GLADIATOR AGAIN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Can I say anything positive about the Gladiator sequel? What is the title? Gladiator 2. That’s not it. Gladiators. Far too obvious. On the cover, it’s a very Roman Gladiator II. Unfathomably, Sir Ridley Scott™ harks back to ALIEN with the title lettering appearing in a vaguely animated form. So, on screen, the movie is GLADIIATOR.
   But really, the movie is Gladiator Again. A film you’ve already seen as Gladiator. By the numbers. Tick off the story points from a checklist based on the first movie. This time around, there are far more computer effects on display. And almost everyone in the film is miscast. Except for those who returned for the sequel.
   Connie Nielsen and Sir Derek Jacobi are cast perfectly as the same characters they played before. Jacobi was cast in Gladiator off the back of the grumpy director’s memory of the actor’s TV role as Claudius. And Jacobi was cast in Gladiator II off the back of the grumpy director’s memory of the actor’s role in Gladiator.
   It would be terribly awkward not to mention Russell Crowe. And also terribly awkward to mention Russell Crowe. He does indeed appear in this sequel, using footage from the first film in flashback. Can’t really fault the casting, there. But practically everyone else has wandered in from another film.
   Chief contender in the miscasting category is an actor who truly has wandered in from another film, and brought his own plotline with him to blur the thin story of this one. Denzel Washington is fucking great in this movie. It’s just…that he was cast off the back of the grumpy director’s memory of having worked with Denzel before.
   Every second on screen, Denzel fills the movie with crackling sparks…and a plot from somewhere else. If they’d stripped all the pesky Gladiator and Gladiator II stuff out of this film, then there’d be another film entirely. One starring Denzel Washington. And one we’d all be interested in.
   Okay. So what’s the thin plot, here? There’s a man lost in the turmoil of battle. Sad things happen. He is forced to become a gladiator. Quickly, he learns how to handle his new life in an arena out in the sticks. There, he meets Oliver Reed Denzel Washington. No one buys or sells any giraffes.
   There’s a shot at taking out the villain in the much larger arena in Rome. We do see a tiger. Villains must be overthrown. People scheme. These scheming people are, once again, Connie Nielsen and Sir Derek Jacobi.
   It’s Gladiator Again.
   Our hero is the down-on-his-luck adult who was the kid from the first film. At least that’s a valid reason for waiting over two decades to make a fucking sequel. I’ll almost give them that. It might have worked, too, if they’d cast the child actor in the adult role. But they cast, miscast, someone else.
   Spoiler. Russell Crowe’s character is very dead. Most sincerely dead. He could’ve been alive and in the sequel. We’ll talk about Nick Cave later. No, really. It was a whole thing.
   Back to the secret kid. Not that the kid was a secret. Maybe his real daddy was a secret, in the first film. Vague hints. We couldn’t have anything more than vague hints. You see, Maximus Derivative Sequelus…
   Fuck it. The whole point of Russell Crowe’s character in the original film is that he’d have his vengeance in that film and not the next. Maximus had to avenge the death of his wife and son. And for that reunion at the end of the film to have an emotional impact, out in the filtered wheat fields, his character couldn’t have a secret son after banging Connie Nielsen’s character.
   But here, as too many movie and TV scripts utter, here we are. The secret son has grown up, turned his back on the Evil that is Rome, and is now living a peaceful life in…aw, fuck, here come those pesky Romans. Our hero, Haribo, goes up against our anti-hero General Stand-In, who felt all inspired by Russell Crowe back in the day.
   I’ll see you…on the beach! That opening bombast is partly Saving Private Ryan, partly Ridley Scott advertising something – we aren’t sure what – and partly snippets taken from Frank Miller’s 300. The gladiatorial movies share the same stunning levels of historical accuracy with 300, I am happy to report. I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if a tyrannosaur turned up in that fancy arena, replacing the computerised rhino.
   Maybe look for that feisty reptilian action in the third glorious movie: Gladiators Three. An epic return to form as the two dead fuckmuppet Emperors from this movie are brought back to life by ALIEN™ technology to ride into battle aboard their steam-powered pet dinosaur Duke Daisy. It’s a musical comedy. I can hear the critics sing, singing a song of angry men. Starring the desecrated digital bones of Ian Holm…
   I’ll stop there. Just don’t get me fucking started on that fiasco.
   How often do I think about the Roman Empire? I never think about the Roman Empire. Even when I’m thinking about how often I don’t think of the Roman Empire, I’m not even thinking about the Roman Empire. I wasn’t even thinking about the Roman Empire when I watched two gladiator-themed moves directed by Ridley.
   Really should stop calling him Ridley. People will think Daisy Ridley directed Gladiator II. No, even when watching a Rome-themed movie, it appears that I never think of the Roman Empire.
   There is no homo-erotic subtext in one film or the other film. (It’s in both films.)
   Plot twist. Gladiator Haribo and General Stand-In are now at odds with each other. Oh no. One is the secret son of Russell Crowe’s character Maximus. The other secretly worship’s Russell Crowe’s character Maximus. Only in cinemas.
   The opening of this movie is full of blood, thunder, thud, blunder, bombast, bomb blasts, napalm, death, and one or two digital sequences. I counted one or two. Then lost interest in counting the rest.
   There’s a new score featuring reheated elements from the original score. Inspirational speeches abound, though they are served up late from the microwaved leftovers from the first film.
   Speaking of microwaved leftovers from a better movie, the Emperor was replaced by two of the most miscast actors in a Mediterranean Sea of miscast actors. Least said, soonest mended. I just don’t have the energy. Should have hired Statler and Waldorf – though they, too, would have been miscast.
   What we do in life echoes in the sequel. Are we not entertained? You’re damned fucking right we are not entertained. Ridley has one eye on another pointless ALIEN sequel, showing us what would happen if the alien infected a family of baboons.
   They could have spent a whole lot more money on the computerised baboons. Wouldn’t have mattered. Strangely, I found the rhino a hell of a lot easier to accept. There’s a sliding scale of acceptance in this movie…
   It runs…rhino, yes. Baboons, no. Rubber sharks…fuck off. All of the computer models for animals are miscast in this film. Even the rhino. But that hardly matters. Here, they are outshone by the miscast humans. Loads of ’em.
   Pedro Pascal, General Stand-In, is miscast as a man who is miscast in a film. Yes, even his miscasting in this movie feels a bit off, a bit extra, in the department of wrongness. In the final analysis, that’s nothing. Nothing. Compared to…
   Matt Lucas as a Roman game-show host. Yes. That bit of stunt casting. Miscasting. David Hemmings wasn’t available. Death will affect the casting process that way. Yes, we miss Oliver Reed as well.
   This farce of a gladiatorial movie almost had me nostalgic for Gor. That’s a lie. I will never have nostalgia for Gor. Not even for all of the Oliver Reed scenes in Gor. They should have called this Gladiator: the Rematch. This time it’s personal. Only in cinemas.
   Gladiator: the Rehash. Okay. I get it. If the role is also part of the title, then we’re going to see some gladiatorising at some point. Gladiator Rising might have been a far better bet as a title. Is there any director out there, way out there, more inconsistent, more fucking random, than Ridley?
   Advertising jobs saved him. Made him. He owed it all to Captain Birdseye. If you listened to Captain Birdseye, though, Ridley was an arsehole. Mucking around at the BBC, Ridley was almost in a position to design the Daleks for Doctor Who. Why didn’t he design the Daleks? Because they’d have fucking resembled him. And Ridley wouldn’t have fucking cared.
   Scrolling down the patchy Scott filmography…it’s definitely a thing. By fuck, he veers wildly from film project to film project. He’s still going as I type, so, luckily for him, GLADIIATOR won’t be his last film.
   At least no one made the GLADIATOR sequel about Russell Crowe returning from the dead as an immortal assassin hell-bent on killing Jesus. Yes, that was my response when I first heard about it. Either Nick Cave was smoking everything while writing…or he was smoking nothing.

SEQUEL OF GOR: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

In my last blog post I changed a bulb and watched the Gor film. At double speed. This was an improvement. In a stunning development, Jack Palance turned up at the end of that movie extravaganza and promised a sequel.
   Who in their right fucking mind was going to fund a sequel? Ah. Distributed by the Cannon people. Fired from a big gun, this movie missed. It’s certainly a skill, missing the planet you are on.
   But we are not on our planet. No. We’ve been transported to the world of Gor. This movie contains a montage of the previous film at the start. By fuck, if I’d known that I’d have skipped the first fucking film.
   Our hero, Carl. Whoops. Tarl Cabot. Damn it. I’d have saved time and effort by reading Almuric comic books instead. Ironhand Esau Cairn would wipe the floor with Carl. Whoops. Tarl Cabot. On with the story…
   The story is a two-word script. When characters aren’t shouting Cabot! they are yelling Guards! Our hero…he isn’t…our hero Cabot is summoned back to Gor by his flashing magic ring. It is most precious to him. That was a lie.
   Landing in the same dead stretch of desert as before, he arrives with a new sidekick: Sleazy. He and Sleazy retread the original movie. No, seriously. Practically fucking nothing happens across 90-odd minutes of sand.
   Insert STAR WARS quote about sand here. Thank me later.
   What’s new in town? Fucking nothing. There’s a warning flash. OZONE LAYER DEPLETED. This pops up every time we encounter the leading lady, here relegated to a supporting role, whose hairspray-drenched mane threatens to have a wholly separate career.
   Cabot has been summoned arbitrarily. There’s no real rush for him to be here, except as a sequel cash-in. Jack Palance looks as though he’s had teeth pulled to star in this movie. I’m sure he had better times before, and he’d have better times ahead.
   But in this film, he looks as though he’s as happy as a man having his teeth pulled one by one between takes. Maybe two by two. Who knows? The best thing to say about Palance’s performance is that he gets to wear a funny hat. No. Really. That’s all I’ve got here, and that’s pretty weak gravy as it stands.
   Gor is a free land. Except where people aren’t free. We see the same scenes again in this movie. No, I’m not talking about the flashback to original footage. After that, we pretty much retread the original God-awful production.
   Our hero meets people from the first film. Not Oliver Reed. He fell to his death. But a half-hearted script could have brought him back and no one would’ve cared. Certainly not Ollie. There’s a king. And his evil queen. Blah-de-blah. The end. Roll credits.
   The evil queen takes on the leading lady status here. She hams it up. That’s all you can do. Cabot’s buddy Sleazy makes moves on the queen and she uses Sleazy to prove she was elsewhere when the king was mysteriously stabbed.
   We have this side-action going on with Jack Palance doing chemistry lessons for pay. The drink he concocts is irrelevant. What’s important? The knife. This is what the queen stabs her husband with. Cue the rest of the script.
   Guards!
   The king is dead. Long live the queen, I guess. (It’s not that kind of movie. Spoiler for the end of the film. She’ll never play piano again.) Someone killed the king. Was it Sarge? Rosemary the telephone operator? Quick, get Scoob and the gang to investigate.
   Yes. Someone killed the king. We’re all very sad, here in movie land. But it wasn’t the queen. No. Sleazy stands up for her. She was with him. If you catch his drift.
   Right. So. The queen couldn’t be a murderer. She was too busy committing adultery. Got it. Checks out. Would stand up in court. Seems legit. I’d had enough of Sleazy when he and his atrocious dialogue entered the start of the film like a virus entering a bloodstream. Maybe even a human bloodstream.
   But. I’d really had enough of him by now. He’s the new thing in the story. And he shouldn’t be a thing. Have you seen the Lethal Weapon movies, with Leo Getz? Stop trying to make him a thing.
   What about MARVEL products featuring Martin Freeman and Julia Louise-Dreyfus? Stop trying to make them a thing. Joe Pesci and those two, in certain films. In other things, I have no problem with these people.
   We revisit the first Gor film, in spirit. (Must we?) There’s a dance number. And the leading lady from the first movie must get into a bitchy fight with a warrior woman, all over again. And then another fight, after that.
   Cabot, meanwhile, must go on the run. Into the beige wastelands. Our queen, evil as ever, wants Cabot brought back alive. She’s sent Sleazy off to the dungeon. Well, he is in leather. And the queen decides to send a minion to hunt Cabot down.
   All of this goes fucking nowhere. Cabot gets into the usual low-rent fights you’ve grown accustomed to in this vague update of a sword-and-sandal movie. The difference is the soundtrack. Needs more cowbell.
   Cabot almost dies of thirst and then almost dies of quenching his thirst. The assassin appears out of nowhere after zero dramatic build-up whatsoever, and Cabot is captured. I’ve no intention of relaying events in chronological order. If I did that, one of my kidneys would rebel, force itself up through my torso into my throat, and throttle my tongue.
   Jack Palance seems to have the same contract Oliver Reed had. Spread a few minutes of performing across the whole movie. The evil queen is having the most fun out of an entire cast not having terribly much fun.
   Cabot is captured. Oh no. He’s going to be taken before the queen and shouted at, I suppose, if she wants him alive for breeding purposes or as a contract bridge partner. What is the point of this film?
   Jack Palance – it doesn’t matter what his character’s name is – Jack, he offers Tarl Cabot a deal. Just go home. But that’s fucking rubbish. So is the end of this movie. It looks like Jack Palance is planning to poison the evil queen. But she stabs him first.
   And then. The queen dies. Slain by her own assassin, who throws his big spear at her. Carl Tabot does fuck-all except shout excitedly from the sidelines. Wait, that isn’t his fucking name. Fuck it. His pal Sleazy ends up back in the real world, and is taken away by the police for having the audacity to appear in this sewer of a sequel.
   I’m not judging you if you like the film – I simply don’t have the energy for that. Did I not mention the title of the movie? Outlaw of Gor. It’s the script that’s the real outlaw here. Film in sand. Check. Use costumes from the earlier production? Bring back the same faces. Can you cut the budget?
   That’s twice, now. I’ve watched two films in the same so-called setting. At double speed. Nothing happens. The same dance numbers and gladiator girl combat. Everyone in bikinis. Not Jack Palance. Wander, lost, in the landscape. You could have driven a bus behind the characters, and no one would have noticed the mistake. Audience would just go with the idea that the bus driver discovered another magic ring.
   Shame there wasn’t a third movie. No, I lied. What would a third movie be about? Let me take a wild guess. Going by production timelines, I’m guessing Gor III would have gone straight to video in 1991.
   So we’d have Liam Neeson as the villain for five minutes. Carl. Damn it to fuck. Tarl. This fucking guy. Tarl Cabot is hanging around Downtown Sand Dune Number Six and he encounters a mysterious sorcerer.
   It’s Wade Webley. A stockbroker who…yes, evil stockbroker. Is there any other kind? A stockbroker who has a glowing ring. You’re making your own jokes up, now. He has found his way to Gor, and likes what he sees.
   Lots of women in bikinis.
   He reveals that he’s not a sorcerer. Just a guy armed with the technology of another world. His evil plan is to sell shares in the planet Gor and then foreclose on the widow’s mortgage, taking control of the beige land.
   Carl Tabot™ stops him with a swift sword to the kidneys. This takes up the last ten minutes of the film. In the first half hour, there’ll be a dance-off, two bikini battles, and Jack Palance hiding behind the palace curtains.
   Palance gets the same amount of time as Oliver Reed had, but it’s a minute more than the span allotted to Liam Neeson – barely recognisable in a state-of-the-art prosthetic mask…made from a Hallowe’en mask. It’s Captain Kirk’s face, spray-painted gold.
   We witness oodles of hairspray. Characters are lost in the desert. They reach the sea, and find Charlton Heston laughing as he walks back along the beach. Liam remarks that the production reminds him of Krull, without the budget. Or Excalibur without the knights.
   My work here is, just like the franchise, mercifully done.

HOW MANY WRITERS IT TAKES TO CHANGE A LIGHT BULB: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

So how many writers does it take to change a light bulb? One writer. There’s no one else in the room when you are writing a story. Though, when a writer changes a light bulb, you are hoping for a really good twist that illuminates.
   And once the light bulb is in and switches on over the writer’s head, hell, that answers the question of where the writer gets all those ideas from.
   I could spend the rest of this blog post making jokes about writers and light bulbs, but I am recovering from the trauma of changing a light bulb. Don’t know what the fuck I was using for illumination before I performed essential maintenance.
   The dim bulb that flickered its last wasn’t really putting out any Lumens, Candles, or a hint of a Lux. Wattage could best be described as rumoured to exist at some point in the distant past – that faraway star snuffed it and died long ago, leaving only faint impressionistic memories of light.
   Typically, the inevitable death of a bulb happened after dark. Luckily, I have two lamps on this side of a Great Wall of Books. By the light of one, repair the other. I reached for a new bulb that isn’t new at all. It’s been lying in wait, ready to pounce at the right time.
   Well, the time came after sunset. And now, I can see. I think the replaced bulb was powered by a tiny candle hidden deep within the mechanism.
   Maintenance this month has been of the essential variety and attacked me from all sides. There was a lot of it. Had to be done. If I don’t blog now, I won’t blog at all. Yes, I could spend the whole blog doing a dog-ate-my-homework sketch.
   But instead, I’ll talk about a movie I watched. Fantasy movies still have a pretty bad rap in the film industry. Make them cheap, throw them out fast, see what sticks. Cut the budget for the sequels. Fade out.
   Occasionally, fantasy films are really good. They are few. We’ll go with the argument that STAR WARS is a fantasy movie about a wizard, a princess, a farmhand who doesn’t know he is a prince, and an evil knight with a magic sword.
   For Arthurian fantasy, there’s Excalibur. There’s a wizard…
   Okay, we can shuffle the elements around. We have a boy who doesn’t know he is a king. And there are plenty of lightsabres in Arthur’s story. For fire-breathing fantasy, there’s the Disney movie Dragonslayer. It’s enjoyable nonsense. I find Sir Ralph Richardson’s turn as a wizard quite appealing.
   When he’s miscast in a movie like Rollerball, you wonder who was on drugs during that computer scene of his: you, watching, or the casting director foaming at the mouth in a dark red corner somewhere.
   We’ll give old Ralph a pass in Rollerball. The computer scene itself looks like it wandered in from another movie and brought the actor along in its wake. My point is…Richardson’s standard level of whimsy works very well in Dragonslayer and also in Time Bandits.
   I could go on, listing this fantasy film or that one. Good. Excellent. Stellar. But that’s not the aim here. You don’t get far in the fantasy movie landscape before you fall off a cliff into a lake of acid.
   Of assorted Dungeons & Dragons movies, I will say only this: caution. I believe Jeremy Irons funded the purchase of a castle in Ireland off the back of his scenery-devouring performance as a misunderstood villain. No one could understand what he was in the movie for.
   For the money, clearly.
   Sooner or later…and I’ve come late to this one…you encounter a movie named Gor. I encountered it last week, in low resolution, at double speed, on the information super back road that is the internet. This is now the only acceptable way to watch Gor. You’ll save yourself a lot of time…
   By reading this and deciding not to watch the movie.
   We’re in familiar territory here if you know your Edgar Rice Burroughs. American man is transported from civilised world to barbaric planet and must learn epic combat skills or die trying. Yes, I have a review here…
   I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating…and it gets everywhere. (A. Skywalker.)
   Gor. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Our hero, if you can call him that, is Tarl Cabot – which sounds like the guy’s own porn name. Surely that’s a typo. I have the overwhelming rage in me to fix that and call him Carl Cabot.
   At least then he’d be in the company of characters like Lief Langdon from Dwellers in the Mirage by A. Merritt. Anyway, back to Gor. We’re dealing with a man out of his own time and place. He arrives in the most beige fucking fantasy world I’ve yet seen.
   I’m with Mr Skywalker here. Don’t like bland sand. This fucking movie. It’s cheap and filmed nastily on a dry golf course at the arse-end of the back of fucking beyond. At least, that’s how it feels.
   Our hero is a professor spurned by blondie. He drives off in the rain and his wayward vehicle hits a tree. And he dies. The rest of the story about being transported to another world is just a hallucination of the people behind this production.
   Anyway, Tarl – should be Carl – has a magic ring that sends him to the world of sand. He can be a loser there instead of back home. Meanwhile, Oliver Reed shows up to film his scenes on the weekend: in short takes between trips to assorted pubs.
   Or that’s how it all appeared to me. Ollie is up against it in this production. His whispered menace competes against an energetic soundtrack that has been hijacked from another movie. The composer is using notes in Morse Code to transmit SEND HELP.
   Action in the film just doesn’t live up to the adventure promised by the score. Maybe that’s a good thing. I can’t see the cast living up to any real action on offer if real action stumbled in out of the darkness.
   No, I’m not saying the leading lady was hired for her ability to emote with her tits. However…I am saying that. But we mustn’t lose sight of the plot, such as it is. Our hero, Porn Name Guy. Incidentally, that reminds me of Flash Gordon.
   Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You’ll truly understand the pacing of Flash Gordon if you realise, in that movie, you are never more than ten minutes away from an Italian porno.
   Oliver Reed shows up as a budget Oliver Reed playing a toned-down Brian Blessed from Flash Gordon, minus the wings. And flecks of foam in the beard. Ollie wants this big glowing rock for reasons unknown.
   He might have explained those reasons during a whispered monologue, but, frankly, with characters like these it was hard to care.
   Ollie’s instant son is instantly killed by our instant hero in an instant accident. And then our hero flees. He gradually joins a low-rent Dungeons & Dragons party that’s too cheap to have an elf in it.
   There’s the first third of the movie for you. Our man wears native costume, and crosses the desert after a spot of training. Travel concentrates on viewing everyone from behind, to show off the hero’s arse-cheeks. It’s not all about the bikini-clad women in this non-epic.
   As far as the director is concerned, I’m starting to think Tuff Turf was the highlight of his career. We get into a spot of mischief at a settlement. This is the sort of crossroads you’d expect in four or five fantasy movies of variable quality.
   There’s no variable quality here. It’s consistently awful. The movie felt like one of those films you saw after midnight on a weekday that felt like a hallucination the next morning, whether alcohol featured or not. Particularly if not. Tiredness robbed you of half the plot, and that was no bad thing.
   Know what the movie needs? A heavy. Surely this guy’s the heavy from Crimewave…yes, yes, he is. We have a low-rent Brian Blessed in the form of Oliver Reed. To this festering stew of a film we must add a knock-off Bud Spencer look-alike in the shape of Paul L. Smith.
   This leads to a catfight. Our heroes win something or other. The right to continue into the depths of the dry golf course. Our D&D party is built up to include the hero and heroine, a wise older character, another dude who is too cheap to put on elf ears, and a little person hired for comedy relief purposes.
   They trek a few hundred yards into an elaborate built-up super-bunker on the golf course, and then must deal with…a hole. A hole opens up. And it pads out the movie. It could be the hole in the plot formed from all the tiny holes in the plot so far.
   Maybe the shoddy nature of the golf course has infected the production, and they’ve thrown a mad ad-lib into the mix. The mix of shit and gravel that is this film. What the fuck is this film? When fans of the Gor books write in to complain about the adaptation…
   Yikes.
   Our heroes attract the attention of a guard and dispose of him. The cunning disguise of putting on a helmet and pretending to be the guard…would work in a game of D&D. Not so convincing in this movie.
   Eventually, after much sand…
   I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating…and it gets everywhere. (Oliver Reed, coming back from the pub.)
   We reach the pointless infiltration of the villain’s lair. Some of the costumes may have been recycled from Flash Gordon, but I can’t be arsed checking the accuracy of any of that. Our villain, the wri…the dir…the produ…Oliver Reed…decides to invite our hero to join his merry gang.
   For, y’know, reasons ’n’ shit.
   Throughout the movie we see women in bikinis and men thinking about calling their theatrical agents and asking soul-searching questions about careers thus-far.
   Oliver Reed finishes his last remaining speeches. In his head, he’s playing Falstaff in Stratford, down by the banks of the Avon in some open-air performance. Pretending to be drunk.
   We’re about an hour in and there’s a dance number. Of course there is. And we have a character moment. This allows us to care about Tarl Cabot. It doesn’t. I lied. A woman is presented for branding. Our hero flexes his mighty thews and enemy guards fall before him like ripe grain before the reaper’s scythe.
   No. I lied again. He just watches. Maybe he likes to watch. Then, when it is the leading lady’s turn, our hero must mark her with the branding iron. He rebels, and starts a change of government right there. Cool.
   Except. Why didn’t he save the first woman? Dick. We move to the open revolt and getting the hell out of Dodge. But first, remember to grab the big glowing stone. It is really important. For…reasons. I mean…someone paid money for the prop, so fucking use it.
   It’s not enough to free the oppressed and reclaim the stone. No. It’s important to get captured and face Oliver Reed one more time. He has to pay…for luring us into this cinematic diarrhoea.
   Things I neglected to mention.
   One. An ineffectual flaming portcullis trap. Straight from the mind of Gary Gygax. Roll well enough on the dice, and our heroes easily survive Cabot’s Sphere of Conflagration.
   Two. The less said about trying to pick a lock with a sword…the better.
   Three. Oliver Reed would bounce back from this mess and deliver lines about queer giraffes in Gladiator. There, in his sober head, he’s still playing Shakespeare at Stratford, by the riverbank, in the pissing rain.
   But let’s deal this movie the final blow. I have to say, this is some feeble shit I had to sit through. It’s been more than a heartbeat since I sat through something this bad. The Acolyte still takes that crown, though.
   Wookiee Jedi? And he’s going to fight the bad guy? (Dies off-screen in his fucking chair. Still hurts. Dies in an office chair, staring at his accounts. Harsh.)
   Our hero has equipped himself with a bow. More importantly, he’s found ammo as well. Earlier in the movie he watched while a woman was branded. Here’s the same woman again. She’s threatened with fiery death…and he just watches.
   Did he really not like the look of her? Was she not using enough hairspray? The leading lady consumed the hairspray budget, it is true. Well, this ritual sacrifice goes as expected. Twice in the film our leading man has the chance to step in and save this woman. He fails spectacularly.
   What’s left? Save everyone else. Fire an arrow through Oliver Reed’s neck. No, seriously. Then he can fall to his fiery death – just to confirm that he’s still alive as he hits the flames, and then there is no way back for him in a possible sequel.
   Sequel?
   To this warm garbage? It isn’t good enough to be hot garbage. This reheated garbage. A sequel? You are fucking kidding me. But wait a bit. Here’s Jack Palance…who has form in the cheap fantasy section of cinema…
   He turns up to introduce himself. O………kay. Meanwhile, our hero returns home. Where he punches out the dude who annoyed him and stole his gal. There’s a moral in here somewhere. The moral is…YouTube should allow me to watch shit films at Warp Factor 10, Mr Sulu.
   The scenes in our world, at the beginning and end of the movie, should have been cut out of the movie – along with all the other scenes. But we return to sequel territory. The tale ends with Jack Palance, this time in a mad fucking hat. There’s a wild declaration about ol’ Jack’s drive for power, here.
   And the only man who can stop him is the guy who just fucked off back to his own planet. Right. Gotcha. No chance of making a sequel to this nonsense, right. Who is behind the production?
   Cannon. A hit-and-miss company with many a cinematic stinker under the brand. Some gems, it’s true. Cannon’s financial history is of greater interest than the film output. Of course Cannon would go after the sequel. I’m not sure I have the mental strength to see me through another one of these efforts. Not even at double speed, and skipping the credits.

CLEAR THE FUCK OUT OF YOUR HOUSE EVERY FIVE YEARS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Obviously, I send stuff to the bins on a regular basis. There’s another mountain of cardboard stashed in the bin this week, and it appeared out of nowhere just after I demolished the last one. The recycling of plastic bottles is endless. Some stuff can only go to rubbish instead of recycling. So…off it goes.
   Rarely, I’ll have to take steps over more specialised waste. Pharmacies still take dead batteries. The only paper I don’t recycle is shredded paper that goes into used paint tins, destroying the last of the moisture in there before responsible disposal can occur.
   Every five years or so, I go for the big clearout. There are big clearouts annually. But after half a decade, it is time to revisit the same old problem. Not enough space. And that’s in a place where I’ve made the most out of the atoms available.
   I’ve been told I’m living as though I am in Tokyo, cramming every possible thing in the universe into a hallway that was in disguise on the property market as a Japanese house. I didn’t know how crammed all the cramming was until earlier this month.
   My old chair died. I replaced it with a new chair. And that chair – the one I am sitting in as I type – is every bit as good a chair. However, it is a teeny tiny wee bit smaller. Suddenly, I feel that I have room to breathe.
   I overcame the temptation to reclaim the extra space in the name of five storage units and a small table. The extra space makes it easier to get to things around the new chair. How stuffed is this place? You know you’ve packed a lot in when rooms have extra lights.
   A reasonable person will place storage units around the walls, and not allow them to project into the room – cutting off light from the central bulb. And a more reasonable person will turn the room into a meandering path through storage, with miniature streetlamps dotted throughout the forest trail. Yes, it is that dim in there. And here. I’m typing under one of those lights right now.
   Every five years or so, it’s time to do battle. This is 2025, ending in 5, and so, for convenience, here we fucking go. I’m late blogging this month, from all the clearing I’ve arranged over the past week.
   Yes, I had a big clearout last year. Wasn’t ruthless enough. That carried over into this year. And…
   This year, I decided I must be more ruthless.
   What stays? Toilets. That’s a legal thing. Also, for my convenience. What goes? Things that lose relevance. You open a drawer and find all the instruction booklets there. How to care for your washing machine. That washing machine left the house three years ago. Why didn’t the pamphlet go to paper recycling when the machine went to recycling?
   One isolated pamphlet. But there are many drawers, and loads of similar things scattered around rooms, across floors, and in the loft. At least the loft is always in motion. At one time it was a static affair. But that takes you to a solid point…
   The solid point is…the loft is packed solid, and I can barely get in there or across it. That’s when I made the loft into temporary storage. Things go there out of the way. Then I arrange for items in the loft to go all the way away.
   They go to Recycleton-by-the-Sea. All of those items are down the local pub having a pint. How do you tackle a massive clearout? In small stages. By that, I mean one large stage at a time. Drawing things out of a room sends them cascading down many hallways that are instantly difficult to navigate.
   You can’t get rid of things when you decide to get rid of things. The big struggle is to extract them from a puzzle of a room. Hallways fill up as you create islands of temporary storage. The goal is the garden. From there all roads lead to Recycling. And possibly to Rome.
   When a cumbersome thing goes into a room and stays there, that’s okay. But when you pack more things in along the route back out, you realise getting a cumbersome item out again is a task beyond mere mortals.
   My advice is never to construct storage inside the room that it stays in. Build the damned thing downstairs. Then wind your way along the tricky path to the final resting-place of this bulky unit or that stately bookcase.
   Foolishly, when there was space in rooms, I did assemble storage inside the room. During this massive clearout, I had to pension off a shaky bookcase. And by fuck, it was a million times easier going in than it was coming back out. That was just going from its spot next to the door….through the door.
   Ideally, certain units are supported by walls. Wall, bookcase, bookcase, bookcase, wall. Thus spake the Lawgivers, and the giving of the law was good, right, just, and proper. Rooms, sadly, have a flaw. Pesky things called doors.
   There’s no way around doors, but there is a way through them. Wall, bookcase, bookcase, space for door. The bookcase shuttered in? Is fine. But the one with an unsupported side will bow out over the passing of the centuries as dust the size of books gathers on top of books the size of books.
   If the individual shelves are screwed in, that’s easier to take. But if floating shelves sit on pins and the shelves bow down with weight as the side panels bow out…thump. A shelf lands on the books below, deep into the night, years after you added that storage to the room.
   When you walk past in the cold light of day – supplemented by light from bonus lamps – you must take a closer look at the disaster-in-the-making. Then you see the side panels are at the limit. Beyond saving, if it’s one of those units that you can’t disassemble without destroying them.
   And so, after years of service under heavy loads, a shaky bookcase had to go. Yes, a unit I foolishly assembled in the room for so-called convenience. Somehow, I managed to use my meagre mountaineering skills to manoeuvre this colossus out from behind the door and through the doorway to a very cramped landing which was now home to three bookcases that weren’t there before. I’d strewn the path with thorns of my own making.
   Made it to the stairs.
   If the whole construction slides out from under me going downstairs, I don’t care. The technique is always the same. I am more important than the rubbish I am removing from the building. If the unit collapses at the bottom of the stairs on being dropped…that is better than my own collapse under the unit at the bottom of the stairs.
   I’ve never surfed a piece of furniture to the lower landing, and I am not about to surf now.
   Making space is good. But after several years of furniture purchasing, the space is so limiting that you must first make space to make more space. Right now I have more space behind that door, right? The shaky bookcase is gone. I’m awaiting the arrival of two units to fill that space.
   But I filled that space with loads of things that came off the bookcase. Those are on other shelves, on the floor, piled on boxes and crates, you name it. I have to clear the space to put units in there and then fill those units. It’s going to be close.
   Meanwhile, waiting, I am making that easier by employing ruthlessness. What, in that room, can I remove? I created a cardboard mountain by ditching this box here and that box there. Easy.
   I turned a bookcase sideways, giving me less-easy access. But that allowed me to reposition the weighty drawer unit with the weightier laser printer atop it. When the new units come in, I’ll have the same storage space but more room to get by.
   Yes, I reached that point. I can only add a bookcase if I take a bookcase away. Dying units are sent to a Swiss Clinic. What else goes? Charity items. Physical media changes. With the advent of 4K movies and TV shows, the bulkiness goes away.
   Simply moving from a DVD set of The Sopranos to Blu-ray saved me an entire shelf. If someone in a charity shop is happy with their purchase, I am happy to ease the space constrictions on my movie storage shelves.
   Physical media is still a thing. If I want to watch the first Doctor Who story, An Unearthly Child, I can pop the disc in. Hell, I can even watch the unaired pilot as a special feature. There’s a dispute over the rights to the episode.
   Yes, the BBC has many episodes available to watch. Not the first one, though. Internet remedies to this problem are unsatisfactory. My best bet is to rely on physical media and pop the disc in. Far better quality than going online. For separate legal reasons, an episode can vanish from the BBC so that it is updated. In light of a scandal, say.
   Streaming comes with these complications. What if your favourite show is only your favourite show and the streaming company makes room for something else? That’s just too bad. Your show went away. Still, you’ll always have Paris.
   The 4K collections move in. And my trips to the charity shops become part of the massive clearout. Recycling plays a large part in this. A cardboard mountain may be a dreadful thing, but it is a recyclable thing.
   Polystyrene, on the other hand, is purely the Devil’s Work. Woe unto ye who doth truck with the idolatry of amassing a mountain of polystyrene, for this will not go well with ye. It’s the worst.
   The main plan is to gather it in one place, instead of having isolated pockets of the menace. I fear if it resides in the one spot for too long that the behemoth will form arms and legs and march upon a major city. This would get it out of the house, but it’s hardly ideal.
   I am missing a whole bunch of books. They didn’t come off the shaky bookcase. I went looking for them, and they’d moved. Knowing me, I preserved each shelf somewhere else. On another bookcase. Rooms are in tatters on the floor, and I can’t get to some places without going on an expedition.
   The good news is that once it’s all back on shelves, the whole place will have more space in it. Alchemy. Sorcery. Call that act what you will. I endure chaos in the pursuit of less chaos. Not the pursuit of order. I’m not deranged. Just slightly mad. About books. Ah, yes, that’s it.
   So far, I haven’t injured myself in getting rid of stuff. A miracle. The heavy-duty boots go on for furniture removal. Gloves prevent cardboard cuts when breaking up hefty boxes. Coffee soothes the troubled brow between stints of hefting and heaving large objects through tiny doors.
   What used to be stored for eternity is now up for renegotiation. What is that, there? Why do I have it? How did it get here? Why would I keep it? How do I move it to the bins? Must I use specialised disposal methods?
   Nostalgia has its place. And that place is now in the recycling bins. I keep an old computer in case this computer dies. Yes, I have an emergency laptop. That could die, too. The most levels of computer fuckery I’ve had to deal with? Two machines, dying one after the other in quick succession. So, yes, the spare died and I was very nearly out of commission.
   Since then, I’ve made sure I can temporarily rely on past machines. They are stored out of the way. As their operating systems cease being supported, they are killed off. There’s emergency provision, up to a point. I don’t get nostalgic about old computers.
   Cables. Why the fuck do I have so many cables? How many can I ditch? Loads, as it turns out. I still have loads of active cables, despite owning wireless machines. There is no nostalgia for the cables of yesteryear. And no space for them.
   Desks? My desk is a fixture. No wiggle room. It is solid, and needn’t be replaced. If I had to replace it, I’d require very precise measurements. The office shredder is under there, and it is the largest shredder I’ve ever owned. As long as the desk holds together, I see no problem. Which is why I periodically check furniture for signs of impending collapse.
   I’m looking around at curious things. You never know when you are going to need…and you realise, during the next clearout, that you never used that thing that you never know...and so it goes in a puff of flame, or leaves in a cardboard box, or it just flops into a bin almost by itself. But was it pushed off the cliff? Yes, yes, it was.
   Occasionally I contemplate removing a door from a room. This is a fire-risk, though, and I come to my senses. What would a door do for me if it became an empty doorway? Let me calculate…
   I’d get a tall bookcase in here, obstructing more light. In my library, a lack of door would do nothing, based on its positioning. There’s a room where I’d sneak in a small bookcase. Not much use. Better to have barriers impeding the advance of smoke in an emergency.
   Am I not ditching books? A few went to recycling. Hell, I never throw digital books out. I’m not THAT pressed for space, just yet.

NEW COMPUTER…SAME ARCHIVE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Buying a new computer comes with a problem: making the new computer as much like the old computer as possible. This takes a month. Doesn’t matter how large the archive is. Over the course of a month’s use, your new computer will throw things at you on a daily basis.
   There are plenty of what-the-fuck moments.
   I turned things up to eleven. Windows 11. If I could drip disdain off that, I would. Sloped type will have to do. Going to a new operating system, you find that something obvious is no longer listed under a really obvious category.
   Purely for the sake of change, it’s been listed elsewhere. You resort to the computerised equivalent of a crystal fucking ball, soggy goat entrails, the bone runes, and wild fucking guesses to take you to the place where you can not quite do the thing.
   Getting there really is just part of the journey. Once you are there, you still have to get there some more. And then your troubles start afresh. This goes on…daily…until, over the course of a few weeks, you’ve finally relocated all the things that have been put in different places.
   I’m a month in, and I’ve covered everything. (This is a lie.) It is aggravating. (This is the truth.) The computer itself is fantastic. I won’t have to upgrade until it becomes a lump of fused circuits. My archive is the same, but that archive has to change.
   So when do you review your archive? Periodically. But always when a new computer becomes the latest home for the same old archive. Some essential files are no longer essential. I look in a folder marked ESSENTIAL FILES, and I see I still have software parcels there from several computers ago – and things were very different, then.
   When I typed by candlelight, with a sepia-toned background, in a cave on the edges of the great wasteland, I found those primitive computer tools quite useful. But this computer is in high orbit over the planet, and I must put the stone axes away. And so…
   Once again, I find myself reaching for the flamethrower. The old archive is installed. Sounds like I am putting a puppet government in place. The basic rule of computing is unchanging. THOU SHALT FIND EMPTY FILE FOLDERS UNTIL THE ENDS OF TIME.
   Been burning those. They burn quickly. Given that I am using a new system, the new system has been hindering my efforts aiding my quest. I had a warning about data allocation. This was an e-mail problem.
   That’s when I remembered I had an e-mail archive. From computer to computer, the e-mail mountain has always stayed in the background. You look over your shoulder, and it glowers in the distance.
   I have loads of e-mail addresses for different purposes. Personal. Business. Assassination. (That last one is also business – but never personal.) Here I am, checking my archive again. But…the e-mail stuff is somewhere else. And somewhere else, it is giving me a warning. If I am not careful, there’ll be a landslide. Even far away, that’s a problem I’ll have to clear up.
   Will I clear this up? I’ve been chipping away at it. Number of unread e-mails? Close to zero. Occasionally, there’ll be a mad flurry of messages from three companies at once…and I’ll find a ridiculous number of messages waiting for me. Ten. Holy fuck, what’s happened? Nothing’s happened. No emergency.
   Electronic messages arrive in dribs and drabs. But then they build up. An e-mail comes in. I read it. Often, that’s the only action I need to take. Or I’ll answer one. And then, as there’ll be further action down the line…I shunt these e-mails to folders.
   They sit and wait. If nothing happens, gasp, nothing happens. And here I am, now, with a new computer, receiving a warning. So I check. Holy fucking shit. Number of unread e-mails? We’re at zero. Number of e-mails in folder? Oh.
   I’ve taken a look. Peeked in. Reached for the disinfectant. First, I found some e-mails were dropped into the wrong folders. I made corrections. Then I did a lot of burning. Messages going back years, dealing with companies that stopped trading. People retired or died. What was relevant then is not relevant now.
   For historical purposes, it is interesting to see what was going on, where, how things turned out…but tumbleweeds gathered in one place take up a whole lot of space for a whole lot of nothing. Burn, burn burn…
   I had 400-odd e-mail entries there, for one e-mail address. How many of these were still relevant? All of them – for taking up online storage space. I was given a warning. Warning heeded. I roasted 200 e-mails in the flames.
   By fuck, that’s a tedious process. And so…I’ll burn more when I feel like it. Killing 200 certainly relieved space-concerns. I look at a few of those e-mail boxes and they are as fresh as they’ll ever be. No e-mails in there.
   A few have a single e-mail left. This tells me I updated a password for a site, and that site is keyed to a particular e-mail address. Handy, if I have two accounts for the same site. The lone e-mail is a signpost telling me that account is tied to here and not to there.
   Junk mail is non-existent. As I have junk mail folders for EVERY account, I am happy to report that Windows is filtering like a fucking zealot. I just wasn’t interested in helping the late Sani Abacha liberate his considerable fortune from those pesky Swiss bank accounts. He can pay his own processing fees. Through his many surviving relatives, I guess.
   Music is, for some reason, the hardest transfer from old machine to new. Everything copies over. But Windows now only operates a legacy Media Player. I know this as the player tells me so when I hover the mouse over a very familiar icon.
   Every time Media Player was “upgraded” people complained. It doesn’t seem to be a particularly complex piece of kit. Don’t fix it. You’ve made it better. Okay, now fix it. You’ve sent it to live on a nice farm, far away in the countryside.
   Here’s a legacy photo of the Media Player, gambolling through the fields, enjoying retirement. You can see Farmer Giles in the background, readying his shotgun for use against a plague of rats.
   And that’s the last legacy photo we see of legacy Media Player. I moved the archive across, and found loads of unknown albums. They were all one track long, and they were all track one.
   I went looking for albums that were known, named, and had been mugged of their first tracks. It used to be the case that fixing this shit…well, it was easy, right. No longer. I cast the mystic runes, sent a text message to Mount Olympus, and pressed a few buttons on the off-fucking-chance.
   This is why it can take a month to recreate the office you were using before. For a week, you are too busy to listen to music. I’ll put some music on. What’s the worst that can happen? Oh.
   And so it goes with MANY OTHER THINGS. I want the name of the fried mushroom of an employee who decided to plant the menu in the fucking middle. The middle. We read from left to fucking right in the English language, you low-rent Satanist!
    It’s not the Satanism I object to, but the low-rent nature of the move.
   Then there was this fucking invisible screen just out of sight at the top of the screen. First, I had to identify it by running online searches guessing at what the fuck it was. When I strayed into the general area, I honed my search.
   This did not improve my mood. But at least my search was honed. I’ve forgotten whatever the fuck it was. All I had to know was the location of the sub-fucking-menu housing the command to delete its thorny arse.
   There’s a calendar. But it isn’t the calendar. It looks very like the calendar from before. Today I discovered the aching need to place an event on that calendar. But, no, not on that calendar.
   Right, then. It must be an app. (It is.) And that app must be listed here, somewhere. (It fucking wasn’t.) I’m looking for a fucking calendar app, not the Northwest fucking Passage. If you aren’t looking for the arse-end of the moon, you shouldn’t have to go to the arse-end of the moon to find the place you are looking for.
   Basingstoke, you say? Wait a bit, while I hop on my rocket-ship to the arse-end of the moon. That’s where they put the index. And that is the only thing on the arse-end of the moon worth visiting. But not repeatedly.
  Turns out, Basingstoke is on this planet…and not on the arse-end of the moon. Who knew? I fucking knew, before I had to climb into the rocket-ship to fly off and confirm the bloody obvious.
   Any-fucking-way…
   Opening a calendar I can add an event to…proved a tedious prospect. I found it quicker to grab a piece of paper and scribble a reminder there. Job fucking done. Move the fuck along. Nothing to fucking see here…except a piece of paper, obviously. And I don’t have to travel to the arse-end of the fucking moon to read that.

HOW MANY BOOKS IN DECEMBER: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Recap from December 2024’s blog post. 

*

How many books have come into the house in the month of December? That’s easy. No books. So now I’ll set myself an easy challenge. How many books will have come into the house by December’s end?
   No more than…five…is my guess. And I will try to hold true to that. How? I’ll just not buy any. But wait a bit. There are things on order. Damn it. Yes. That’s true. How many? I have no clue. You see, I don’t want to know, and I don’t need to know. 

*

Now that I’ve caught up to January, how many books actually came into the house in the long month of December? Two. Okay. That’s no more than five. Easy guess. But how many books did I read in the month of December? With last month’s blog post in mind, I decided to keep score throughout December. If I tracked the number of books in, I had to track the number of books out. And something else, besides.
   Zero books went out. One day, this will be a problem.
   What else, though? I knew I’d track the number of books read, as well. December is a monumentally busy month, or feels busier. Yes, there’s a holiday atmosphere, and that contributes – paradoxically – to the feeling of great activity.
   Maybe it’s the colder weather that makes things feel as if more’s going on. Nat King Cole never sang about those lazy, hazy, crazy days of winter, after all.
   How many books did I read in the busy month, then? My tally says sixteen. Maybe seventeen. Not sure if I noted the last one on a scrap of paper. We’ll say sixteen, for sure. I was on a mad mission to read a book a day, but life intruded. Could I read a book a day for a month? Yes, if I pick out loads of short books to read. True, they’d be short. But…those light tomes still take up space on the shelves. And a book read is a book read.
   How many unread books are on my shelves? Unknown. Books are crammed…everywhere. Across how many rooms? Oh, and hallways. It’s a rule that I don’t keep books in the kitchen. Unless they are pamphlets. Instruction manuals for kitchen gadgets. They go in a drawer, and are fine there. One day, the kitchen gadget is done. The corresponding instruction book is recycled.
   No, the kitchen isn’t a tribute to clouds of cookery, but steam does form on occasion. I kept a bookcase or two in the kitchen for a short time while I rearranged things upstairs. But nothing permanent sat in the kitchen on slick shelves that would attract condensation.
   Never read in the bath. That’s a top tip.
   I was told plumbers spend a ludicrous amount of time fishing mobile phones from toilet bowls. Unjamming dead electronics sounds like no fun. So…never answer the telephone while you are on the throne. Maybe that’s a better tip than not reading in the bath.
   Off the top of my head, I don’t know how many bookcases there are here. And I don’t have to care. As I don’t know how many books are on my shelves, I can’t really say how many unread books are on my shelves.
   If I could divide the books into read and unread collections, gradually adjusting the dividing line, a slow rising tide of reading, then I’d need an extra five rooms. Books go where they fit. And to store them in read/unread sections is impossible at this stage.
   Instead: chaos. Occasionally, this means I will accidentally read a book I thought I hadn’t read before. Chief suspect here was a book on renaissance art. This was a gift. And it was time to read that gift. Except, after delving in…yes, I realised I’d read it before.
   It was a good book, so I finished it again. What’s at the other end of the scale? A book I’ve walked past, convincing myself I’ve read it. No, I don’t think so. But then…how would I know for sure.
   Is such a volume more likely to be wedged into the top end of a distant bookshelf? Almost all books here are upright. And almost all books here have writing on the spines. Almost all books here have spines readable if you tilt your head to the right. There are exceptions.
   Hardly any books lie flat. Those that do lie across a line of books of equal height. The uppermost volume is almost always connected to the books it lies atop. An author puts out one more book before death. And there’s just no way to rearrange the books on shelves. Can’t be done. But there is that tempting space on top of books…
   I use that space rarely. While I still have space elsewhere, I needn’t resort to using that awkward gap at the top. Books that lie flat feel a bit isolated. Maybe I think I’ve read all of those. Some books will remain unread…
   Dictionaries. Those are dip-in tomes, and you are a fool to read a dictionary from cover to cover. I say that having read The Devil’s Dictionary in its entirety. Trust me. It’s a dip-in book, too. Ah, well. A book read is a book read, whether I liked it or not. At least I needn’t read the damned thing twice.
   How many books will come into the house this year? I must cut back, as ever. Let books come in, but read more than you let in. I must review the concept of sending books out. There’s charity. And there’ll be gifts.
   You can’t recycle hardback books. That’s what charity shops are for. I’d have to think really badly of a paperback book to recycle it. There are categories, I guess. Outdated books. But those might be useful as snapshots of history. Would I feel the need to stare at those snapshots? If not, do I need to store those?
   Taking a look at the shelves above my desk, I see they are accessible. The shelves below my desk are obscured by my desk. There’s a book hierarchy. In this case, it’s a lower-archy. Some things I won’t need quick access to. Until suddenly I do, and then I curse the arrangements.
   What are the arrangements? They are office-based. I can’t operate the computer and its many gadgets without clamping a few USB hubs to the shelves. Books lurk behind the cables. Why waste the space back there? It’s a bookshelf, after all.
   Books in and books out. Need to work on that second one. Books read and books unread. Then there are books read again. At the thorny end of the scale there are abandoned books. Books I tried to read and noped out of finishing…are few and far between.
   You need to be really bad at writing to come up with a book I won’t finish. Hell, my allergic reaction to Ambrose Bierce half-killed me. But I made it through The Devil’s Dictionary. Once. A second time would send me into author-phalactic shock.
   Books damaged beyond reading? No fires and no floods. There’s no mouldy old manual or worm-infested writing. Books produced to the very limits of reading? I have a few. There’s a limit to the concept of the tiny font. If I have to be miniaturised so that the letters appear as vast sculptures on the horizon, then maybe rethink your book production process.
   Odds and ends. My entire library seems to be made up of those. Massive manuals, tiny tomes, and a few items that barely qualify as books – they are all here. I want to read all of them, apart from the reference volumes. And I mean to dip into all of those.
   Will I keep score this year? I still have items on order, and feel I always will have. My guess for January is…two books in. I am definitely cutting back…on books in. Books on? Well, books on the shelves are going to keep living on those shelves. Worn-out books? I try to look after them, so that’s a small category. Dusty books? I have no way to avoid those. All bookcases with doors on them had the doors removed for reasons of space. I don’t need to provide space in which to open the doors if I take the doors away. Every room with books in becomes an aisle. And the upper hallway has gone that way, too.
   I think taking the doors off rooms is a step too far. Going by the layout, I’d only get one extra bookshelf in here, and that’s hardly worth the bother.
   Yes, I have glossed over digital books. The space they take up is time. Priority goes to physical books in front of me. And to the left of me. To the right of me. Not behind me. I have some limits. Need to leave room for the chair at my back.

BOOKS AT CHRISTMAS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Not Christmas books. Those are books about Christmas…or they are not about Christmas – just set then. Great Christmas movies? Bah, humbug! That was a hint about a great Christmas movie. I’ll leave you to discover it on your own.
   Christmas movies?
   Batman Returns.
   Lethal Weapon.
   STAR WARS.
   A James Bond film. You’ll have to guess which one, as many of them are shown at Christmas – which makes practically all of them Christmas movies. Do you know how Christmas trees are grown? I’ll leave you to discover that on your own.
   Christmas movies. Okay. But Christmas books? Do I read Christmas-themed books at this time of year? What would I consider a book with a Christmas theme? There’s an obvious candidate by Charles Dickens.
   The Chronicles of Narnia feature…koff, koff, spoiler alert…okay, eternal winter, and no Christmas as a major theme. So maybe, just maybe, if you do believe in fairies, talking lions, and Turkish Delight…Christmas might return to Narnia. Don’t accept sweets from strangers.
   It’s easier for C.S. Lewis to add Santa Claus to The Lord of the Rings than for J.R.R. Tolkien to add Galadriel to The Chronicles of Narnia. Tolkien couldn’t stand the thought of Santa Claus ripping down fictional barriers and being a guest star in a fantasy land. Mainly as he’d been busy as fuck impersonating Santa in letters to his children.
   Narnia is all the better for having Santa Claus in it. If, indeed, Santa puts in an appearance at all. I’ll leave you to discover that on your own.
   Do I consider Christmas books to be those with snowy settings? Is there more to it than that? Vitally, is there less to it than that? For reasons of the plot, C.S. Lewis gave us a Christmassy story. And there is snow. The snow also melts away, in the end.
   What about a story with a Christmas connection, angle, or timeline? The Midnight Folk, by John Masefield, leads to a very festive sequel called The Box of Delights. Perhaps the setting becomes more Christmassy for being written in the mid-1930s. But what sort of festivities feature in Masefield’s tale? I’ll leave you…etc.
   Scrooge inhabits Christmas. He is haunted by it. That was a spooky spoiler. In the land of Narnia, it’s always winter. Christmas was frozen out. Until…ah, but that’s a spoiler. I suppose there are stories you forget are set in December…
   But there are fantastical tales that don’t have the month of December in them, or any other month of the year. Those stories develop their own calendars. And may yet be Christmassy as fuck.
   There’s a rule about much-loved classics. Beware those who tout the phrase around. Particularly if they insert the word holiday into proceedings. A much-loved holiday classic. One we’ve never heard of.
   To return to the movies for a moment…animated movies…there’s a cartoonish cartoon based on the much-loved classic book I’d never heard of. The Polar Express. What the fuck is that, and why the fuck does everyone in the cartoon look like melted rubber?
   You may vomit at the very concept of Narnia, and that’s your business.
   Perhaps you’ll barely make it through more than five minutes of The Lord of the Rings. I read the whole thing and discovered that I’d never need to read one of Tolkien’s stories ever again. C.S. Lewis, being eminently more readable, and with a sense of humour, is an author I return to. But not specifically at Christmas.
   So what of books at Christmas? Not Christmas books. Books I find myself reading at Christmas. Oh. Gifts. Christmas presents. If I think of those books, they aren’t Christmassy in scope, theme, and use of language…
   The best gift of a book at Christmas is always one you are going to buy for yourself, as you know roughly what your own taste in books is like…though even you might unpleasantly surprise yourself with an ill-thought-out choice. So buyer beware – never surprise yourself with an off-kilter purchase.
   But always delight in an off-kilter purchase that proved true.
   You are not buying yourself a Christmas present. No. It’s a festive excuse to buy a book. As if you fucking needed an excuse. You aren’t going to wrap it and leave it under the tree for a stunned you to pick up in wonderment.
   For years, I’d just buy myself music I’d heard somewhere. That was my festive treat. Always have a back-up – music to listen to. I still buy music in, around this time of year. But the point of this blog is to consider books, and not festive discounts on music purchases.
   Books are great gifts if you like the books given. And if the books aren’t for you, they are for someone. Have I ever given away books I received as gifts? People have always chosen well, when furnishing the gift of a book.
   So…that’s never come up. It would be awkward to receive a duplicate of a book. But there are checks and balances in place. What would you like? Do you already have BLAH DE BLAH? I find that saves a lot of bother.
   It would be nice to receive an entire bookcase as a gift for more books that’ll turn up sooner rather than later. But I’d have to be asked if I have space for yet another bookcase. The answer is always NO, and then I conjure up more space anyway.
   How many books sneaked into the house this year? I never care to hear the answer. Why not? I always think the answer is around five. And it never fucking is. How many books leave the house? That’s the tricky part.
   I haven’t had a charity clearout in some time. And I didn’t dump much on the charity shops, even then. If I really need to, I’ll cast a cold eye over one or two volumes. Then I’ll take them to that nice farm in the country, and I’ll point out the rabbits.
   How many books have come into the house in the month of December? That’s easy. No books. So now I’ll set myself an easy challenge. How many books will have come into the house by December’s end?
   No more than…five…is my guess. And I will try to hold true to that. How? I’ll just not buy any. But wait a bit. There are things on order. Damn it. Yes. That’s true. How many? I have no clue. You see, I don’t want to know, and I don’t need to know.
   It’s true. I count my books by tonnage and not by volumes. The only thing stopping the floors collapsing is the lack of floorspace for more bookcases. It’s a complex mathematical calculation, to be sure. And it goes like this…
   Floorspace is represented by the symbol F.
   U, or Utility, covers the usefulness of the assembled volumes.
   From Einstein’s formula, we have C – in this case, standing for CASE. That’s the type of unit which absorbs floorspace and holds books.
   K gives us F.U.C.K. That’s what I think when I have to think of the number of books already here. The K might as well stand for KETAMINE at this point. I’m going to be on horse tranquilisers just thinking about moving another bookcase to make room.
   But I need not add five books to the library this festive-tide. I suspect five. There are 30 days left. If I want to be picky, I wouldn’t place bets on books arriving after Christmas itself. And we have to knock off a few days for lack of postal activity.
   Then there’s a week in which I will be recovering from the annual food coma. Last year I decided to cut back, and foolishly added parsnips to the Christmas dinner. I should have added lumps of concrete. Less filling.
   I suppose the most Christmassy book of all is a Christmas cookery book. That’s a gift once, just in time to be no use that year. But forever available for study, thereafter. I don’t believe I have any cookery books in the library. It’s better just to get on with the cooking.
   But that flies in the face of an entire industry, based around festive meals! So? Do any of these cookery books implore you not to add fucking parsnips to a meal that you are already trying to cut back on?
   Didn’t think so.
   I am reminded of Christmas annuals. Hardback anthologies of comic book characters. They year would always be the next one. So a 2024 Christmas annual is dated 2025. The format is for the next year. You are getting to buy the book early for Christmas, even though it’s technically a book for the New Year. Just a publishing quirk, designed to flog as many copies as possible. It’s like a sell-by date for a much-loved classic.
   A quick online check of Christmas annuals shows this chicanery is still going on.
   This blog post is now host to a question. Will there be more than five new books in the house, by month’s end? It’ll be a very short blog in January.

KARLA’S CHOICE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Fact, in a world of fiction. Clear reflection, for once, in a wilderness of mirrors. George Smiley left the Circus with unfinished business. His chronicler, John le Carré, is no more. The family firm, concerned with the writing of stories, passed to his son. And so, I picked up KARLA’S CHOICE – written by Nick Harkaway.
   The premise is that intelligence officer George Smiley left the secret world of espionage behind, that he’s happy away from managing shady activity, and there’s a decade or so of a gap to fill in the chronology. And now the story can be told.
   What happens between THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD and TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY…well, that’s the topic of this continuation/fill-in book. To get into that, just a little, first I must bring an old file from Cold War storage… 

*

George Smiley is a character who sipped, like Horace Rumpole, from a minor immortality potion. Before A LEGACY OF SPIES came out, you could point to assorted Smiley stories and say, with confidence, that the dates didn’t quite match up. Characters simply had their ages revised, for convenience.
   This is the Batman Effect. Batman’s history extends back around a decade or so when considering his many adventures. He stays eternally fit and is forever 29 years old unless stated otherwise. The character is deliberately an older caped crusader in The Dark Knight Returns, for example.
   Inconsistencies in A LEGACY OF SPIES are overlooked. 

*

Why mention this observation from yesteryear? Nick Harkaway, in his introduction to KARLA’S CHOICE, tells much the same tale. He thinks of all the Smiley portrayals. Various actors from television, the movie, and audio adaptations. I think of Smiley once…
   This particular once. Only SMILEY’S PEOPLE puts that character’s name in a book’s title. Harkaway had one eye on that, I’m sure, when he took Smiley’s Cold War adversary, Karla, and bumped him up to star status on the cover.
   Co-star status. The cover tells us this is A JOHN LE CARRÉ NOVEL. Not a George Smiley one. It is a George Smiley one, but it is from le Carré’s universe. Graham Greene has Greeneland, a country of everywheres. No matter where you are in the world, in Greeneland you are always in the same place – five minutes from betrayal if you are on the ball. That’s five minutes after betrayal, if you aren’t.
   But le Carré only occasionally flirted with Greeneland. If anything, he subscribed to Tolkien’s draughty character-building England, and took over management of a small misty corner of it when the resident wizard left for the dreaming spires of Oxford the Far West and a community of weed-smoking elves.
   Not for le Carré the excessive usage of a literary crutch holding Cold War novels upright: flashy expensive science fiction gadgetry of the Yankee variety, which he considered akin to the use of magic in a non-magical world when writing espionage fiction – stripping away the label of espionage fiction in the process of employing said wonders. With one mighty gadget, our hero clichéd free. No.
   Instead, he relied on muddy tea, clanking lifts, Victorian brickwork, and rattling radiators of a between-the-wars vintage. Oh, and Russian interference with same.
   Karla is the bogeyman. He’s mostly an off-screen villain: Sauron, with hints of Lenin’s face. An all-powerful ring in a le Carré story is going to be a spy-ring. And that’ll be an all-powerful spy-ring…with many flaws.
   In the television adaptations, Karla is an almost unknown force of nature. He provides the Russian wind which blows through the Cold War. In portraying him, Patrick Stewart says not one word. But he brings the adversary to life.
   The non-speaking role in the flashback is important as a driver of many plot-threads. Smiley meets Karla and tries to recruit him, early. This encounter plants seeds of doubt in the boss, Control, looking for a traitor. Control considers the possibility that Smiley was recruited by Karla at that meeting, instead. Or that Smiley was already a traitor before then, and used the meeting to catch up with his Russian master.
   Control was strong on paranoia. He took three lumps of it in his toffee – a strange mix of tea and coffee served in Victorian institutions that exceeded their original century by some time.
   TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY has a list of suspects, including Smiley for several reasons, but it is the flashback meeting which furnishes a prominent mark against Smiley’s name. Why mention Karla and his non-speaking role?
   I’ve gone over it several times. When reading this John le Carré novel, written by le Carré’s son, the question of voice comes up. Once Alec Guinness played Smiley on television, le Carré found it difficult to shake the performance from his head. And so, he wrote fewer stories about the character. Guinness, ever the imp, stole more than a few le Carré mannerisms for the role.
   Reading KARLA’S CHOICE, I can hear Beryl Reid when Connie Sachs enters the tale. No one says actually quite like Hungarian Toby Esterhase. He seems to speak that way by bringing remnants of at least two other languages into English and hiring the word actually as the face-paint on the foreign words, to whore its way around a sentence or two.
   There’s a Hungarian connection in this novel, so Toby is brought into the narrative – and a welcome addition he is. Connie Sachs is always great fun, if alcoholically tinged with great sadness. And that’s her point.
   So, yes, characters are preserved. The timeline is a moveable feast, but at least a feast is had. And Harkaway confesses this in his introduction. He’s damned right to do so. Expectation is high. We’ve been down this road before…
    When A LEGACY OF SPIES came out, le Carré went back and filled in a few gaps so that THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD would make sense in light of TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY. And there, date-of-birth and character age were on the moveable menu.
   In terms of age Smiley may very well pass for 63 in the dusk with the light behind him. He hovers in the perpetual Twilight Zone of fifty-something years old under your average pub lights on a bitter mid-week November night, and sixty-something to any doctor evaluating him for signs of heart trouble.
   With that loose age in mind, Harkaway visited the well his father had returned to. KARLA’S CHOICE gives us more about that time between THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD and TINKER TAILOR…
   In dropping his bucket into the well, Harkaway had to give us another layer between those books that didn’t ruin the extra layer of icing his dad had already added to the cake with A LEGACY OF SPIES. Difficult terrain. Many mines on that field. The best approach was to say…
   Well, dad shifted the dates around a little and where’s the harm…do you want this book or not?
   I am strongly reminded of the oft-mentioned Penge Bungalow Murders. Horace Rumpole, Old Bailey Hack, consumer of Chateau Thames Embankment, and husband to the formidable Hilda, would trot out this running joke on an hourly basis. But Sir John Mortimer left the gag dangling. It was better to travel than to arrive.
   Until, in the end, he wrote Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders. Inconsistent? Rumpole isn’t a reliable narrator. If you believe that, I have Tower Bridge to sell you. And the book? A triumph, meeting impossible levels of expectation? It’s not about the murders. No, it’s about Rumpole’s meeting Hilda. A triumph.
   On a side-note about voice, and image, Leo McKern is Rumpole. His caricature adorns the book covers. Turning back to le Carré, you’ll find all sorts of editions of his books have very vague people on the covers.
   Except for one of the covers of KARLA’S CHOICE. One man, Karla, is inside the head of another – bespectacled Smiley. Smiley could be a vague nod in the direction of Sir Alec Guinness, though reminds me of Alan Arkin in profile. Karla seems to have been conjured up from publicity stills of East German Stasi man Markus Wolf.
   Le Carré almost used Wolf as a character, taken from his lawnmower. Then he learned Wolf was a real spymaster over in the East. If you believe the bit about the lawnmower, let it be on the basis that you’ve checked that brand exists. It does. We’ll leave off there, unless you, like control, also take three lumps of paranoia in your tea. And coffee. It’s toffee.
   What do we get in this book? Karla, scheming. He has a walk-on part. Many cogwheels click around. Do we have le Carré’s voice, and is Harkaway his own man? Yes and yes. He writes in the terrain of his dad, but not in his dad’s shadow.
   Harkaway respects the landscape of lamplighters and scalphunters. He wheels Connie Sachs on for a turn. But Harkaway gives us more. Connie is one of the Norns, weaving a thread and telling the tale of a man’s fate. She can’t do this alone, and has two other Norns in attendance, as is the custom. Harkaway uses another name for them. But they are Norns, just the same.
   This extra level of detail contradicts nothing in the original novel cycle. Even if there were contradictions, remember this is an espionage novel featuring Russian agents. The future is certain. It is only the past that is unpredictable.
   There’s a bit of a blip, but it is easy to overlook. Yes, there’s another book in the series. THE LOOKING-GLASS WAR features Smiley. But it doesn’t matter. He’s hardly in it. That story takes the Special Operations Executive from World War Two and imagines the organisation’s floundering and flapping along well beyond its use-by date.
   In that sense, it’s a bit of a curio that le Carré himself rejected and accepted and rejected by turn. Ultimately, he appeared to have settled on the idea that the bruises died down with the passage of time.
   Voice. Character voice. The voice of the setting. Voice of the argument, theme, being put forward. Those voices of TV and movie and radio/audio book actors. Smiley’s voice as a character and as Alec Guinness.
   Yes, le Carré’s voice and influences on him. His influence on Harkaway’s voice. (Harkaway sneaks in a spot of blurry family background that le Carré used extensively for THE PERFECT SPY. It’s his family history, though. So, fair game.)
   Then there’s the spectre of Kim Philby.
   Graham Greene and le Carré each had to deal with betrayal by Kim Philby. In le Carré’s case, he gave us TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY. Philby, in commenting on le Carré, set about a casual almost disinterested scathing dismantling of le Carré’s voice and purpose. By contrast, Graham Greene turned up to see Philby in Moscow, and sloshed vodka as they spoke of old times and a changing world.
   Greene provided a plug for THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, and Harkaway seems to have returned the favour somewhat with a not-so-sly reference to Greene’s work in this continuation/fill-in novel.
   It’s difficult to evade the very long shadow of Greene in writing espionage fiction. Yes, le Carré fell foul of this with THE TAILOR OF PANAMA. That book has everything to do with Greene’s work OUR MAN IN HAVANA. For those embarking on the task of writing spy books, read Eric Ambler first. Then you’ll have a different shadow to leapfrog away from.
   I have to avoid the plot of this book. That means I must skirt around plotting in other books in the series. Where would I place it in the running? Same advice as ever. Read the Smiley books in order of publication…
   Start with the two murder mysteries. CALL FOR THE DEAD. A MURDER OF QUALITY. Then Smiley takes a back seat to proceedings in THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. But events in that book come to haunt him.
   Smiley has a token role in THE LOOKING-GLASS WAR. After that, he’s back in THE KARLA TRILOGY – TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY, and SMILEY’S PEOPLE.
   He turns up almost reluctantly in THE SECRET PILGRIM. Then we have the fix-it novel that connects THE SPY WHO CAME IN WITH THE COLD to THE KARLA TRILOGY. A LEGACY OF SPIES fills in some crucial gaps.
   Okay, but to read this book, KARLA’S CHOICE, I’d say – bare minimum – read CALL FOR THE DEAD, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, THE KARLA TRILOGY, and A LEGACY OF SPIES before even thinking about tackling Harkaway’s continuation.
   I have my suspicions about certain aspects of the plotting that could lead to another continuation book or two. More unfinished business. But I can’t really give you the plot here. Except to say…a man goes on the run, and everyone would like to find him.
   Smiley, called back to the job, goes after this man. Karla, Moriarty to Smiley’s Holmes, lurks in the deep background but haunts many a page. Characters collide, some old, some new, and Harkaway does justice to his dad’s legacy. Of spies.