You are Spider-Man
Spider-Man 85%
Iron Man 65%
Catwoman 65%
The Flash 50%
Superman 50%
Hulk 50%
Green Lantern 50%
Robin 48%
Batman 45%
Supergirl 43%
Wonder Woman 23%
You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.
I’m in control of BBC Radio Cambridgeshire. The whole thing. Right now.
Just me.
I’m in charge. I can do what I like.
If I wanted, I could completely stop it from going out to Cambridgeshire. I could pull the plugs on the whole thing.
On the other hand, that would inconvenience an awful lot of Fenlanders.
I’d better leave it as it is.
This year’s Doctor Who Christmas offering, “The Runaway Bride”, was so tiresomely crap that I can’t even be bothered to talk about it.
But I have reason to be grateful for the new series of Who, substandard though it so often turns out to be (and don’t even get me started on Torchwood…). Because one its consequences has been the production of a varied and I reckon pretty high-quality (if overpriced) range of merchandise. And as of Christmas day, I have been the proud owner of a radio controlled Dalek.
It is officially the Best Christmas Present I Have Ever Had.
The downside, I fear, is that it already accounts for most of next year’s procrastination time. In fact it seems likely that I’ll have to make a whole load of extra time for the usual procrastination, meaning that I’ll get nothing useful done at all.
Ah well, so much for 2007.
A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps,
snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana
bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a
jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal – Panama!
(Via a friend, but found on the Internet at Anvari.Org.)
This is what the Internet was created for.
Thanks for the many enquires I’ve had into the current situation as regards my plumbing problems; for those of you still worried that I may be drowning in my own excrement, I’m pleased to say that Ambassador Property Management sent somebody to sort out the problem after a mere two days of pestering phone calls, and we now have a new toilet which doesn’t sluice our own shit into the hallway.
On the other hand, in spite of assurances that the shit-encrusted hole in our hallway ceiling would be repaired, and that the shit-encrusted lino in our bathroom would be replaced, and our sewage-soiled carpet would be scrubbed, nothing further seems to have happened. And there’s only so many phone calls you can make before it started to feel like somebody is taking the piss.
Yesterday we discussed the possibility of sending a Christmas card to Ambassador, perhaps containing a subtle reminder about our problems. We came up with various messages that managed to combine Christmas with sewage, but the following are my current favourites:
Ding dung merrily on high
I saw three shits come sailing in – through the hole in our ceiling
This is the shit sent from above
Deck the hall – with shit
Shit had fallen, shit on shit, shit on shit (after Christina Rossetti)
How silently, how silently, the shit drips through our ceiling
I’m dreaming of a brown Christmas
When Santa got stuck up the chimney…at least we had a second hole in our ceiling for ventilation
Or perhaps the most pointed in the circumstances:
On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me…sewage-related hepatitis B
I’m working on my Britten biopic and I just noticed that at one point I’d described Peter Pears as “a figure of clam sanity”.
I immediately corrected the word “clam” to “calm”. Then I started to wonder if it might not have been better the way it was before. I admit that it would change the focus of the film considerably – if Pears is to be portrayed as a clam then Britten will have to be a mussel or something similar – and it would be altogether less of a costume drama and more the kind of film produced by Pixar.
But so what? I can think of several advantages:
1. It would bring the music of Britten to a younger generation through a Snorks-like re-imagining of history.
2. It would draw clever parallels with the sea-oriented operas Peter Grimes and Billy Budd.
3. It might inspire the insane people who threaten world peace with their nuclear stockpiles to try to be “figures of clam sanity”. And drown.
4. Peter Pears as a clam – you’ve got to laugh. And it would make the sex scenes considerably easier to write.
Last Christmas but two I gave you my heart,
About seven months later you gave it away;
This year, to save me from tears,
I’m drinking mulled wine until I pass out.
Christmas shopping in Piccadilly last Friday I passed not one but two people openly crying in the street. The second had (I assume) her boyfriend walking her along, arm round her shoulders, with what I felt was a slightly smug smile on his face – and I wondered if I should point out to him that his other half was sobbing loudly.
It seemed to me a positive indication that Christmas is frankly a miserable time. Possibly, the latter example suggests, even if you do have a boyfriend. I certainly haven’t passed people openly wailing without cause on the street at any other point this year.
A few ideas to stop you from going the same way:
1. Buy your Granny some nice biscuits from Fortnum & Masons, then put all the rest of your Christmas shopping in the same carrier bag – it’ll make you look classy.
2. If you listen to the soundtrack to Mary Poppins as you fight your way around the city it makes it feel even more like London. Even, I suspect, if it is actually Royston.
3. Make a point of noisily exiting any shop that starts playing Wham!. Nobody will notice, but you’ll feel like you’ve made a difference in some small way.
…where I can buy a cigarette lighter in the shape of Jesus?
Googling for “Jesus lighter” just brings up a load of discussions about whether Jesus would drive an SUV.
Since getting back to “normality” after a mental summer of Edinburgh Fringe and touring Australia in a pair of shoes that let in water, I’ve been hoping for some kind of – well – rest.
It hasn’t quite worked out like that. Firstly because I was thrown into the necessary but stressful experience of moving house, then because no sooner had I assembled my bed when I was thrown into teaching forty-six Cambridge undergraduates in a variety of musical skills. And of course, being my own worst enemy, I have continued to impose an impossible schedule upon myself as far as my “free time” is concerned; keen followers of my activites will already know that I’ve been writing a musical, and amazingly in two months have managed to assemble about half of the words and music for it.
I’m not complaining, I’m just saying things have been generally quite demanding. And what with the approach of Christmas (always a taxing time if you work for the church) there hasn’t been much of a let-up.
All of which has culminated in this week.
We’ve been having a few issues with our plumbing. Essentially the problem appears to be that our toilet was installed in such a way that it was pumping sewage underneath the lino on the floor of the bathroom; it had also started to occasionally flood the bathroom. Naturally we haven’t been altogether delighted with this arrangement, but letting agencies being what they are, we’ve generally been told that something will be done about it next week.
This week, I was having my lunch in front of “A Magical Musical Reunion” with Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke and Richard Sherman (and rather enjoying it), when I heard a steady dripping in the hallway. My investigations revealed that half of the bathroom seemed to be on the verge of crashing through into the hallway.
And this was indeed the case. Essentially, owing to the eccentric arrangement of our plumbing, we had shit dripping through the hallway ceiling. And whenever we flushed the toilet or took a shower, the shit would not so much drip through the ceiling as sluice through the ceiling.
If you think I might be exaggerating for the sake of an interesting story, I can assure you that it was every bit as hideous as it sounds.
Chris and myself have mostly laid the blame on Alastair; bad things happen to him, as demonstrated every time he sings with my church choir and God strikes down an old lady in full view of the congregation. (Alastair’s theory is that the thunderbolts are aimed at him, he just moves out of the way at the wrong moment.)
So this week we have been forced to go swimming in order to take showers, and to go to Starbucks if we want to take a leak, as we listen to the steady drip of raw human excrement in our hallway. You’d be surprised how many phone calls you have to make to a letting agency before they realise the urgency of such a situation.
Last night we tried to forget our troubles and relax for an evening by going to the Selwyn Snowball. Except that this turned out to be less relaxing than we’d hoped. It would make fine dramatic sense to say at this point “I’d forgotten how stressful Cambridge balls can be,” only it would be a lie – I’ve been to very few balls where I haven’t felt obliged to squeeze as much fun into the night as possible to get my money’s worth, constantly rushing around because of the nagging suspicion that something much better is happening in a different part of the ball. Selwyn had successfully exacerbated this feeling by ensuring that there was pretty much nothing to do at their ball except hunt for things that might be happening – a kind of night-long impossible quest in the manner of The Crysal Maze. Central to this effect was a distressing one way system whereby if you actually managed to find a door you were allowed to go through, there would be somebody there to ensure that on no account you went back through it the other way. A simple trip to the toilet necessitated a circuit of the entire ball to get back to your friends, who would inevitably have moved on by the time you made it back to the spot where you’d left them.
I whiled away an hour by queueing for a massage, which was an anticlimactic hand massage because I was told men weren’t allowed to have shoulders done (apparently the sight of my naked torso was liable to make the female guests faint); towards the end of the evening I got so bored I offered to help carry some boxes of empty bottles, but even there the system contrived to get the better of me, and I was halted at the last moment by a burly security man who said I couldn’t lift things because I’d been drinking. The ball organisers smiled at me and said “well, thank you for offering,” which was also a let down because they clearly hadn’t noticed that offering to carry things was the ultimate insult towards the ball they had put together.
The theme of the ball was “The Beauty of the Orient”, but if they’d called it “Red Tape and Bureaucracy” I might have seen the point. As it was, it just fuelled an immensely frustrating evening, where the best thing to do was enjoy the atmosphere of Selwyn College and chat to friends. Something, need I point out, you can usually do without paying £52 for the privilege.
Talk To Rex 