And its all over!

Why is it Christmas seems to come and go so much quicker than any other part of the year? And yet still I have nothing to show for it!

I seem to have misplaced the last two weeks and all I have to prove it happened is a handful of receipts and a bin-full of festive wrapping paper.

Admittedly I do also have a shiny black box with futuristic writing on the top that will claim the next 5-8 days of my holiday. No more reading for me bar the subtitles on the bottom of the screen.

My game of choice is predictably Role-Playing-Games (RPGs). These have a more involved and prolonged storyline than most games. The story is experienced through a main group or character and the more you spend looking around and speaking to the Non-Playable-Characters (NPCs) the more you find out about the story.

The one I’m most looking forward to is ‘Dragon Age, Origins’, although when I actually manage to brave the shops is another thing.

I can’t understand why people are so eager to go shopping in the ’sales’ after they have spent the last month battling queues and crowds to buy presents for people they hardly know. Surely now is the time to appreciate what you already have and spend some time relaxing at home. Unless of course you work in retail for you have no Christmas Holiday time.

I feel really sorry for people who work in retail, I’ve been there. They work you right up until the last minute and then expect you to come in again the DAY AFTER it’s all over. Not very fair I must admit. Especially when you have to deal with the sale-crazed public fighting and squabbling over the last size 10 sparkly top thing on the sale rack.

At least have the decency to put it back on the hanger once you’ve established it’s not the right size!!

I think I will hide inside my house for the next few days reading Dracula, playing video-games and eating my weight in chocolate!

Enjoy the holidays if you can! xx

Impotence in the face of Nature

Last week I watched more television in the space of two days than I usually do in a week. It is only recently that I have acquired a tv aerial in my bedroom so I am no longer subjected to the TV regime dictated by the family collective which always outvotes my own interests.

One show that really caught my eye was the first of a new series ‘Man on Earth’ presented/narrated by Tony Robinson. It followed the emergence of our species termed as ‘Homo Sapiens’ and their near-extinction due to a significant shift in climate.

I would recommend watching this programme if you missed it, it is available to watch online from channel4.com.

Robinson occasionally referred back to our current paranoia about the start of something similar. He did not over exaggerate the comparison nor did he infer that we have doomed our own survival. There was one quiet, understated suggestion that perhaps we have accelerated the coming of the next climate shift.

The fact that we are up against the forces of nature, can we be so arrogant as to assume that there is something we can do to stop or delay it? No amount of ‘cutting carbon emissions’ can protect us against the waxing and waning of the sun’s rays.

Pollution never caused the ‘ice-age’ that the Homo Sapiens suffered but it does damage our own health. Does this then mean that the politicans are using the fear ignited by such films as ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ to stop us from further damaging our own health? Are we such a sensationalist nation that we need something big and dramatic to kick us into action like in the Hollywood films?

This is reality and we need to accept that we are not all-powerful or all-intelligent. Neither is a big strong male going to come rescue us at the end of the film. In a few decades no one will even know we existed …

“And so this is Christmas, I hope you have fun …” (John Lennon, ‘Happy Christmas (War Is Over)’)

Only a few more days now till Christmas and still I have only bought a few presents. I can’t understand why people get so hyped up about just one day.

The last few years have been a little disappointing and, frankly, empty of the Christmas cheer I used to feel when I was younger.

Perhaps it is because I am older and more cynical or perhaps it is because as families grow more distant there is little to enjoy except the presents you receive that day. Being over twenty there are few ‘toys’ to enjoy and presents consist largely of beauty gift sets and tops that I will never wear.

After striking a deal with a pound-stretched Santa I have managed to convince him to buy me a PS3 if I agree to put over £100 towards it. This went down fairly well and I now have something to look forward to Christmas morning. When did I ever get so materialistic?!

I foresee that such a shiny console with its never ending list of new games, I will find it difficult to squeeze in many chapters of Dracula over the winter. Either way I will enjoy the break after nearly three months at work without having a day off besides the statutory weekends.

Still, I can’t complain, at least I still have a job which in the current climate is something to be grateful for. Even if I don’t exactly enjoy what I do!

When Reading Aggravates The Hangover, Turn The Telly On!

I never get the same feeling from watching a long adaptation of a book than I do from reading the original. However with books like Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights I feel that this is the only way to get to know them.

They were written in an era where books were written to be as long and as ornamented as possible. There are large chunks of the book which are unnecessary to the story and there is little to be gleaned from analysing them. In a modernist, minimalist world there seems little point to pouring over the lengthy chapters and just skipping to the good parts. This is where abridged versions come in … semi-skimmed literature with all the boring ‘fatty’ parts taken out.

Unfortunately my sense of pride forbids me to read abridged versions. If I’m going to read a book then I want to read it in its entirety the way the author meant it. I will not be beaten by a book but I will put it on hold if I find it a struggle. For example I have been reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy for over eight years now. I am on the last book but I keep forgetting the names and the places. At some point I will start this book over but I am so close now it seems a shame to give up now!

I sat down, well lay down actually because I had a raging hangover, to watch what I thought was the recent dramatisation of Wuthering Heights that ITV put on a few months ago which I missed but it turned out to be a film starring Ralph Fiennes. I thought I knew the story vaguely but on watching the film I realised that actually I knew very little bar the name of the protagonist (Heathcliff) which I had gleaned from a very old episode of ‘Sabrina the Teenage Witch’.

The film was actually very good. It appeared low budget and the special effects were meek though I think it was a very old or low-budget production. The suspense was built up through the script rather than effects which is what I like about film adaptations of books in the first place. They seem to play more heavily on the talents of the actors than the producers.

I don’t think I will be rushing to get myself a copy of Wuthering Heights in the near future as most of the scandal is fairly low-key will manipulation than anything juicy! Although the faint-hearted, swooning women of the Nineteenth Century, this was probably as much as they could take!

Welcome

I’ve always dreamed about being a writer since I was little. My mother told me that I needed to plan on having a ‘real’ job to pay the way while I write. My nan on the other hand encouraged me to write all the time and hoped to see me in print before she died. Sadly, I never got around to finishing a book let alone seeing it in print before my nan passed away. I’m still determined to finish a novel, I just need to find that elusive thing I’ve been told is called self-discipline.

At school I was always good at English until I reached GCSE level then it suddenly got hard. I realised there were a lot of people about me who were better than me and this humbling sense of incompetence followed me throughout the rest of my education right up until the end of my degree in English Literature. Although I knew I was not the best at the subject I still pursued it because I loved the subject. Occassionally I even managed to contribute something valuable to the seminar and right in the very last semester I managed to find my feet and catch up with my fellow students.

Since leaving university there is a gap that has formed where I no longer discuss or think about what I am reading. I tried to join a reading group but it seemed to disband after the first book. Then I fell into the dreaded (for me) 9-5 routine that changed to 8.30-5 routine after I got made redundant last February. I have read (and finished) a grand total of seven books in the last two years, one of which was for the reading group, and feel that I should make time to read and even more time to think about what I am reading.

I’m hoping that by putting it into a blog I can set myself on the right course towards writing in print and reaching out to other people who like to read actively.

Laura

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