The HitchHiker’s Guide To The Galaxy: Quintessential Phase.

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there.

And so opened the fifth and final book in the Hitchhiker trilogy.

Many fans dislike the final book, as fans dislike everything they love.

Douglas Adams, meanwhile, has always had a reputation for spewing forth the most incredible ideas and concepts, but also for having a great deal of trouble finding a story to fit them all into.

For example, Mostly Harmless spends the first three-quarters of the book getting started, after which it quickly finishes.

But the ideas contained therein are lovingly brainstormed gems, like….

Oddly, the man's face was now only a couple of feet away. He seemed in one way to be a perfectly normal shape, but his body was sitting cross-legged on a pole forty feet away while his face was only two feet from Arthur's. Without moving his head, and without seeming to do anything odd at all, he stood up and stepped on to the top of another pole. Either it was just the heat, thought Arthur, or space was a different shape for him.

…and…

‘Am I still infinite?' it asked, ballooning this way and that in space. `Am I infinite now? How yellow am I?'

Moment by moment the bird was going through mind-mangling transformations of shape and extent.

`I can't...' said Random bewildered.

`You don't have to answer, I can tell from watching you now. So. Am I your mother? Am I a rock? Do I seem huge, squishy and sinuously intertwined? No? How about now? Am I going backwards?'

…until finally…

’…in your universe you move freely in three dimensions that you call space. You move in a straight line in a fourth, which you call time, and stay rooted to one place in a fifth, which is the first fundamental of probability. After that it gets a bit complicated, and there's all sorts of stuff going on in dimensions 13 to 22 that you really wouldn't want to know about. All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty complicated in the first place.’

By a staggering coincidence the phrase “pretty complicated in the first place” also only happens to be a perfect description of the history of The HitchHiker’s Guide To The Galaxy itself.

In the early 1980s, the story began as a radio series.

After the radio series had been novelised, author Douglas Adams continued the story in book form until his death in 2001. At this point radio producer Dirk Maggs adapted the remaining books for radio, and reassembled the original cast, 20 years older, to record them for transmission.


However, as Adams would revise and reorder events to make more logical sense, there was some disparity between the original radio series and the novelised book versions.

For example, the last original radio episode finished with Ford and Arthur being strung-along by a guy called Zarniwoop from the HHGG building.

However the next book in the series began with Ford and Arthur trapped for years on prehistoric Earth.

This is of course impossible.

And yet, that’s exactly the jump in storyline that the new series began with.

It gets worse – on radio, Ford and Arthur had already been through the prehistoric Earth storyline 5 episodes earlier.

It gets even worse - it was the late Douglas Adams’ own plan to ignore the last 5 episodes.

Oh dear, you can’t argue with that.

So Dirk Maggs’ compromise solution was to add-in a few throwaway lines at the start of the first new episode, writing off the last 5 episodes as just a dream.

As a result, subsequent episodes, though quite brilliant, nonetheless met with a bitter taste in my mouth. I was forced to choose which of the 2 contradictory sets of radio episodes were the ‘real’ ones.

The original series, of course, won.

Maggs picked up the production story in a BBC webchat on 22nd June 2005: (full transcript here.)

The changes in the Tertiary Phase were Douglas's in episodes 1 and 2 except the part where Trillian dismissed Zaphod's experiences in The Secondary Phase as a dream. Douglas was happy to just ignore the Secondary Phase as if it had never happened (because the books worked in a different way to the radio series, and these new series were based on the books), but I thought that as we were continuing the 'reality' created by the radio series we couldn't just ignore it. Episode One wasn't the right place in continuity to 'rescue' The Secondary Phase at that point but I was able to adapt the scene in the novel where Trillian was fed up with Zaphod's egocentricity to add a disagreement between them as to what exactly HAD happened to Zaphod when he visited the HHGG Building. Zaphod's insistence it DID happen incidentally helped Trillian's motivation to leave him, so it was dramatically useful too, and was supposed to flag up the fact that this was an issue we'd be returning to later.

The rest of The Tertiary Phase stuck very close to the book because I had promised Douglas it would do so. On the other hand when we (briefly) discussed the last two books, he felt they would require more hands-on adaptation. … Thus later on in the Quintessential Phase the memory of Trillian dismissing Zaphod's very real (to him) encounter with the Total Perspective Vortex motivates him to go and find out what DID happen - thus restoring the Secondary Phase to its rightful place in the Saga.

And so it was that I found myself listening to the final 4 HitchHiker episodes ever, and actually encountering the joy of hearing a NEW HitchHiker storyline!

Zaphod realises that all those episodes weren’t just a dream, so he sets out to find Zarniwoop to prove it.

And he does.

Zarniwoop of course had been originally played by Jonathan Pryce, an actor who, since the original series, has enjoyed success escalating him far above cheap little BBC radio productions.

But no – he came back!


What a joy to hear Zarniwoop’s rich tones again, especially after all these years!

The build-up to Zaphod’s final confrontation with him was therefore sheer wonder.

And then… we cut away to something else.

It’s a tragedy that we never really got to hear the big showdown. Like so many big scenes in Neighbours, we’re only really told afterwards what has transpired, but the whole production was so enthralling, that that was good enough for me.

All three of these new series have been absolutely stuffed with quality, and it’s all been because of Maggs’ talent as a writer, talent as a director, and his loyalty to the original. (that last one seems extremely rare)

It’s a shame his hands were so tied though, as he was clearly committed to finding the best way of doing everything.


For example, Sandra Dickinson (Trillian in the TV series) played the alternate American version of Trillian in the radio version, and was surely who Adams was thinking of when he wrote the final book.

But despite the new series’ canonicity with the original, I still can’t get over that clumsy start, and I think my key problem is this:

Whilst I applaud Dirk Maggs for at least putting one line in to acknowledge the jump in story, that line left me, the listener, agreeing with Trillian – that Zaphod really had only dreamt those episodes.

If the story’s narrator had established that Zaphod was in fact in the right, then I would have been able to believe in what followed. After all, the opening narration to that episode did have a heap of new dialogue as it was.

And with the entire original cast returning anyway, even including guest actors Jonathan Pryce, Rula Lenska and Stephen Moore, just a quick ‘final’ scene with their characters would have worked wonders.

I don’t think anyone would have found that disrespectful.

I love HitchHiker, and I love all the episodes old and new, but now when I lend my tapes of the series out to anyone, I know that at episode 13 they’re going to come back to me and ask “What on Earth just happened?”

And, just the once, and only the once, I’m going to have to apologise.

(Production company's website here)

Ape Ball

Herschel has a new game for his Playstation 2. It’s called Super Monkey Ball Deluxe.

Ever keen to torture chimps on TV, now he’s bought a virtual compendium of popular ball-games…with monkeys trapped inside all of the balls.


We pushed the poor things down ramps and into the sea, we played snooker by knocking them across the table – we even threw them, still incarcerated in their spherical cages, down bowling lanes to knock over skittles.

And it was a lot more fun than throwing ordinary balls into the sea, across snooker tables and down bowling lanes I can tell you. We got to blow them up and drown them too.



I tell you - even the monkeys were enjoying it.

They cheered, they danced, they even implored us to hurry up and start.

Yes – the monkeys could even talk.

Reminded me of a Christian children’s TV show that I saw a few months back about creationism. There was a whole song and dance number performed by these monkeys, singing and dancing about how Jesus was king of the jungle. And they did funny monkeying about antics like reading magazines, looking through telescopes, and Jimi Hendrixing their guitars. Their lead singer didn’t even have his monkey mask on – happy to be a monkey from the neck down, but with a human head on top. For a song about creationism...they were kinda giving off the wrong signals there, don’t you think?

Anyway I digress.

I had so much fun playing this innocent little game. And the cool laid-back music made me feel like I was back on holiday in Crete again.

So - this Playstation 2 game with all these monkeys inside balls.

How long do you reckon before this happens in real life?

War Of The Worlds

Why do they remake classics?

Usually I would cynically believe that it was for the money, however this movie was directed by Steven Spielberg, who obviously doesn’t need any.

The story is about…yeah, I think you know.

This version certainly has a lovely start. Spielberg spends a good 20 minutes establishing what normal everyday life is like for his principle character, and I do mean normal. Even the lighting looks natural.


And that, I guage, was intended to be the film’s hook.

After all, in the last decade the great spectacle of an alien invasion has really been done to death, so there’s really not much new that CGI can offer us now. To find a new take on such a familiar story, it seemed that this movie was aiming to make the whole thing actually look real.

So this film goes to a lot of trouble to tell its story through the eyes of just one man, yet at the same time, it unfortunately shows a great deal else through the eyes of a movie.

The opening shot, for example, is a great majestic sweeping shot of our hero filmed from a helicopter – exactly the sort of perspective that most of us are not used to seeing things from.

Then aliens slowly and unstoppably force their way into our world, something that could be quite disturbing, if we were seeing it from our usual head-height point-of-view. Instead of which it all looks like a movie - because that's the only place I've ever seen big spectacular CGI effects.

Yes, that’s my main gripe with this film – that my expectations of Spielberg were too high! (a bit like the camera-angles) :)

To that end, losing the music would have helped too.

(Incidentally, this is the same problem that I had with The Passion Of The Christ - that it was so cinematic. Had it been in black and white, silent and told in chronological order without all the slow-motion, then it would have looked far less fabricated. My review is here.)

Following the lead character also resulted in my repeatedly thinking “What the heck is he doing that for? Why isn’t he turning back from all these people? Surely he must know that they all want his vehicle?”

Sadly, he thinks like a poorly motivated movie character, just not thinking things through, something I’m disappointed to see more and more of these days. Why on Earth do films spend so much money on everything except the script? How much would it cost to pay one objective proof-reader?

But I’m griping, the film’s real flaw comes at the end, when (obviously) we win, but we are never clearly told how. What we do get is a narrator (you read that right – a narrator) who makes a throwaway explanation so quick that I missed it. It's as if they presume that all already know it from the original...

Spielberg is a great director, one of the best, but here he followed others and became wallpapery. Engrossing while it was on, but not a film that I’ll take away to relive in my mind.


6½ out of 10.

Star Wars: A Tape Of The Klown’s

A long time ago, in a London borough far, far away, my klown friend Herschel had got hold of a Star Wars board game, catchily entitled Star Wars: The Interactive Video Board Game.


He’d been waiting for an opportunity to play it with someone, and that opportunity had finally arrived.

I, however, was definitely not that someone.

“Oh, c’mon!” he scowled at me through his cigarette smoke and revolving bow-tie, “look, it's this or the Barney Miller game!”


Star Wars: The Interactive Video Board Game, we discovered, is just about the most complex board game ever devised.


The board has three, count them three levels, and comes with three sets of cards. (Mission Cards, Data Cards (which comprise of Memory Bank Cards, Color Key Code Cards and Detention Block Escape Cards), and Force Cards which each contain two instructions, depending upon which side of the force you are currently on)


In addition to this, each player gets two plastic playing pieces (a Rebel figure and an R2 Droid), a Force Level Indicator (to keep track of those ominous Dark Side Points) and six coloured explosives.

It even refers to ordinary things like “rolling the die” as “using the Force.”

I might have had greater patience assembling it all had our third hand Elmo not habitually given me a running commentary on how not to.


“No Mister Gobles, that piece doesn’t go there, no, the other way around Mister Gobles, don’t hold the AC power plug that way round Mister Gobles…” (TZZT-TZZT-TZZT! GOBLE GETS ELECTROCUTED) “… Ahh! Hah-hah-hah-heh-heh, you’re really funny Mister Gobles! Okay, Elmo loves you, bub-bye!”

But the game’s crowning glory, and the thing that motivated Herschel so, was the promisingly integral VHS videotape.

With the tape lined-up and ready to play in the VCR, Herschel stood in front of his curtains and read us both our mission:

“Hey! Hey! Hey! So are we all ready to have some FUN? Hyu-hyu-hyu-hyair-hyair-hair-hyu-hyu-hyu… Eurghhhhhh.”

Ignoring his audience’s lack of reaction as usual, he continued.


“Okay. The “Death Star”” (he mimed the air quotes) “is about one hour away from destroying the planet Drinba IV. We three adventurous young rebels are going to infiltrate the “Death Star”” (again) “that’s the board, and lay all six of our charges to blow it up and destroy it before it can get there. Oh boy – this is gonna be so much fun! Any questions?”

Even Elmo was silent. Herschel continued:

“Well I sure got a question - why do they call them LIGHT sabres? Huh? I mean the way they struggle around with them – they’re obviously pretty heavy, right? Right? RIGHT? LIGHT-sabre, huh? WHAT??? You expect me to waste A-list material on your blog? Ah, run the freakin’ tape already.”

Elmo pressed play, chuckled at the button lighting up, and it began.

As we started taking turns to throw the die, a countdown appeared at the top of the TV screen to tell us how long we had to set our charges before the “Death Star” reached the good planet Drinba IV and destroyed it. About an hour.

And then the magic bit happened – beneath the countdown, Darth Vader swam into view.

And he was Darth Vader. He was played by the original actor David Prowse (who once walked in on one of my radio shows, but that’s another story), he was still voiced by James Earl Jones, he wore the same costume as in the movies and even had the same 80-something cinematographer Gil Taylor filming him.

In short, he really was Darth Vader.

And he knew what we were up to.

Approaching the screen, Darth Vader could see us.

“You.” he growled. Herschel, Elmo and myself looked guiltily back and forth at each other. I was frozen half way through throwing the die. “The rebel using the force.” Oh dear. “Come over to the screen.” Oh dear, oh dear.

I complied, as you do. Reflected in the screen I could make-out Herschel and Elmo both sniggering together and pointing at me.

With the clock still ticking, Vader growled on at me. “What is your name?”

“Err…Steve. Steve Goble. I met you once on Radio Cracker…”

But Vader cut dead my attempt to shmooze him, and punished me with a couple of Dark Side Points. Returning to the board, we all realised that this was not merely an innocent board game. Vader now knew my name, and he had made an example of me. Suddenly winning took on a whole new priority. Herschel summed it up with the words that were on all of our lips: “Eurghhh, tough crowd.”

So-called "Interactive TV" has nothing on this.

So we began to pick up the pace. We started rolling the die while the previous player was still moving his Rebel figure or R2 Droid.

For most of the next hour, Dark Side Points were amassed, wiped off, and amassed again. We all followed the “Light Side” instructions on the Data Cards. We got imprisoned and freed, began to set our six bombs and reset them every time a Stormtrooper found one.

We also realised that we would have no way off of the “Death Star” when we detonated them. We would all die, but we would take the “Death Star” with us. Grimly I wondered how fate had now dealt me the hand of becoming a suicide bomber.

But time was fast running out. There were now precious few minutes left until the “Death Star” destroyed Drinba IV, and, worst of all, Vader was back.

And this time there would be no escape – he wanted one of us to become his pupil.

Vader’s pupil would no longer follow the Light Side of the Force – from now on he would follow the Dark Side and seek to eliminate the other two rebels. The decision would rest upon which one of us had amassed the greatest number of Dark Side points.

The last 40 minutes had been fun – we had laughed together, cried together, and become a team.

Incredulously, we looked back and forth between each other. Which of us could possibly betray our friends by going over to the Dark Side now?


Me? The guy running the Christian blog about following Jesus Christ and being nice to people?


Elmo? Everyone’s favourite four-year-old muppet who parents regularly trust alone with their children?


… or would it be the short-tempered chain-smoking klown, dressed-up in scary face-paint that made him look like Satan?

(scroll down for the answer)

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Elmo had gone over to the Dark Side.

With the minutes now becoming seconds, Herschel and I furiously took our moves as quickly as possible, actually making it into the Inner Level, but all the while being stalked by Elmo, his whole face now a thoroughly disapproving shade of red.

Me: “Throw the dice!”

Herschel: “Quit yellin’ at me you putz!”

Elmo: “La-la la-la, Drinba IV, is Elmo’s World!”

Me: “THE MUPPET’S GAINING ON US!”

Herschel: “EURGHHH… I HAVEN’T BEEN IN THIS MUCH TROUBLE SINCE JOHN MACENROE WAS GUEST-HOST!”

Elmo: “And now Elmo is going to annihilate the whooooole population of this planet!”

Me: “HE’S FOUND ONE OF THE BOMBS!!!”

Herschel: (in slow-motion) ”NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

The music reached a crescendo, Herschel’s gaze slipped behind me at the TV screen, and I saw his green hair droop dejectedly as his cigarette fell out of his mouth.

Herschel: “WE’RE LATER THAN A RERUN OF SEINFELD ON LWT – LOOK!!!”

I looked behind me, and there it was.

We gawped in silence as we witnessed the “Death Star” effortlessly destroy the good planet of Drinba IV, and then quaked as Vader reappeared to revel in his victory.

And then the credits rolled, while we just sat there in stunned silence.

The copyright notice faded-out, the tape clicked off, and the TV snapped back onto some digital channel.

Elmo himself became a saggy old cloth muppet again. Baggy, and a bit loose at the seems.

There was nothing to say.

We had failed.

I looked at my watch. It was about 9:30. It was definitely time to go home now.


“Hey-hey!” sparkled Herschel. “Of course, we could just rewind the tape and play again! After all, that one was just to get used to the controls, right…?”

Job 36:13-16 (New Living Translation)

13
For the godless are full of resentment. Even when he punishes them, they refuse to cry out to him for help.
14
They die young after wasting their lives in immoral living.
15
But by means of their suffering, he rescues those who suffer. For he gets their attention through adversity.
16
"God has led you away from danger, giving you freedom. You have prospered in a wide and pleasant valley.

Psalm 6 (New Living Translation)

1
O LORD, do not rebuke me in your anger
or discipline me in your rage.
2
Have compassion on me, LORD, for I am weak.
Heal me, LORD, for my body is in agony.
3
I am sick at heart.
How long, O LORD, until you restore me?
4
Return, O LORD, and rescue me.
Save me because of your unfailing love.
5
For in death, who remembers you?
Who can praise you from the grave?
6
I am worn out from sobbing.
Every night tears drench my bed;
my pillow is wet from weeping.
7
My vision is blurred by grief;
my eyes are worn out because of all my enemies.
8
Go away, all you who do evil,
for the LORD has heard my crying.
9
The LORD has heard my plea;
the LORD will answer my prayer.
10
May all my enemies be disgraced and terrified.
May they suddenly turn back in shame.

The Fantastic Twelve

"HHHHiya, heroes!"


They’ve been a Marvel comicbook since the 1960s, then they made 2 cartoon series, and I used to collect their adventures in the mid-80s.

Then in the 90s, I forgot about them.

Now, in the zeroes, The Fantastic Four (FF) have finally made it to the big screen.

And it’s about time.

The premise of The Fantastic Four is this:

Four astronauts, while up in space, are bombarded with cosmic rays, which cause their ship to crash back to Earth, and each of them to develop a different super-power.

This afternoon, Herschel and I were planning to go see the new Fantastic Four movie at Richmond Odeon, but before we did so, we had a bit of history to clear up. Because, unbeknownst to many, this is the second movie version of the FF.


Y’see back in 1994 Roger Corman had the rights to transfer the FF’s story onto celluloid, in fact he so had the rights that he actually, shot, edited and finished the whole thing. Why it was never released is, to me at any rate, a bit of a mystery.

Most mysteriously, the copyright holders are rumoured to have now junked all the master copies of it.

Anyway, thanks to the miracle of free bootleg DVDs, this afternoon we... what?

I know, I know, bootlegs, but this film has never even been released! Surely everyone involved in the production must have wanted someone to one day watch it?

In fact, Herschel put it best of all:

“It's not available in any other way, if I could buy it in the shops I would. Like my Percodan addiction. Eurghhh…”

Ahh, and that’s the lovely thing about giving into temptation – all the excuses that you get to make up.

So Herschel met me at the door, gave me my ticket and concessions of fruit pastilles and Smarties, told me the seats were all non-smoking and then with a torch directed me in to a spot on his bedroom floor.

Then he loaded said free bootleg DVD of said 11-year-old unreleased movie into his Playstation 2, and warmed-up the portable TV.

Were we actually about to see this rare sought-after masterpiece, or were we instead about to sit through 90 minutes of silhouettes carrying popcorn across an echoey dubbed German cut of a different movie?

Well, it was a bit ropey, but it was the right movie alright.

And it was pretty interesting too. A bit hard to get hold of the characters at first, but to my mind there were two moments that really stuck out.

1. After their spaceship has survived the bombardment of cosmic rays and crashed to Earth, a weird kind of common-sense kicks in. Sue asks if anyone else thinks it strange that, with all the wreckage lying around them, the four of them have all survived unscathed.

With the surrounding countryside utterly deserted, and no-one quite sure where they are, this is a disquieting observation indeed.

2. The second point is weirder. Alicia Masters, who’s blind, is alone in her flat. Then we see her attackers quietly breaking in and silently jumping down the stairs. The weirdest thing is the way this scene has been edited to run in a jerky strobing sort of slow-motion, freezing on an individual frame for a long time.

A great way of helping the audience to empathise with the character’s blindness, I thought. And kept on thinking. Until we both eventually stopped watching the screen to instead peer intently at the whirring black box beneath it.

And it turns out that was the end of the film, or as far as the dodgy free bootleg DVD was concerned anyway. We must have spent the best part of an hour trying in vain to get the thing onto the next chapter, or even the next frame, but all we got instead were pain and frustration.


“Hey, hey, kids – just say ‘no’ to bootlegs – it ain’t worth it. Unless they’re free.”

Yet something about those first 45 minutes seemed far more enthralling than the big-budget version we had to pay to see at the cinema that evening.


Perhaps the modern 2005 version was just too clean-cut.

The characters were all established more clearly, the effects were bigger and showier, and the comedy more focussed.

The earlier Corman version however was far less clear, and therefore more believable. Real life just ain’t that neat.

And of course the 2005 movie had the inevitable expository line about DNA about 22 minutes in, just like every super-hero movie has to nowadays. I swear if they ever make a Hollywood version of SuperTed, it’ll all be because of his rewritten bear DNA.


Fig. 1: Who was that incredible masked man?

What I did like though was the overall turnaround of events. At the start Dr. Doom has everything, and Reed Richards has nothing. It’s a movie, you can guess what happens.

My point is that this is a fair depiction of real life. So many times now something has appeared to me to be impossible, and yet when an impossible-to-foresee turn of events reverses the situation, I don’t attribute it to God. You see by then it’s in the past, so it’s now not only possible, but definite.

God, why don’t you perform miracles any more?

Finally, while all movies have faults (the 2005 version’s main one being the technologically all-powerful situation that the FF finish-up in), at least they told a better origin than the 80s cartoon version did.

Without the rights to The Human Torch, the cartoon makers came-up with Herbie The Robot to make up the team’s fourth member. And he gets his powers in one throwaway line in the opening credits:

”Now with Herbie The Robot – the newest member of the group…”


This is accompanied by a shot of Herbie emerging from the spaceship’s wreckage, cheerily waving his robot arm in greeting - whu…? How did he come to be again? The only reasonable interpretation of this shot is that when the spaceship crashed, several random pieces of wreckage were forced together, accidentally buckling into a super-intelligent flying, talking, wisecracking robot.

And why not? After all, it’s consistent with natural selection, albeit without the selection component.

I guess it's easier to accept if you're a true believer.

(review of 4: Rise Of The Silver Surfer here)

Donnie Darko

Today, Alistair and I were heading out to see the movie Donnie Darko at an open air cinema in London.

I was a bit apprehensive about this, after my negative experience of open-air cinemas in Auckland when I’d seen The Incredibles, however I did want to finally see Donnie.

But then, I didn’t.

I called Alistair and did something I very, very rarely do.

I cancelled.

The thing was that Johnny B had invited me to a party this evening that Esther was throwing in Clapham, and this would probably be my one and only chance to catch up with my circle of catholic friends. Kevin, Fraser, Steve K, Emma, that lot.

But much as I wanted to see them, (as indeed I also wanted to spend more time with Alistair again), I didn’t much feel like trekking out to Clapham.

Or anywhere in London, for a movie or not.

It occurred to me that, after a year separated from home, during which time I had spent 8 months in a room with no windows with over 20 strangers passing through the other 3 beds, 2 months living with a Korean family, regularly attended church services in a foreign language, presented a year of radio shows on a station with no listeners, eaten left-overs for 6 months and walked away from my faith 3 times, not to mention everything else, I was probably a bit burnt out.

I’d been back a month now, and in that short time I’d gone to church, seen Herschel a few times, been to Kingston, attended a graduation day out with evening meal, had a drink with Goodwin, had a coffee with Mickey, gone to the south coast for a weekend, visited my Auntie Sunny, seen my solicitor in Reading, spent the day with Pope and family-to-be in Tewkesbury, spent a day catching-up with Alistair and Jo, visited my dad’s ashes at the crematorium, shot pool with Uncle Travelling Matt, seen an Australian circus in London, witnessed the continued return of Elvis at The Rising Sun and single-handedly organised 3 separate film-shoots, plus spent much time taking additional shots/cataloguing pictures and audio.

Charging around 7 days a week suddenly struck me as not the wisest way to spend my precious time out back home.

I really needed to relax. I really needed a holiday. Which meant that I needed to go away to some place other than New Zealand.

After all, how can you have a holiday while you’re at home?

I hated cancelling that. I never cancel.

The Return Of The King

Youth groups never last, because, sooner or later, everyone stops being young, and finds a new group.

That’s called life, yet every once in a while it’s nice to get back together again and catch up.

One 18-23 church youth group that I used to be a member of – called Lighthouse - broke up in 1989, shortly after I’d joined.

14 years later, in 2003, fellow Lighthouser Perry told me that a reunion had been planned.


So it was that on a cold December evening that year, I had apprehensively pushed open the door of The Rising Sun pub, and glanced around to recognise my long lost aging peers.

I was ready for the whole thing – the enthusiastic greetings, the “How are you?"s, the explanations for my unemployment and failed dreams, the embarrassed silence when we suddenly realise that we no longer have anything in common, the huge successes of those who had wronged me, my unusually well-catalogued memory dwarfing their recollections and leading to a perceived judgement of my living in the past and not getting on with my life, and above all the sheer inadequacy of how, unlike theirs, my life had not changed one jot.

It wasn’t much to show up for, but in practice what happened was I pushed open the door, and realised that there was in fact only one person there who I recognised.

Elvis Presley.


(I guess I should have read the sign out front, like you did)

Sure, he’d aged a bit, and he hadn’t moved on with his life much either, but I had to admire his decision to relaunch his old career anyway, even if the only venue willing to book him at first was The Rising Sun.

I couldn’t recall him ever actually coming along to any Lighthouse meetings though.

I hung around for a couple of numbers, during which time I photographed him, (above) which he acknowledged by coolly pointing a finger at me. After that I exited to begin a freezing hour-long trudge around all the different pubs in the area, in search of my long-lost old friends.

They were nowhere. When I bumped into Perry a month later at St. Margaret’s train station, he explained that the whole reunion had in fact been cancelled. It did happen the following summer, shortly before I left for NZ, but that’s another story.

18 months after that empty night, in other words today, I found myself back in The Rising Sun for another Lighthouse reunion.


It was much smaller than the main event – there were only 4 of us – but for me it served not so much as a memory of things past, but of our ongoing friendship with each other.

Perry, Hastings and Goodwin.

There was a shared sense of fun, together with the confidence that comes from having known each other for 15 years. It was these things that, when I got out my 10 films of my year in New Zealand, enabled Perry to boldly assert “Okay Steve – you hold up the pictures, and I’ll tell everyone what they’re of.”

Cool!


Perry: “Okay, this is me at home before I began my trip to New Zealand.”


Perry: “And this is the view from my window on the plane.”


Perry: “This is Auckland.”

Steve: “Actually I think that’s Los Angeles. It's another photo from the plane.”


Perry: “This is the place where I stayed.”

It was official - Perry was a better me than I was. If anything, he was proving that no-one had missed me.

However, Perry’s brilliant running commentary then hit an unexpected snag. Something unanticipated that no-one could have foreseen. A deadly bolt from the blue that left us all mentally howling “Why, God, WHY?”

Yep, Elvis began his act.

I couldn’t believe it. The single most successful singer in the whole history of the world had staged his comeback here a whole 18 months ago now… and he was still here???

As he proceeded to belt out That’s Alright Mama I had to reflect on just what a tragic comedown this was. Sure, he was a bit slower on his rooted-to-the-spot feet now, but he still commanded the attention of the whole room. Even Perry, recognising that no-one can outclass Elvis, gave up narrating my photos to take his own pictures of the human sideburn.


But alas, although we loved him like a dead icon, Elvis Aaron Presley just was not what we had all got together for, so we reluctantly finished our glasses and left the King for The Crown.

Sitting around in our second pub of the evening, I got out my photos again…


… and, as I recall, another band started up. Honestly, this lot were just Elvis wannabees.

This time I raised my voice anyway and went through the remaining films, before we all went our separate ways, probably vowing to get together and do this again sometime.


That's alright mama, that's alright for you,
That's alright mama, anyway you do.
Well that's alright, that's alright,
That's alright now mama, anyway you dooo...

Circus Oz

Q. When you’ve only got a month back home in the UK, how do you spend your time?

A. You go see a show from Australia.


Tonight my oldest friend Alistair procured a couple of freebie tickets for us to see Circus Oz performing on the South Bank.

Circus Oz does exactly what it says on the tin – it’s a circus, and some of them are Australian.

And, true to their antipodean origins, many of these acrobats, contortionists and gymnasts spent a good deal of the night up-side down.

Particularly homesick was the clown opening the whole shebang. After the intial topical announcement of "Please do not take photographs, or mention the cricket," this trained professional harlequin walked right out in front of us… on the ceiling.

Really. Heels over head. (N.B.Head over heels is probably an imported phrase from ‘down under’)

But anyway I’m getting off the subject (as he was) I mean I’m starting this entry off on the wrong foot (…) I mean I got out of bed on the wrong side oh forget it.

The point is he walked along the ceiling, and protested sadly that he was an old clown now, and no-one believes him anymore when he tells them that, back in his heyday, he used to walk along the ceiling up there. (points down at the stage floor)

He then proceeded to drink a glass of water, put on his costume and apply his clown make-up, by which time I was looking at my watch impatiently. Sheesh, had we really paid to watch a show that wasn’t even the right way up? Have these Australians really never heard of adapting their material to suit a local audience? If he’d poured his glass of water into an up-turned sink so that we could watch it climb up the plughole in a clockwise direction, then I’d have been impressed, but this aging geezer was getting dressed in front of us – had we actually come to some sort of back-to-front aussie porn show?

Once I’d remembered that neither Alistair nor myself had actually paid for our freebies, I began to feel more optimistic – maybe these guys were going to unwittingly follow the reverse thing through, and pay us the ticket price at the end of the show. Maybe that was why they had been forced to come here from Australia in the first place – they’d lost all their money.

Anyway, the night began impossible and gradually got more so. Other artists joined the aging clown, to juggle up-side down (using the floor), dress-up as trapezing birds, and in one particularly trippy sequence, a guy called Mr Chips got chased around in mid-air by a flying cello.

Truly, the stuff of dreams. (or nightmares if you happen to be a cellist)

Alistair and I could hardly criticise, though.

Outside during the interval, and staying with the topsy-turvey theme that the evening seemed to be taking, Alistair and I took some holiday photos of ourselves by the River Thames in front of Big Ben.



It was at that moment that I began to question just where my place was in the world...


Six months earlier I had stood by another river with Scottish Dave, Kevin and Ian photographing ourselves in front of the Sydney Opera House. (handily located in Sydney)

That had been a holiday photo, and indeed I’d shown it to Alistair, but who on Earth did I think I was going to show these to?


Circus Oz: 9 out of 10.

Show-Stopping Action From The Wembley Conference Centre Now On Two…

Well I’m sorry if you’ve tuned-in hoping to read Steve’s blog today, because we’ve just had to change our schedule to instead bring you some more great snooker.

Uncle Travelling Matt has been regularly beating me at pool ever since we were at college together. In fact, I’d say that Matt beats me at pool about as regularly as I beat him at it. We’re pretty evenly matched.

Which is a fairly egotistical thing to say about myself. Matt is brilliant.

Just look at the picture above, complete with blur-marks. Take away the cue, and is it me, or is he telekinetically drawing that white ball towards him?

Fig.2: Steve insists on lining-up his shot, despite having gone blind.

Returning Home

One of the things you do when returning home from a long period abroad, is you visit people. Aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, verbose plantlife, but no matter how busy your schedule, there is a shortlist of people who you simply can’t miss out.

a) Your immediate family.
b) Your best mate.
c) Anyone who visited you while you were abroad.

You have to visit these people no matter what. They might now be a brain in a jar living on the moon these days, but you still have to go visit them. They could even be dead.

Today was my dad’s birthday, so we all bought some flowers and went down the crematorium.


Revisiting a place that doesn’t change is a good way of recognising any changes in yourself.

I think the last time I had been there had been in April a bit over a year ago, on the 2nd anniversary of his death.

That time, I had walked around all the grounds and prayed for the recipient of every single bouquet, plaque and dissipating pile of grey dust that I had found. I’d prayed for 2 things – for their forgiveness, and for the comfort of those left behind.

I’d had a similar compulsive tendency a week later when working in Crete. We'd driven past so many monuments to those claimed by traffic accidents, that almost every blind mountainous bend seemed to have one. Too many, in fact. Maybe they were actually look-out plaques. Saying in Greek something like "LOOK-OUT!" (1 out of 10, all right, I'll shutup)

Anyway, today at the crematorium, I was past praying for everyone individually, so I went next door to the graveyard, and found a spare patch of untouched ground, where I lay down in the sunshine.

Morbidly, it was my way of praying without words. I was telling God that I felt dead, and that I really wasn’t interested in a life that, after 34 years, was still crammed with frustrated unfulfilment.

Without a vision, the people die.

So, had any of my futures come to pass yet?

I was still at home, still unemployed, still with the same friends, almost all of whom were now married with kids and careers and no time to see me. In fact, was anything about my life even different at 34 to when I had been 18? Oh yeah – now my dad was dead.

Greeeaaat.

For years now I’ve carried a quiet sense of redundance, that God has a great life for every single person in the world, except me.

I am really getting tired of hearing people protest “Oh but I wish could do what you can. You have no ties. You can just get up and go to New Zealand for a year – I really wish I could do that. Of course I would never leave my wife/kids/career which mean everything to me…”

That’s right – you wouldn’t.

Alone by the bush where we’d sprinkled his ashes 3 years ago, I carried-out the same pointless exercise that so many bereaved people do – I caught up with the deceased.

I mean you have to – you have to let out all the news that, out of habit, you’ve hung-onto to tell them about.

So I imagined that he was somehow there with me, invisibly dressed in his overheating suit, and able to hear my muttering. Expressing not a single emotion as usual, but still grimly believing that I was somehow going to have a normal life like everybody else.

I told him the highlights and lowlights of New Zealand, how things had unfolded, my beliefs about the future and my reasons for those beliefs.

In short, I talked to him in exactly the same way that, had he been alive, I would never have.

I could never really talk to my dad.

As usual I left, believing 100% that he had not heard a single word, and considering that to be a good thing.

Father wasn’t a Christian in the normal sense of the word. As far as I know he never prayed, read the Bible, went to church or anything like that, in fact he once told me to take the Bible with a pinch of salt.

Yet on the 2000 census he wrote his religion down as “Church Of England.”

The hardest thing about his death was reconciling his apparent unbelief with salvation. The two didn’t go together, and yet to reconcile them, I had to change either my faith or my memory of my dad. And honesty wouldn’t let me budge on either of those.

And what the heck is a “Christian” anyway?

“If you confess with your lips that Christ is Lord, and believe it in your heart, you will be saved.”

I think salvation is a truth that cannot be expressed in words. In today’s automated world of rigid company policy, dogged beaurocracy and “intelligent” computer-programs (that actually follow whatever instructions they have been given), I think we’ve forgotten that God’s natural world is not like that.

God doesn’t need a rule to follow in order to save time when deciding who’s in and who’s out. I think God considers each of us on an individual case-by-case basis.

I think he looks at our heart.

I cannot say “My dad is saved because he was a Christian,” because I still don't know what a "Christian" is.

I cannot say “My dad is saved because he was a good man,” because none of us is.

I cannot say “My dad is saved because I want him to be,” because that is just delusional wishful thinking.

I can say “My dad is saved because it is right.”

And I have no words that can express that equation.