I was going to write about Minority Report, but Jonathan has already made many of the same points – so read him instead.

I will say this though: some of the early scenes were a little bit difficult to follow without some prior knowledge of the plot. So if, like me, you’re someone who avoids reading film reviews in case they spoil the surprise, I do recommend you make an exception in this case.

Great blockbusting entertainment that, like The Matrix before it, will clean up on DVD; this is one of those richly detailed movies that will bear up to repeated viewing. A big Troubled Diva thumbs-up, then.

Sex and Lucia was great as well, in an entirely different way. A complex story, cleverly told and beautifully shot, with the narrative jumping forwards and backwards in time, and deftly mixing fact and fiction. But crumbs, just how rude was it? Lady bits, stiff willies – the lot! Missus!

For most of the day, the guy from Tech Support in Liverpool has been trying to remotely install various pieces of software on my machine. The phone rings again.

“Hi, T.”

“Hello again, Mike. Sorry about all this. I’m going to try something else now.” Pause. “Are you married?”

(Slightly too sharply) “No - why?”

(Slightly sheepishly) “Oh…er…it’s just that we’ve spent so much time on the phone to each other today, that I thought you might want to invite me over to your place, and have the wife cook us a meal, like.” Weak nervous laugh.

I laugh back, even more weakly, just to be polite.

“Sorry – personal question. Shouldn’t have asked that. Sorry.”

(Casually) “That’s alright…”

The installation continues. T now has remote control over my machine, under my User ID. He opens up Internet Explorer.

“Right – we just need to check whether you can still access external sites. Let’s see…”

He clicks the down arrow next to my Address window. A list comes up of the last 14 web sites that I have visited.

Oh God, no, please.

He starts moving down the list, looking for something to click on. He is moving down the list far too slowly for my liking. I feel my face burning.

He gets to http://troubled-diva.blogspot.com. Pauses, moves past. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

A couple of lines below, one particular URL screams out of the screen at me: http://searchforlove.blogspot.com. He knows I’m not married. He thinks he overstepped the mark by asking me. And now, he’ll be putting two and two together, and making five, and thinking I’m the sort of sad lonely person who goes “searching for love” in office time. There’s nothing I can say.

He gets to Google, and clicks. I breathe out.

North A House, The Leys School, Trumpington Road, Cambridge. 1974-1979.
Transient Workforces, Living at their Place of Work

Boarding school did not suit me well. Trapped for weeks on end with the same group of people, under the same roof, the constant casual cruelties of adolescence were both magnified and intensified – causing me much quiet suffering.

As prisons go, this one was not without some external architectural merit. An ivy-clad, late Victorian brick building, North A House looked out over a neatly lawned quadrangle, bordered on its other sides by a classroom block, the school dining hall and the school chapel – all of the same vintage. The overall effect aspired to evoke the atmosphere of a Cambridge college, with some degree of success.

Inside, we graduated through the house with each passing year: from shared dorms and common rooms, through to shared studies, and finally to individual studies with beds. With no locks on the study doors, privacy was minimal, hearty communality being the prescribed order. The overall look was, as in most boarding schools, plain and institutional; in contrast, every available inch of wall space in every study was plastered with posters and magazine pages. The reigning favourites: Roger Dean album covers, pin-ups of Charlie’s Angels (Farrah, Jaclyn and Kate), and fag-end-of-hippydom posters ordered from the back pages of the NME.

As the stock representative of authority in the building, our housemaster never really stood a chance. Never mind the fact that he had been forced to leave South Africa after refusing to racially segregate his classes – all we cared about was his insistence on upholding petty rules and regulations, his cheese-paring obsession with small economies, and (most fatally of all) his involuntary nervous twitch. He did his best under difficult circumstances, but remained a tense, suspicious figure whose occasional attempts at cheery bonhomie always struck a false note with us.

My abiding memories of North A: the smell of dirty laundry, piled up for collection on Monday nights – the scrum round the toasters in the basement at break time – the fetid atmosphere of the TV room, packed on Thursday evenings for Top Of The Pops – the mad dash for the morning post – the marathon “round the table” ping pong sessions – the gramophone in the common room – the schoolgirls on the afternoon bus who we all waved to for a couple of weeks, leaning out of our study windows – the water bombs – the pillow fights – the morning wake-up bell – struggling with the trunks at the end of term – and not knowing which was worse: term-times or holidays.

Jump to next station.

Labels: stations

First Sasha and Francis, then Fraser, and now Peter - all officially recommended by Guardian Unlimited. Congratulations to all.

Incredibly rare MP3s from Old Mother Ritchie, including unreleased songs. How frustrating that I can't download them until this evening. However, Dymbel recommends:
- Revenge, a fully produced song which didn't make it onto Ray Of Light.
- Gone Gone Gone.
- the original demo for Substitute For Love - "fascinatingly different", he says.

Y0rk House, Blyth, W0rksop, N0tts. 1965-1981.
Wealthy Suburbs, Large Detached Houses

The second house I ever lived in also had a name, not a number. As a young boy, I couldn’t imagine ever living in a house with a mere number attached to it. People who lived in houses with numbers on them weren’t really our sort of people; they spoke with accents. My father created a scarlet Dymo label for the new house, and stuck it on the front gates: Y0RK HOUSE FORMERLY THISBE FORMERLY THE HAVEN.

In actual fact – as my grandmother told me many years later – my father nearly fainted when Y0rk House went to him at auction, as he wasn’t at all sure whether he actually wanted it or not. As it was, this random capriciousness on his part ended up providing me with my main home address for the next 16 years.

Y0rk House had a vast garden, with an orchard and a paddock. There were figs, walnuts, mulberries, apples, pears, damsons, gooseberries, elderberries, raspberries – and chickens, which we had inherited from the previous owners. In the time we had them, the chickens only ever managed to lay one egg between them; this was treated as a minor miracle. We got rid of them after a year or so.

The garden had many different areas, and I took great delight in wandering round and naming them all. At the age of seven or eight, I devised an imaginary tube map, which linked all the areas of the garden together in an elaborate network of lines. I would then pace round the garden, constructing imaginary tube journeys, changing lines at various stations and so on. The garden had become a rich source of material for my private imagination, which was growing ever more powerful. Other children might have had an imaginary best friend; by now, I had an entire imaginary parallel city - then country - then world. It didn’t just have a tube system; it had TV stations, pop charts, celebrities, warring nations, a history, and even separate languages. I wrote and drew comics, TV guides, pop charts, history books, and – believe it or not – school text books for my new imaginary languages. I had particular fun devising the irregular verbs, which were as far out and irregular as I could possibly make them.

Somehow, I was aware that my fantasy life had become a little odd. I kept nearly all of this strictly to myself. I didn’t want anyone to find out what I was up to.

My new room was very big, with lino on the floor, a huge toy cupboard, and a set of Matryoshka dolls on the chest of drawers beside my bed. I loved being in my room. As the years went by, I loved being in my room more and more. After my parents split up, and my mother moved out, and my father’s temper grew worse, my room became my sanctuary against the outside world. After my father remarried, and my stepmother moved in with her three children, my room became my only remaining place of refuge. I sat on my bed for hours on end, with my albums and my pop magazines, and lost myself in music.

Y0rk House stayed in the family as I left home, followed in turn by my sister and our three step-siblings. When my father died, my stepmother stayed on, remarrying a couple of years later. Her new husband was greeted with a certain amount of suspicion in some quarters of the village. One day, shortly after moving in, he took a pot of red paint and daubed, in large letters above the kitchen sink: I AM NEVER LEAVING YOU. IF ANYONE SHOULD DOUBT IT, LET THEM READ THIS. The letters remained there after his death from cancer less than two years later, and right up to my stepmother’s death three years after that.

In the 34 years that Y0rk House remained in our family, almost no structural maintenance ever took place. By the time it came up for sale in 1999, it was in a truly dreadful state of repair, suffering from chronic damp and in need of a new roof. It sold for a fraction of its true original worth. I saw too much misery, rage and sorrow there to retain many fond memories of the building, which is still being renovated by its new owners. I wish it happier times ahead.

Jump to next station.

Labels: stations

Two differing anti-Pride rants from pissed-off Yank fags: one from Michael (via David), and the other from Jhames (via Duncan).

I agree with Jhames more than I agree with Michael. And yet, I agree with both. And yet, I agree with neither. In as much as I have any residual feelings about the big Pride events, those feelings remain...mixed. Fine for those who want to be there - but No Longer For Me, and (unarguably?) Not What They Used To Be. These days, I tend more towards the local, smaller scale, non-corporate, community-based Pride events, which for me still retain some of the original spirit.

Speaking of Duncan (and it's high time we did, because I've been watching him off and on for ages), he has a couple of spiffing Johnny Gielgud anecdotes which I hadn't heard before. No, not just that "umbrella story" - a couple of new ones.

Puncknowle, Plantation Avenue, Bessacarr, Doncaster. 1962-1965.
Wealthy Suburbs, Large Detached Houses

The first house I ever lived in had a name, not a number. Puncknowle was the name of the village in Dorset where my mother and father first met – at a regimental ball, while my father was completing his national service. Puncknowle (pronounced to rhyme with “funnel”) was a neat and tidy post-war bungalow, situated on a quiet, leafy lane on the outskirts of town. The ideal starter home for a smart young couple, freshly returned from their society wedding in London.

A pair of potted hydrangeas sat on either side of the front door. There was a rose garden off to the right, with tall roses that seemed to me like trees. Behind the bungalow, a lawned area led down to a compost heap and a small ditch at the bottom of the garden. I liked this area the best. It was my territory: wilder, more interesting, less boringly formal, where I could indulge my already fertile imagination, and lose myself in elaborate fantasies.

Although we left the house when I was only three and a half years old (on September 13, 1965 – the date has always stuck with me), I have strong and detailed visual memories of most of the house – except for my parents’ bedroom, which for some strange reason I cannot remember at all. There were stairs leading up to a loft, and to my baby sister’s bedroom – ideal for throwing myself down when she returned from hospital, in a bid to regain some attention for myself.

One morning, my father came to the breakfast table, his face beaming, bringing me exciting news. We were moving! To a large house, with a big garden, in a village called Blyth! I had never heard of Blyth before. I knew that London existed, and Sheffield, and Cornwall (we had all been to Cornwall). But that was about as far as my universe stretched. Twelve miles away from Puncknowle, Blyth was something new entirely. My father’s excitement was infectious. This would be a new adventure.

Jump to next station.

Labels: stations

It has been a good long while since I last read a newspaper story which made me feel quite this angry, despairing, and helpless. In fact, I was beginning to think I had lost the capacity. Where are the cheap drugs, where are the condoms, where is the health education - and where is the urgency, for pity's sake? I cannot think of a bigger indictment of global capitalism than this.

I have work!

After nine days on the subs' bench, wallowing in indolent surfing and revelling in my sheer economic superfluity, I have finally been given a small job to do. Just as I was about to embark upon a Major Writing Project, as well.

No doubt the Major Writing Project will seep through the cracks, though. It is of the episodic kind, which therefore lends itself quite well to seepage.

Right. Time to crack those knuckles, to roll up those sleeves, and to justify my existence on the payroll.

To work!

Culled from today’s local rag, this made me laugh. But then, the central figure of the story always makes me laugh. I’m not always subtle and sophisticated, I’ll have you know....

Wa-hey! The meme is spreading! Presenting: the Top Ten Australian Weblogs on Blogdex.

(Via Luke, who is at #5 on both this list and my UK list.)

Blimey! K's tale of taxi-to-Leipzig misery, which I blogged about on June 10th, has now made it to the Business Diary section of today's Nottingham Evening Post. We're such a high-profile media couple these days.

As I wouldn't know a "wireless network" if it leapt up and bit me on the bottom, all this endless recent talk about warchalking has left me stone cold. What I find much more interesting is that leaving chalk or coal marks on buildings turns out to be nothing new. Early in the 20th century, American tramps and hobos had devised a similar system of signs, which they left for each other as a means of communicating important information. Take a look at them (you can hover over each symbol to discover its meaning), then take a look at some more recent additions.

Is nothing sacred?

From The Doors official website (via Popbitch)...In case you can't quite believe what you've just read, perhaps I should run that past you one more time. That dodgy old Goth Ian bloody Astbury, formerly lead singer with The Cult, is the new lead singer with The Doors. Ye gods!

Fraser has come up with Blogpop, which is his own Top 30 UK Blogs list, based on traffic (via Alexa) rather than links. This makes for a fascinating comparison with my own Top 40, as it reads very differently indeed.

Two caveats: blogs are only ranked which have been registered on the GBlogs list, and Blogspot hosted blogs are excluded (for reasons which I discussed a few days ago).

Update: When perusing Blogpop, be sure to mentally insert Naked Blog at #21 - see the comments for an explanation.

Folks, this is what happens when you fluke your way onto Blogdex for the day...



There is clearly something wrong with Blogdex right now, as I spent a large part of today at #2 in the rankings on the strength of just two links - and I'm still at #24 and #25 even now. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. Oh no. Far from it...

So, all you stats whores, listen up and listen good! Exploit the system while you can! Pool those links, and ride that wave! Cheap day returns to the A-list have never come so cheap, and they may not ever come this cheap again. So get linking! Work that hole!

Update: Too late. Normal service has more or less been resumed.

The Troubled Diva Old Curiosity Box - Item 26.
Subsonic 2 - Addicted To Music (1991)

The Troubled Diva Old Curiosity Box - Item 27.
Billy Preston - Will It Go Round In Circles? (1973)An unjustly forgotten single from 1991, which missed the charts entirely, Addicted To Music will strike a chord deep in the heart of anyone who, like me, takes a perverse delight in filing their music collection in alphabetical order.

It was only many years later that I discovered the wonderful Billy Preston track which provides its main sample. Some of you may already be familiar with the cover version of Will It Go Round In Circles? on the most recent Jools Holland album, with vocals by Paul Weller. Well - forget that version, and feast your ears on this instead.

Update: Sorry - you weren't quick enough. These MP3s are no longer on my server. I generally make them available for a week or so (sometimes less) before substituting them for new ones. Better luck next time!

About two years ago, at Dymbellina’s spontaneous “I got the job!” midweek house party (aren’t spontaneous parties always the best?), I found myself talking to a locally based screenwriter and playwright of some repute. Asking him what he was currently working on, he replied that he was in the process of writing a TV drama based on the recently convicted serial killer Harold “Doctor Death” Shipman.

What I wanted to ask him at the time was this. How could he justify turning so much freshly minted human misery into mass market entertainment? I had absolutely no doubt that he could have provided me with a considered, convincing reply – but I also had no wish to be so confrontational on such a happy occasion, and so confined myself to nodding, smiling, congratulatory noises. But I was curious, none the less.

I had forgotten all about this exchange until this morning. In today’s Guardian, there is a lengthy article by the very same fellow, all about the very same drama: Shipman, which screens on Tuesday July 9 at 21:00 on ITV1. Finally, my questions are answered - in the considered, convincing manner which I had expected, but with far more forceful vigour and moral power than I had bargained for. I am glad I kept my impertinent trap shut two years ago, and I am now looking forward immensely to watching the drama next Tuesday night.

Update: The transmission date has now been corrected: the play screens on Tuesday July 9, not this Friday.

On Hydragenic (surely bound for that Fab Forty any day now, if there is any justice in the world) Stuart asks: What do you fear most?

Tapping out my answer in his comments box, I surprised myself with a sudden revelation - which (particularly in the absence of the Heavy Duty Personal Shit which used to characterise this here blog), I feel like sharing with you now.

Enclosed in yesterday’s Observer: a daft little picture book, intended for British travellers abroad. Containing 1200 photos of every item imaginable (from tampons to car tyres), the idea is that, when confronted by some ghastly Johnny Foreigner type who can’t speaka da lingo, our intrepid Brit can then point at the desired object instead. Images irresistibly spring to mind of a throng of red-faced Basil Fawlty types, all jabbing furiously at pictures of Waldorf Salads.

I also can’t help feeling that some of the photographed objects are somewhat superfluous: that bottle of Coca-Cola, for instance. Can there be one single human being left on the planet who doesn’t instantly recognise those four syllables? I have visited remote villages in the African bush, where – even if the village consists of no more than half a dozen mud huts – the outside of one of them will still be adorned with a painted Coca-Cola logo, in scale-perfect detail.

However, my absolute favourite section of this absurd little book is the short “Useful Phrases” section on the inside back page. Here, 21 of what are presumably considered to be the most essential phrases of all are listed, with accompanying translations in French, German and Spanish. Read out loud, in sequence, this frankly bizarre selection reads like a strange fractured monologue from a condensed one-act drama which has not yet been written. There is a beautiful arc to the phrases, which could describe an complete evening out on the town – if you were a randy, drunken, possibly drug-f***ed English teenager, that is. Let me quote in full...

HELLO
GOODBYE
WHAT WAS YOUR NAME AGAIN?
I LIKE BOYS
YES
NO
DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?
DO YOU LIKE KISSING?
PLEASE
THANK YOU
I’M LOCKED IN THE LOO
CAN YOU DRINK THE WATER?
MAY I HAVE THE BILL PLEASE?
DO YOU COLLECT STICKERS?
HOW DO I GET TO…?
JUST ONE MORE, PLEASE
MAKE MINE A DOUBLE
CAN WE PLAY NOW?
WHERE CAN I FIND A CUP OF TEA?
PHAT
I CAN’T OPEN THE MINIBAR

As Peter notes on Naked Blog, there has been a distinct shift of emphasis on Troubled Diva in recent weeks. There are fewer personal revelations, more pop-cultural reviews, and more links (mostly to good writing on other blogs).

This shift hasn’t been consciously made – it is merely symptomatic of what is currently going on in my head. Right now, life is stable, simple and secure. Life is pretty bloody good, basically – but slightly devoid of blogworthiness, for all that. However, this period of calm in my inner and outer life does, in turn, give me the mental space to look outwards rather than inwards. Hence all the linking.

As a barometer of my current state of mind, the content of this site has in fact remained more or less entirely consistent. So rest assured: when reality does eventually decide to hot up again, you will be the first people to hear about it. And that’s a promise!

- If you're blind,
- and using a text-only browser like Lynx,
- and browsing a weblog which uses tables,
- and the weblog has a navigation sidebar on the left,
- then the entire contents of the sidebar will be displayed before you get to the main postings,
- meaning that you will have to read the entire sidebar every time you look at the page!

For this reason, I have now moved my navigation sidebar over to the right hand side of the page.

For other ways of making your weblog more accessible, take a look at these suggestions.

What a brilliant way to start a brand new blog. I wish I'd said that, instead of this.

Today's brand new blog: Upside-Down Hippopotamus, which is the nearest thing you'll find to a sister blog for The Search For Love In Manhattan (Oops! I Linked It Again!). It's witty, it's writerly, it's wry. It's spry, it's crisp, it's dry. Although it has only been in operation since June 5th, I predict Great Things Ahead.

On Blogdex, Upside-Down Hippopotamus is currently registered as having just one link. Let this be the second link.

Of course, the Top 40 list you see below is – inevitably – riddled with flaws. Let’s go through them one by one, shall we?

1. Blogdex indexes every link made to a site, but will never remove those links if the linking site in question removes them again, or indeed if the linking site disappears entirely. So, http://www.plasticbag.org/ isn’t actually linked to by 351 currently active weblogs – the true number will be smaller. Therefore, the list can’t be said to be a measure of current popularity, although it could be used as a reasonable measure of all-time popularity. For this reason, longer-established sites will always have an unfair advantage. If Plastic Bag, for whatever reason, suddenly experienced a sharp downturn in popularity, its high ranking would still stand.

2. Blogdex only counts the links made by sites which have themselves registered on Blogdex. This is good, in that those sites will almost certainly be other weblogs. This is bad, because links from non-registered weblogs won’t be counted, and because links won’t be counted from other sites which don’t happen to be weblogs.

3. As I have chosen only to list weblogs which are currently active, this effectively penalises sites which have changed their URLs. Two notable losers under this system are Swish Cottage (which would have ranked at #12 with its old URL), and Ann Elizabeth (which would have ranked at #17 with its old URL of http://www.annelizabeth.co.uk/words/, but which misses the top 40 entirely with its new URL of http://words.annelizabeth.net/).

4. Sites are also penalised which have more than one commonly used URL, as Blogdex maintains separate counts for each. Blogspot hosted sites lose out, as some links will be to http://www.whatever.blogspot.com instead of the more usual http://whatever.blogspot.com. One of the most significant losers under this rule is the unarguably popular Mo Morgan, with 32 links at http://www.momorgan.com and a further 16 links at http://momorgan.com - the combined total of 48 would have placed the site at #30 on the list.

5. So, why haven’t I combined the totals for sites with multiple URLs? Well, apart from being far too much hassle to contemplate, combining the totals would then have run the risk of including duplicate links from the same sites, thus unfairly inflating a site’s score. I would then have had to browse the individual source links for each URL, eliminating duplicates. Frankly, life is too short!

6. You may argue that some of the sites listed do not warrant inclusion. The two Guardian weblogs are very different creatures from the usual “personal publishing” sites. A site like Ellen Stafford’s LiveJournal doesn’t really link out to other sites, and would therefore fail many people’s definition of “weblog”. Lastly, sites like B3TA and Rather Good generally only contain links to other pages on the same site, making the “weblog” element more of a contents directory than anything else. So, why have I included these sites? The answer: I decided to extend my definition of “weblog” to include any regularly updated site whose core element contains entries posted in reverse chronological order. So sue me!

7. I compiled the list by manually working my way through Blogdex, keeping an eye out for familiar names, and opening up any other site which might just possibly contain a UK weblog. Erring on the side of caution, I have now viewed more international weblogs than is strictly good for me. In fact if I ever see one more word written about the Pledge Of Allegiance, or Enron / WorldCom, or one more set of bleedin’ Friday Five answers, then I may not be responsible for my actions. However, with the best will in the world, I might still have missed the odd site here and there. If I have, then please let me know.

Lastly, I have made one happy discovery. On a quiet day, it is possible to get to #2 on Blogdex with just two links! This feels like I have suddenly been granted an off-peak day return ticket to the A-list – for which, of course, I am profoundly and pathetically grateful.

Footnote: the ranking for Troubled Diva? How kind of you to ask:
27 links for http://troubled-diva.blogspot.com
5 links for http://www.troubled-diva.blogspot.com
“Bubbling under”, shall we say?