Three quotes from Coming Up For Air

This month I read Coming Up For Air by George Orwell. (Review here.) I like Orwell's prose and he has a sharp wit. Here are three quotes that made me laugh or nod in agreement.

As the main character ruminates on being married...

"When a woman's bumped off, her husband is always the first suspect - which gives you a little side-glimpse of what people really think about marriage."

I knew exactly the kind of day he meant with this...

"You know the kind of day that generally comes some time in March when winter suddenly seems to give up fighting.  For days past we'd been having the kind of beastly weather that people call 'bright' weather, when the sky's a cold hard blue and the wind scrapes you like a blunt razor-blade. Then suddenly the wind had dropped and the sun got a chance."

And as a driver of an older car with a lot of mileage on it, this bit about his car rang true too...

"You wouldn't believe any machine could vibrate in so many directions at once. It's like the motion of the earth, which has twenty-two different kinds of wobble, or so I remember reading."

It shows how good a writer George Orwell was that 85 years after this book was published I was smiling and nodding as I read it.

Football crossover surprise

I split my footballing allegiances a few ways, but mainly between Shrewsbury Town, the team I have supported since I was a kid, and Barry Town, who are my 'local' team. The past few seasons I have been to more Barry games than Shrewsbury games, but I do try and make an effort to get to some marquee Shrewsbury games. 

One of the most fun things about Shrewsbury's longstanding membership of EFL League One is the number of big clubs who end up slumming it down with the likes of us. This year's new arrivals from the division above included Huddersfield Town. Not that long ago they were in the Premier League, mixing it with the elite, and now they aren't. 

I'd never been to Huddersfield before, and I like watching Shrewsbury playing at bigger grounds, so was keen to 'tick off' this one. With the game falling on the Saturday of the August bank holiday, a possible road trip was on. My brother, Dave, filled up his new tankbus with people and drove us there. We made good time and we had a quick look around the town before heading to the ground. 

The John Smiths Stadium is a relatively new construction that is nestled into a hollow of some hills. I really liked it. The arched stands looked lovely in the August sunshine and they seemed to hold the acoustics well - it was noisy in the away end, as the home supporters next to us also had a drum so there was a constant beat going. 

The game itself was surprisingly even, given that Shrewsbury are already bottom of the table and Huddersfield were already near the top. The home team played some lovely football but were the very definition of profligate in front of goal, only managing to get the ball in the net once. At the end they were hanging on to the three points as Shrewsbury pushed for the equaliser. It didn't come, but I hadn't expected Shrewsbury to still be in the game at the end so I thought it was a very encouraging performance against a side who are likely to go back up this season. 

However, an even bigger surprise was waiting in the match programme. It's common to see a feature on the visiting team which will include a player who has played for both clubs. The writer opted to mention goalkeeper Tim Clarke, and offered some highlights of his career - which includes playing for Barry in their famous win over Porto in 2001!

I didn't expect to follow Shrewsbury away and end up reading about Barry as well!

Alien: Romulus - kicking a franchise in a new direction

This was my second trip to the cinema this month. I went with Ian, who informed me this film is what's known as an 'interquel' as it's set between other movies in the Alien franchise. As we chatted before the film we worked out that this could well be the first film we had been to together since Alien: Covenant back in 2017.

I reviewed Alien: Covenant in my round up of films I saw in 2017. I hated it. I felt an intense anger at how much it insulted my intelligence and the intelligence of everyone in the theatre around me. Even now, seven years later, I can feel the rage at the sheer stupidity of the script bubbling as I type this. Movies shouldn't do that to people!

Anyway, very briefly, before I get into the review, here is a non-spoilery summary. This follows the now traditional formula for an Alien movie. There are a group of people. A xenomorph gets loose. Then it's just a case of trying to guess who dies next. There are jump scares and some gore - how else can you have a juvenile alien burst out of someone's chest? 

I think a person could watch this if they hadn't watched any other films in the franchise, although I don't really know why they would want to. However. it will be easier to follow if they have at least seen Alien, Aliens and Prometheus - although there isn't very much related to the latter movie. There are a lot of callbacks to the first two movies - to the point where they feel overdone. And there is one recurring character who I will discuss below the spoiler barrier of the film poster. But you wouldn't need to know they were a recurring character, and maybe it would be better not to know. 

There are two other aspects of the film that I don't think are spoilers. One is the grimness of the colony world at the start of the film. This is where our doomed gang hail from. Theoretically the colonists can work their way off the planet and book passage to another world. But the rules keep changing to keep people there. Then an opportunity arises to leave. The escape plan means going into a space station where bad things happened. And those bad things are waiting for them. 

The franchise's vision of the future is one where people are expendable on worlds run by corporations. This is true if humans are toiling down mines or encountering xenomorphs. The people don't matter. It does feel like a realistic possible future - not a pleasant idea, but a believable one. 

And if humans are expendable, 'artificial humans' are even more so. This is the second interesting aspect of the film, the relationship between Rain, played by Cailee Spaeny, and her 'brother', an android called Andy played by David Jonsson. I'm very interested in films that look at how humans interact socially with machine intelligence and this is explored in the film cleverly and sympathetically. 

Spoilers follow below the film poster! (You have been warned.)

Let's talk about those callbacks, and the big one - the very unexpected appearance of a CGI version of Ian Holm as an artificial person Science Officer. This one is known as Rook, not Ash, but to all intents and purposes, it is Ash. The CGI is a bit awkward at first, but when the action switches to Rook appearing only on TV screens it looked much more believable. 

But it gave me the ick. Ian Holm is dead. Unless they secured his permission to do this, then using his likeness in a film just feels wrong. I've felt the same way about the way Christopher Lee was regenerated for Star Wars: Rogue One. This feels like a violation because it's using a person's voice and likeness without their consent. 

The acting was OK, not that most of the xenomorph fodder had much to do except scream and die. But David Jonsson stood out among the rest of the cast. His initial damaged goods persona was full of pathos and his switch to an upgraded AI operating under a different prime directive was eerie and scary. 

But I did catch one interesting thing, when Rook identifies Andy's android model, Rook refers to that model as key to the early colonising efforts but now obsolete. I'm not sure if it was meant that way, but it felt a bit awkward that the colonising efforts used a large number of black synthetic humans effectively as slaves, while the white synthetic humans had roles as Science Officers (for example). Maybe the film-makers were trying to make a comment about race or maybe I'm just being sensitive. Either way, I felt uncomfortable. 

There are some plot holes. We see one xenomorph gestate and emerge, and then suddenly there are loads of them infesting the space station. Rook explains that one original xenomorph - picked up from the wreckage of the Nostromo destroyed in Alien no less - ran rampant through the ship but that didn't explain where the room full of cryogenically stored face-huggers came from. 

But there are some great sequences as well. The lift off from the colony world and Rain seeing sunlight for the very first time. The space station's collision with the icy rings around the planet. The idea of using zero-g to fight the xenomorphs so that their spilled acidic blood didn't melt through the hull, and the ensuing balletic float around the clouds of acid droplets to escape. 

I'm not sure we really needed the final scenes and their jeopardy once Rain and Andy made it back onto the ship. Although, that is traditional for Alien films too - Ripley in the escape pod in Alien, the queen xenomorph appearing on the USS Sulaco. But I think they could have left it with one extra survivor in a pod bound for a new planet, carrying something awful. 

I did like the touch of Rain leaving a message before getting into cryo-stasis. Her target world is nine years away and so she is going to sleep. Very much like Ripley at the end of the first two movies. Cailee Spaeny could easily go on to become the face of the franchise for further films so I hope she gets to wake up in a future movie. Even though, there will be fresh horrors waiting for her.  

Books of the Month - a trio of twentieth century novels

Recently TK Maxx has had a great selection of books available below list price. (Including several different editions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which felt a bit odd.) Over the last couple of months I've bought some older fiction that caught my eye. I'm going to review them in chronological order, starting with the oldest.

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

I'd never read any Hemingway, and this might not have been the best novel to start with. However, it sounded interesting from the blurb on the back. The basic premise is that a bunch of dissolute American ex-pats living in Paris in the mid-1920s decide to go to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls and the bullfight there in the fiesta. 

It's not all bullfights and drinking. Along the way some characters go fishing. There's a deep love for angling in the writing, almost as much as there is fascination for bullfighting. Within the group of tourists there is a woman who is the object of attention for several men, including the narrator, who is carrying a war injury. It's never spelled out but the inference is his wound prevents him from functioning sexually. 

And that's about it. The various infatuated men either get with the woman or don't. The narrator seems detached from all their drama. The Spanish and French characters are just background or mainly there to be patronised. There's some antisemitism and a one character discusses a black boxer he admires using the N word to describe him. 

And fair enough, the book was published in 1927 so what else would be expected. It's an outsider's viewpoint with an ingrained superiority and yet a hollow sense that the people they are so superior to actually have more authenticity. The main characters flit through and observe, are amused by what they see, and then flit off and in the process are utterly meaningless. The fiesta would happen with or without them.

Overall it hasn't inspired me to actively seek out any more Hemingway. It had its moments. (If you like fishing, I think you'd like that chunk of the story!) But I wasn't sorry to finish reading it. 

Coming Up For Air - George Orwell

From the mid-20s to a novel published in 1939 and full of semi-prophetic foreboding about the looming war between Britain and Germany. There's a weighty inevitability to the coming conflict that is reflected throughout this novel - but it's what will come after that really terrifies the protagonist, an era of secret police and endless propaganda. 

When I read On 1984 by DJ Taylor, which was a book about how Orwell wrote that book, this novel and Homage to Catalonia were mentioned as feeding into the key ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Having read both books now, I see what Taylor meant. There's a lot here about the way memories preserve things that have been otherwise obliterated by progress and how the world was going to change. 

The book is set in four parts. In part 1, George, the 45 year-old protagonist is unsettled in his life as an insurance salesman, married with kids and trapped in suburbia. In part 2, he recounts his life growing up in a little Oxfordshire village, his experience in the First World War and his subsequent career in sales,  made possible by the social upheavals caused by the war. In part 3, the hatches a plan to use some money that his wife doesn't know about to fund a trip back to the village he grew up in. And in part 4 he makes the trip which ultimately ends up in disappointment and realising that you can never truly go back. 

There is quite a bit of humour in the book, particularly George's life story. There are several vignettes that capture some true-to-life experiences and observations of people. We stray into some unprogressive views when George the protagonist (and possibly George the author) shares some negative opinions about women, although in fairness several male characters come in for a verbal bruising as well. 

Orwell is good at describing archetypal characters, like men living on faded glories, the genuinely wealthy, the penny-pinching middle-class who don't have funds to match their status, the tory-voting suburban families desperately working to pay their mortgages, and the hard-working, perpetually screwed-over poor. He has particular fun mocking the earnest young men who are various shades of communist and argue fine points of political dogma as if any of it matters. George (and probably George as well) are older and wiser than that and recognise it's all futile.

Despite that negative cast to the story, and the depressing conclusions drawn by the protagonist as his trip doesn't work out as he naively expected, I enjoyed reading this. I find Orwell a very readable author. His character's inner monologue is engaging, and while George the protagonist makes no claim to be a hero or a good person he is extraordinarily sympathetic. I might not have felt that if I had read the book when I was younger, but now I'm in my 40s and slightly horrified how long ago my school and university days are now, I get where he is coming from. 

The Stepford Wives - Ira Levin

And so this trio of reviews jumps forward to the 1970s. This is a very short book, with incredibly lean prose. A lot is left to the imagination with one sentence or a short paragraph summing up key events that move the story forward.

I knew the basic outline of this story without ever having read it or seen any of the film adaptations. The main character is Joanna Eberhard, who moves with her husband, Walter, and children to the seemingly idyllic community of Stepford. She soon notices there is something odd and docile about most of the other women in the town and the few free spirits she encounters seem to be creepily changed somehow after a few months living there. 

The basic gist is that the men of the town have a secret society and have found a way to turn their partners into "perfect" housewives. Joanna realises she needs to escape from Stepford to avoid a similar fate and the story takes a tense turn as she flees. That section was very well written and I had to keep reading to find out whether she made it out or not. 

The edition I read had an introduction by Chuck Pahlahniuk, the author of Fight Club and several other novels. I read the intro after I had read the book - to avoid spoilers. (That proved to be a good choice!) Chuck thinks The Stepford Wives is a warning of a backlash against feminism and that Levin is just illustrating a more fundamental truth - men will just find a different way of putting women in boxes. It's an interesting take and shows that even a comparatively short novel can have depth and layers to it. 

I recognised the titles of most of Levin's other novels and would like to read more of his work, which I think is the highest credit a reader can give. The Stepford Wives really captivated me and I've found myself thinking about it several times after I finished the book. 

Film review: Harold and the Purple Crayon

SPOILER ALERT!

Harold and the Purple Crayon is a very popular illustrated children's book in America. Despite not being very familiar with the story, I thought the trailer for this looked interesting. And with Zachary Levi in the title role, it felt worth a look. 

The story starts with Harold and his friends, in their illustrated form, having various adventures with the magic purple crayon. Anything drawn using the crayon takes form, whether that's a dragon, a moose, a porcupine, a boat, or whatever. 

Harold and his friends are used to listening to the "narrator" and when the narrator stops answering their questions, Harold draws a way into the "real world" to try and find him. Mayhem ensues as Harold uses the creative power of his purple crayon to help people, although his good intentions cause chaos. 

I won't relate the entire story, but basically there are people who realise the power of the crayon and use it for their own ends, but it all works out in the long run. Zooey Deschanel plays the other lead role opposite Levi and there is able support from Lil Rey Howery (who I last saw as Buddy in Free Guy) as Moose, Tanya Reynolds as Porcupine, Benjamin Bottani as Harold's first friend in the real world, and Jermaine Clement (from Flight of the Conchords) who plays a great hammy villain. The script is quite tight - I laughed several times - and the runtime of 90 minutes is just the right length.

Apparently the reviews haven't been kind to the film, but what do film critics know, really? I went in with fairly low expectations and was pleasantly surprised. And there was one element of the film that went a bit deeper than I expected. 

Harold has entered the real world looking for the 'old man', the narrator. This is a mix of father figure and creator, who has suddenly gone silent. As he becomes aware of who the 'narrator' was - the author of the book, the late Crockett Johnson - he realises that from now on he won't have a narrator for his adventures. This places him in existential crisis - asking the big questions of what does he do with his life now?

In one sense this is a way of looking at parental bereavement. The gap left by a now absent parent. But, for me, it felt there was a wider parallel of any occasion where we are feel that things we were certain about are no longer certain and the need to find a way through - that suddenly we are the narrators of our own stories, the creators of our own worlds and we can't rely on there being a voice from the sky telling us what to do next. 

Harold's response when he gets a final message from the author, telling him to take his destiny into his own hands is to be grateful for the opportunity and to see it as an adventure. It is refreshing to watch a movie with such an uplifting and life-affirming conclusion. 

Croeso Billy - a musical icon plays the Principality Stadium

This was the big gig we have been waiting for all year. Billy Joel is an iconic artist and someone Cathy and I have always wanted to see play. And for the first time in his career he was coming to Cymru, playing a venue we could walk to, in his only European gig in 2024. We had to go! And on Friday night we did!

It was the biggest gig we've been to since seeing the Muppets at the O2. It was also my first stadium gig since seeing U2 nearly 20 years ago in the same stadium. (Although it had a different name then!)

We had a lot of emails ahead of the event warning us of restrictions and entry requirement, but getting in was an absolute breeze. There was also absolutely no hassle from fellow gig-goers, although that might be because we were in the seats in the middle tier. The standing area below us was packed. 

Chris Isaak was the support act. He was pretty good. I only knew one song of his, same as everyone else, and he played it midway in the set. You can guess what the song was. He can't hit the high notes any more but he did his best. The rest of his setlist was mainly rock and roll country bluesy stuff. I liked it.

And then at 8pm, the main man came on. True, from where we were sitting he was only a few centimetres tall, but there were huge screens either side and multiple cameras so we could see him quite clearly.

The screens were also used for a montage of background images in several songs - night scenes of New York during the song New York State of Mind, and a fast gallery of pictures of all the people and events name-checked in We Didn't Start the Fire. It was a very effective show. With the roof closed, it didn't feel like a stadium show - more like the world's biggest lounge act.

Billy leaned into his advancing years, apologising that he would probably struggle with the high notes when he sang An Innocent Man. He did point out that he recorded the song in 1983 and didn't expect to still be singing it 40 years later. The flipside of that was an injection of youth when his very young daughters joined him on stage - the older of the two belting out the chorus of My Life to great cheers from the crowd.

The show was all hits and a couple of cover bits - he got cheers when he sang snippets of What's New Pussycat?, and Green Green Grass of Home, and he also sang a chunk of Start Me Up after warning us "I'm no Mick Jagger..." He also gave some of his band opportunities to sing in one or two places, so he could get a breather. 

The final song of the main set was just him, with the piano, singing Piano Man. It was incredible. He stopped and let the crowd sing the chorus and we could see his expression on the big screen. He was visibly moved. It felt like the entire stadium had switched on the torch setting on their phones during it. We were all in the mood for a melody, and he had us feeling alright. 

The encore was five of the higher tempo songs including Uptown Girl, It's Still Rock and Roll to Me, and finishing with You May Be Right. During that one, Cathy looked into my eyes and sang she may just be the lunatic I'm looking for and I sang it back to her. It's one of our favourite songs and the perfect high note to end the show on. 

Snacks of the Month - choccy goosegogs and chin chin

Two snacks this month. First, another random snack from Lidl: chocolate covered  gooseberries. 

Cathy spotted them while we were having a mooch round one of the stores. I expect they were part of one of the themed weeks that Lidl do - in this case Polish week.

Gooseberries aren't massively popular berries. I like them in desserts and as jam - mainly because my mum had a very productive gooseberry bush in her previous back garden and both gooseberry jam and goosegog crumble featured in her home cooking. 

There's also a story about how some bitey creepy-crawley that lived in the productive gooseberry bush bit Mum and a little while later the infected bite hospitalised her... in the USA. But that's another story.

These goosegogs are creepy-crawley free and are coated in a rich dark chocolate. They're about the size of Maltesers.

I was able to remove the chocolate coating and leave the gooseberry intact. It was brown and didn't look appetising. Instead here's a cross section with the chocolate still on.

Cathy reckons she wouldn't recognise the taste as gooseberry but to me they had all the tangy sharpness I'd expect. The dark chocolate works well to complement the sharpness of the fruit. 

They taste very rich, though. I wouldn't be able to scoff a pack in one sitting (and I know I shouldn't anyway). But for an occasional burst of tart sweetness these are pretty good.

My second snack this month is Africa's Finest chin chin, which I found in Asda. Despite claiming to be Africa's Finest it's actually made in the UK.

One reason I bought this was because of a funny thing I remember when I was a kid. A few years after my family came back to the UK from Africa we were invited to a wedding. The groom's family were from Nigeria and his relatives had brought some African food to the reception.

My brother and I ignored the normal British style buffet and went straight for the African food, much to the amusement of the groom's female relatives who were surprised to see little white boys so keen to try their cooking. One of the things they had was a massive sack of chin chin. 

Chin chin is a crunchy biscuit produced in small square chunks and fried rather than baked. Sometimes flavourings are added, sometimes not. There usually isn't much sugar in it, just a tiny amount to give it a slight sweetness.

In contrast to the home made stuff I remember with heavily nostalgic bias, this commercially produced and packed chin chin wasn't as good. It had a great crunch. It tasted fine. 

But, honestly it was never going to live up to the chin chin I had at that wedding. 

Summer speeds by - July 2024

July is called Gorffennaf in Cymraeg. Literally "finish (gorffen) summer (haf)". But as we ended July in a mini heatwave it feels like summer has actually kicked in, at last.

Something that did finish rather spectacularly was the Tory government - unceremoniously subjected to an epic battering in the General Election at the start of the month. I've already blogged about it, but I forgot to include the customary polling day selfie!

We had some visitors all the way from Scotland, with my sister and her three kids in Cardiff for the day. After living in Cardiff for almost 30 years I have now finally been to Techniquest!

I enjoyed a visit to the annual model railway exhibition in Penarth. As is often the case, the most interesting lay-outs are the small ones, like this one that was built in a pizza box and themed on the book 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt'. 

The same modeller had built a lay out in a suitcase as well.

The level of detail on some of the exhibits was truly outstanding. 

I went to my second gig of the year - Frank Turner live in concert at The Tramshed. It was our first gig there since before the pandemic. 

Cathy and I have both enjoyed listening to Frank a lot over the past year or so and we were both excited to see him live. I intended to write a post about the gig, but didn't get to it, so here is a mini-review. 

I have had some poor experiences at gigs - usually because of the behaviour of other gig-goers - and I often feel apprehensive in the run-up to going. But I'm pleased to say we didn't fall foul of any idiots this time. Frank tells the audience the first rule of being at his concert is 'Don't be a dick' and considering the defiant nature of many of his songs, people went along with the rule. 

(The Tramshed was still the same old sweatpit but they had enough staff on the bar for once and the floor wasn't already sticky when we walked in for a change.)

Frank was just great. He played most of the songs off his new album. We got an explanation for the new song 'Letters' and how it was about a penpal he had in Llanelli when he was a teenager. He had lost touch with her over the years, until she heard the song on the radio and contacted him to ask 'Was that about me?' 

He also played the songs we all wanted to hear. Everyone in the crowd - and I mean everyone - seemed to sing along as loudly as possible with the songs that need to be sung along to. I suspect a correlation between everyone being there because they appreciate the music and a lack of annoying people ruining it.

It's worth mentioning punk duo The Meffs, who were a decent support band, as well. They did their job of warming up the audience far more capably than most other support acts I've seen.

And finally, football is back. I watched the European Championships final and felt a bit gutted that England came so close to winning, only to lose late on. They did set an unfortunate record, becoming the first nation to lose back-to-back European Championship finals. 

But the new football season had already begun before England's defeat. I went to one pre-season friendly game this year - Barry Town away at Oxford City. Sadly Barry got hammered 9-0. But I did get to see our friend Ella and she even came to the game. 

The lower league teams in Cymru started their campaigns at the end of the month so I made it to another three games before August rolled around.

I'm not going to do a monthly round up of all the games this season, instead here is my current season stats on Futbology at the end of July. I'm pleased with the percentage of new grounds visited. 

And some selfies!

With Ella and an ox in Oxford.

With Tom and Paul at the Dracs.

With Scott when we went up to Ynyshir Albions to watch them play the Dracs.

And with Steve at Chepstow Town v Caldicot on a very warm Tuesday evening. Dig the hat!