Day 178: Who taught you meteorology?

“Thunder only happens when it’s raining,” sings Stevie Nicks in Fleetwood Mac’s inimitable 1977 hit Dreams. But the truth is that thunder does not only happen when it’s raining. That is not how thunder works, Stevie Nicks! In actual fact dry thunderstorms are a major cause of wildfires in the American Southwest, occuring when mid and upper level moisture, drawn into the region from the subtropics, forms convection currents in the intense summer heat, producing cloud to cloud and cloud to ground lightning! At least according to the /askscience Reddit, which I trust a damned sight more than a band whose most famous work is the hearsay and conjecture filled album Rumours.

A trifling mistake, though, you say? Well it turns out that the more you look, the more you find that popular music is riddled with such factual inaccuracies, spurious and oftentimes slanderous statements furthered by irresponsible artists lost in the avaricious pursuit of poetry and rhyme. Here are the first ten examples I found. You don’t want to know how deep this rabbit hole leads…

1. “The change has come, she’s under my thumb...” - Under My Thumb, The Rolling Stones - Now, people can’t fit under other people’s thumbs, even when the thumbs belong to that famously beef-handed cockerel-man Mick Jagger. Unless there exists a race of faerie folk that Jagger has been keeping locked in mason jars in his garage, trading crusts of bread and another day’s supply of oxygen for spoonfuls of the creatures’ magic dust, which the preening septuagenarian imbibes to provide him with the requisite energy to continue his campaign of printing red lips on pieces of tat and selling them at disproportionately marked-up prices as an alternative to writing any good music since 1978. Is that what you’re telling us, Mick Jagger? Is it?

2. “We could be married, and then we’d be happy…” - Wouldn’t it Be Nice, The Beach Boys - No, The Beach Boys. No, it wouldn’t be nice. You would not “hold each other close the whole night through.” You would lie in bed pretending to read on your Kindle while actually seething with fury about how your wife undercut the punchline to your story at dinner with the McCallisters earlier in the evening, screeching in that moronic tone of hers, “No you didn’t! You only thought of that in the car later!” without even a basic grasp of the demands of storytelling and entertaining a crowd. Meanwhile, your wife would pretend to be reading on her phone, while actually scanning the Instagram feed of the bloke from her office who regularly works out (your three press-ups once a month don’t count) and holds her gaze in the coffee room in a way that makes her feel like an object of more allure than the comfy yet de-elasticated winter socks you've started picturing when you think of her face. And then you both turn away from one another and fall into another lonely, dissatisfied slumber. Because that’s what marriage is, isn’t it?

3. “I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song, I’m twenty-two now, but I won’t be for long…” - A New England, Billy Bragg -  Billy. I'm a big fan. But are you telling me you took a break of a year between writing the first and second lines of this breakout hit? I like the lines and all, they’re good lines, but it’s no wonder you’ve never achieved the heights of pop success with a productivity rate like that. Get the content out, Billy, or YouTube's algorithm is going to eat you alive.

4. “There are nine-million bicycles in Beijing, that’s a fact…” - Nine Million Bicycles, Katie Melua - Katie. Katie, Katie, Katie. I love you. I love your mellifluous name. I love how unperturbed you look about being dragged by your ankles away from a quiet picnic with your lover and across the entirety of the globe. But no one knows how many bicycles there are in Beijing. Do us all a favour and admit that your song is fake news. This declamation as unquestionable certainty of something about which we can at best only hazard a loose guess is precisely the kind of irresponsible songwriting that I’m talking about. You’re paving the way for Trump and the return of fascism, Katie Melua. I hope you know that.

5. “What’s my age again, what’s my age again?” - What’s My Age Again?, Blink 182 - I mean, you say your age is 23, right there in the song. But those Dickie’s board shorts and primary-coloured sweat bands aren’t fooling anyone, Mark Hoppus. You’re the oldest man alive. You’re even older than Mick Jagger. You’re even older than Tom Delonge, whose head is staying the same size while his face gradually shrinks into nothing. Even in 1999 you were old. Now it’s just pathetic. Put on an M&S sweater and learn how to do cryptic crosswords and let it go. You'll feel so much better.

6. “Played it till my fingers bled, was the summer of ‘69…” Summer of ‘69, Bryan Adams - In these lyrics Canada’s answer to Ryan Adams, Bryan Adams, claims to buy an electric guitar, learn to play, form a band, hang out at the drive-in, and fall in love, all in the summer of 1969. But during the summer of 1969 Bryan Adams was nine years old. Now, I’m not saying that one of his bandmates didn’t quit the band, while the other got married - I’m just questioning Ottawa’s matrimony laws that led to a primary school child making it to the altar.

7. “Well I stand up next to a mountain, and I chop it down with the edge of my hand…” Voodoo Child (Slight Return), Jimi Hendrix - That didn’t happen, Jimi. You took some bad acid and rolled your trousers down to your socks and squirmed on the grass shouting “Earthworm Jim doesn’t need his spacesuit to have a good time”. It was embarrassing for all of us, and we try not to talk about it. Please stop bringing it up.

8. “You don’t have to be beautiful to turn me on… You don’t have to be rich to be my girl…” - Kiss, Prince - The artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince was romantically linked with many women over his lifetime, including Madonna, Kim Basinger, Carmen Electra, and a sixteen-year-old dancer to whom he became a guardian until she turned nineteen, at which point he put her on birth control and threw her in the sack. All of these women were either beautiful, rich, or both. Words are easy, Prince. We can all say things. It's your actions that count.

9. “Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?” - Ironic, Alanis Morissette - Anyone who thinks rain on your wedding day is ironic has obviously never spent much time in the UK over the summer months. “Isn’t it a depressing inevitability?” more like.

10. “I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear…” This Charming Man, The Smiths - No you wouldn’t, Morrissey. Who do you think you’re kidding? Fresh wardrobe or no, you’d stay in your room and eat four bags from a six-bag multipack of Lidl-brand pickled onion “Monster Claws”, scroll way further than the acceptable amount down the Facebook photos of that girl you used to work with, and write in your journal about how you’re not racist but you just reckon that all Chinese people have weirdly malicious eyes. The same as you do every night, Morrissey. We’ve got your number.

Would You Just... Write a new post despite it being months since the last post in which you all but swore to write more regularly, and yet here you are, drinking after work again, sleeping till noon, killing evenings so you don't have to deal with them, killing thoughts for reasons of same, and you find yourself one night stood in your kitchen eating digestive biscuits from the tin staring not through the window but at it, at the glass, not even seeing, your eyes just resting there, zoned in truth somewhere deep down inside yourself, as you eat biscuit after biscuit, hand raising towards mouth probably the tenth now, crumbling through biscuits the way you are crumbling through life, and suddenly your vision snaps to focus and you see yourself in the glass, your reflection, and it's not a moment of clarity or anything, you continue crunching into the biscuit-teens, heading dangerously past biscuit-adolescence towards biscuit-legal-drinking-age, and you spend the rest of the evening doing Not Much As Per Usual, but the look of your eyes reflected in that glass stays with you, how little you recognised of yourself, and whether it's this, or perhaps just the new meds starting to work, but you sit down the next evening home from work after, yes, a little drink before the bus, but only a half, and you realise the moment has to be now, or you're a goner, and so let me pull back onto the main track of this question and ask, nay, beg, with every ounce of my being, for you to please, even if it is just one word, just one measly word, write a goddamned new post, right now?

OK.

Would You Just... Reopen the Tunnel?

So I don't know how much of this has become apparent, but a major motivation for writing this blog series was that I could use it to address the many varied aspects of my life about which I am frustrated, embarrassed. To explore the things that are wrong with me, one at a time, six thousand million times, until I die at a ripe old age not even a fifth of the way through my list which was in all honesty a rough and highly conservative initial estimate not really even scratching the surface of the things that are truly wrong with me.

I cleaned the grill, and I moved back in with my mum, and this was good, and allowed me to clear some space around me, gave me room to breathe.

But I find I cannot go further without first turning to some space even closer than that around me -- namely the space inside my head, because in there it is still utter pandemonium.

Honestly, it's a mess. Dark caverns filled with teetering piles of unfaced issues stacked to the ceilings. Rats of self-doubt gnawing at the walls. Lower chambers submerged in lakes of anxiety. A giant demon, a horned and suppurating arch-field, charging around on cloven hooves yelling about random past moments of shame, such as the time I mistakenly referred to Frank Ocean as Billy Ocean. A room containing a man who does nothing but perspire in front of onlookers, for eternity. Entire cave-systems dedicated to reconstructions of conversations with girls during secondary school, with the role of me played by Leonardo DiCaprio -- in What's Eating Gilbert Grape. A Tannoy on the wall that simply announces every fifteen minutes, as if it was new information, that I am a twat.

It isn't easy existing in such a cacophony of craziness. But for a long time I have had a method for coping with all this mental junk, and that has been my writing. If the space in my head is a cavern, then writing is like putting on my miner's helmet and hoisting my pick and tunnelling up to the surface, lugging handfuls of psychic detritus with me as I go. Emerging into the light, gulping down air, I will fling the mud and slime and bits of brain onto some blog somewhere, for people to rummage through. Take it, I shout, have what you will; it's yours now, I'm done.

And sometimes, among the waste, people tell me they find chunks of ore, hidden diamonds, fragile, shimmering veins of amethyst and quartz. And even if they're just saying that to be nice, and there's nothing there but a load of crap, I'm still that much crap the lighter.

For a few hours I will feel purged, at peace. Like I have fixed myself. But the problem with trying to escape your own head is that wherever you go, your own head pretty much has to follow.

Every time I finish a piece of writing I will awaken the next morning to find with dismay that I have rolled back down the tunnel I opened, that its walls have collapsed in on themselves during the night, that I am once again trapped in the darkness of my mind. All that effort, and I am right back where I started, and it's just as fucked in here as it ever was.

So basically I give up. I fall back on a different coping mechanism, which is to eke out an existence beneath the light shafts of distraction.

The cavern walls are thick, but here and there a tiny chink opens in the rock, a crack that allows stale, fetid air to filter down to me. I'm talking nights out with friends, downloaded films, the dopamine hit of social media feeds, video games where you drive fast in cars or shoot people and the people fall down and you get to think, I did that, I'm powerful.

I shamble between these brief base pleasures, pressing my face to the rock, breathing down as much air as I can. And this pattern ossifies into routine that keeps me alive, but barely. I shuffle on in torpor, resigned to my fate, even as the rampaging of various demons and hellion imps and putrescent ogre-lords -- "HEY ROB REMEMBER THAT TIME YOU THOUGHT THE RAMONES WERE ALL BROTHERS AND EVERYONE LAUGHED AT YOU? THAT WAS FUNNY. ANYWAY I MUST BE OFF. YOU'RE GOING TO DIE ALONE BY THE WAY. TA RA" -- even as their stampeding causes tremors that shake the walls and begin to block the light shafts in one by one.

But still I'll plod along out of habit, hoping some last vestiges of air will continue to seep through, mostly finding nothing. Distractions cease to distract. I stop being able to concentrate on films or games, I sit in bars letting conversations wash over me, I get drunk and night blurs into day and the cavern grows darker and in the darkness I sense shapes gathering, the brush of mottled hide at my back, the flap of leathery wing, a glint of tooth.

Eventually of course the dread builds to such a crescendo, I become so starved of oxygen, that I break out of my routine and strap on my mining gear and make one more great expedition to the surface, perhaps wrestling one of the foul beasts that has been stalking me up as I go. I'll be a different person during this ascent, determined and focused, and I will smash through the crust to the outside world with a cry, hurling the beast away from me, and the beast in light of day will turn out to be nothing more than a common bat, or a frog, and will flutter or ribbit off into the night, and I will breathe a sigh of relief and pass out from exhaustion, finally free.

And then morning will dawn, bleak and grey, and I will open my eyes to find I am lying on cold stone back in the darkness of the cavern, and something in the shadows will be stirring, something that cannot just be a bat, and the thing will smile a serrated smile, and cackle, and the whole process will begin again.

***

So that has been the cycle of my life for many years now. But not this time. Okay, the previous two posts were mostly fuelled by the pent-up energy amassed from festering too long down in the caves, but this one was written when I'd normally be giving up, getting drunk.

It was difficult. Setting off into that collapsed tunnel every morning, to chip away thanklessly, with all the demons crowding around me trying to force me back down. Hitting blockages of pure rock and having to tunnel round far longer routes, or even go back the way I came and try to open another tunnel. Not knowing when I'd emerge, whether I ever would.

It would be so easy if this wasn't the case. If my head wasn't dark, if it was instead like one of those grand ballrooms that other people must have in their heads, open spaces with light from expensive chandeliers gently coruscating, demure residents engaged in polite chit-chat, perhaps a waiter passing around trays of amuse-bouches. It would be so easy if there was a passageway to the outside world open at all times, a wide, poplar-lined gravel drive along which butlers would carry neatly gift-wrapped presents for the waiting masses, who would (the masses would) cheer and chant my name and write nice things about me in broadsheet newspapers.

But no. I've got dingy basements with tribes of scabrous toad-men charging into walls and waggling their flocculent little penises at one another and vomiting down themselves, and I have to sweat and grunt away in cramped tunnels just to squeeze weird excretions like this post out of openings that immediately close back over.

But okay. If that's my life, then okay. The work is hard, tiring, often frustrating, sometimes leads nowhere. But okay. It's also rewarding, complexly enjoyable, cathartic. The actual action of pick against rock, pick against rock, tip-tap-tap, is not, under everything, a bad way to spend the day. And at its core it feels... I don't know, necessary.

Yes, inside my skull there may be dark caverns. But I have a feeling that many people's heads are darker than they'd care to admit, and the more light I shine into my own, the more I go down day after day and reopen that tunnel, the more it might let those people know that they are not alone, that they do not have to be afraid.

Would You Just... Help Your Mum With The Shopping?

I'm at my mum's house trying to clean her kitchen. "Trying" being the operative word.

My mum is a hoarder. Not in the sense of stacking newspapers dating back to the seventies against the walls, or hiding mason jars filled with urine under the beds, but she does have trouble throwing things away. She wants to keep everything, finds meaning, memory, in everything.

"What about this?" I say, holding up a small and badly-painted plastic dog figurine, the kind you might get free with an RSPCA membership, perhaps.

"Oh, no," my mum says. "He's special."

"These?" I point to the mountain of half-empty Tic Tac boxes I've found.

Long sigh. "Well, I suppose. Although if they're different flavours..."

I usually leave my mum to her Ways. I'm not home often, and the odd evenings I do pop by we find enough about politics and religion and my future to argue about without bringing her house into it. But this is different. My girlfriend and I, after a long period pretending things were working when they evidently were not, have broken up, and lacking anywhere more sensible to go it now appears I will be staying back with my mum for a while.

There's not much it would be fair to say about the break up. My life is material for my writing; Charlie's is not. I hope she's going to be happier eventually without me, that we'll still be friends, all those cliches you cling to in a sea of terror and uncertainty.

Anyway, after two days on my friend's sofa drinking whisky and watching, inexplicably, Mythbusters and Singin' in the Rain, I decide I am not going to fall apart, so I cook my friend and his girlfriend a risotto, then go home to my mum's.

This is not my house, I tell myself later, standing in the kitchen. This is my mum's house. She has a right to keep it however she wants. If she finds calm in clutter then that's fine.

Except, are these birch leaves here? Brought back from a walk last autumn, maybe, and now crumbling to dust beneath, what? a pile of ancient Spanish phrase books, some dog-grooming leaflets for the now dead dog, a one-legged, mud-encrusted action figure from my youth, rediscovered I presume while gardening, and a veritable smorgasbord, a cornucopia, of phone and camera chargers, some of these surely from phones and cameras that haven't been turned on since before Live and Kicking went off the telly.

Perhaps I will do a little light clearing, actually. But I'll be understanding. I won't interfere; I will help.

"This?" I say ten minutes later, waving a car-parking voucher from a folk festival held in 2013 at my mum's face in an accusatory manner. "Surely you don't still need this?"

"That will go upstairs," she says, "with the others."

"Yes but are you going to put it upstairs, or are you going to drop it in the other room and then I'll find it under a load of old crosswords in six months time?"

"Oh, Robert..."

As far as I can make sense of my mother's system, she seems to have three baskets in this kitchen for odds and ends, either sort of inchoate, nebulous planets towards which odds and ends are being pulled from the asteroid fields of odds and ends littering the rest of the room, or else the odds and ends are the inhabitants of the basket-planets, now migrating across the room's galaxy to find new homes among the stars (or kitchen appliances) -- it's hard to tell. There is also an odds and ends drawer, that will no longer open all the way, that probably contains clues to the birth of the universe, but I just cannot even think about that drawer right now.

I condense the baskets into one, fit all the odds and ends from the rest of the room into it. I pull out the microwave and the toaster and the bread bin, brush away all the crumbs and leaf residue and sticker-ties from loaves of bread that have accumulated behind. I wipe the counter tops, clear and wipe the table. I scrub the fronts of the cupboards and around the sink and behind the collection of Interesting Shells and Rocks (?). The grill, thankfully, is already relatively clean, but I do under the hobs and the oven front and around the dials. I sort out the Things Under the Table. I sweep the floor.

That's okay, I think. Everything is okay. I cook tea for us, serve tea, respond to my mother's conversational prompts -- Yes, it's tough, it hurts, but I think everything is going to be okay --, smile, take the plates out, wash up. Then I go to my room and close the door and spend the rest of the night worrying that everything is really not going to be okay.

* * *

The office chair is a problem. It's my day off and Charlie is back home with her family and we've arranged that now is a sensible time for me to pick up my belongings from her flat. No longer our flat. It's these little thoughts that are the most serrated. Other examples: We'll never now finish watching season two of Mr Robot together. How will Charlie complete the Day of the Tentacle remaster without my Playstation? And what should I do about my office chair, the one Charlie paid for the day we went to Ikea, when I zoomed about on the trolley like a child instead of thinking about the future, before Charlie got angry and I got to pretend it wasn't my fault? I want to offer to pay for the chair, but there's something about this that feels horrendously pragmatic, cold, like we're negotiating a business deal. But to just take the chair would be wrong.

I text Charlie, offering to pay.

"The chair was a present," she replies. "I don't want anything for it."

I feel sick.

I put the chair in the car, along with my clothes, my PC, my books. The guitars I can barely play. The DVD collection I haven't added to since 2010. All the stupid videogames with the stupid war-men on their covers.

I sit with the cat for a long time. She attacks my hand, bounds away. She doesn't seem to comprehend the gravity of the situation. I say goodbye to her, close the door, leave.

Back at my mum's there is no space on my floor left on which to stand. I look at all my junk splayed about the room. A sorry account for a life. Yet all I have left to hold onto. That night I fall asleep under floral-patterned spare covers, feeling that I am slipping through the gaps between the cardboard boxes and bin bags into a weightless void beyond. I feel like I am disappearing.

* * *

The next morning, however, I have not slipped, have not disappeared. I am still here.

My mother makes coffee, talks about the Archers -- which programme apparently makes her more angry than some real-world wars, yet cannot ever be missed -- then asks me if I will go to Sainsbury's with her.

I have lived back home before, as an adult, and I was bad at it. I acted like an entitled adolescent. I would get in at 3am, drunk, maybe stoned, fix myself maybe one last gin and tonic from my mum's spirit shelf (telling myself vaguely I'd buy replacement bottles some time, never doing it), then lock myself in my room and watch films or play games, feeling unhappy, until it was time to go back to the job I hated. I treated my mum horribly, as if it was her fault I was so miserable. I sat in silent disdain through her meandering stories at the dinner table, mocked her offers to get me out of the house on a walk to the countryside -- "Thanks all the same but actually I don't fancy spending my one day away from the purgatory of that job walking around a large body of water discussing farm-based radio soap operas with my mother," -- and, most of all, I despised being asked if I would go to Sainsbury's with her.

I would slouch along the aisles, scowling, saying I didn't care what we bought, I didn't know when I'd be around for tea, I'd just eat out or something, whatever. I'd be as uncooperative as possible, hoping negative reinforcement would condition my mum into never asking me along again. I would basically be a terrible prick.

Remembering those days now I think about how much I don't want to be that person. How terrified I am of still being that person.

"Of course I'll come to Sainsbury's," I say. "Shall we go now?"

In the car down, as my mother talks about Karen, who I don't know, who was the teaching assistant before Geraldine, or was it Katie? No, it was Geraldine, because it was Geraldine who, her husband Keith, it was very sad actually, Keith had lost his brother Gavin, and Keith hadn't really recovered, although... no, well of course that was the year before, or... God, it wasn't Gavin was it? It was Richard -- as my mother talks, I look at her, think how lonely she must be in the house by herself sometimes, about how she texts me whenever she's in town asking if I want to meet for a coffee and I reply, three days later, "Sorry wasn't around", and she texts back that she loves me, and I don't reply.

"So yes," I say. "Geraldine's husband...?"

We walk around Sainsbury's, chat. I pick up a few Belgian beers, don't say anything about my mother's silence, accept that she worries about my drinking, accept that she is making an effort not to comment.

Back home I bring the shopping in from the car, put it away, offer to cook.

Then I sort out my room. I empty the cupboards and drawers, the boxes and bags, of my own odds and ends, mementos left over from shared houses, old jobs, university, school. I put a few letters, notebooks, old drawings to one side, throw the rest away. I bag up for charity all the clothes I don't want. I strip everything down, dust. Then I put out my books, and the names -- Foster Wallace, Delillo, Vonnegut, Hemingway, Kerouac, Fitzgerald, Plath, Woolf -- look down on me approvingly.

I don't know. It's all a bit fucked. But maybe it will be okay. Maybe a step backwards isn't always a step back. When you've lost your footing, for example. When you've walked head-down into a bog. Sometimes the best way forwards is actually backwards, just a little.

***

I go downstairs. The light is fading. Mum is standing in the half-light staring out of the window, one hand lightly touching the locket she wears about her neck.

"I could get rid of a few bits myself, I suppose," she says. "Take a few bits to the charity shop. I won't be around forever, after all, and I hate the thought of you and Liz having to deal with everything when I'm gone. That wouldn't be fair on you."

I put my arms around her. She is very small next to me.

"I'm sorry I haven't been a very good son," I say.

"Nonsense," she says.

We stay like that a while.

Would You Just... Clean the Grill?

I am about to do something unconventional, radical, perhaps even heroic. I am about to clean the grill.

I know.

I hate cleaning the grill. I have always hated cleaning the grill. I remember childhood as one long uninterrupted stretch of wonder and joy, pretty much because I spent it never having to clean any grills.

At 15 I could be found in the kitchen of my family home, staring at the grill with tilted head, silently, like that dinosaur trying to comprehend existence in Tree of Life. Cleaning that grill must be a nightmare, I began to think. I'm glad that has nothing whatsoever to do with me.

At university I was appropriately adequate in many ways. I finished my assignments on time and washed my pots and only occasionally maxed-out my overdraft. But the grill was just not my domain. I found if I left it long enough someone else would get angry and clean it for me -- and that person's anger was always infinitely preferable to actually doing the grill myself.

But then university was over and I was living back at home, pretending I didn't need a job because I was going to be the next Jack Kerouac, and suddenly my mother had decided the rules had changed.

She would return from work and I would hastily tab out of World of Warcraft, back to the Word document in which had been scrawled the same lousy four paragraphs for weeks, and my mother would come upstairs and ask how the writing was going, and I would squint at my lousy four paragraphs and say, Yes, good thanks, yes. And my mother would put her arm on my chair, and I wouldn't say anything. And she would peer out of the window, and I wouldn't say anything. And she would walk back towards the door, and my fingers would be hovering over the alt and tab keys, and she would be at the door, through it, gone -- and then she would turn around, like fucking Colombo, and offhandedly ask if I would mind quickly cleaning the grill.

And I would stomp downstairs, muttering how the grill wasn't even dirty, I hadn't even used it, that Jack Kerouac never would have finished On the Road if he had been perpetually forced to clean grills like this, and I would get to the grill, and in fairness it would look like the back seat of the car in that scene in Pulp Fiction when John Travolta accidentally shoots Marvin in the face.

But I had meandering poetic romans-à-clef to be writing -- or at least night elf druids to be levelling up -- so I would do with that grill what Harvey Keitel had the mobsters do with that car in Pulp Fiction: I would gather up all the sodden old tin foil and throw it away, and then basically ensconce the grill pan and all the crumbs and congealed fat and bits of crisped bacon in new foil, so that if someone peered close the subterfuge would not hold, but from a distance any mum-cops in the area might be fooled. And then I would make cheese on toast and go back to World of Warcraft.

***

Of course now, a decade later, I'm a proper adult, which means I don't even change the foil in the grill. I just leave it all and hope that, like hair, it will eventually start regulating itself.

Except the roguishly deprecating tone I've engendered here belies the truth of the situation, which is that I am miserable. My girlfriend will come in from her exhausting job as a pub manager -- which job provides the flat in which we both reside -- and I'll hastily tab away from, I don't know, a Wikipedia page detailing Captain America's role in the 1982 Marvel comic book cross-over event Contest of Champions, say, back to the Blogger draft in which has been scrawled the same lousy four paragraphs for an eternity, and she, my girlfriend, will ask how the writing is going, and I will squint at my lousy four paragraphs and mutter, Yes, good thanks, yes.

And it's all fucked. I don't know what to write. If I'm not up for work or something that will let anyone but myself down then I'll just stay in bed all day, and the flat is a tip, and I've got no clean socks, and I keep reading the first page of books and then throwing them aside, and there's this weight pressing down on my chest that has been pressing down in some form or another for as long as I can remember, and it's like everything is too heavy, I can't lift any of it off, it's all fucked...

And then here I am in the kitchen one day looking at all the dishes feeling the weight pressing down, and sort of slowly yet all at once it strikes me that although I can't lift off the heavier weights, the ones about my career and my future and the apparent inexorability of my failure, there are smaller, more manageable weights that I could lift off, if I actually so desired, and one of these, perhaps the smallest, so small that it would almost be more ridiculous to not do it, is cleaning the grill.

So I am going to clean the grill.

***

And immediately I find I can breathe easier. Although, yes, only a minuscule weight, it is the first time anything has been lifted off rather than added in aeons, and it fills me with hope. Life is not so bad. You do little bits and they add up to big bits, and eventually you are free. The trick is to go slowly, and go easy on yourself. The grill today, then later I will watch Netflix, maybe have a beer, and I'll be prepared to tackle more tomorrow.

But what will I watch on Netflix? Do they have Aliens on Netflix? I love Aliens so much. It's not got the majesty of the original Alien, of course -- what does? -- but it is basically schlocky 80s B-movie as apotheosis. I tell you what, when you're having a beer, a few beers, and watching Aliens -- when those marines are running around in their bandanas, and Bill Paxton is shouting "Game over man, whoah man, we're toast man," and Michael Biehn is being Michael Biehn -- when the alien queen detaches from her flaming egg sack -- when that reveal comes of Ripley in her mech suit...

... Or is it Bill Pullman? Bill Paxton and Bill Pullman are similar, no? Is this a thing? Do people know about this?

I continue with such thoughts for about half an hour, until I realise I've spent all the reward from cleaning the grill but have as of yet not actually cleaned the grill, and that there is nothing left to do but go and clean the grill, and I instantly start feeling miserable again.

I motivate myself all over again, and head into the kitchen. To the cupboard where we keep the tin foil. There is no tin foil.

What the Paxton?

I swear, every time I try to drag myself out of this pit, God comes and puts some insurmountable obstacle in my way, like he doesn't want me to succeed, like he wants me to stay suffering here forever. How are you supposed to fight against God?

No, Rob. Stop inventing deities to blame for your inability to complete basic household chores. Just go to the shop for more tin foil.

I go to the shop. Outside it is balmy, warm, wonderful, and everything feels great. I'm moving, life is happening, we can do this.

My cheeriness lasts for two and a half minutes, until I arrive at the shop and the lady points me to the wrong aisle for tin foil, and I decide the best course of action is to stand there pretending to choose from what is actually a selection of tinned goods until she disappears and I can go looking myself -- except then the lady realises her mistake and comes jogging back, and I have to yell at her that It's fine, it's absolutely fine, I wanted butter beans anyway. Which I definitely didn't.

Then at the counter I put my basket down before the woman in front has finished paying, and I don't know what to do, whether to draw attention to the awkwardness by picking the basket up again, so I just hover there too close while the woman buys lottery tickets and chats to the cashier. I'm invading this chat, I think. My arms hang at my side like repugnant flippers. I can't for the life of me remember how people are supposed to stand.

Finally, eight years later, it is my turn. I act too northern with the cashier to mask my embarrassment, but it comes off weird and I know she can tell I'm from the posh end of Sheffield, that I don't belong here. All walk home I am distressed, gloomy. I think of others my age, struggling with promotions and babies and marriages, and here I am struggling to buy tin foil from a shop. I am wretched.

But the only thing more wretched, I decide as I return, would be to use my self-pity as an excuse to not clean the grill. I really am going to have to clean this grill.

So I get started -- by planning out what I'll do. First the dishes in the sink will need washing to make room. Which means actually first I'll have to put the dry dishes away. I hate that this is a thing. Why don't we just build kitchens with huge draining boards instead of cupboards, and then we could store dishes where they dry, thus removing a pointless and mundane job from existence? The same with clothes. Replace wardrobes with massive clothes horses, then we'd never again have to stress over folding t-shirts and the sides not being even and having to shake them out and try again, and finding pairs for all the socks, and staring at the wall as the light fades and the evening draws in, wondering whether it's even worth being alive in such a bourgeois existence that apparently consists of nothing but putting possessions in drawers and then taking them out again, over and over, until death comes for us hunched and--

--Oh, that's the dishes put away. Wasn't so bad.

I wash the dishes in the sink. I wash the big roasting pan that we inexplicably store on top of the grill where it gets covered in dust and grease. I bet that was my girlfriend's idea, I think. I find a better home for the roasting pan, on top of the highest cupboard where neither of us can reach.

Finally it is the grill's turn. The old tin foil wilts in my hands. Underneath is a fatty pool of despair. I scrape out the pool with a spatula. I attack the grill pan with wire wool, green scourer, sponge. I attack the grill rack with same. I put it to dry.

I rinse out the empty wine bottles, the empty milk carton. I clean the hobs, the front of the oven, the kitchen tiles. I look around, panting. I do inside the sink, the back of the sink, wash out the cutlery tub with all the pond water in the bottom. I take out the recycling. I empty the cat's litter tray, take the bins out, sweep the floor. I get it all done, do it all.

***

It is later. We're watching Netflix. I tell my girlfriend I'm making a brew. I go to the kitchen, stand in the middle of the room, look around. The grill is gleaming. Everything is gleaming.

This will be easy, I think. All I have to do is apply today's technique to every issue in my life that I've allowed to get on top of me over the past decade, and continue applying it every day for the rest of my life. Yes, I think. Easy.

On Brexits, Portents

Last Friday, as the pound plummeted and the markets tanked, as our prime minister shuffled out of the house we gifted him to announce that, with a sluice gate of excrement opened above our heads, he felt that his job was now complete -- as Scotland muttered of independence and Labour began to implode, I was in Bruges, getting drunk. Wandering the old town's cobbled streets, its gently arcing canals, a few bottles of Chimay the heavier, I found my gaze pulled upwards towards the fronts of grand hotels, where, tousled by a soft June breeze, fluttered the unmistakable azure-blues and golds of the European Flag.

I looked at the stars upon these flags, each representing a distinct nation, arrayed in a chain of unity and cooperation, strengthened from the outside, joined within, facing the darkness of the unknown together, and I thought about how that morning one of those stars, our own, had voted to leave the circle, to break the chain -- and I grieved.

***

The coming years will be tough. Taxes will rise. Food prices will rise. Mortgages will rise. Wages, in relation to inflation, will likely fall. In free-market capitalism the only god is profit, and he must be appeased. It will not be the richest who sacrifice. It will be the poor, as always, who will become poorer.

In the power vacuum created by the collapse of the two major political parties, if they continue on track, it is not impossible to envisage a far-right organisation, whether Ukip or someone new, gaining traction. The weapons that we use to combat such evils, weapons of compassion, creativity, cultural exchange, the enriching worth of diversity, have all been dulled by the referendum result.

Yes, in such times grief feels appropriate. But let us be aware, those of us who mourn, of the form we allow our mourning to take, especially as shock turns to anger, as a desire to act sets in, and we begin looking for people to blame. Anger, carefully directed, can be a powerful tool, but its power is dangerous, a charging horse of which it is all too easy to lose the reigns.

***

I have no qualms, though, being angry at David Cameron. There has been praise for the poise with which he has accepted defeat this past week, for his leaving with, as one friend put it, "his head held high."

Perhaps. Yet he is leaving office for a life of luxury, free to spend the gains from his many financial interests away from the public eye, no longer having to pretend he enjoys riding that bike of his everywhere he goes. I wonder for how long his wife will keep that Nissan Micra he bought her.

Never mind the past week, Cameron's actions these past years have epitomised a Bullingdon Club arrogance for which we are all now paying the price. Cameron was supposed to be the captain of our country's ship, yet to quell dissent among his officers he let the crew below deck vote on the direction we would sail -- a crew who, meaning no offence, did not have a view from the crow's nest, had no access to navigational charts, were not familiar with the geography of the surrounding regions. And when this crew inevitably plotted a course straight into the largest storm on the horizon, our captain jumped overboard, presumably onto a raft made from our rations, to float away to a beach on the Cayman Islands. Holding your head high at such a time seems less like poise to me, and more like sharp insult.

And then there is Nigel Farage. Seeing the man gurning his way through European parliament this week, cackling with whatever the word is for the polar opposite of magnanimity, I felt like I was watching someone who had been spanked in childhood so often, and with such vigour, that he could no longer experience pleasure unless it was attached to a sense of being utterly despised. His cheap attacks on MEPs appeared less like healthy democracy and more like that one boy at school who can only gain attention by smearing shit on his hand and chasing children around the playground with it. That this man may be offered anything more in his future than sympathetic looks and some in-depth group therapy is simply unthinkable.

As for Boris Johnson, I still cannot decide whether this wealthy ex-journalist who purposefully musses his hair before public appearances, who doesn't understand how a capo works, is a blustering buffoon, careening through intra-continental relations as he careens through small Japanese children, or else some kind of malevolent, Playdough-faced Bond villain. The announcement today that he will not be standing for Tory leadership only serves to confound matters.

While we're angry, of course, we should reserve some of that anger for Thatcher. We should always reserve some for Thatcher. To continue the earlier seafaring analogy, it is true that by the 70s, by the Winter of Discontent, our ship was listing heavily, its beams straining, taking on water. But as captain, Thatcher's response was to strengthen the hull by stealing from internal supports, to create affluent officers by destroying morale among the poorest of the crew. She gilded the upper cabins, sold the rights to manufacture sails to wealthy cloth merchants, yet down below entire decks were being left to rot. Pitilessly, myopically, her government shovelled up all the shit that had been plaguing the vessel, and then dumped it into the hold with the poor, telling those it buried that if they couldn't dig their way out it was their own fault for being weak and lazy.

How can we be surprised that communities in Sunderland, in Lincolnshire, in the townships surrounding Sheffield where I live, have voted overwhelmingly in favour of Leave. For generations we have built up the City, made cosy our leafy suburbs, and it has been working-class communities that have paid. For generations these people have been abandoned to fear and despair, and now they have finally been given a voice, and that voice has cried out for change.

Yes, they're wrong to blame immigration and the EU for their problems, they have been manipulated by heartless chancers. But the point is they have problems, serious ones, and we have ignored them for too long. It is not hard to goad beaten animals into attacking other animals, while those holding the clubs become rich off the violence. Perhaps the middle-classes, never having been locked in such cages, could use their energy more effectively than by getting appalled at a whipped beast for the ferocity of its snarl.

Because I've still got a little anger left in me, and it feels only fair to end this charge by turning it towards ourselves.

Seventy years ago our continent, our world, was at war with itself. We ended that war by dropping two bombs, on the city of Hiroshima, the port of Nagasaki, that instantaneously liquefied 120,000 factory workers, labourers, nurses, schoolchildren. Countless more died in the months that followed.

We committed this act of unimaginable evil, we tell ourselves, to prevent the dragging out of further pointless, meaningless evil, to get all the evil over with in one final burning, gasping scream, so that the years that followed might be marked with a lasting peace.

And for some of us they have been. Those melted nurses, all the divisions of soldiers lying crumpled across the Earth's fields, sowed with their blood a freedom that you and I still reap today. We have been gifted prosperity, comfort, calm.

And how have we spent that gift? Playing World of Warcraft. Ordering pizzas to our doors baked with bits of hotdog meat stuffed inside their crusts. Arguing over teaser-trailers for Marvel superhero films. Ours was a world of limitless potential, paid for with untold sacrifice, and we wasted it drinking frappuccinos and complaining that our Snapchat filters made our cheeks look fat.

Yes, we are cultured, sophisticated, knew the many benefits of EU membership. How could we not, with our first-class educations, our family holidays to Cannes, our university halls filled with interesting Europeans, our jobs in the city among the cream of the continental crop? We enjoy the benefits every day. I imagine that for someone whose life contains none of these things, but instead betting shops, job centres, John Smiths, cocaine, the value of wealthy politicians in Brussels must feel rather more remote.

We awoke last Friday in shock, fearful for the first time for our futures. But many in our country have been fearful all their lives. The flag they fly says nothing of unity between distant stars, but tells the simple story of a numbing blank white tedium, and a central red cross marking a single spot, the self, where they must stand strong whatever the odds. You and I may only now be feeling the first portentous raindrops upon our quaint patio doors, but make no mistake: this storm has been brewing for a long time.

***

On days when I'm feeling down I like to listen to videos by Jon Kabat-Zinn, this nice old man who runs a program of mindfulness meditation for those suffering from chronic pain, mental disorders, terminal illnesses. In the videos, Kabat-Zinn encourages patients to turn not away from the suffering of their bodies but towards it, to look directly at it, with eyes of awareness and curiosity, and in doing so to find a place beyond the suffering, an aspect of the self rooted in the present moment, where whatever is happening may be allowed to happen, to play itself out. Moments of pain, Kabat-Zinn says, deserve to be experienced as fully as any other moments of our lives -- sometimes are the only moments of our lives. And experiencing them, though we would never ask that they continue, may nevertheless teach us much, if we are prepared to listen.

Home, now, from Bruges, I find myself walking instead around the polished floors of my local shopping centre, in Beighton, an ex-mining village to the south of Sheffield. Residents here voted leave, by a vast majority.

In shop windows gaudy signs advertise Amazing Value! Everything £1 on goods worth much less than a pound. 25% is slashed from the price of clothes that still turn a profit because they are made by women in Bangladesh for 23p an hour. Cakes glisten with wet icing sugar that masks their partially hydrogenated oils, their artificial flavourings, their petroleum-based additives. In CeX, teens, those in their 20s, their 30s, their 40s, trade copies of second-hand videogames, on whose covers armed men are poised in stoic silhouette against backdrops of orgiastic destruction. McDonald's is, as ever, booming.

Our country, it seems to me, is a kind of person, a body, a connected organism. And this organism is in pain. On the streets of my hometown I turn my eyes not away from but towards this pain, towards the overweight, those on mobility scooters bedecked in Union Jacks, those carrying bags of fast food, cans of cheap lager -- and meeting my gaze I see not demons or enemies, but people, mothers, grandparents, sons, struggling on through hardship they never asked for, whose reasons they may never understand. There has been a storm coming for many years. For those of us who are concerned, I believe it is time we began thinking about what we can do to help.

Bombing the Bad Guys

"...if sensitive issues of governance can be made sufficiently dull and arcane, there will be no need for officials to hide or dissemble, because no one not directly involved will pay enough attention to cause trouble. No one will pay attention because no one will be interested, because, more or less a priori, of these issues' monumental dullness." 

--David Foster Wallace, "The Pale King"

The House of Commons will meet on Wednesday to discuss whether our military should begin launching airstrikes into Syria. A few days ago David Cameron, through his Facebook page, posted the text to a statement he gave to the House in which he outlined his views on the matter (spoilers: he's up for it). The post is here. But you are not going to read it. There is no way. It is 3,148 words long, of which most are constructions explaining what he has just said or what he is about to say ("I said I would respond", "I have done so today", "I want to answer all relevant questions", "Let me deal with each of those questions", "Let us be clear", "Let me turn to"), as well as a bunch of phrases where he says things like, "we can significantly extend the capabilities of", when he just means, "we can help".

Fucking YAWN. We have sneak-peak trailers of probably ultimately disappointing superhero films to be watching here, Dave. The speech does pick up after a while, but only because ol' Moon-Face starts getting a weird hard-on for describing missile launchers and bombs and bullets all named by men who'd I'd guess didn't have such a hot time of it as kids -- "We have the Brimstone precision missile system", "RAPTOR -- the reconnaissance airborne pod for our Tornado aircraft -- has no rival", "Reaper drones" with their "high-precision missile systems". All right, mate, put the Call of Duty box down before you jizz yourself.

But the thing is, underneath all this obfuscation and bluster and army porn, what he's saying is really important. So I've rewritten his speech for him. This isn't me going off on one, this is the actual (more or less) contents of his argument, translated into language real human beings can understand:

Mr Speaker, I want to explain why I think we should bomb Syria.

Firstly, I believe ISIL poses a threat to us. They have attacked Ankara, Beirut and Paris. They are terrorists. They do terroristy things. They're bad guys. We should stop the bad guys -- and doing this involves bombing Raqqa, because that's where they all live.

But why should we be the ones to do something about these bad guys? Well, because America and France are doing it, and they want us to join in. And because we have the bombs to do it -- the same bombs we used in Iraq, which as you'll all recall worked perfectly there.

Most importantly, though, we should be the ones to stop the bad guys because we want the bad guys stopped, and therefore it is only fair and morally decent for us to be the ones to stop them.

So why is it time to stop them now? Because they did a bad thing in Paris, and therefore we're now in more danger than we have ever been before. Also the bad guys are thumbing their noses at us telling the world we can't hurt them in their, like, secret volcano base in Iraq and Syria (okay, maybe we didn't completely fix Iraq) -- and when the bad guys say this it makes bad guys all over the world flock to this secret volcano base and twiddle their moustaches and laugh at us mockingly.

Also we should bomb the bad guys in Raqqa now because we have bombed them out of Iraq (okay, look, we didn't fix Iraq at all, and the bad guys made a volcano base there, but recently we've done really well at getting them out) -- and, basically, it's like we squeezed a spot, and the pus was all pushed into a neighbouring pore, and so now obviously we need to squeeze that pore. Don't ask me where the pus will go then. Into the tissue of democracy, I guess.

Some people have asked me whether bombing the bad guys will make the bad guys more likely to come after us. Well, they are already coming after us! If a wasp has already stung you it makes sense to beat its nest with a rolled-up newspaper, no? And we have the best rolled-up newspapers known to mankind, let me tell you. We have the Raptor, the Wyvern, the... ahhh yeah... the Lizard-King, the... the TriceratOOOOOOPSOHGOD... Umm, excuse me...

Where was I? Yes: is bombing Syrians legal? Well, sort of. Basically, all the powerful countries got together last century and decided it would be legal to bomb bad guys if it was in self-defence. And luckily that's vague enough to apply to pretty much anything we want it to. And as we're the ones making and upholding these rules anyway, who gives a shit?

Now, although I said before that it was morally decent of us to be the ones to stop the bad guys, we're not going to actually send any of our people to do it. We think it best that the actual people risking their lives be Syrian rebels and Kurds and moderate Sunni Arabs. What we will do is stay a long way behind these people and press buttons to drop bombs on the bad guys. And this will be, I believe, really helpful.

Getting the bad guys with bombs is only part of our strategy. We'll also foil plots, and do things about the nasty words the bad guys say about us. We'll also talk to countries near the bad guys, and give aid to the Syrian people who are being murdered in their thousands (who there's like zero chance of us harming with our bombs), and in the long-run we'll look at making these people's homes safe.

How much effort will we put into this? A lot. A lot a lot. Do not even worry. We're going to do loads, and eventually we'll get rid of Syria's president, Assad, who is a bad guy on a scale the ISIL bad guys can't even hope to reach -- in fact he's the real bad guy, the M. Bison if you will, except confusingly he's not aligned with the ISIL bad guys, and we don't know what we're going to do about him, and it's all really convoluted and complicated and difficult, so let's move on.

What's the end goal for us then? Well, we're going to chip away at the bad guys for a while, and we reckon eventually they'll just sort of collapse and be gone from the world forever. Now, we're not naive: we know this will take a lot of chipping away. So if you come to me next year and say it hasn't worked yet, I will say that I did tell you it would take a long time. And if you come to me in a decade, well, same thing. You really cannot touch me on this, because though I am saying it is what we should do I am also admitting it might take forever to work. But eventually it will work, and Syria will be free, and ultimately Assad will be got rid of. I'm sure of this.

Another question I'm asked is whether us bombing bad guys will have any repercussions in the incredibly convoluted intra-religious conflict of the region, wherein Sunni and Shi'a Muslims have this whole thing going on not unlike Protestants and Catholics, only actually worse, if that's possible. Well let me just say: no. No no no. It's Us-versus-Them and it's also Them-versus-Them, but ultimately it's Good-versus-Evil, and I can envisage precisely zero problems arising from this viewpoint in the decades and centuries to come. Just chill, please.

So then, the crux of it all. One question. Should we bomb the bad guys?

Well. Plenty of people are saying we should try other means, for example closing the bad guys' supply routes, cutting off their methods of weapon accretion, helping stabilise the surrounding region so suppressed Sunnis don't feel as if a radical extremist group is the only sympathetic shoulder to which they can turn. But to this I say: well, actually you're right. But that all takes a long time. We need to do something now! We need to do whatever is immediate, regardless of whether it will help or just make things way way worse in the long run. And you know what is immediate? Bombs. Brimstone. Motherfucking RAPTORS and STEGOSAURI and FIRE-BREATHING GOLEMS and shit. We can unleash these bad boys tomorrow. Today. Right now! Let's get going. Huzzah!

***

Does all this sound good to you? Because it is essentially what our prime minister just said to the major legislative body of this country. Which makes it what he just said to us. Do you agree with him? Do you see any holes in his logic? Do you, perhaps, kind of want to know more information before you agree to rain fire down upon a country of mostly not-terrorists, many of whom, despite empty assurances to the contrary, will be killed, in awful and bloody and painful ways? Not that I am telling you what to think, here -- just that I reckon you should.

Wednesday Thursday Reviews

Yes, it's late. The world is full of disappointments. Suck it up.

You know how occasionally you haven't seen a thing that most people have seen? A film or TV show? It happens. Life is short, the world is large, and distractions abound. The usual way of it is that someone will be quoting from the thing you haven't seen, while let's say chuckling doltishly to themselves, perhaps dribbling a little spittle down their chins and rolling their overly-moist eyes up into their skulls and rocking on the spot through the sheer delight of remembering something they liked. And you'll have to interrupt them and say, "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I haven't seen [whatever the thing is you haven't seen that most people have seen]." And they'll stare at you, and then reply, eight octaves too high, in a voice fairly drowning in incredulity, "You haven't seen [whatever the thing is]?" And you'll say, "Uhh, yeah, as I just said, I haven't seen [whatever the thing is]." And they'll stare at you some more, and then say, "You're seriously telling me you've never seen [whatever the thing]?" And you'll say, "Yep, that's what I'm saying." And they'll say, "What, like, never?" And this will go on for four and a half hours. And finally you'll say, "Look. This isn't some elaborate ruse. I'm not trying to trick you. Why can't you understand? I've just never seen [whatever], is all. Okay?" And they'll glance around, momentarily lost in an alien world where nothing makes sense to them any more... and then they'll recognise a friend in the distance, and they'll shout, "Kev, here, Kev, you will never bloody believe what this person hasn't seen!"

Anticipating a veritable slew of such lively back-and-forths with the release this week of a big-budget Mad Max videogame, and the knowledge that I'd never seen a single shoulder-padded, leather-lined, gas-guzzling minute of any of the Mad Max films, I went away and watched all of them. Every one. So now I'm just like you. We're the same. We're all morons together.

Here are some words from my brain about the different Mad Maxes:

Mad Max 1 (aka Mad Max)

This film is weird. For something called "Mad Max" it isn't very madmaxian. I don't know anything about Mad Max and even I can see that. There are barely any shoulder pads. There's not much sand, and what sand there is is on a beach, for Gibson's sake. Max hardly even gets mad -- and when he does he proceeds to get shot in the knee and then run over. Maybe it was the tightness of his leather trousers clouding his judgement.

There are lots of cars, and a smorgasbord of gay bikers, so it's not all bad, but still this is a disappointing experience.

People tend to think of this first film less in its own right and more as the piece that spawned a series, filtered through public consciousness, and influenced every post-apocalyptic movie, book, and videogame that came afterwards -- but it was also the inspiration, via its final scene involving a gruesome death trap, for the entirety of the Saw franchise, so good fucking going, I guess, guys.

Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior)

Better. Dwindling resources, car fetishes, a hellish wasteland picked clean by a mankind eking out a grim existence in its final twilight days. It's like a Friday night in insert-name-of-smallish-town-near-your-town-here. Hey-o!

The film is frequently silly, often camp, and firmly a product of the 80s, but it's interesting nonetheless. Co-writer/director/creator George Miller has an idiosyncratic style that starts to shine through the more of these you watch. I can never tell whether he's better or worse than I expected him to be. In some ways Road Warrior is utterly in thrall to common action-movie tropes, in others it cynically subverts them. The plot is mostly clichéd and predictable, but then something you hadn't anticipated will happen and you'll find yourself knocked for six. There are frequent elements that aren't quite satisfying -- stretches without Max that would be referred to in screenwriting workshops as POV issues, story beats unfolding without fanfare, misalignments of the archetypal hero's journey -- and you're never (or at least I wasn't) sure how much it's intended.

The end result, though, is a film that's unlike any other genre work of the period, and vastly more intriguing than the bland written-by-committee fare of today, polished pablum where every script element performs exactly as expected and nothing ever surprises. This at least is markedly its own beast.

One other thing I liked: Max is rarely heroic, but when he is his heroism is real, i.e. it entirely eschews fame or recognition or reward. This makes him come across stranger and sadder and ultimately more human than his action-film counterparts, those strutting suave cool guys whose hair styles and demeanours and entire performances are exactly that: performance, an act, bravery designed to be seen, theatre intended to be maximally appealing to us the audience sat safely at home watching the good guys always triumph, allowing ourselves to believe this is what the world is like. Max isn't about that. Max survives, he does what he has to, and if his humanity is occasionally awoken and he helps others then he doesn't do it with a cocksure grin and a glint of whitened teeth and an adjustment of his cufflinks -- he does it after weighing up the cost to himself, looking inside to see whether he actually still cares about people, and then helping them for their sake, not his. In the wasteland, we sense, people become who they really are.

Mad Max 3 (aka Beyond Turnerdome)

Larger than Road Warrior but also less focused, more child and box-office friendly. The one where they went Hollywood, essentially. If the previous films' plots were predicated upon some weird internal logic that you could never tell whether it was actually logic or just inexperienced filmmaking, but screw it it was interesting, then Beyond Turnerdome feels like a film made with extensive input from the suits. Max meets a gaggle of kids who're basically the proto-Lost-Boys from Hook (seriously, what with Hook and Waterworld, and like every Saturday morning adventure cartoon, my childhood owes far more to Mad Max than I was aware), and it's hard to believe all these children weren't inserted to help skewer the succulent PG-13 market -- especially as the film progresses and you realise no one is dying, or if they are it's mostly off-screen where maybe they fell off the cliff into some water and they're all right, who knows, don't think about it kids.

The set design is gorgeous, though edging into self-parody. The plot has its moments, and the proto-Lost-Boys were at least unexpected, but there are inconsistencies and contrivances everywhere. Characters are forever collapsing in the middle of nowhere and then conveniently being stumbled upon and saved when they're on the verge of death. The good guys get themselves into situations they could never survive, but then by some fluke they surely couldn't have been planning for do end up surviving. And all roads apparently lead to Barter Town, the lavish main setting but what would realistically only be an insignificant blip in an endless desert were it not for having cost so much to build and maximum screen time needing to be squeezed from it. The chase scene is rubbish as well.

Though on the other hand, the shoulder-pad quotient is through the roof, and it's got Tina Turner in it. A solid 3/5 Gibsons.

Mad Max: Fury Road (aka Mad Max 4?)

The last chronologically, but the first I watched. I didn't understand any it of out of context, so I went back and watched it again after the others. It's good. It's really good.

It's one long chase sequence, essentially, a high-speed, white-knuckle blast of bright, kinetic action, the camera soaring and swooping around clunky Frankensteinian vehicles hurtling across the desert spitting fumes, careening into one another, exploding in gorgeous orange blooms against a fiery Valhallan sky. Fury Road's world is an unforgiving one, filled with the twisted and mistreated, almost everyone in some way damaged, deformed, suppurating, broken. It is quite the marvel, a vision exquisite in its grotesqueness.

And again those same Miller touches, the idiosyncrasies in plotting, the subversion of tropes, producing, as with Road Warrior before it, an action film dazzlingly different from its contemporaries.

The Max of this film is barely introduced before he is captured, bound, shaved, muzzled, and branded; his trusty V-8 Interceptor is destroyed, and he is left rotting in the fortress of a cult leader whose front-line-fodder band of war boys use Max as a universal donor to refill their sickly and presumably irradiated blood.

This sense of weakness, disempowerment, emasculation is hardly a typical way to showcase your protagonist -- and nor is it the shocking abuse that justifies the later bloodlust of a revenge thriller: Max does finally escape, but only to fall into more mishaps, to struggle onwards, to continue doggedly surviving.

Dialogue is sparse, characterisation minimal, but with the confidence of something that knows the right word or action can imply so much more than a million clumsy words or actions can state. Charlize Theron is brilliant as Furiosa, the fleeing lieutenant that the cult leader sends his war boys -- and by extension their blood-bag, Max -- to reclaim. Furiosa has a stump for an arm, a shaved head, grime all over her; nothing about her is glamourous or sexualised. She looks precisely as old as Theron is (late-30s considering the few years the film spent in post-production), and she radiates beauty, strength, depth, and occasional vulnerability. Tom Hardy is a good Max, skittering and twitchy, a man reduced to an insect-level existence, living moment to moment, yet sometimes finding scraps of his old humanity not yet peeled away by the blowing winds and burning sands. His Australian accent is the pits, but that's my only complaint.

There's an excellent three-way fight between Furiosa and Max and the emaciated war boy who Max is chained to (played with wide-eyed lunacy and a touch of sweetness by About a Boy's Nicholas Hoult). The upper-hand belongs to one, then the other, then another, no one is quite sure whose side anyone is on, and it's all filmed to be violent, clumsy, slightly humourous, and hard to predict. And this is the larger film, too. A riotous journey, brutal, unique and unrelenting. A fitting return: the best of the lot, I reckon.

Now I wonder what that videogame is like...

Wednesday Reviews

The Wolverine

Hey, pachinkos! Am I calling you traditional Japanese betting games involving rains of metal balls there to insinuate you're all nothing but endless gaping maws into which our culture's wealth is squandered? As a memento mori to remind us that, despite our best efforts to catch them, the moments of our lives slip through our fingers like so many tinkling orbs? Or maybe I'm implying that you regularly get fondled in harshly lit back-alley amusement arcades by desperate old men with pocketfuls of loose change? Actually I was doing none of the above, but merely introducing the theme of Japan as a soft lede for this review of 2013's Tokyo-set superhero film The Wolverine. And though that wouldn't have been enough to work by itself, all this meta commentary has just about provided the necessary opening. Who said you can't have your cake and eat it, too? You just have to be able to put up with a cake that tastes faintly of self-loathing. But then doesn't everything, eh?

So, The Wolverine. After subjecting myself to the soggy, insipid mess of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (or X-Miaow, for sort of short) last week, you'd be forgiven for thinking I'm some kind of perverted sadist for rushing headlong into this with nary the time to wipe the tears from my home-made latex Wolverine costume. But I'm not. This film is an attempt to right the wrongs of X-Miaow, directed by James Mangold (of Cop Land and Walk the Line fame), with a story inspired by a much-loved comic book run from the 80s -- and it's only bloody brilliant.

Well, it's all right. It's way more involved and assured -- from the opening shot you feel safe in  Mangold's experienced hands -- and it's made by a bunch of people you can just tell all actually give a damn about doing justice to the character and underlying mythos.

Where X-Miaow tried to colour in the gaps in the canvas of the established cinematic canon, and ended up smudging the lines, drawing over bits that were better to begin with, then spilling a pot of paint all down its trousers, The Wolverine opts instead to rip its character from the old canvas and dump him in a new scene and see what happens. It's typical fish-out-of-water stuff as the gruff, no-nonsense Wolverine gets transported to a Japan dictated by custom, tradition, and the ever-looming presence of the Yakuza -- and the contrast between character and setting is used to paint the clearest portrait of old Claw-Hands yet put to film.

Mangold has fun with the tropes, as does the ever-enthusiastic Hugh Jackman, archly beefed up here for his, what, like sixtieth outing as Wolvy? The character fits as comfortably on Jackman as the familiarly faded denims; you can tell he relishes the role, clearly enjoying himself while working hard to stay true to the source material.

The film begins with a weathered and world-weary Wolverine living rough in the mountains, having hung up his claws and abandoned the superhero life following the events of X-Men 3. But though one particular memory weighs heavily on him, and was certainly the catalyst for his change, this is not the whole picture. More, we get the sense of an old soldier who has experienced too much killing, a man sick of who he was born to be and the only thing he knows how to do, worn down, past caring, not so much consciously running away as having simply accumulated too much shit and finding something deep and automatic within himself has snapped and lead him away from everything he knew. It's Paris, Texas, essentially -- only as far as I remember Harry Dean Stanton never killed a grizzly bear with retractable adamantium claws.

When a feisty Japanese girl with mad katana skills arrives to tell Wolverine that an old friend in Tokyo who is dying wishes to see him one last time, we recognise the herald calling him to adventure. An adventure, we know, that will force him to confront the pain he has been hiding from and offer him an opportunity to rediscover his raison d'etre.

It's pulpy stuff, for sure, but deftly handled, and as Wolverine's plane touches down in Tokyo we find ourselves drawn in.

Sadly, the film doesn't maintain the purity or cohesion for its duration. The plot ceases to make much sense approximately two minutes after arriving in Japan, and the early grittiness gradually gives way to primary-coloured villains, dastardly double-crosses, and the seemingly obligatory CGI-heavy action scenes so overblown as to shatter any suspension of disbelief the actors have worked to engender (though in fairness one fight above a moving bullet train does provide some satisfying physical comedy).

The thing holds together -- there is a nice scene about Nagasaki recovering from the Bomb, and an unexpectedly tender romance -- and the pace picks up after a convoluted second act for a suitably climactic showdown, but here, again, the better character-based drama is overshadowed by secret mountaintop lairs and armies of samurai and battles with ten-foot-tall chrome warriors wielding magma swords.

The film has done enough for us to stay invested to the end, but it's a shame that something that began like an accomplished graphic novel would turn out to be more of a children's comic. A well-constructed comic, replete with sufficient pay-offs and successful character arcs, but one that in the end finds far less to say than it made you hope for.

But maybe I'm asking too much. This is still a boisterous and enjoyable superhero movie that never takes itself too seriously while taking its duty to its fans very seriously indeed. The characters are believable -- the inclusion of a number of female leads who exist outside and above their relation to the male characters shouldn't need to but does deserve mention -- the script is tight, and Mangold directs with a steady hand. For better or worse, you can tell everyone involved in the production of The Wolverine really cared about bringing to life the story of an indestructible metal-clawed mutant. And their passion will make you care, too.

And that's enough superhero films for me for the moment, I reckon. See you on Friday! x

Wednesday Reviews

I'll put that diary up on Friday, but for now here are some musings about a film I watched, to keep you occupied...

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Deadpool, then, eh? Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool. All anyone seems to be banging on about these days. But what is a Deadpool? For the uninitiated, he's the star of the leak of a teaser for a trailer for a new Marvel film that's coming out, and the internet is very excited about him and which of his quirky catchphrases he'll be repeating when the real teaser for the trailer for the new Marvel film is finally released. On tenterhooks myself, I tell ya. But not personally knowing quirky-catchphrase one for this Deadpool chap, I thought I'd investigate X-Men Origins: Wolverine, an X-Men spin-off prequel (sprequel? prequoff?) from 2009, in which Deadpool features as a side character and has his origins explained. 

Except after sitting through two hours of flaccid, cliché-ridden dirge I went on Wikipedia to discover that, although the upcoming Deadpool film stars the same actor, playing the same character, in the same cinematic universe, the film-makers have completely re-imagined his back-story for the new film, making the crap I watched even more irrelevant than it already blatantly was. Which is nice.

X-MO:W (does that work?), then, tells the story of a young Wolverine (he's the angry one with the metal claws) and how he became Wolverine. Except that was sort of already covered in previous X-Men films, and what's added here doesn't make any sense if you think about it too much. It's like they've taken a rather nice painting -- no Monet, but I thought Bryan Singer's X-Men films had heart -- and tried to colour in the gaps, but ended up going over the lines here and there and smudging some of the original work. At best you'd say the new stuff has no real reason to exist; at worst it ruins your impression of the original.

We open with Kiddie-Wolverine running away from home with his brother, who possesses similar powers of regeneration and cool slashy attacks. This is all in Olden Times, by the way, for it turns out Wolverine is dead old, and over the opening credits we see a montage of the brothers fighting back-to-back (that's their thing) in the American Civil War, the Trenches, the beach scene from Saving Private Ryan, and Vietnam. The two leap about, bop baddies on the heads, shrug off bullets -- it seems war is loads of fun when you've got bone claws and can't be killed.

Apparently Brother-Wolverine likes war a little too much, though. We can tell because he keeps gunning people down he doesn't need to while grinning maniacally. You're supposed to slash their faces off while looking miserable, you muppet!

It all goes too far -- and too Casualties-of-War -- when Broverine attempts to rape a young girl in Vietnam, then viciously attacks the G.I.s who tell him that's not such a hot idea. Wolvy rushes to Brovy's defence -- Brovy's a nutter but they're bro-bears, what you gonna do? -- and so they're both carted off to face the firing squad together. Which set piece might prove more dramatic if we didn't already know that neither of them gives a shit about being shot. "Wake me up when it's done," Broverine whispers. Yeah, ditto.

So the credits end, and we're into the film proper, as a shady military dude comes to visit the boys in prison (hey, they survived the firing squad!). Military Dude says his name is Stryker, who we remember as the bad meister from X-Men 2, only here he's younger and not played by Brian Cox (the actor, not the physicist -- though there's an idea for casting!). Stryker asks what the firing squad was like, and Wolverine replies that it "tickled", and they all have a big laugh, and the brothers go off with Stryker to join his mutant black ops squad, and the traumatised Vietnamese girl and the dead G.I.s are conveniently forgotten. Casualties of war indeed.

The black ops squad is called Team X (they love their Xs!), and is comprised exclusively of Glowering Men. There's the one who likes swords (this is Deadpool, but he's not Deadpool yet, he's just called Wade), there's the Chinese one, the big one, the one who's Merry from The Lord of the Rings -- whose singular role in the gang is to fly the plane with his mind, which is cool and all, but I reckon a regular pilot would have been cheaper -- and there's William.

Sorry, "will.i.am". This is tricky, because on the one hand his name is his property and it's a bit harsh on him to refuse to call him whatever makes him happy, but on the other hand it's a bit harsh on the fucking English language to spell your name all in lowercase with full stops everywhere, so I don't know.

Anyway, William can disappear and reappear somewhere else, which I'm sure I've seen at least six mutants do in these films already, and he also likes cowboy hats.

Team X engage in some Witty Banter in the back of the plane for a while (during which time I imagine Merry being like, "Haha yeah good one, well yo' momma is so fat she-- oh shit I forgot I was meant to be flying this plane, we almost crashed into the ocean there, haha, oh well, jokes"), then they go assassinate a bunch of Nigerians. They're (Team X are) after a chunk of meteorite that later turns out to be the stuff Wolverine's metal claws get made out of, but no one in the film seems to care much, and neither do we.

Wolverine decides to abandon the gang here because of all the assassinating, which I guess he didn't sign up to this black ops squad for, and goes off to become a Canadian lumberjack and fall in love with a hot Native American girl instead. Which is fair enough, really.

All goes swimmingly, for a time, until Broverine reappears and murders Native American bae, but not before bae can spout some faux-ancestral folk tale about a mythical wolverine that TOTALLY WON'T BE SYMBOLIC LATER ON.

Wolverine gets pretty miffed about what's happened to bae, so goes to find Broverine and duke it out -- though, just to reiterate once again, neither of them can die. They punch each other for a while, neither of them dies, and then Broverine leaves. Wolverine gets taken to hospital with multiple stab wounds, the doctors think he's going to die, but then he doesn't die.

Stryker comes to visit Wolverine in hopsital and tells him he should let him inject his body with metal from the meteorite so that it'll fuse with his (Wolverine's) skeleton, because that's the only way they can defeat Broverine. It's pretty clear the real reason is so that Stryker can do Nefarious Things, but maybe Wolverine has taken a few too many knocks to the head because he looks at Stryker stood there trying not to like cackle evilly to himself and shrugs and goes, "Yeah, sure, whatever. YOLO, eh?"

So Wolverine gets a shiny metal skeleton instead of the stupid bony one the rest of us have to make do with, but then while he's still strapped in the injecty tank and unconscious Stryker is suddenly all like, "Cool, now to erase his memory and extract his DNA in order to make an even more powerful mutant," -- except Wolverine is only pretending to be asleep, and he leaps up and is all: "Oh, thou Icarian fool, blinded by hubris, unable to feel satisfied with the perfectly adequate super-regenerative metal-bodied mutant you possessed, you wanted more -- but now, just as Icarus's wings were melted by the sun, so shall your face be melted by my kick-ass adamantium claws, bitch!"

... Which is to say, he breaks free and slashes some guards and runs away to hide in a barn.

Look, how much more of this do you need? X-Miaow (for thus it shall be named) is not good. It slouches on for another hour of insipid dialogue, nonsensical plot twists and surprisingly incompetent CGI-based action scenes. Wolverine discovers that Broverine and Stryker are in cahoots, and goes off with William and another mutant we don't care about about in order to set things right. William gets killed and the newly-introduced mutant does nothing at all. Wolverine has a fight with Wade, who's now called Deadpool and has everyone else's powers (gets retconned though, so nm). Wolverine doesn't fare too well (though, again, can't be killed), but then Broverine turns up and they fight back-to-back (like at the start!) against Deadpool, because Broverine doesn't want anyone killing Wolverine but himself. Deadpool gets decapitated, all the characters who survive into the other films leave, and then Wolverine gets his memory wiped so the plots of the other films can make any kind of sense.

It's all just so limp, so long and loud and dull. The script is the main offender, carelessly derivative and filled with characters flatter than the pages they've been pulled from. The direction is tolerable but uninspired -- Gavin Hood keeps all the elements together but displays little love for the source material, giving the impression of moving from Tsotsi and Rendition to this popcorn-fare not because of care for the character, but because it was a job.

A good superhero film should explore bold themes of heroism, redemption and sacrifice, with costumes and villains and explosions all supersized to match. There's little of that here. Wolverine isn't even heroic. The only time his actions are motivated by anything other than revenge or self-interest is when he lets some mutant children out of a cage Stryker has imprisoned them within. But Wolverine is stood right there at the time -- he doesn't even have to find a key or anything, he just slashes the cages with his claws. It's the equivalent of a multimillionaire giving a fiver to charity.

All of which is a shame, because there is the shadow of a better film hiding somewhere within this detritus. According to Hood, he wanted to make Wolverine a war veteran suffering PTSD, but executives dismissed the idea because they thought it would bore the audience. How sad, because I can totally see how that would have worked. Wolverine as a mutant murder machine, used as a weapon in America's wars for a century, physically indestructible but slowly accumulating the psychic burden of so much killing. The film following his struggles to free himself both from the shackles of government control and from his own violent, primal urges. These struggles would be neatly embodied in Wolverine's relationship with his brother, a mutant who embraced and revelled in his nature where Wolverine repressed it. The two would periodically clash in snarling, frenetic duels where the brother's savagery would initially give him the edge, until Wolverine learned to accept his inner rage and integrate it within his greater being, becoming both the Animal and the Man holding its leash, able to use his violence without being used by it.

Sadly, the suits that sign the checks decided to go in a different direction. Their approach wasn't a failure, at least from a commercial standpoint -- the film more than made back its budget -- but then we're judging the film as a product to be bought and sold rather than as a story with the power to speak to something inside us, to make us better people. Earning a few dollars for your studio is hardly the worst thing in the world, but it's not very heroic, either.