Yes! It’s official!

I actually feel a little better!!!

Got a fairly decent amount of sleep, and now feel slightly ready to take on the day. I’m still a little suspicious of my head, and I’m still determined to take it as easy as possible today, but I do feel a hundred times better than wen I went to bed.

Saw A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE last night- quite wonderful, even though it’s the least deliberately Cronenberg thing that Cronenberg has done. Other directors could have done it, but they wouldn’t have brought so much genuine humanity and emotion into the story, and they also wouldn’t have tackled the violence with quite such brutal relish. There’s some brilliantly nasty stuff in there.

Also added Nessreader to my list of friends, and slightly despairing of ever reaching the heights of wonderfully venemous strangeness that she reaches on her blog. It’s the kind of diary that you can imagibne people discovering in fifty years and saying “Ah! Now we have ze truth of what life in ze early twenty first century was reaaly like!”, or something. Go check her out. You won’t be disappointed!

Got home last night, and watched more of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets- George went Potter mad earlier in the week and picked up all three films. It’s quite bizarre- Chamber is a much better movie, much better shot, and yet it’s so bloody long! We’d already watched fifty minutes, so we started again, had dinner, sat there for a while- and there was still about 40-50 minutes to go! And the plot didn’t seem to have moved onwards that much! Had a small discussion about the ridiculous structuring problems in Rowling’s work this morning- particularly easy with Book 6, which suffers from the same episodic, loose structure as everything else, and also completely fails in her attempt to get the characters to “grow up”. The kids at Hogwarts discover snogging. They’re seventeen, and they’ve only just discovered snogging? If I remember rightly, Rowling’s excuse for this is “oh well, they’ve had such action-packed lives that they haven’t developed as fast”, but I think if there was that much death, threat and destruction going on, they’d have been leaping into sexual experimentation as fast as you can say “Avada Kedavara”, or whichever bizarre curse is your phrase of choice. It’ll be interesting to see how long they last as “treasured literature”, because to be honest Rowling is standing on the shoulders of better writers who’ve accomplished better things in the past. And the end of book 6, with Harry doing the “no, I can’t be in love with you, it’s too dangerous” nobility thing is the kind of stuff I thought went out with the fifties.

Right. I feel cleansed!

Got the invitation to my friend Tristan’s wedding (well, technically “Blessing”) yesterday. The illustration featured guinea pigs, a Ford Capri with “Monster Tyres”, and the word “Dreckly”. I kid you not.