1. It’s NomNomNom time again, and I seem to be entering for a 3rd time. With a 3rd different partner. I am fickle
2. Someone mentioned the act of deep frying on Twitter.

Deep frying is something that I have done precisely one (1) time. I made battered sausages (with a side order of cherry jam and frou-frou ponciness, as is often my wont), some homemade crisps (aka Blackened Potato slices) and then saved the oil in a bottle in my pantry (for I once had one of those) for a year before throwing it out when I moved house. It had black bits in. It wasn’t a bad thing to dispose of it. However, I posit a hypothesis – Deep frying makes any food stuff better. And now for some proofs.

Firstly, outrageously hypothetical (to make the following paragraphs seem sane in comparison): Poo. I have never had an urge to eat poo. I may utilise the phrase “I eat a lot of crap”, but that refers generally to the fetid outpourings of Messrs B King, R MacDonald and K Fried-Chicken (of the Indiana Fried Chickens [Harlan Sanders was born there, to save you the inevitable Wikipedia lookup. I read his autobiograpy - it took me months to find a copy and is awesome. It starts with the word 'Dadgummit' and gets better from there. "Life as I have known it has been finger lickin' good" RIP The 'Colonel']). However, while considering this while headbanging to the dulcid tones of the little people of the band SOiL in a lift this evening, I realised something. If I was going to have to eat a log of human excrement I’d rather it was battered and deep fried. There’s not a lot more I can add to that. On with the less crazy talk.

[Aside: I am currently smoking half of a large cigar that I just bisected. It's about 10 years old, 20cm long, and was given to me by a colleague when he left my old place of employment. He'd had it in his drawer for a while and gave it to me as he thought I might like the dried up husk more than he would. I've had it in a drawer since then and recently in my laughably named and incredibly dry humidor. The former colleague in question is a chap named Herbie Leonelli. He went from being a finance guy who feigned back problems to avoid scary Italian clients to being a pizza chef - you should all go and eat in his restaurant, Datte Foco. He's a dude. This cigar is very stale. Aside ends]

Anyway, taking the concept of battering making things better to the next level, I have discussed in great details with m’colleague Mr Morris (aka Dave aka My Landlord aka The Ideas Man who can’t be arsed to tell anyone his ideas) we chose a variety of battered foods which could be thought of the best ever. Starting with a simple concept, we decided to embellish until we could find an incredible foodstuff. First up – pizza. Pizza is pretty awesome, for a substance that is basically posh cheese on toast (joke stolen from the Mary Whitehouse Experience Encyclopedia, circa 1991) but the addition of a deep frying step at the end of its production will, based on the hypothesis above, make it better. We decided to add things to a theoretical pizza and after a number of days of debate ended up with this combination:

Folded
Doner kebab meat
Chilli Sauce
and
Roast Potato
Pizza
Deep Fried

The ultimate food stuff we originally thought. The addition of roast potatoes also makes all meals better, so why not a kebab meat pizza? However, we then decided to decompose this pinnacle of gastronomy – who needs the other items? Roast potatoes are almost the perfect foodstuff. If cooked in an animal fat they count as including meat and with a crunchy external counting and an internal nutritional paste of potato they are the ultimate food. So after further discussion we decided on the ultimate food:

Battered, deep-fried, roast potatoes

Just think about that for a bit. Have a private moment. What could be better, we posited? Then the mathematical side of our brains kicked in and we came up with an incredible plan: If battering and deep frying makes things better, how far could we take this?

Start with a void. An emptiness. A hard vacuum is Hard and we are lazy animals, so just take a blob of batter. On its own, fairly shit, but when deep fried it becomes a lot better. Take that blob of deep fried batter, batter it again and then deep fry it. This is now, by definition, a better food stuff. By the laws of mathematical induction we can then apply that process to a theoretical infinite series of battering and deep-fryings, which leads, after infinite time, to the ultimate food stuff.

So, according to maths(tm) air is the finest food stuff in the world, when prepared properly. This may remind me of the parable of the soup stone (stick a stone in a pot and you can make an excellent soup, as long as everyone else who’s eating it sticks in some tasty things) but as we all know that that maths is Law we can be safe in the knowledge that deep fried and battered air (to the power n, as n tends to infinity) is the end of the road when it comes to tastiness.

Apart from deep fried and battered Dr Pepper.

NomNomNom is in on July 12th and Dr Reeve and I will be The Booze Brothers for the day.

I still remember writing up joke beer descriptions on the board when I used to be barman, talking of a beer having a hint of baked apple by an abandoned cooking fire, and laughing at the ridiculousness of Jilly Goolden’s histrionic explanations of the make-up of wines, and am shocked by how foolish my past self now seems to my then future self. These days I can happily wax lyrical about cloth plasters, fresh struck matches and primary school plimsolls in whisky, gravelly minerality and green vegetables in tequila, and metholated cherries in port (all three of which I have done in one-day-to-be-published-booze-blog-posts this weekend) but even a couple of years back I’d have given you a funny look and ticked my mental ‘pretentious idiot’ box without a second thought. Before I started finding out the joys of sciatica I thought my uncle’s description of it as being like ‘having a tooth-ache in your leg’ was a strange way of saying ‘it hurts a bit’ until the first night that I woke up to find that it was an incredibly accurate bit of wording.

This contemplation has been brought about by latest awesome bit of self injury, complete with ridiculous circumstances. My sciatica was brought on by playing Fallout 3 for way to long in a single sitting; I painfully broke a tooth hours before catching a plane to the USA, leading to a week of an unwise liquid diet (beer and bourbon) due to a lack of ability to chew, while eating a very soft fish finger; and I brought my potentially award winning taekwondo career to a shuddering fault after falling over on a set of very wide, very unslippery steps while considering a story from an insane chemistry supply teacher of a colleague who had run down some steps while carrying a bottle of hydrochloric acid under each arm with predictably fatal results. Today’s sensation was the ‘pinging’ of a muscle under strain, as while increasing the weight on my left leg to give a burst of speed I felt that incredible sensation and just had enough time to contemplate on the correctness of the sensation’s description before I stumbled into a lamp post in quite impressive levels of pain.

Unfortunately I can’t quite claim to have been doing anything as interesting as the London marathon, sedentary animal that I am, but instead was bending one of my primary rules of living in London – not to run to ensure that I can catch a means of public transport. In this case it was a bus, which to add insult to injury was not only a mere 5 yards from the starting point of my ‘run’ but also sat at the bus stop for a further 5 minutes after I crippled myself, but my original resolution was made thanks to the tube. One rainy evening while changing platforms at speed to make sure I got my train I missed a step, hit a slippery step and fell face first onto the platform. Luckily my self-preservation instincts kicked in, preventing my beautiful face (9/10 fit according to the iPhone ‘Fit or Fugly’ app, backed by Real Science) from doing anything more than impacting into my delicate wrist as I reached out to stop myself, but my plastic bag of goodies with ejected by the saving hand, skidding across the platform towards the open tube door. A kind punter stepped down for long enough to stop its kamikaze slide with his foot before inquiring if I was alright. I looked up from the wet, gravelly ground, scraped some muck from my cheek and said ‘Yeah’, at which point he nodded, climbed back on the train and waved as the doors closed. I rose from the ground, brushed down my damp front, picked up my bag and limped behind a tree to have a pee.

Since that day I have vowed never to run for a train (recently reinforced as I saw someone run face first into the recently closed door of the tube, before bouncing off and trying to make it look like it what was they were trying to do all along) and as of today my running ban has extended to buses. I am considering extending that to trams, as the other main form of public conveyance in London, but a) I’ve used a tram precisely three times since they appeared, b) they’re so irregular that the chance of one being at a stop when I get there is so remote that I doubt I’ll see it in my lifetime and c) I like trams enough as a concept that I am happy to watch one pull away just for the joy of seeing a tram’s arse, that I reckon I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

So, time to break out my walking stick again for the next week of cross London trekking. It may have the bonus of magically getting me a seat on the tube from time to time, but it also carries an incredible guilt as the only people who seem to give up seats are those that probably need them more than I – mainly the elderly, pregnant women and those with obvious physical injuries that a seat will help to assuage for a short time. I will try and carry myself in such a manner as to suggest that my black stick with black horses head handle is merely a fashion accessory (and I do have at least one hat that will help me carry this off), but that does carry the danger that my fake pimp limp will merely exacerbate my already existing ‘conditions’ and make me walk with an even more exaggerated fools gait than I am already pulling off.

So there it is. Don’t run for a train. Eat your greens and then remember what they smell like – one day you might need to describe a tequila.

(I’ve been thinking too much today, can you tell?)

If someone invokes the Libyan, Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings in a discussion related to none of them then they lose the argument, á la Godwin. This I decree. Idiots.

So, how much does it cost to produce a hardback book? How much does it cost to produce a paperback book? How much does it cost to produce an ebook? It doesn’t matter. This was the point that I’ve got stuck on in the past, but as I’ve looked into book pricing more and more the price of the underlying physical materials (and editing, and author fee, and admin, and advertising, and transport, and storage, etc, etc) means very little – books are sold at the price which the market will bear. This jumps up by a pound or two on paperbacks every few years and hardbacks bounce all over the place based on how well the publisher thinks the book will sell, but no matter how much the book takes to produce the price stays the same.

The actual physical costs of producing a book, the bit that varies between ebooks and papperbøks, is something that it’s difficult to get out of people. I’ve heard estimates of everything from 2-5% up to 75% of the overall cover price of the book, and as far as I can tell all of those numbers are probably correct – the price of the book is not to do with how much it costs to make.

Unfortunately it is here that we hit on the problem – people know that nicer things cost more money. If you have a flimsy, fall apart, US edition mass market Mills & Boon novel you don’t expect it to sit on your shelf for years in pristine condition (unless you are one of those special collectors – well done…in a scary kind of way) and they are not constructed in such a manner. If you have a hand-bound, engraved edition of one of Neil Gaiman’s books, signed in quill pen by the man himself while Amanda Palmer serenaded him on the way to their wedding then you are probably expecting it to last a while. At those two extremes the manufacturing cost will most probably impact the asking price, but probably not as much as you may think. The normal books, the ones that are £15-18 undiscounted in hard back and £7-£9 in paperback when they appear, probably don’t cost all that much different per unit (considering all the associated costs, not just physical) in the long run and almost certainly not the 2x multiplier that the cover price suggests. But the hardback is demonstrably a ‘nicer thing’ that people are more happy to pay more for, because there appears to be a reason why it costs more. The real reason is that the publisher wants the early adopters to pay a premium, before the cheaper, less profitable, paperback appears at a time in the future. Windowing, I believe this is called.

Anyways, now we come to ebooks – £15 for a newly released ebook, £14.99 for the hardback version. At the back of our lizard brains we immediately cry “No!”. Why should we pay more for an ebook, with “no production” costs and no physical object to fondle in a way that shows our money was spent wisely? There are several pieces to this, but in general I agree – if the price is just a made up figure then the publishers, understanding human psychology (as they should – if not, there are books about it), should probably tweak the price to be below the physical book price. However there are a couple of bits:

1. Ebooks have VAT charged on them, paper books do not. This will hopefully stop soon, as I’ve heard tales of changes being pushed through european law to classify ebooks as books (although that is a legal minefield open to manipulation if they don’t get it right) but at the moment in the UK 1/6th of the cover price of an ebook is tax. So, our £15 ebook is actually £12.50, rather than £14.99 for the paper book. The ebook looks a little bit better now.
2. Discounting. Amazon are the main place that ebooks are actually being sold in a reasonable quantity at the moment (the reason I have a Kindle is due to the woeful state of non-Kindle ebook sales, including availability as well as price) and they were originally very good at offering ebooks at a lower price than they did a physical copy (whether paperback or hardback was currently the standardly available edition). However, at the end of last year they introduced the ability of publishers to set the price of an ebook, which meant that in many cases the price then rose to above the physical copy’s price. I’m not sure if Amazon allow publishers to do this for physical copies (as I suspect the price setting was a bargaining chip used to get more ebooks into the Kindle store in order to make it a worthwhile proposition to book buyers) but Amazon do discount a lot of their physical books, cutting their margins in order to ship more units – being an online seller they can do this and it’s why brick and mortar book stores are closing all over the country. So, the £14.99 for our hardback copy was probably an RRP of £18, making our ebook look even nicer in price.

These two points don’t justify the high initial pricing of ebooks, but it does give a couple of extra reasons why it’s not as unreasonable as the shouty people on the internets think. In the end though the price of a book is really just a number plucked from the air. For physical books that go through the publisher system a large number don’t make any money (again, the percentages I’ve seen that say how many do make money vary as wildly as almost any stat publishers produce seem to) but in the end it all balances out so that some cash is finally made. Over time the publishers are learning, and some have already done so – look at the top of the non-free Amazon chart and you will see authors who you wouldn’t normally expect, all with ebooks priced at less than the regular going rate; at the time of writing there are two sub-£3 Stieg Larssons, a £5.99 Wilbur Smith and 7 books at less than £1 by authors I’ve not heard of (apart from Stephen Leather, who I know as “the guy who’s books are in the Amazon top 10 because they are sold for 71p each”).

Vote with your wallets, that’s the only way I think we’ll manage to get the publishers to change their ways. If people don’t buy the books then the publishers will either be forced to raise or lower prices to cope. However, I don’t think necessarily that book prices should fall. If I’m happy to pay more for an electronic version of Iain M Banks’s latest novel, which I was, due to the convenience of having the electronic copy delivered to me immediately and not having another hardback to find space for in my book-filled flat then I think I should pay the asking price. Paying a decent price for a book in order that the publishing industry has enough money to continue, helping to get the work of new and smaller authors into distribution channels is another thing that I’m broadly in support of, despite the spectre of easy self publishing that hangs over things at the moment (there is still a place of publishers, in my opinion. That may change over time, but that’s the way the world works), and the strange feeling of people that we should be entitled to cheap books (especially with the restricted forms that ebooks are delivered in) is one that alarms me. I can understand why most people ebooks should be cheaper (although the restrictions on them that people complain about – resale, lending, etc – are things that I don’t care so much about) and can see that over time the publishers will probably start honouring that even more than they are doing now, but as with other media that have gone digital, it’s a hard road on the way there.

I have to bill it as ’semi-professional’ for tax-reasons as well as adhering to company policy. HR frown on moonlighting, even when it’s in a distinctly separate field. I think you should take that into account when considering this position, although it doesn’t affect all that many members of staff. I like to get that out of the way as early on in an interview as possible, so as not to cloud the air with it later.

So, last night was a title match with me billed as a face against Crippler Cranshaw’s crowd beloved heel and the natural escalation of ticket price demanded something more from us than our normal nipple tweaking, mat slamming fun-fest. They upped the place of battle to a barbed wire (well, more chicken wire with ‘barbed wire’ written in red paint on a few clapboard signs that were zip tied through the large metal loops) cage containing a ‘typical family living room’ – subsidies from the home office have led to alterations in the scenarios we play out in the ring and each week they seem to focus on a different ‘message’ that we impart to our baying audience. This week’s ‘message’ was that while considered comparatively harmless, the lounge can be the most dangerous room in case of a home invasion, unless you are prepared.

The bout started as one would expect, with me in my usual attire of tweed plus-fours, smoking jacket, guards tie, wrestling pumps and pipe, sitting in my ‘front room’ listening to Camilla, née Shand previously Parker-Bowles now surname-less, gracing the hallowed grounds of Ambridge with her temporary presence. With a gentle knock upon the door, the only solid item in the walls of our field of battle, The Crippler™ (as he is known amongst his Definite Article loving fans) announced his presence and I stood up, turned down the wireless, adjusted my protective cod-piece (part of my signature pre-match preparation, accompanied by the sound of a wine cork being removed forcefully from a bottle of Chateau Lafite 1979, and affordable expression of the classic which is having the value pushed upwards by my fans) and turned pantomime style to the door. With the audience shouting at me to avoid a door-opening situation and me holding my hands to my ears in the universal sign of not being able to hear their roar I turned the handle and the fight was on.

He sprung through the gap and turned a full 360 degrees, drinking in the crowds cries of disapproval at this tiny deceit, his cape flowing and gilded Nixon mask catching the light in that special way only it can. As he finished turning the crowd quieted and he slowly withdrew from a crouch to face me.

“What is this”, I cried, “an interloper in mine house? For what reason dost thou interrupt my radio listening on this frost-bound eve?”

[The flowery language is written for me by a team of scribes selected by our shadowy overlords from the best of ITV's sitcom writer's room and then kidnapped during the dead of night and chained together in a room under Westfield's shopping shed - so close, but just out of reach of the hallowed turf of BBC TV Centre to which they aspire]

“It is I”, he retorted, “The Crippler™! [pause for audience reaction] And I have come to…[further pause]…CRIPPLE YOU!”

And with that the bout began. We slipped naturally into a grapple, flicking seamlessly through the 3rd, 7th and 26th positions (a classic opener, made famous by Killa Kasparov in ‘86), before breaking and flinging each other into carefully selected collapsible items of furniture. I extracted myself from the remains of a Louis XIII cabinet (replica) and grabbing a crossbow tried to put a bolt through through the head of my opponent. This was, of course, scripted and, throwing pieces of hostess trolley in my direction, he intercepted the bolt with his cloak and was pinned to the sideboard. As I approached he tore himself clear and launched at me with his signature move, the pinking shears. Gripping my head in a vice like grip between his powerful thighs he proceeded to lay punches down along my back in a zigzag pattern before throwing me effortlessly (with significant effort from myself, I might add) into an altered Ikea GRÖNÖ, which shattered at my touch.

I will stop describing the ebb and flow of combat at this juncture, as my contract forbids blow by blow accounts due to the impact on pay per view writeups, a significant income driver in these days since The World British Wrestling Foundation Society (Southern Division) has been forced from our television screens by the spectre of political correctness gone quite mad. Suffice to say that at one time I was hanging upside down from the collapsible paper lampshade as The Crippler™ pummeled my kidneys with a Jamie Oliver Flavo(u)r Shaker and at another time he was bent over the divan chair as I went about his behind with a pair of M&S slippers. It’s not as choreographed as some might say, but our sponsors do love their products to be used in contractually specific ways.

The bout was only billed to last for 20 minutes, due to only having forty 50 pence pieces ready to be inserted into the meter, and we played the crowd right up to the button. In the dying moments I removed a razor blade from the chinese puzzle box that had fallen ‘to chance’ under my hand after a heavy fall through John Lewis Mystic Square glass table, and while thrashing amongst the beaded safety glass opened a small cut in my forehead. Blood streamed as I stood, with theatrical shaking of my head and general scooping of said fluid aiding the effect. I rounded on my attacker and, spoiler alert, performed my signature move on him, pinching first left then right nipple, before hooking his nose from the middle of his confused face and flinging him over my right shoulder into a, until that time, carefully avoided stack of Habitat vase-ware. He at last lay still and with a flourish of arm and leg entanglement I pinned him, the referee (the second of our match, after an hilarious incident involving the first and a porcelain petunia) declaring my win after a slow and, for once, uninterfered with 3 count. I stood, leaving my opponent feigning unconsciousness amongst the flapping neon tetras of a broken fish tank, and walked out of the cage into the bosom of my beloved audience.

Now we’ve got that out of the way, why did you choose us over other financial service establishments?

I have interviews to give this week. I have a chunk missing from my forehead due to an interaction with a low bookshelf while visiting my mum this weekend. This is the explanation I am tempted to go with.

Graphic novels: 22 (otherwise excluded from here-on)
‘Proper’ books: 35
Paperbacks: 14
Hardbacks: 3
Ebooks: 18
Of which were on the Kindle: 14
Of which were read on my new Kindle since September: 10

So, almost half the books I read this year were ebooks, almost exactly the same proportion as last year. Also this year there were 6 non-fiction books (with 2 more still sitting half read by my bed), again the same proportion as last year. I am nothing if not consistent.

So, books of the year. This was surprisingly easy, as book number 57 wins – How I Escaped My Certain Fate, by Stewart Lee. If you like comedy and especially if you like Stewart Lee then you must buy this now. It’s about £6 on the Kindle and Waterstones are currently doing it half price at £6.50 (as usually it’s a very expensive paperback at £12.99). It’s part autobiography and part dissection of three of his most recent shows, all accompanied by footnotes that probably are over half of the text.

Here’s the list:

How I Escaped My Certain Fate – Stewart Lee
Buy it. Do it now.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker’s Guide, #1) – Douglas Adams
Elidor – Alan Garner
Rereads. The first I know almost off by heart but I haven’t read any Alan Garner in a while. It’s still very good.

A Week in December – Sebastian Faulks
The Lacuna – Barbara Kingsolver
Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
Eating Animals – Jonathan Safran Foer
One Day – David Nicholls
One Good Turn – Kate Atkinson
The Owl Killers – Karen Maitland
We now have a monthly book club at work, and these are the first 7 months of it. A bunch of bookstore-front-table stuff that I wouldn’t have touched in general, varying from the light (well, lighter) One Day and Week in December to The Lacuna, which I thought was excellent, if slightly dense. If you’ve read the above then you know that somehow we managed to choose books that aren’t all that happy, going from the persecution of religions in the middle ages through to a dinner party of deliberately awful people via a discussion of the morals of eating meat. Happy times.

Kraken – China Miéville
Like The City and The City this is full of excellent ideas. However, unlike TC&TC it backs those up with a much better story. It may well be that I don’t know the occult thriller as well as the detective novel and thus aren’t as harsh on this as I was on the previous novel, but either way I enjoyed it, and can see why it one this year’s Clarke award. I got it and Neverwhere for my Dad for Christmas – they go together very well, almost as if Miéville wanted to do his version.

Surface Detail – Iain M. Banks
A return to form, in my opinion, with big space opera, ships being ships and people sat around in the middle getting squished.

Solar – Ian McEwan
A book about a thoroughly unlikeable guy who does the wrong thing at every turn. It does talk about Imperial College and science a lot, but it ade me cringe enough that it was painful to read.

Yellow Blue Tibia: A Novel – Adam Roberts
Another entirely different book from Mr Roberts. I enjoyed it more than Swiftly, but less than his earlier more spacey and surreal stuff. This has his traditional interesting idea pulled out into a book and was a good read.

The Evolutionary Void – Peter F. Hamilton
The third part of the series that has generated my favourite book of the year for the last two years. As expected, it didn’t live up to expectation – the Waterwalker segment ended with a small bang quite early on, leaving the real space stuff to fill in the gap. It did quite well, ramping up the action, but things got a bit too big and confused and the whole lot eventually ended a bit anticlimactically with hints of the Night’s Dawn trilogy.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson
Got it because it was £2.50 on the Kindle. I won’t be getting the rest – okay, middle of the road thriller. Reading opinions about how the entire series is all just wish fulfilment fantasy by Larsson, with the everyman journalist lusted after by every woman he meets as he solves complicated puzzles to show his vast intellect, made it collapse even further in my estimation.

Nova War – Gary Gibson
Part 2 of 3 and I’d forgotten most of part 1. Interesting universe and this time bringing in some new races and getting a bit confused along the way. Not bad, but I’ve not rushed out to get the final part.

Sandworms of Dune – Brian Herbert & Kevin J Anderson
It was robots what done it. Thanks guys. Avoid.

The Fuller Memorandum – Charles Stross
More fun with The Laundry. This one didn’t grab me as much as the previous ones, which means it’s only very good.

Nights of Villjamur – Mark Charan Newton
I started out liking this one, with the city beautifully realised, but over time I got more and more bored and ended up not caring by the end. I hear that the next book isn’t as good, and that was from someone who loved the first one.

Orbus – Neal Asher
Another one that I don’t remember much – all of Asher’s books have started to blend together in my head. I still enjoy them while I’m reading, but quickly forget what they’re about. More Spatterjay stuff here, which is good, and more old captain v Prador. Other than that, I can’t say.

Shadow of the Scorpion – Neal Asher
I remember a bit more about this one, with the origins of Asher’s agent Cormac coming through. It was a quick read, not particularly challenging and tied in stuff that appeared after Cormac’s genesis which I suspect will appear in future books. Asher can bang these out at a scary rate while maintaining a fairly high level of quality. I think he’s up to 2 a year…

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
I’ve yet to read a bad Vonnegut. This didn’t break the cycle. Whimsy and pseudo-philosophical examination of the world via a surreal and fun story. I think I need to ration his remaining books.

Retribution Falls – Chris Wooding
Firefly, the unofficial novel. Pretty much. Nominated for a Clarke award, to my surprise after reading it, but it’s more of a fun romp of a book than the average more serious Clarke nominee. Good fun and worth a read especially if you liked Firefly.

Secret Harmonies – Paul J. McAuley
This one took me a bit of a run up to read and in the end I found it a bit confusing as I didn’t remember much from the first book, which I didn’t particularly enjoy. Once that’s on the ‘go back and try again’ list.

Pasquale’s Angel – Paul J. McAuley
I liked this one. Alternative history with intrigue amongst the artists of medieval Florence.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ – Philip Pullman
Interesting, but not as interesting as it wanted to be. This is shown out by the fact it’s pretty much disappeared from the radar now. I bought a shiny interactive iPhone version with Phil Pullman talking about the book and other bits and pieces. I suspect I should have waited for the Kindle edition.

God of Clocks – Alan Campbell
Book 3 of 3 – not as good as book 2. Reminded me a bit of the Matrix sequels – portentous setup that fell flat at the end.

The Adamantine Palace – Stephen Deas
I don’t like books about dragons, but enjoyed this. I don’t know if I’ll grab the next load in the series, but it’s a well written fantasy novel with a take on dragons that’s different enough that I endured it happily.

At All Costs (Honor Harrington, #11) – David Weber
War of Honor (Honor Harrington, #10) – David Weber
This brought me up to date with the Honor Harrington series, but I’ve just noticed that there is a book 12 that I will be downloading shortly. There are diminishing returns with every book, but it’s still good fun military space opera. I’m just wondering how much powerful Honor can become without becoming queen of the known universe…

The Craftsman – Richard Sennett
Picked up due to a recommendation by John Glaser of Compass Box Whisky during a ‘How to Blend Whisky’ session that I’d forgotten about until seeing him talk about similar things again this year. An interesting pulling apart of the concept of craftsmanship that I’ve highlighted a bunch of stuff in (yay Kindle!) to push at managers at work. Lots of interesting stuff but the occasional jarring note when talking about areas of craft that I know about (mainly software engineering).

A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind – Michael Axworthy:
Part of my mission to learn a lot more about the middle east and a good introduction. It covers from prehistoric through to the present day and shows the incredible array of cultures and people who have wandered through Iran, and how the current regime is rather different to the past. Features a picture of Churchill, FDR and Stalin sitting on a podium together.

In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions – Marybeth Hamilton:
One that’s been sitting for a while after I got it for my birthday one year. My original read of the introduction made me think that it might have slightly worrying opinions with racist overtones, but after I pushed on I realised that I was wrong. It’s more a dissection of popularisation of music by white researchers in search of a mythical ‘pure black voice’ while the voices in question were more interested in making their own new music than reiterating the past. An interesting look at how the observer can influence the observed.

This Sentence Is False: An Introduction to Philosophical Paradoxes – Peter Cave
My first book of the year, courtesy of Christmas. A great introduction to philosophical paradoxes, twisting your brain a bit as Peter Cave walks through seemingly obvious statements to show how they aren’t what they seem.

Ignition City – Warren Ellis
Yuri Gagarin as the town drunk in the shanty town surrounding the last spaceship launchpad. With rayguns, intrigue and Warren Ellis’y dialogue. I loved it.

The Unwritten, Vol. 1: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity – Mike Carey
I’ve heard that this is one of the best things that Carey has written, and while I quite liked it I’ve not been back to grab the rest of the series. I think I need to have a reread and see what the fuss was about again.

Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour – Bryan Lee O’Malley
The final book in the Scott Pilgrim series and one that despite not ever being able to get up to the levels of expectation still left me with a tear in my eye. Marvellous.

Concrete Volume 3: Fragile Creature (Concrete (Graphic Novels)) – Paul Chadwick
Concrete Volume 2: Heights (Concrete (Graphic Novels)) – Paul Chadwick
Concrete Volume 1: Depths (Concrete) – Paul Chadwick
Rereads and still brilliant. Poignant and strangely philosophical examinations of life from the view of a senatorial speechwriter who wakes to find himself embedded into a giant concrete body by aliens. I’ve got all of the rereleased volumes (apart from the recent one about views on human birth rates, which I have the issues of) and I work through them from time to time.

Incognito, Vol. 1 – Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips
More quality superhero/criminal crossover that reminds me that I need to reread Sleeper.

Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka, Volume 1 – Naoki Urasawa
Pluto: Urasawa X Tezuka, Volume 2 – Naoki Urasawa
Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka, Volume 3 – Naoki Urasawa
Pluto: Urasawa X Tezuka, Volume 4 – Naoki Urasawa
Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka, Volume 5 – Naoki Urasawa
Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka, Volume 6 – Naoki Urasawa
Pluto: Urasawa X Tezuka, Volume 7 – Naoki Urasawa
Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka, Volume 8 – Naoki Urasawa
My favourite comic series of the year – a reworking of the Osamu Tezuka Astroboy ‘The Greatest Robot on Earth’ series from the 1960s by Naoki Urasawa, the guy behind 20th Century Boys and Monster. It’s beautifully draw, wonderfully written and a really interesting story that touches on modern conflict as well as being true to the story it came from. It makes me want to read Astroboy, and with my dislike of Tezuka’s work that I have read that’s impressive.

20th Century Boys, Volume 10 – Naoki Urasawa
20th Century Boys, Volume 9 – Naoki Urasawa
20th Century Boys, Volume 8 – Naoki Urasawa
20th Century Boys, Volume 7 – Naoki Urasawa
20th Century Boys, Volume 6 – Naoki Urasawa
20th Century Boys, Volume 5 – Naoki Urasawa
One every two months, only 14 more to go. And maybe 2 prologue volumes. I like this still – the action has continued to hot up and I think we’ve only got a couple more years of story to go…

Monster, Vol. 2: Surprise Party – Naoki Urasawa
Bought because I needed an Urasawa fix and 20th Century Boys hadn’t been delivered. I think I need to continue with this series, as the idea of a doctor trying to catch the serial killer who is a child he saved before his career collapsed, with the serial killer taunting him as being the one who unleashed him on the world is interesting. That was a very long sentence.

Anyways, I’m currently reading Iain Banks’s Transition for the work book club (my suggestion was chosen from the lunchbag/hat this month) and I’ve got The Men Who Stare At Goats, a book about concrete and other materials (thankyou RI Christmas lectures), and another Honor Harrington book on the horizon, along with the various history books that stare at me from the bedside table…

And now I must be away – I’m off to see Stewart Lee’s new show this afternoon…

So, this year I watched 52 films. Lots less than in previous years, but I’ve been too busy drinking (and have probably missed out a few from my list).

Here’s the big list (in sort of reverse order) and the traditionally pithy reviews. Italics are rewatches, bold is in the cinema:

• The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus – very pretty, rather mad and wrapped in tragedy. Also quite a good film.
• The Blues Brothers – My Christmas movie, chosen due to someone using the phrase “we play both kinds of music” a few days earlier. I watched it sitting on my balcony in temperatures of -4°C due to the rather nice Montecristo cigar I was smoking. I bought myself a humidor for Christmas, this can’t be a good thing. It is humidifying behind my head at the moment – it’s at 60% humidity and rising…
• Iron Man 2 – excellent. It went BANG and WHOOSH and BRIEFCASE SUIT in all the right places. It was also my first rental from the PS3 store. It is my last rental from the PS3 store (took ages to download [1/2 my broadband speed] and their interface is shit).
• Aeon Flux – it was on the Lovefilm PS3 player, which is quite nice, and I was in the mood for some surreal Charlize Theron in tight clothing action. I need to watch my DVDs of the original animated series again.
• Superhero Movie – this was awful. There were laughs in it, but there was also much head in hands badness. Leslie Nielsen RIP.
• Dorian Gray – surprisingly good – I’ve heard it follows the book rather closely, but I’ve still not read the rather nice copy I’ve got. It has bad people being bad…and not a lot else. The first film I watched on the PS3 Lovefilm player – worth a watch.
• The Men Who Stare at Goats – Almost a brilliant film, but the there were the last 15-20 minutes. I bought the book within minutes of finishing watching it and look forward to seeing what Jon Ronson says, as I suspect the good bits of the movie were what he wrote. Clooney, Bridges and Spacey are great. Ewan McGregor is also pretty good. I think I love Jeff Bridges.
• Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country – The first time (surprisingly) that I’ve seen this all the way through. It’s no Wrath of Khan or Search for Spock (the trilogy of Khan, Search and Voyage Home are the only Star Trek films that need ever be mentioned. I consider Search for Spock to be the Empire Strikes Back of the Star Trek world. Yes, I am broken in the brain) but it’s fun and worth a watch.
• District 9 – I’ve not seen a film where I shouted at the main character for being a tit so much. Really good though – great handling of aliens.
• Inception – Loved it. Great physical effects, lovely idea and some good acting. I didn’t find it confusing and am very pleased to boast this to people. Like now.
• Zelig – I <3 Woody Allen. Liked this, but not his best.
• Paranormal Activity – Impressive, the finest microbudget film I’ve seen. Further down this list is Blair Witch – this pisses on that. From a height. I didn’t have trouble sleeping, unlike various professional reviewers.
• Gremlins – Yes. I know. This was the first time I’ve seen it. I had the sticker book, even, but have never seen the film after an incident when I was kid where a child minder put it on for a bunch of 10 year olds and I (with all of my prissy kid powers) refused to watch it due to not being old enough. I never got round to watching it until now. It is great, as you all knew already.
• The Black Dahlia – Meh. And Meh. The book was my first James Ellroy (accidentally stuck to the front of a copy of Loaded that I bought in a service station on the way to the Lake District on a school trip back in the days when Loaded wasn’t entirely full of soft porn [this issue had Leslie Nielsen on the front and was mainly about comedy]) and it was confusing and excellent. The film is neither confusing or excellent.
• Zombieland – strangely the bit I disliked of this was the ‘mysterious celebrity cameo’. If you chopped that bit out it would be really very good rather than very good. If you released the ‘mysterious celebrity cameo’ as a short film it would be excellent, but I don’t think it fit with the rest of the movie. I think I love Woody Harrelson.
• Scott Pilgrim vs the World – This film annoyed me. I love the books but didn’t like it and it felt like it was my fault. Edgar Wright made a great film and I didn’t like it. I am a bad man. I have bought all the Anamanaguchi albums I could in penitence.
• Che: Part Two – depressing and not as good as the first one. All of a sudden having this in reverse order seems like a bad idea. It’s because I’m too lazy to sort it the other way round.
• Che: Part One – the first part of my gradual shift towards being a communist this year, culminating in searching Wikipedia a lot after reading Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna (about Trotsky staying in Mexico with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and about McCarthyism in the USA – worth a read). Much more uplifting then the second part.
• The Book of Eli – Fallout 3 on screen (complete with HDR and oversharpened look) and a good post apocalyptic movie with a clumsy message about the power of faith. If they’d kept it non-explicit what the book was then I reckon it’d have been better.
• Gran Torino – Clint Eastwood can still both act and direct. This we all know.
• White Men Can’t Jump – I rather liked this. Can’t say much more as I was quite drunk when I watched it.
• Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro – A bit of fun and light Studio Ghibli that I chose to watch over Grave of Fireflies, which I recorded from the same season of films on Film 4. I’ve still not watched Grave of Fireflies…
• Rushmore – another one that I can’t remember much of, although this time due to general forgetfulness, but again I remember it was rather good.
• Midnight Express – I didn’t even remember that I’d watched this until I saw it on the list. I vaguely remember a wild looking John Hurt and an escape, and looking up Brad Davis to see if he’d starred in anything since. The answer – not really, and he died in 1991.
• Tell No One – a bit of a rubbish thriller that I still get confused with Liam Neeson’s Taken, despite there being no resemblance.
• Religulous – Bill Meyer does an okayish takedown of religion, while at the same time not doing much more than preaching to the converted.
• McVicar – Roger Daltrey in the British version of Shawshank Redemption? But with less tunneling through posters and more shouting at the screws.
• Doubt – Meryl Streep scares me. Philip Seymour Hoffman continues to be good. That is all.
• Bronson – Tom Hardy is rather excellent and this film is both pretty and mad. I like things that are pretty and mad.
• Changeling – Despite the various awards it garnered I expected to dislike this. I was wrong, it was good.
• Redline – Insane anime racing action that I saw at Sci-Fi-London due to it being pretty much unavailable through useful channels. You haven’t seen racing until you’ve seen a cartoon car overtaken by a cartoon trike the size of an aircraft carrier ridden by Satan.
• Universal Soldier: Regeneration – Mr Van Damme continues to try and make more poignant dramas where he has to act, and on top of that they added a bunch of shooting and Dolph Lundgren appearing for 10 minutes so that they could put him on the poster. This is the film that Sci-Fi-London put on at Eastercon. I hope we put something better on next year…
• Kick-Ass – I loved this until the very end when a couple of things (which weren’t in the comic book) broke me out of the movie as being ‘too unrealistic’. In a film where an 8 year with purple hair kills everyone. Everyone. My brain is broken.
• The Blair Witch Project – I got a bit bored, to be honest.
• Miller’s Crossing – I like the Coen Brothers. I am repenting for my earlier dislike by watching all of their movies – this one is good, like the other ones.
• Micmacs – While I’ve met Marc Caro (who was allegedly the visual part of the directing duo who did City of Lost Children, which is ace) it seems that Jean-Pierre Jeunet (the other half of the aforementioned directing duo) has pinched some of his former collaborator’s style and made this rather orange and blue, and very pretty movie. The first (and only) film I saw in the posh screen in Westfield. It was quite nice.
• Deaden – One of the stupidest films I’ve seen this year. Given to me by the director, Christian Viel, and self published due to noone wanting it, it’s a fairly trashy, alright-ish revenge movie. However, the first 10 minutes are some of the most offensive I’ve ever seen, almost as if they made a list of sexual and societal taboos and went through them ticking them off one by one. It’s a film designed to have early walk-outs and I can imagine Christian high-fiving his producer as each person left the premiere.
• Inglourious Basterds – I liked it, even if I did cringe in the ‘we can see what’s going to happen. nonononono!’ bits that Tarantino likes to sprinkle into his movies. He does tension well.
• Million Dollar Baby – See my previous comments about Clint. Excellent and a film that I was sure I wouldn’t like that much. I’m almost tempted to watch Invictus now.
• Sextette – one of the first to arrive off of my ‘worst films ever’ list from IMDB that I put on LoveFilm. It was entirely strange – well done Mae West.
• Once Upon a Time in the Midlands – anything that Shane Meadows makes is worth a watch (even the no money, early days of his career, 5 minute short ‘Where’s the money Ronnie?’ that I saw on Film4 as part of their lead in to This Is England ‘86 [which I didn't see. for shame])
• Sunset Boulevard – Rather good. As you’d expect for a film that everyone continues to say is rather good 50 years after release.
• Glengarry Glen Ross – Again, rather good. I’ve read a book by Mamet about the film industry and now need to continue working my way through everything he’s scripted.
• The Cat Returns – more Ghibli, this time doing its usual “harrowing tale of potential childhood tragedy hidden underneath beautiful animation and hope”. And the cat’s cute.
• Judge Dredd – I’ve never seen it all the way through. Now I have. Hmm. Never mind. They’re making another one I hear. Hmm. Never mind.
• The Hurt Locker – I hated this. Yes, it was well filmed and all that but I found it profoundly insulting to pretty much everyone involved in the war in the middle east (and the armed forces in general) whether they deserved it or not. A lot of shouting at the telly.
• Schindler’s List – Again, one that I have never watched. Impressive – the documentaries I’ve seen that mention it made me fear that Spielberg had gone for too much heartstring pulling, but he balanced it very well making it an interesting and tense war movie with a nod to the tragedy of history.
• Manufacturing Dissent: Uncovering Michael Moore – again, one that preached to the converted. Precis: Michael Moore’s documentaries aren’t balanced, they push a certain agenda using various trickery if the facts don’t match up. Meh, we knew that.
• My Neighbor Totoro – Brilliant. The background of my laptop is still (almost a year later) Totoro at a bus stop in the rain. It’s beautiful and up there with Spirited Away as my favourite Miyazaki movie. Catbus rocks!
• Underworld: Evolution – Cate Blanchett in rubber, Michael Sheen with long hair and that other bloke whose name I don’t remember showing his chest off. I don’t really remember it, I don’t think I can be bothered to.
• Lesbian Vampire Killers – it was free off of iTunes. I didn’t get it by choice. Really. It was nowhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be and had Paul McGann in.
• Avatar – my first 3d movie. Fairly rubbish but pretty, and that was what it was going for.

Four trips to the cinema is rather low for me, I think I need to get out more. About half of the list above was from Lovefilm, the other half from TV (mainly recorded as I am rubbish at watching live television). On top of that I didn’t buy any of the films above (the only DVDs I bought this year were Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Sapphire & Steele, both of which I’m still working my way through), rented one as a download (Iron Man 2) and watched a few at the end of the year through Lovefilm’s online service.

Along with my not buying DVDs I’m also selling many of mine through Amazon, although only the ones that are actually worth something. I have too many things and am slowly divesting myself of many of them so if you are interested in a riffle through my DVD collection I’ll do you a deal on a few fillums.

I wrote this mainly while watching Screenwipe 2010. I think I love Charlie Brooker.

The final picture of my naked jowls will have to wait until my blotchy face has recovered from its trauma (ie. tomorrow morning) and I hope (if I remember) to document my incredible moustache growing prowess over the next 30 days. I suspect it will not be successful – the first time I grew a beard I was asked if I was Amish. I really don’t like the abbreviation ‘Mo’, -tache is much better. Aug-tache isn’t as good a name though and would have led to Australians (the lovely chaps who started the whole thing) with chilly faces.

So, if you want to be lovely and sponsor me then you can over on my ‘Mo-space’ on the Movember site. At the time of writing I have raised £5, go me.

I done went to Edinburgh, as has been my wont on occasion over the last few years. Yet again I went to the festival and stayed in the excellently located flat with the wonderfully uncomfortable beds that I have the last couple of visits, and I went to see many things. I was also good and didn’t let my hunger for booze blogging materiel get in the way of wandering around between shows and spent most of my time surprisingly sober. I did get food poisoning from a dodgy shepherds (actually cottage) pie, that only led to me missing one planned show (Simon Munnery – the first half was, according to comedy buddy Michael, excellent and new, but the second half was stuff that you have probably seen before if you’ve seen him in the last couple of years), but other than that things went swimmingly.

There were a few things that I wish I’d made time to see, but above all of them is Joe Power. Yes, Joe Power of being exposed as a fraud (although only by inference) in Derren Brown’s recent TV series. His show has had the level of success that I would have hoped, although he has had some with people paying just to heckle and walk out before the end. Michael Legge wrote up a lovely account of his experience with him on his Award-Winning Blog. I really dislike Joe Power, although as I’ve never met him I think it’s fairer to say that I dislike the concept of Joe Power.

For those who like the sound of my voice, me, Michael and other comedy buddy Will Howells did a podcast. Well, we spoke and Michael turned it into a podcast. It’s here, but also clickable on the little thing below:

So, things what I done saw (most of which are represented in ticket and flyer form above):

Daniel Kitson and David O’Doherty’s MacMillan Cancer Trust charity gig – our first gig of the festival and what seemed to be our only chance to see Daniel Kitson, as his one-man storytelling show had sold out despite being on at 10:30am. He generally doesn’t do stand-up any more, focusing instead on scripted whimsy and stories (and is by all reports excellent at it), so this was a bit of a treat. He was seemingly unprepared (and did apologise to the audience when he discovered that we’d paid £15 a ticket) but is man who knows how to do banter, and banter he did for 30 minutes (”You. Name?”). David O’Doherty was good, with a fairly slick show of songs, but he wasn’t really my kind of thing – I like a whimsical man with a worrying beard, notes that remind him to drink his tea and one piece of prepared material about one man’s history with a staircase.

Stewart Lee’s Silver Stewbilee – to celebrate (and publicise) his new book (How I Escaped My Certain Fate, available from some bookshops now) Mr Lee put on a variety evening of various mates of his from over the years. It was a great night, maybe one of the best gigs I’ve been to (especially due to the atmosphere), and featured a bunch of people who I was half planning to see: Kevin Eldon (whose poet Paul Hamilton is a marvellous character), A Ant (aka Bridget Christie aka Mrs Lee), Paul Putner, a cameo from Richard Herring (playing a book tearing heckler shouting ‘tell a joke why don’t you!’ before throwing the pieces of Stewart Lee’s book at him while chasing him off the stage) and a band introduced initially as ‘Franz and his Ferdinands’, which caused an amount of confusion as Franz Ferdinand appearing on stage to back Kevin Eldon singing Machadaynu from Look Around You. The final act of the evening were Frank Chickens, who were recently hailed as Foster’s Comedy Gods, thanks to a campaign seemingly accidentally started by Stewart Lee. They were slightly mad. There were probably other people, but my brain is mush. Stewart Lee rounded out the evening with his 20 minutes on charity that I’ve seen develop in the last couple of times that I’ve seen him – he’s still rather good.

Gutted – a Revenger’s Musical – written by Danielle Ward and Martin White of Karaoke Circus fame, this was the one concession I made to the theatre side of the Edinburgh Festival. I have in recent times become rubbish at watching plays, becoming embarassed that the actors are performing for my benefit. This is something that I need to fix and Gutted went a long way to helping. Some excellent comedic turns, great songs, occasional fluffs, The Penny Dreadfuls (gentlemen of varying height who wore top hats of equally varying height to bring them all up to the same height) indicating by their performance that I had to see their own show, Colin Hoult playing most of the characters in the show, Michael Legge as a blind priest and Jim Bob of Carter USM fame as a wedding singer and dead parent. Thoroughly silly and good fun.

Your Days are Numbered! The Maths of Death – a perfect geeky start to the day with as Matt Parker and Timandra Harkness told us all about probability and death. There were audio footnotes to explain why Matt’s maths jokes were so funny and stickers to attach to ourselves as the audience ‘died’ over the course of the show.

Audi, Vidi, Tace – Charlotte Young’s tales of her secret life as an agent working for a shadowy organisation run by a man posing as a caretaker at the Reichstag in Berlin. We learned about secret life of Rupert Bear and Tiger Lily as well as a variety of other random things which worked at varying levels of effectiveness. I think in the end it was let down by a slightly long and drawn out bit of homage to the Brando scenes in Apocalypse Now, but the funny bits were pretty good.

Andy Zaltzman swears to tell the truth, half the truth and everything but the truth – I like Andy Zaltzman, from his overly contrived similes to his obsession with sport (and ability to equate almost anything to an event in English cricket in the last 100 years) and also liked this. Over the road from where I saw him a couple of years back, this was a larger room, full and containing people who had sought him out for an afternoon show. As he’s someone who pumps out 30 minutes of fairly tight comedy with John Oliver every week on The Bugle podcast (now with no homepage thanks to The Times’s paywall, even though the podcast is still free) I was surprised that I’d only heard a couple of bits of this before – definitely worth a watch if you are not afraid of similes.

Paul Foot: Ash in the Attic – watched because I’d heard it was good. I didn’t agree – this was maybe the most unsuccessful comedy show I’ve ever seen. He’s known to be divisive and since his show I’ve done a bit of watching on YouTube and found him to be pretty funny, but this show put my teeth on edge and annoyed me. Looking back on it afterwards I think that I would have liked the second half of the show if the first half hadn’t turned me so much against him, with a particularly tedious and unfunny section that lost the audience completely, myself included. Rants about carthorses being homophobes and an ironic gollywog might have worked at other times, but not that night for me.

Camille O’Sullivan – I have one of her CDs and it’s okay, but nothing like as good as the live show I saw at the festival last year. This show was only a week or so old and it showed – Camille was still getting used to her costume and not doing her normal banter with the crowd, and some of the songs not working quite as well as they might. It got better as it went on, apart from a woeful dip with a cover of Tom Waits’s God’s Away on Business which descended into silly voices (which Waits can get away with by O’Sullivan can’t), and peaked with an a capella version of Bowie’s Port of Amsterdam that almost got a standing ovation half way through the set. Not as good a venue or set as last year, but still a good show (especially when it gets a bit more familiar and starts its inevitable tour).

A Random Open Mic Night – the name of which I have forgotten. We went along to see Will, who I have successfully missed every time he’s performed since I’ve known him and very good he was too. He was best, and not only because he told me to say that. The other comedians on varied from the awful to the okay to the very drunk and awful, so he didn’t have to do much to rise above them. Apart from Mr Howells there was one other decent guy, but the un-pc’ly amusing guy of the night was the partially blind comedian who couldn’t see the compere waving at him from the side of the room to let him know that his 5 minutes was up – after 20 minutes the mc gave in to the obvious pressure from the crowd and wandered on stage and tapped him on the shoulder.

The Penny Dreadfuls – having seen them in Gutted and also individually at Karaoke Circus (the Penny of medium height, David Reed, is the Karaoke Circus band drummer) I was tempted along to this, despite it being sketch comedy (which is a bit close to theatre for my liking). I was in the end rather pleased that I did, as it was quite excellent. Very well polished sketches with a running storyline, ridiculousness and lots of opportunities for Thom Tuck to get dragged up. That boy likes wearing dresses a lot. My cold anti-theatre heart is being slowly melted. I now have a Penny Dreadfuls ‘Mr Princess’ badge, which I am very proud of.

Invisible Dot …by The Sea – an unknown show, recommended by Niki, with a to-be-announced bill at a to-be-announced location that we were promised was By The Sea. We piled on to coaches and after a quick burst of Cliff Richard and Summer Holiday listened to seaside organ music until we got down to the shore. There we were let out and led to Portobello Town Hall, sat down and then presented with a brass quartet until the comedy started. Compered by Daniel Kitson (yay!) we had sets from Kevin Eldon (doing his poetry again), Colin Hoult (doing his ex-army movie obsessed wannabe film maker character), Josie Long (being lovely), Tim Key (being Tim Key) and Stewart Lee (doing his 20 minute bit on charity again). It seems that I wasn’t the only person who’d seen it before (as you’d expect from the audience, who Kitson described as Stewart Lee’s ‘homest of home crowds’) but unfortunately one person decided to let the rest of us, including Mr Lee, know by shouting out the next line during one of the large number of pauses that punctuate the set. This inspired Stewart Lee to point out that while he was contractually obliged to be on stage for 20 minutes he wasn’t obliged to say anything, before standing motionless and silent, staring towards the heckler for a few minutes (as caught on camera by Michael). He did continue and finish, even if he did promise to do it word for word the same as earlier in the week while lying on the stage facing away from the audience, and was, as usual, hilarious. A very strange end to the gig.

Andrew Collins: Secret Dancing – the other half of the Collings and Herrin podcast and a show that I felt I should go and see through a strange loyalty to Mr Collins, despite the things he says and writes occasionally annoying the hell out of me. Having seen him do bits of comedy around town I wasn’t expecting much new and was pleasantly surprised, with a quite tightly written hour of comedy with only a brief dip into the well worn Secret Dancing of the title. He does wear the influence of his various comedic friends on his sleeve, with dips in to Lee and Herring’s style books as well as others, but he pulls it off very well and I’m tempted to seek him out if he does another show. This was the last in his run and we turned up 45 minutes early, which was lucky as they had to turn people away in the end as the room at Bannerman’s (part of the Free Fringe) filled, even down to standing room near the front. Impressive.

Goring and Stokes: Nerds of a Feather – a recommendation from Mr Howells again and another show delighting in the geeky. Chris Stokes was up first with a half hour of tight and well put together stand-up that I rather enjoyed. Primed by Will I looked for potential geeky errors (he said that he reckoned he might be the only person in the room with a favourite episode of Columbo – this was wrong for both the time Will saw them and also when I was there [Season 6 Episode 1 - Fade in to Murder, one of William Shatner's finest roles. I had to look up the episode number and name, which Will didn't...he is best at Columbo]) but could only point out that the Captain Kirk wore a red dress uniform in most of the Star Trek films, rather than the yellow command shirt of the TV series. The boy had done his research. Graham Goring had a slideshow of funny pictures to go with his stand-up and while I laughed much louder and more frequently during the second half, it’s Chris Stokes’s set that I still remember. Both excellent though.

Edward Aczel: Ever Tried. Ever Failed. No Matter. Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better - A man who describes himself as a ’semi-character based anti-comedian’ who I’ve seen do excellent short sets didn’t quite pull off a full hour to the same level of success. It didn’t help that the Friday night audience were expecting constant laughs, where Aczel is not a man who provides on that front, deliberately. There was a flip chart graph of audience enjoyment, SWOT analysis, a constantly held and read from script, a random pulled from the audience (who was either the best plant ever or the most fortunately chosen volunteer of all time) and constant uncomfortable pauses. I like him, not many others in the audience did.

Barry and Stuart: 98% Seance – I saw these guys on TV a few years back and didn’t take too much convincing to take a chance on them for my Friday night show. They are great showmen and while I could see how many of their tricks were done (although far from all) this mattered as little as it should. The only problem was an unwise choice of volunteer for the finale which meant that the end of the show was wrapped up a bit quicker than they would have liked and didn’t work quite as impressively, but it ended well and was worth a watch.

Ian D Montfort: Touching the Dead – our final show and one that had been recommended to us all week by Niki. Tom Binns, of Ivan Brackenbury fame, doing a new character – a Sunderland psychic with a strong connection to side of spirit. It was quite excellent, with slightly uneasy moments as he seemed to do bits of cold reading that worked alarmingly well (with much speculation afterwards as to whether it was people going along with what he said, prior knowledge or just good cold reading skills), occasional magic tricks and a lot of well written comedy. But the bit which I felt gave the best insight into the show was his comment, in character and veiled in words so as to keep in character, that it’s not stupid people who fall for people like Joe Power, it’s people who are in need of what they seem to be providing, no matter how intelligent they are or not. A show poking fun at the psychics and not so much those who are taken in.

All in all an excellent week. As ever, it was far from a relaxing holiday but there will be another trip organised next year. I have enough people interested already that I have the excuse required to look for a new flat. One with comfier beds…

Strange hand position due to a large gooseberry stain on my shirt

Voting for me and Melanie (The Tarragons of Virtue) is good because:

1. Warm fuzzy feeling, etc, etc
2. Mel could win some knives
3. I could win some gin.

Mel likes knives, I like gin. Anyways, please click over to the website and do some votiness. Due to the voting system that Annie Mole is using you can vote once a day, so if you do feel like stuffing a ballot box please feel free to click over every 24 hours. I might even share the gin with you.

Recipe:

• 1kg boned pork loin, butterflied
• 1/2 a medium onion, finely chopped
• 2tbsp chopped sage
• 2tbsp fresh thyme
• 30g crumbled bread
• 30g pine nuts
• 10 dried apricots, chopped

Firstly I gently fried off the onion with some of the sage and thyme, until it was very soft and translucent. I then combined it with the bread (the inside of a fresh french stick made into breadcrumbs as best as I could) apricots and pine nuts. This mixed together into a fairly dry stuffing which I added a little seasoning to.

On the day we got our piece of pork from The Ginger Pig and the butcher boned and butterflied the loin for us. However, he also recommended that we didn’t stuff it as I had done in my experiments (simply dumping the mixture onto the butterflied pork before rolling it up, as seen in the piccy above) and cut a small pocket in the meat which we filled with our stuffing. This meant that nothing fell out during the cooking and everything looked prettier on serving. I then rolled it up and tied it with string (I used cocktail sticks to hold it together in my experiments but the nice butcher also threw a small ball of string into our bag, along with the ribs that he had removed when preparing our joint – I had them roasted for my dinner…they were very nice).

To aid the creation of crackling (the most important bit of most porky dishes in my opinion) the butcher scored the skin while preparing it. I then thoroughly dried the top, rubbed it down with salt and olive oil before sprinkling some more big sea salt crystals on top along with the remains of they thyme and sage, and a few good grinds of pepper. It went into the oven at 250°C for about 30 minutes before cooking for a further 30 at 160°C and finishing at 200°C for 20 minutes (unintended but fortunate as it really helped the crackling). It came out pretty much perfect, although maybe slightly under done. I cut a slice for the judges and finished it off in a pan to ensure that it was cooked all the way though, leaving the rest to rest, during which it did finish cooking – the perils of cooking to a time limit with only a vague plan.

The crackling was great, really crispy and flavoursome, but the pork was maybe a little dry – some fruity gravy to go along with our peas and creamed leeks would have made it perfect.

We didn’t win, that honour going to Rachel and Danny – Pilluelo and the Catalan Queen, but there was some rather good food knocking around for us to dig into afterwards. Plans are already afoot for next year…

Ta muchly to Annie Mole and The Cookery School for looking after us (especially the lovely Marcella, who put up with me being frantic in a kitchen for a second year running, and the guy who cleaned up the wall that I covered in stewed gooseberries when I dropped a bowl) and to all the lovely people who loaded us down with goodies when we left.

There’s also a post over on my booze blog about our dessert…