I blame Cedric Klapisch

Amendments which it would be necessary to make to 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona' to render it watchable:

1. Jettison all the non-Spanish characters. Drop Vicky and Cristina somewhere in the Llobregat marshes. Eviction and deportation of the rest by a sturdy crew of Mossos d'Esquadra. This need not be depicted.

2. Delete the dire voice-over, and execute the narrator as an example to others. This need only be depicted for purposes of catharsis.

3. In the real world, Barri Xines sex workers - those that are left - will make quick mince of any clown with a camera, Javier Bardem in attendance or not. It is vital that this is depicted.

4. Increase Javier and Penny's screen time to fill what were aching voids even before Scarlett and the rest were disposed of. Also, more of his cute poet dad.

Long term actions needed to address this problem:

Strengthen the Euro to the point at which mainland Europe is no longer an attractive location for once great but now merely competent directors to have a holiday and make a lazy, pointless, weak and intermittently crass movie on the side. Thankfully this is already in progress, ha!

f i c t i o n a l

Things that could be part of some sort of series but aren't: Bus Stop Bingo

To pass the time while waiting for the bus, and test your own deeply ingrained sense of injustice against actual outcomes, mentally (if physically, you will need a dry-wipe marker to allow multiple plays on the bus stop panel, and possibly a stepladder) cross off the number of each bus which is not yours that calls at your stop during the time it takes for your bus to arrive. Once all but yours have been crossed off you have reasonable cause to feel aggrieved. And the gentle mental exercise involved in retaining the numbers in your head is beneficial to the grey matter.

Experts can factor in weighting for known variations in frequencies of all buses. For advanced players, award yourself further misery points for notyourbuses which pass in multiple during your waiting period. See also, buses grouped to call at another stop and passing yours, even buses going in the other direction!

You may also wish to test your empathy against the experiences of other passengers, shifting the focus from your own plight to that of those reliant on e.g. the 189, of which there are hardly any, or the 113, half of which turn at Portman Square: two minutes walk up the road but for all practical purposes at this stop, on the moon.

Also count vehicles which might get you where you're going if you were more desperate or didn't already have a bus pass or travelcard on your oyster so don't see why you should pay twice, ffs. Proper cabs (orange light on). Legit minicabs doing the 'Mr Smith'*. Datsuns driven by qat-chewing Somers Town psychotics providing innovative transport solutions for London's Vibrant Night-time Economy, rickshaw bikes providing third world solutions for etc.

Then include vehicles which do not carry (human) passengers: Ocado vans, Royal Mail vans, pizza delivery mopeds, Onyx rubbish lorries, Essex Taxis. Also, decommissioned Routemasters carrying wedding parties, George Michael looking for a quiet spot to park up for a spliff and snooze.

*"Mr Smith? Mr Smith, yeah? But you're going North London, yeah? Where you going? Call it fifteen, yeah?"

These foreign measurements, coming over here, stealing our heights and depths...

It's all bollards when people say that they deeply mourn the passing of such and such talented figure, when they didn't even know the individual personally and will have forgotten them by tomorrow.

On the other hand. Heard on the news that half a foot of snow is expected in some parts of England tonight. And couldn't help thinking of the late Humphrey Lyttleton discussing the weather with the lovely Samantha, who declares that the last time she had six inches in her front garden was...

Well, Humph would have recounted it so much better.

Jacqui Smith and her guilty shoplifter's expression

Satire seems practically impossible in current conditions. The humorous critique usually works by taking the subject and exaggerating and distorting a little. Not too much, or it's no longer funny. It has to run slightly ahead of that subject but these days how can it even keep up?

The challenge for a good satirist is that reality is now its own satire, done badly. Politics and government play like a series of Armando Ianucci sketches, abandoned by the writer on grounds of implausibility. Popular culture and mass media appears to have been produced by a gigantic factory staffed by an army of clumsily cloned Chris Morrises who weren't really into it this morning but supposed they might as well, assisted by a branch plant of genetically modified Charlie Brookers, each of whom has recently suffered a mild stroke.

I've recounted unto tedium how waking to an aural background of Radio 4's morning news and current affairs programme distresses my subconscious into producing nightmares featuring the content. Like Goya's 'Sleep of Reason', but with cabinet ministers in place of the sinister compound winged beasts.

Woke at a less uncivilised hour the other day, to Mr Bragg and crew discussing Jonathan Swift's 'A modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick'. Can't be bothered to post a link here, Google it baby!

Bertie Bassett's Barmy Army! Bertie Bassett's Barmy Army! Bertie Bassett's Barmy Army!

In the interests of maintaining the delegates' focus on the matters in hand, through sensory deprivation, there were no windows. The lighting was erratically spaced and curiously specific: here a glare like that of nuclear fission from which people emerged permanently sightless, there a murky gloom in which nothing could be deciphered. Also, some dire framed reproductions of countryside scenes, fuzzy and with the colours printed out of register, lit as if they were works of art.

There was also a poor attempt at a chandelier, whose plastic crystals gently tinkled whenever a certain piece of apparatus in the gym upstairs was used. The pattern of exercise was generally one of slow but steady application escalating to a climactic frenzy. Even in the context of a hotel, this wasn't nearly as amusing as it should have been.

In addition to the usual false leather blotter, wide-bore ballpoint pen that clicks and unclicks with an unpleasantly loose rattly action, paper with widely spaced lines and the hotel chain logo squatting ugly at the top, blank nameplate toblerone, and a map of the building showing escape routes, each place at the table had been provided with a pack of Refreshers.

To my immediate neighbours I remarked: 'Refreshers. I didn't realise they were still doing them.' There was a pause and then from left and right a rush of Refresher reminiscences, to which I quickly contributed.

Later we introduced ourselves, later still we exchanged business cards. It wasn't much, but in difficult circumstances it was all we had.

Esperanza

Once in my early teens, seeking to relieve the tedium, I let off a fire extinguisher. It was a warm day and the exercise was intended to provide both entertainment and a welcome cooling shower for my companions. In this measure it was successful, but I'd only intended a brisk squirt and once the lever was depressed it irrevocably stayed that way. The stream was unending and all attempts to halt it proved fruitless. The situation was becoming desperate, as this took place in furnished quarters. I was left with no option but to point the thing out of the window until fully discharged, thereby betraying my misuse of emergency appliances to a wider audience than intended.

It would indicate me as callous, lacking in empathy, quite without the basic human wherewithal to engage sensitively with the emotions of another, if I were to admit that, whenever confronted with a person crying I experience an acute jolt of memory back to the day of the unstemmably flowing fire extinguisher. So I won't. In particular, on such occasions I do not recall the sense of rising panic, nor does the repeating tickertape thought: "ohmygodhowdoimakethisstopohmygodhowdoimakethisstop" return to mind. At all.

And I certainly don't hang anyone out of the window as a last resort, in case you were wondering.

It's clear that no-one ever told Esperanza to pull herself together. No stiff upper lip for her. There's a Mediterranean saint for you - an English equivalent, faced with the suffering of Aar Lord would probably set her face at lemon sucking and possibly emit a disapproving tut. I expect if Esperanza ever did dry up someone would have been quick to restart the waterworks:

"Oh hello Esppie dear, how cheerful you're looking today, glad to see you're not letting thoughts of Christ's suffering get you down so much now... you know, the crucifixion, darling... with the crown of thorns, the nails and that." And she'd be off again, snot everywhere, shares in Kleenex, etc.

Should be at a party to celebrate the Announcement Of The Recession but cried off citing indigestion

Among the stacks of books I had not previously got around to reading, 'Anna Karenina'. Had always meant to, though all I knew of it hitherto is that the lady of the title does not buy a return ticket. Saw Il'ya Repin's portrait of Tolstoy at that RA exhib not long ago, which gave me fresh impetus - the fellow was standing in the out of doors, barefoot and in his nightshirt. How could I not?

I took advice on the translation. Limits to what can be done to convey style - only deadpan travels relatively unharmed. Best you can hope for is that the prose made their own is unobjectionable. I was ordered to seek out the rendering by Constance Garnett. A perfectly Victorian name, speaking of sublimated urges, which is what you want in a translator.

In fact her work was the only one in my language to be found. There's an Oxford Classic edition faced with that hoity toity sort in the Ivan Kramskoy painting, and several others but I bought an import on the strength of the lovely supple floppiness of the cover. Didn't look at the introduction - I usually read these last, like film reviews they make more sense afterwards. Only when several pages into the thing did I sense something missing among the words.

Went back to the forenote, and after emphatically saying they have not flipped with the text they admit to having altered some 'Britishisms'. What are Britishisms? Perhaps in Miss Garnett's unaltered draft someone is erroneously depicted lurking about the samovar with a jug of Jersey cream? The sleighs and carts misrepresented driving on the wrong side of the carriageway?

So far, no appreciable damage. The cleaner at the publishing house will have been finding the odd excised 'and' here and expurgated 'to' there for several weeks after the adaptation process, but I seem to mentally slip them back in anyway.

Even without trousers there are some satisfying lines. Just as much as the one about families, etc, I like the ones that just sit nicely, even if not doing a great deal beyond the necessary. At the opening of the chapter in which the youngest Tcherbatskaya starts pashing on Mlle Varenka:

It was a wet day; it had been raining all the morning, and the invalids, with their parasols, had flocked into the arcades.

I can read that repeatedly without it ever seeming banal to me.

This is why I don't

It had been a while since my phone was last charged. From a number I didn't recognise, a message obviously not for me:

"i miss u"

So I composed a message back. It took ages, even with making a concession to the medium of using the word 'text' as a verb (it felt wrong but I thought it might be more easily understood).

"Sorry, you texted the wrong number."

In reply, seconds later.

"fuck u"

There's only so much you can do. I consider the correspondence closed.

Things I've recently thought of on waking

Appearance of a cloudless sky where, beyond the crest of a hill, there is sea beneath.


In an empty playground as a child, near the top of the steps of the slide, no-one to rush you: thinking that you can, but if you can't that's okay too.


Weakness and aching of limbs after a long time spent in bed: with illness or a person, the feeling is the same.


Creak and thump of doors in a hotel, how quickly they become familiar.