setting in the template, crossing my fingers, pressing preview and then swearing loudly when either:
1. nothing happened.
2. the blog crashes.

Time and again, I tried to get everything looking right and pretty. And eventually, I managed it.
Once you've put all that time in, the sense of achievement when you finally click on the preview link and it actually does what you intended is quite something.

I think the new font, slightly more modern looking sleek, thin style and particularly the line spacing has really helped the look of the blog.

But what do you think? I know, - you didn't notice did you?
I spend all day slaving away........ for you.......least you could do............etc etc

And being a stupid man I am now toying with the idea of having a look at the colour scheme on the blog. And with each slight colour difference having a different coding and me having at least 14different colours all over the blog - I should be at that for ages, you'll probably hear the cries of torment from wherever you are..

And to think, originally this was just a little distraction, a mere entertainment.
Hah!

Molly at King's Camp

This week has been Molly's first week of two at King's Camp.
Kings Camp is one of those summer sports camps for working parents to drop their children off for the whole of the summer. Or, in our case, just somewhere fun for Molly to go for a couple of weeks whilst Mommy's at work and Daddy gets on with loads of stuff that needs doing.

Although this time around Daddy feels like a bit of a cheat because there isn't a big project to do on the house like normal and in theory I could drop Molly off at 10, pick her up at 4 and spend the hours in between doing absolutely nothing.
But that isn't my way of doing things so I'll be tinkering about the place and sorting out odd things.

Molly has been having the greatest time at sport's camp.
On her very first day she managed to win the prize for the happiest and most helpful child and she's loved everything they've done so far.

After last years disappointment of being in the beginners swim group she was really chuffed to make top group this year (deep end and all the floats!). She's had fun playing loads of games and managed to impress everyone (coaches included) with how good she was on the trampolines.
(all those swimming and trampoline lessons are paying off then!)

The one big problem (well, okay, not that big a problem really) is that every day they have a different theme. Monday was fine, winners and grinners. But after that we have to put some effort into it. Tuesday was back to front day, Wednesday was World cup day and today was "come as your coach day".
Now, even though the very last thing you really need after getting in from picking Molly up from camp is to plan the costume for tomorrow, we prevail and today we managed to come up with a great one.

Take 1 red top
Add liberal amouts of t-shirt pens to put King's Camp logo on back.
Stick King's Camp logo on front.
and for the final touch, get wife to blag name tags from her work.
Half hour of labour later and the result is this....



Pretty good huh?

The Escapists by Brian K Vaughan & Phillip Bond

This is a weird one.
The Escapist is a character from the great novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (wiki).
This series is one of those mess with your head meta-fiction things.
It's set in our time, talks about all the comic book characters and creators we know (Bendis, Pekar, Siegel & Shuster). The fictional title character finds his dad's collection of comics about the Escapist, a comic-book about an escape artist hero from the 30s. and goes out to publish his adventures. More than this he decides to enlist his friend to dress up as the Escapist and make public appearances.

And the first issue is just fantastic fun, Vaughan's story is great, Phillip Bond's art is, as usual, wonderful and playful and fun.

This is one of these series' that the whole of Nostalgia & Comics has fallen in love with and we would really appreciate it if you could join in with us.

Altogether now, f*** off.

138 shopping days to go....
(or at least it was when this was posted a couple of days ago - and I can't be done with changing it).

"Harrods opened it's Christmas Department yesterday... 'Christmas World was packed, with an ominous background tinkle of shoppers edging past racks of glass baubles. The fairylights were eclipsed by the barrage of camera flashes as tourists immortalised themselves in T-shirts and shorts standing in a glade of £119 slimline artificial trees."
link (via )

Wouldn't it be nice, just once, to actually start Christmas at Christmastime?
Or is that just me?

Post holiday catch up time!

When I came back from holiday last week I made the decision to just blog all the stuff I'd written whilst in Anglesey in one chunk. But I didn't particularly want to put everything up in one go, so I made the decision to post a couple each night.

This has meant that I've been suffering the bloggers equivalent of constipation for the past week or so. All my new ideas, new posts, new links, new rants, new everything has been put on hold.

So to catch up with myself, here's a quick recap of everything I've done since getting back:

Friday 04 August:
We all popped into town to get stuff. New clothes, new pair of Converse for me,
Saturday 05 August:
Went over to mom & dad's to celebrate a belated birthday with dad.
Sunday 06 August:
Lazy morning followed by a lovely afternoon celebrating little Thomas' 3rd birthday. Thomas is the brother of Ellen, Molly's oldest friend whom she went to nursery with.
Monday 07 August:
Molly started sports camp.
Daddy was meant to be having rest but ended up dashing around the place doing loads of little jobs and seeming to waste the entire day without getting too much done.
Tuesday 08th August:
Molly Day 2 at sports camp
Daddy - same as yesterday really. But with added seeing about an ICT course to do in September.
Wednesday 09th August:
Bloody hell, that's today!
Molly Day 3 at sports camp
Daddy - went to hospital to see what the hell the docs can do about my knackered bloody elbows (not a lot, it transpires).
& then see Monday.

Okay that's it - from tomorrow, you get all new stuff (bet that's made you wish it was Thursday night already!)

Happy Birthday Dad!

My dad, Roger Bruton, was 71 on July 29th.

And, being on holiday, we missed it. & since getting back I've completely forgotten to blog it.
Not that Dad was that bothered, but we like to show we care.

So Happy Birthday Dad.
(This, of course, will also tell me whether my own bloody father bothers to read this)

Favourite photo July 2006

This has to be my favourite photo from the whole month of July, captured on holiday in Anglesey.
Louise always says I tend to take far too many pictures in close up of Molly and I keep meaning to try different things. But then I get results like this and realise I take these sorts of pictures because I think they're fantastic.

Of course it does help that I happen to think the subject is the most gorgeous thing in the world.

Anglesey Holiday - Day 11 - Thurs 3rd August

Last day, time to go home.
Set off about 12 and had a lovely lunch in Betys-y-Coed.

Overall a lovely holiday, spent in a lovely place.
It's not quite enough to change my mind about the Welsh people, I still think they're arrogant without reason, self important and deeply resentful of belonging to what isn't really important enough to class as a major county never mind a country (at least Scotland has North Sea Oil).
But their country is truly beautiful.

And of course, as soon as we got back to Birmingham we had all those post holiday feelings.
First came the sense of happiness at being home.
Then came that horrible feeling of not being on holiday anymore.
Finally came the idea that we want to change our lives to feel like we're on holiday all the bloody time. Still working on this one to be honest.

Anglesey Holiday - Day 10 - Weds 2nd August

Last full day in Anglesey.

The original plan was to go to Moelfre for some more crab fishing and then head to the beach.
We got down to Moelfre and went down to the rocks to set up the crab lines, armed with our crab gear.
We were well prepared this time: lines, bacon as bait and one of those washing machine nets weighed down with some stones - very high tech.

Bloody hell it was cold.
And windy.
And pretty wet as well.

On the good side we ended up pulling in more crabs in the first 5 minutes than we got last time in an hour and a half.
On the down side Molly wasn't too keen on the cold.
Or the wet.
Or the large crabs.

So we packed up early and headed off for lunch and cake in one of Moelfre's coffee shops.
The afternoon changed quickly to going off to Pili Palace - the Butterfly farm, packed with lots of fantastic butterflies and most importantly for Molly, a huge adventure playground.
Then as a special treat it was off to the pub and lots of games of pool and a very late night for molly. Of course she loved it. And she's not bad little pool player.

Anglesey Holiday - Day 9 - Tues 1st August

Day two in Llandudno (link & link).

We decided to head back because both Louise and I wanted to see the Great Orme Copper mine and Molly felt she really needed to get back on the pier.
It seems that 2 hours on bouncy castles just wasn't enough. It never really is.

The copper mine was amazing. (link & link)
Situated just off the summit of the Great Orme it's been gradually explored and excavated since 1987 and although they've uncovered miles of ancient mine workings the archaeologists reckon they've got over 70% to uncover. The Bronze Age tunnels are incredible, tiny spaces to get through taking you down almost 60 feet below ground level on a snaking tour in eerie light. Stunning.

Then onto lots of fun for Molly around Llandudno pier.

Anglesey Holiday - Day 8 - Photos

Photos from Llandudno. So good we went there twice.

(Punch & Judy - mass murderer entertains small children. Parents happy.)

(The Llandudno Jet-Ride. That's me and Molly disappearing into the distance at speed)

(Top picture - the view from the top of the very, very windy Great Orme.)
(Bottom picture - sod the view, lets play golf daddy)

(The Great Orme tramway - well worth a visit, great fun, beats walking.)

Anglesey Holiday - Day 8 - Mon 31st July

Off to Llandudno for the day. (link & link)
We figured we'd be able to fill the day here, but in the end we had so much fun that we're going back tomorrow.

Llandudno is a really surprising town. I must admit I was expecting some horrendously tacky, overly commercial Blackpool of Wales sort of town, but in actual fact Llandudno is more of the typical Victorian seaside resort with a long pier, promenade, stone and sand beach and a sweeping seafront packed with a wall of stunning 4 storey buildings.

We started off walking along the pier in the rain and then started to wander the sea front, stopping off for a traditional Punch & Judy show (wiki).
Half an hour later when Mr Punch was hitting and maiming his way through the extensive cast of characters we're starting to wonder when it's actually going to end.
Isn't Punch & Judy meant to be fairly short?
But it seems that traditional Punch & Judy shows go on and on and on. But Molly loved it and sat rapt for the entire time. Mommy and Daddy took it in shifts.

I've always liked the idea of Mr Punch. Murdering, wife-beating, child-abusing, serial killer with no respect for police, justice or even old nick himself. And of course, small children think this is all bloody hilarious. When you put it like that you wonder why the PC brigade haven't got onto Mr Punch's case yet.

After the sedateness of the Punch & Judy show Molly spotted the advert for the Jet Rides speed boat. Now as bad as Louise is with vertigo, she's worse with anything like rollercoasters or thrill rides, so it's always me who ends up sharing these moments with our adrenalin junkie daughter.

Absolutely fantastic.
Once it got out of the confines of the bay the driver opened the throttle up and the boat just shot away, bouncing over the waves like a mad thing. I looked across at Molly at this point and she's just smiling and laughing maniacally. By the end of the trip she's still laughing and starts asking if she can go back on straight away.

Next up we trekked up the hill to the Great Oromo Tramway. This is a spectacular piece of Victorian engineering. A road and track born cable tram pulling up to the Great Orme summit at 679ft. It pulls halfway up to the summit and then stops at the Halfway station where all the passengers transfer to another tram and journey up to the summit.

Once up at the summit the views are wonderful, but all Molly could see was the playground. Then we rounded a corner and are presented with the strangest sight imaginable at this height with the wind whipping around us nearly blowing us over. At the summit of The Great Orme sits a crazy golf course. And of course, within the hour, we're playing it. Wonder how you score a hole when the ball has blown away?

One strange thing I did notice was the couple in front of us on the golf course had a small son playing as well. They ended up getting on the tram to go back down with us and the dad was still holding his son's golf club. Now does this mean he'd stolen it or even more weird, had he brought his son's very own putter up a bloody mountain just for a game of crazy golf? Bizarre.

Anglesey Holiday - Day 7 - Sun 30th July

Today was meant to be a trip to Moelfre for a spot of crab fishing followed by a trip to Holyhead to visit South Stack, the lighthouse on the eastern coast of Anglesey.

We got as far as Moelfre and spent the day.
Moelfre is a beautiful little picture postcard rocky beach surrounded by a perfect sweep of cliffs.

The crab fishing didn't go that well, we managed to get 1 crab.
1 bloody crab.
From 2 crab lines.
In an hour and a half.

But Molly and I had a fantastic time.
Neither of us have done crab line fishing before. We found out that our obvious mistake was getting the bait wrong. We had a couple of bits of Mackerel on each line and the bloke next to us had a washing machine net packed with stones to weight it down and what looked like about a kilo of squid in it.
Every time he raised his crab lines you thought of the scene where jesus blesses the fisherman's nets.
Oh well, maybe next time we'll end up with the full bucket of crabs to throw back into the sea.

Louise spent most of the time watching us, sniggering about how unlikely a pair of crab fishers we were and how no-one that knew me would believe how happy sitting on a cold, wet rock with a piece of string dangling into the water could make me.

After that we ended up walking around the shoreline and spent the rest of the afternoon walking around and throwing rocks into the sea.
Somehow this seemed to fill the entire day. But that's what made the day so nice, just the whole thing of not being able to explain where the time went.

To finish it all off we had dinner at the pub at the top of the road. Special treat for Molly was the pool table where, with quite a bit of fixing it, ended up with Molly beating Daddy for the first time. She'll remember that for ever.

Anglesey Holiday - Day 6 - Sat 29th July

Today was the first day we've had traditional good old fashioned British summertime weather. So 10am we headed down to the beach and enjoyed the wonderfully overcast and cool conditions.
We found the spring running from the cliffs again and created this fantastic series of pools and gulleys. Until it started to rain. We made the right decision and got the hell off the beach before the heavens opened but that still meant a rather soggy walk back up to the bungalow to shower off and get some lunch.

After lunch we drove out in the greyness to Bangor. Bangor has the sort of down at heel, completely crap town feel about it. Full of dubious characters, lots of teens hanging around and a general threatening air about the place.

Spotted on a wall in Bangor - http://www.notenglish.com/.

This is one of the things you feel in North Wales and particularly in the more urban, disadvantaged areas. The sense that Welsh nationalism is alive and well.
Not so much in the sense of burning holiday cottages but the feeling that the chav youth of Wales are casting around for someone to blame for their lack of jobs, lack of nice things, lack of education, lack of fun, lack of pretty much everything and have decided to blame us English.
Because as we all know, it is all our fault.
Or maybe, just this once, maybe they could try looking at themselves?

Anglesey Holiday - Day 5 - Photos

Day 5 of the holiday was spent at Henblas park -

(when I said giant inflatable pyramid, I meant giant inflatable pyramid)

(I swear the riding hat fitted fine when I put it on her)

(No, I have no idea what is so interesting over there either)

Anglesey Holiday - Day 5 - Fri 28th July

Park Henblas
(or as the Welsh would have it - Parc Henblas. I ask you, what is the point?)

Molly chose to go here after she saw the leaflet which had the giant bouncy pyramid on it. That sold it as far as Molly was concerned.

A great day. We got there at half 10 and left at 5 and filled the day with loads of stuff. Bouncy pyramid, sheepdogs, bouncy pyramid, crazy golf, bouncy pyramid, sheep shearing demonstration, bouncy pyramid, horse ride and did we mention the bouncy pyramid?

Anglesey Holiday - Day 4 - Supplemental Rant. What's wrong with a family of 3?

One thing that really gets us going, particularly when we're away on holiday is the trouble over Family tickets.
It's bloody annoying that we're not actually classed as a family by these bastards who decide what we're meant to pay.
Everywhere we go we see prices for Adults and Children.
But the discounted family tickets always seem to read: Family ticket (2 adults + 2 children)
Sometimes they go further and produce more discounts for 3 or 4 children.
But just because we have just the one child we're not allowed to get any discount at all.
Bastards.

(well that was short and sweet)

Anglesey Holiday - Day 4 - Thurs 27th July

Conwy.
A relaxed day really - did Conwy castle and the town. Louise's increasing vertigo got the better of her again, she actually started feeling physically sick at one point, both for herself and for Molly. Of course, Molly wasn't at all worried and we ended up marching up and down the towers and looking down from precarious heights.

Conwy the town is pretty small and not particularly great. The one thing that struck me about it was it's complete lack of music and bookshops - the two essentials for anywhere as far as I'm concerned.
But in Conwy if you want music it's Woolworths and if you want books there's one antiquarian bookshop.

Molly finally got to spend her money, which is a very important thing for every holiday now. For the last couple of holidays she's properly understood the value of money.
And of course, being a good girl, every holiday she gets holiday money from Grandma & Grandpa and Auntie Sharon. So whenever we get to the shop at the end of an attraction or we get to a town with a toyshop she feels like she has to spend the money. All of it. On anything.
Louise and I are now at the stage where we just have to roll with it. To be honest it's become simpler to just let her get on with it and it's with some relief when we point out to her that she's now spent her holiday money.

This holiday she's bought herself a bow and arrow set in Greenwood holiday park yesterday and today she spent the rest of her money in one go on a fantastic puppet in a wonderful old fashioned toyshop in Conwy.



It's really cool and looks a bit like something from Sesame Street. Molly and the lady in the toyshop decided she was called Lucy and Molly immediately adopted her as her younger sister.

Anglesey Holiday - Day 3 - Supplemental Rant - How to solve the environmental crisis is 3 simple words....

I was going to include this as part of the main post but in the end thought it best to let it stand alone as me basically going off on one (again).

Greenwood Forest Park is (as I said in the previous post) obviously a Millennium project, full of interesting things, packed with educational opportunity, very eco-friendly. And it was fantastic.

But what was the first thing we saw as we got to the entrance?
What looks like a coach party of Scallys on day release from their correction facility.

A combination of the continued presence of the Scally day release children and a host of eco-friendly nature families led me to think about the two main things that we need to be doing to genuinely make a difference to the environment.

First of all you need to educate the ignorant.
It's all very well taking the Scallys to the eco-centre but all they really want to do is ride the roller coaster, have burgers and drink coke. It's not enough to passively educate them, you need to sit them down and force it into their heads. If necessary cut their benefits until they take notice.

But the most important single thing you can do is........
(And this applies equally to the un-eco-educated Scallys and the eco-friendly Harbourne parent types)

STOP HAVING CHILDREN

It doesn't matter how much plastic and paper you recycle, if you have 5 kids you are creating a huge environmental debt that you just cannot pay off.
The more kids you have, the more you will consume, the more waste you will create and the more damage you will do to the environment.
I can guarantee you'll be using more water, electricity, gas, air, money, petrol, food and space than we will with just Molly.
Simple really.

(join me next week where I solve the fuel crisis is my lunch and work out how to reach the stars over morning coffee).

Anglesey Holiday - Day 3 - Photos

Day 3 of the holiday was spent at Greenwood Forest Park - mainblog entry here

(My daughter trying to impale me instead of making dens like we were meant to be doing)

(Look at the concentration - yes, she did manage to beat the child in front to the bottom)

(The intrepid explorers on the third circuit in the Jungle boats)

Anglesey Holiday - Day 3 - Weds 26th July

Greenwood Forest Park.

We gladly took a welcome break from the beach and took Molly off to this fantastic place she's seen in one of the local guidebooks.

Greenwood Forest Park is obviously a Millennium project, full of interesting things, packed with educational opportunity, very eco-friendly.
And it was fantastic. We got there at 10:30 and still had loads of things we could have done when we left at 4:30.

Highlights included the Treetop Towers, a huge series of nets and ramps and slides set in the woodland, the make your own den area, the Green Dragon roller coaster, a people powered roller coaster and the Jungle Boats, a circuit of boats where Molly and I pulled ourselves and rowed ourselves round not once, not twice but three times.

Really great fun for the whole day.

Anglesey Holiday - Day 2 - Supplemental Rant - Welsh TV

One thing that I've always found slightly strange about holidays since we had Molly is the fact that from about 8pm you're effectively trapped inside the holiday cottage so Molly can go to bed.

Which means all we can do is sit and relax. Which is of course nice.

But it does mean I have to suffer the delights of Welsh TV.

Channel 4 doesn't exist here - it's S4C.
S4C is pretty much the same as Channel 4 for most of the day except for the prime time viewing between 7 and 11 where they decide to put out 4 hours of shit Welsh programming.
Having the news in Welsh is fair enough, but when they then continue to put a Welsh language soap on with the sort of production values that would make Crossroads look classy you realise you're in trouble.

Then of course, after 11 they put on the programmes that Channel 4 have put on at primetime.
It's no wonder that the Welsh walk around in such bad moods, they're all bloody exhausted after staying up late to watch the programmes they actually want to watch rather than some Welsh am-dram soap or documentary about sheep farming.

Anglesey Holiday - Day 2 - Tues 25th July

Today we spent all day on the beach.
This was not the best of things for Louise and I, hating beaches and sunny weather as we do, but Molly thought it was fab.

For a few hours we sat sweating and feeling bloody uncomfortable whilst Molly danced around the beach having a great time. We sat and sweltered, we made sandcastles and sweltered, we walked down to the sea and sweltered, we went for walks and sweltered. Luckily on one of the walks we found a sheltered and shaded spot under the cliffs so we all decamped to there. it was a damn sight better for us all after this.

(Unfortunately by then the damage had been done. After spending ages making sure Molly had enough sun cream Louise managed to forget to put any on herself. Ouch).

Right by us was a little stream running from the cliffs down to the sea. The kids did exactly what I remember doing as a kid, making channels, digging out pools, damming the flow and just generally becoming sand structural engineers.

There were a load of kids involved but unfortunately there was one horrible, nasty little 8 year old there. She was the sort of child that you can instantly take a dislike to and you just know they're going to be trouble.
Hard faced, pouting expression and obviously used to getting their own way. Probably because mom and dad are typical Harbourne parents (or equivalent from wherever they come from) and like to let angelic little Tarquina do whatever the hell she wants because to discipline her infringes her human rights and limits her as a person. Or some similar bollocks.

And of course because all the other kids were playing so well together and making this huge interconnected series of channels and pools she decided to start causing trouble and breaking the others work.
Eventually things escalated as they always do when mardy kids are involved and the mardy girl and one of the boys started throwing sand at each other. Nothing too bad so we didn't get involved, although it seemed like it was going to get nasty when Tarquina picked up a rock but nothing came of that so we sat back and watched the cabaret unfold before us.

One thing led to another and the girl's mom appeared and squared up to the poor lad, asking him what he thought he was doing and why he'd been throwing rocks at her little girl.
Up to this point we'd just been interested observers but it was lovely to be able to pipe up and tell her that her darling little Tarquina had thrown the sand first and the only person who'd talked about throwing rocks was her.
The mom's face was a picture. She marched Tarquina off and we could hear her being told off for a good 10 minutes. And the lad - well he was good enough to say thank you.
The forces of right and justice win over Harbourne mom.
Yah!

After that the day just got better and better. We actually enjoyed the beach once we found the shade and relative cool of the cliffs. Molly loved being involved in the sand engineering and we had a great afternoon. Very relaxed now.

Anglesey Holiday - Day 1 - Mon 24th July

The journey:
Every holiday we have we always talk about getting started early, hitting the road at 5 or 6am, having breakfast at some little chef most of the way through the journey and getting there at midday.
And every holiday I end up going to bed late the night before after fussing over something about the packing and we end up leaving the house about 9 after Louise and Molly spend an hour or so trying to get me out of my bed.
So it was to everybody's amazement that we ended up being out the door and on the road at 6:30am.
We ended up getting into Benllech by 1 in the afternoon.

Benllech:
A little village (compared to the rest of the island it's a town, but trust me, it's a village) on the east side of the island.
Sharon & David's bungalow is really nice and very homely. But of course, for Molly the main attraction is that it's only 5 minutes walk to the huge and very lovely beach.

It is stupefyingly hot, sunny and even the coast breeze doesn't give us that much relief.
This would be perfect weather for the traditional beach holiday, which would suit Molly to a tee. Unfortunately the beach holiday is possibly the very worst holiday that Louise or I can imagine. Nothing is more boring for us than sitting on a beach for hours. We can manage a couple of hours: get there, set up, potter down to the sea for a paddle, back up to the beach, sandcastle, back to the sea for swim, play on the sand, bit of rock pooling, sea, sand castle, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored.
The problem is that neither of us can take the heat, don't much like the sand getting everywhere and we can't even escape into a book as we both dislike lying down and reading and I get a horrible headache from the glare off the white pages.

(Oh moan, moan, moan, we're on holiday and the weather's fantastic and everything's great and I'm still not happy. Bloody hell.)

Anyway, we unpacked, got the shopping in and then nipped down to the beach for a couple of hours, much to Molly's delight. And even though it was quite breezy it was still torture for Louise and I. Molly had a great time though.

Anglesey Holiday - Day 0 - Sun 23rd July

In case you've all been wondering why there have been no posts for the last week and a bit, we've been away from Bruton mansions on our holidays.


While we were away I was blogging on the Palmtop but decided not to bother e-mailing it to the blog. Far easier to just blog it when I got back.
Of course the plan was to blog a little bit whenever we found an internet cafe.
But those really don't seem to exist in North Wales, so it's all had to wait until now.


Everything from this point on was written on holiday, hence the slightly strange present tense for writing about stuff that occurred days ago.

Louise's sister and brother-in-law own a bungalow in Anglesey so we've been there enjoying the summer in Wales.

Anglesey is the island that sticks out from the top left bit of Wales. It's main feature is that thousands of Irish people pass through it to go home via Holyhead to get a pint of Guinness that tastes like someone hasn't shat in the casks.

Anyway..........
We're packing our bags and getting everything ready for the holiday and Molly decides that she wants to take her 2 cuddly dogs, her cuddly Peter Pan & Charlie Bear (giant bear that never leaves the end of Molly's bed).
Then she throws Bug downstairs.
Bug is a giant cuddly ladybird bought for Molly's first birthday by Louise's dad Bert.
Molly has decided Bug needs to come to Anglesey with us because the last time we were there we were with Bert.
It was his last holiday and he had a fantastic time.
Bless my daughter.

Rejoice for I am returned!

Did you miss me?
Did you?
Really?

I have been away on holiday with Bruton clan (all 3 of us) and am now back.
But I am also bloody tired and need my bed.
More tomorrow no doubt.