It is very hard to describe the beautiful moment of revelation you get when you get a pair of contact lenses in your eyes for the first time after being blind without assistance for the previous 15 years. Certainly to those of you who don’t have sight issues, the only thing I can suggest is that you rewatch the first half hour of spiderman. That moment when Peter realises he can see without his glasses is similar to after I’d had my eyes prodded at yesterday afternoon, only I was slightly more overjoyed.
I do warn you though, four hours into wearing them today, my eyes fucking hurt.
10/08/07 - My Tank is Fight by Zack Parsons
Twenty brilliant deranged yet entertained inventions from WW2, some of the also-rans in Hitler’s quest for the Allies-beating superweapon, discussed with a frankness, delicacy and humour that makes a book like this entertaining enough to wish you could make it required reading for history classes.
The Norwich Odeon (Formerly the UCI) now has a digital projector in screen 8, which is where Rachel & I watched Transformers for our 5th anniversary. Aside from my usual quibble of being tired of watching enormous blurs because they can’t be bothered to render in the detail and slow the footage down, the film’s awesome. A true spectacle.
I’ve been getting back into playing the Piano since being back at home. When away it’s rarely something I ‘miss’ (Notwithstanding moments of drunkitude, I do realise what I’ve lost out on not having it with me. This last summer, I’ve been trying to play several songs that have irritated me with their excessive use of sharps and minors which my useless, oversized hands won’t stretch to - most of which exist within Beck’s Sea Change.
When I purchased the music from a store in Canterbury a year and a half ago, the guy on the desk asked me if it was any good. I was stricken with a bad case of nothing-to-say, the album was beautiful and exquisitely melancholy, a masterful work of genius which I couldn’t in any way express. Some music just gets you like that - ’specially in a world so personal as music. One man’s Beck is another man’s Trivium, and discussing music on here brings with it the dread fear that Dr David Thorpe will arise from the mire and start shitting on me (As if me complimenting Beck would force him out of retirement, but allow me my paranoia).
Either way, with only the guitar tab for comfort, I’ve spent a while picking the songs apart and putting them together in a way that can be understood for piano, and playing them on my (SHIT!) digital piano is a soulless, hollow excuse for the real thing. My real piano, as noisy and de-tuned and awful as it was, had enormous character (Even if you had to de-tune your ears to make it sound right in your mind) and I really want to be able to have my own space and money sufficient to buy myself a proper (i.e. black satin baby grand or grand) piano. I doubt even in my wildest dreams I could afford a Steinway & Sons, but by jove I’d like a proper piano that can make you feel a sound that no computer can replace, no matter how advanced. I doubt anyone but other string-fondlers would appreciate that sentiment, but I’m sure one of my reader knows what I’m talking about.
5/8/07 Box 132 by Alex Shearer
It’s odd reading a novel about attempted adultery recommended to you by Cheryl ‘Dalek Box Set’ Bardell* in her second or third letter, written to me in year 9 (We would pass them between classes and sit reading and writing responses in the afternoon’s classes. Except I’d usually avoid her until the next day so I could type mine. Think my handwriting’s bad now? You should have seen it then). I can’t fathom why I remembered the title of the book, so many years later when I found it for £1 in Bookthrift, 9 (Fuck, I’m old) years later.
Sadly the context is more interesting than the novel, which has ‘Really low-budget British Feelgood romantic comedy’ (Which will bomb at the box office) written in it’s DNA like a stick of rock.
* My one reader will at least remember her by that moniker.
29/7/07 - Picking Up the Pieces by Paul Britton
The sequel to ‘The Jigsaw Man’ follows Britton as he tries to balance his criminal work with his job as a NHS psychologist and the cases here are far more personal. No longer do we deal with famous killers like Fred and Rose West or the Bulger killers, now we’re onto smaller stories about a man who killed rabbits because he couldn’t kill his abusive father, a woman who was ‘posessed’ with a repressed personality and a man who thought he was a werewolf. Read both back-to-back, and marvel at how Britton manages to solve a case using only a photo of the dead body - the rest of the information is missing.
28/7/07 - The Jigsaw Man by Paul Britton
Paul Britton was a forensic psychologist before the term was invented. A police officer asked him once how he would go about creating a ‘profile’ to catch a killer, and in a flash this oop-north NHS doctor became single-handedly responsible for solving and catching some of Britain’s most lethal killers. Not only is this an amazing account of his work, it’s a brilliant insight into how psychological profiling works - not to mention all the way through, you’ll be thinking ‘Why hasn’t someone made *this* into a TV show yet?’. I might phone his agent and find out how much the rights are myself…
Either way, the scariest thing about this book is that it’s all true.
24/7/07 - Tunnel Visions by Christopher Ross
This book is either
a) A self-effacing witty discourse as to the mundanities of working on the London underground through the eyes of the world’s smartest man - a philosopher who has travelled the world, being blown up, taught kung-fu in the far east, smuggled things in the middle east and wound up a tubie for the intellectual pleasure of it all…
b) A self aggrandising hagiography (Like there’s any other kind) with embellishments of a wannabe Indiana Jones figure who presents himself as a ‘philosopher’ as he travels the world seeking enlightenment…
c) A thready narrative from a writer who has grasped hooking his audience but confuses his conclusion by having an entire section of the book as snatches of philosophical musing without conclusion.
Either way, I enjoyed it. Tomorrow’s book’s a little heavier though.
22/7/07 : Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
I’m a grown man and as such refuse to suggest that I even contemplated weeping at the conclusion of the book. Now I can sit with that hollow feeling that I’ve lost an old friend, never to excite me again, smugly smiling to myself that at least some of my guesses were right.
[Edit]
Hang on a mo, I’ve spotted a massive error here chaps!
How could [x] remove [x] from [x] when placed on his [x] when the [x] had been given to [x] after [x] had broken into [x]? When you’ve finished the book, tell me, because I’m scratching my head here.
20/7/07: The Truth (With Jokes) by Al Franken
Written in my diary at work
Al Franken’s books are a slog. Not because he has a poor prose style but because it’s hard not to be driven to a psychotic rage when you read the litany of crimes the current U.S. administration will avoid punishment for. I tried to reccomend the book to a friend who in typical fashion defended the (alleged) child prostition and enforced abortions of the slaves of Saipan as beneficial to capitalism. It made me wonder if he was serious, I wasn’t in the mood for such irony when all I wanted to do was react violently.
Having finished the book at 3:00am and expected the shift to end early, I shall have to sit my remaining hours seething in jealousy at those who are already well into the final Harry Potter.
