I spent the morning sweeping up leaves and digging up spuds from our dreadfully neglected vegetable patch, in weather chilly and wet enough to need a hoody. This is autumnal activity. It’s early September, and I’ve seen no decent sun this year at all. I’ll take any escape from this seemingly endless dull grey procession of dark, dismal days.
Which was why I was so drawn to Julien Bocabeille’s Oktapodi. A sharp, bold little tale of octopi in love, I enjoyed the beautiful blues and bright sun of the Grecian setting as much as the story and animation. And it is very funny and well made.
Following a recommendation from Katherine Farmer at the Forbidden Planet Blog, I’ve just spent the morning reading Evan Dahm’s Rice Boy.
It’s an extraordinary, surreal, moving and thoughtful tale, telling the story of the titular Rice Boy, a limbless, mushroom-like blob, and his quest to prevent a war and save his world.
The artwork is lush, while still remaining accessibly cartoony, and the story twists and turns, leading to an epic climax with a twist that I genuinely couldn’t see coming. I’m reminded in a very good way of Lewis Trondheim’s Donjon books. It’s a genuinely all-ages story, with enough to keep an inquisitively-minded reader absorbed for hours. I really can’t recommend it highly enough.
Six and thrupence for the ween. The other one you can have for free, he does nothing but eat and go on about something called GTA4.
Now, every so often I get into an argument (or as I like to call them “reasonable discussion at high volume” about the state of the nation, or on days when there really is nothing better to do, the world. The general consensus seems to be that we’re screwed, and the handcart to hell is now loading on platform 666.
I tend to be the dissenter in these discussions, largely because I’m prepared to take a slightly more open view and actually look at how we used to live. It’s not pretty. Global war in the teens and forties. Poverty and want in the fifties. Race and sex wars in the sixties and seventies. Kylie and Bros in the eighties.
That’s without even starting to consider where we were a hundred, a couple of hundred years ago, where people from my level of society would have been living in a slum, scraping a living at a manual trade if you were lucky, and dead at fifty. The quality and sheer joy of my life would have been dismissed as the rantings of a lunatic.
In my opinion, the best time to be around is right now. We live in a world where for the first time people are being accepted on the basis of their talents, regardless of creed, race or sex. Global communication is accessible and instantaneous. Despite what the press would have us believe, we’re actually in a better place now than you’d think.
Now, there are those that consider this site to be the Great Work, to which I can only blushingly offer my thanks. However, the Work I’m considering in this post is the one that occupies my day job.
Or rather, not my day job. In order to get The Work done, I have had to do some very peculiar hours. For example, this week I am doing a 7pm to 5am shift. Which is fairly unique in my experience.
What’s doubly peculiar is how quickly I’m getting used to it. I was always of the highly vocal opinion that I was incapable of working nights as the lack of sleep would kill me within a week. This does not seem to me the case. I have laid off the caffeine a bit, but I’m getting enough kip and feeling remarkably lively, all things considered. I’m probably just on the verge of a psychotic episode instead.
The Great Work provides its own compensations for my collapsing mental state. I am witness to some of the richest and least seen TV archive this country has to offer. Science programming, political commentary and satire of the highest quality spool past my rheumed, reddening gaze. There used to be a reason that we had the reputation for having the best TV in the world, and the proof is in front of me nightly.
But now, most worryingly of all, I have to confess to a crush.
On Lynda Baron. That’s right, big motherly Lynda Baron, Arkwright’s squeeze on Open All Hours Lynda Baron. Clearly, my readership murmurs, the boy has lost his marbles. And the plot. And all reason.
But wait. The Lynda Baron of my dreams is the 1966 model, the looker with the achingly now flippy hairdo who chantoosed regularly at The Talk Of The Town in Mayfair, and had a gig on one of Ned Sherrins later satire shows. She fills the Meredith Martin on TW3 bit. Slinky dresses, funny songs and a touch of glamour just to set off the comedians of the day who, let’s be frank here, were not on telly for their looks. John Bird is many things, but he can’t shake his stuff in a cocktail sheath dress like Lynda Baron. Or rather, it’s not something I’d really want to see.
Blimey. Hello.
So, yes, it may be the lateness of the hour, but I’m crushing quite a bit here. I’m sure you understand. If you were in my position, you’d probably do the same.
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 