Truth, like love, is hard to pin down

A new series of progs on Ch4 kicks off with Peter Osbornes Reckoning, candid and well made on a miniscule budget, reflections on the factional war ravaging Iraq, like a sandstorm, swirling with desert ghosts. A political a maelstrom born out of tribal feuding, centuries old, embroidered with tales of kangaroo Shia courts and blind hatred, of raging militia gun-battles in Sadr City and Basra, the Sunni-Insurgent axis in the western deserts. In one hit, Osborne deftly blew away the gossamer threads of a new democratic Iraq.

So insightful and rigourous was his report that I felt awakened from a dream, that I too had fallen foul of a tendency to suspend our disbelief. It's one thing to oppose the war, it's harder to digest the sordid details of the dystopia that follows in the wake of the supposed Shock and Awe. Far easier to anaesthetise yourself with the fictive reports of the embedded, the networked and the second-hand. No a more pertinent and incisive despatch would be hard to find.

Nic Cage singing Love Me Tender, sitting here in the pale blue velvet of the USB lamp, wondering if I should text H. We blew-up this weekend, like a car that stammers and sputters with the sudden onset of winter. A weekend of frosty mornings, outside in, gently thawing afternoons, all culminating in a showdown on Shoreditch High Street, where else... But it was far from all bad - shot through with spectral winter-wrapped moments at Somerset House, Brick Lane and The Golden Harte. We got up earlier than usual, and we spoke our minds, and as is sometimes the case we sometimes got ourselves misunderstood in the process.

A Kinda Hush...

Tuesday, Katjas birthday: wonderful dinner at Andrew Edmunds - coupla beers, champagne, homemade wrapping paper, scrumptious food, a few bottles of the house 2003 Minervois, and great company. Always lovely to see Alex and Kat, and Anna met Helen for the first time - they got on like the proverbial house on fire, arm in arm as we swayed across Charing Cross Road. There was a time at Forma when this kinda mid-week social was quite common, but nights like that are very rare these days... fuck me, still dancing at AKA bar at 4am.

The post-wedding week signalled a marked dip in spirits, and it didn't improve much this week - Jake and Wayne drawing the short straw in an elaborate management game. Only the project, semi-hatched with Paul, lunching on a gourmet burger southwest of Harrods, provided a rare moment of enthusiasm and belief. And I gotta get a Plan B.

Tonight too I spoke to the Glenmore posse for the first time in months, and it's Lloydys birthday to boot. They seem a little closer for the call, but not close enough. Later, and Helen calls to say she's down with flu symptoms, a reaction to the jab administered at work today. Mine is scheduled for next week, and I really should be looking out for myself. I suffered for Tuesdays debauchery, big-time, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy myself - it was worth every minute of physical pain and mental anguish that followed. I can't recall the last time I dined so well, or was out on the town with a pair of sexy women for company. I guess it reminded me of a similar night, 2 years ago, at 333 - little wonder I felt so high, and it felt so tender, and so naughty...

Do You Expect Me to Talk?

A TV ad for a new console game used to be quite an event, but you have to go back a coupla years to recall one that really grabbed your attention. Metal Gear Solid, Medal of Honour, even the GTA series... and of course the Bond games like Goldeneye. One aired in a primetime slot this evening. Interestingly it's another Bond-movie game, but this is not just a new game, it's a new game based on an old movie. It's not the first game that's been spawned by a movie that predates it, but From Russia with Love is positively retro, and perhaps the first seriously retro game.

And it certainly won't be the last. Just as the DVD market, having exhausted the '1990 to current' Hollywood blockbuster catalogue, has suddenly erupted into a frenzied release of foreign, fringe/cult and softporn free-for-all, so the games industry seems set to embark on a retro-fetish that will undoubtedly make a lot of people very rich. The Eurythmics perfom 'live' on the incredibly schmaltzy UK Rock Hall of Fame, confirm this supposition: Ours is a culture moving so fast, with such exponential momentum, that it is destined to regurgitate its own until every cultural artifact we consume is a simulacrum of its former self.

So many of the Connery-Moore era Bond series are certain to follow, with tasks and levels that echo the (already spongey) plots of their namesake... Not that I'm neccesarily complaining, it's just that my PS1 is gathering dust, in storage under the stairs.

Wind-up clocks and Turner skies

Spent this weekend away in the green, pleasant and sodden bosom of Yorkshire. The 3-day event inspired and exhausted me in equal measure... Train to Leeds, out to the airport to pick up the car in teeming rain, skirting the outer reaches of the city with the Morvern Caller OST. At Selby Fork a strange oasis of lights, a Crossroads-styled 60's motel, emerged from a darkened rainly stretch of the A1(M)... And so began Charlie and Hazels wedding, and in the midst of the formal, and ritual, elements of the event, a family odyssey unravelled.

I knew it would be challenging, and also special, but I couldn't predict how profound. Something like a carefully staged work of fiction... Like something I'd already read a review of - very charismatic protagonists, old stage-hands, often performing in less than comfortable circumstances. It wasn't the kind of wedding you remember for gaity or style, but it was a sincere celebration, a simple measured ceremony with the least fuss, and a party of the highest order. Maybe more on this later...

Saturday, breakfast in spite of nausea, coffee, family farewells. We descended from a grim Halton into Leeds proper. We heckled the phallic DHSS monolith, and sped through the city to (Rodley?) for a pint. I changed outa my suit in the car and we walked along the canal towpath, parallel to the mainline railway. We met a dalmation puppy, anme escapes me, and spied a canal-gypsy, doing his laundry and cooking on a stove in the woods. His boat was decorated with faded souvenirs of the waterway, banal canal junk. These sights and smells awakened the power of the land, stirred the industrial history slumbering beneath the turf... But the spell that swallowed us up let us go, so we drove to Guiseley for a Morrisons sarnie, and then a coffee, in a cafe-bar where half the clientele gossiped, and the men eyed the footie results on widescreen. Then we daisy-chained from one town or village to the next, continual rain, sporadically lit mill-building conversions.

At Tom and Lucy's place, in Huddersfield, was a veritable oasis. We ate sausage'n'mash, drank wine, and set off to launch fireworks from Lisa's allotment. We watched them fizz, frequently splutter and sometimes burst, just under the clouds and the drizzle. We descended back down to The Slubbers, a great pub selling a fine pint of Landlord and for a few hours all was well with the world. Started to spin a bit after an hour or two at Dan and Lisa's... Next morning another hangover, but a lazy coffee & croissant breakfast sorted that. Squeezed Lucy, hugged Tom, and we hit the road.

We got lucky with a local by-pass, a glimpse of Elland valley, then way up high above Halifax, then got lost. I stopped to take a photo of the hills west, first backlit and proudly layered, then enveloped by rainclouds... Discovered the camera missing so onward, until our road, sandwiched between a huge wind farm and a resevoir, became ravaged by pot-holes and broken bitumen, until it seemed likely to disappear completely. A burly man in a tracksuit, unloading quad and trials bikes from his van for his kids, helped us out. He reassured us that the way ahead was in fact a national highway (transpires it's known as Nab Water Lane) and that by navigating gingerly for the next 500 metres, we would then descend a steep narrow road (Hill House Edge Lane) into Oxenhope, and then Haworth.

Effectively we found direction by getting lost, but it was a memorable and valuable diversion. We sped on from by-passes, vales and villages until Ilkley, and up to The Cow and Calf for a pasty, styrofoam cuppa tea, and this time lose my lover, albeit temporarily. Like Heathcliffe, standing high on the rise, looking to see if Helen had gone to the pub, I had time and chill-factor enough to blow the cobwebs away... From o'er the risibly darkening moor came a wind of change, and I was doomed.

We set off in search of the airport, and the setting sun flashed momentarily, white gold, beneath that shelf of cloud. But the winged spirit in the soul seemed to go down with it. We delivered the car and again the sense of freedom and expansion faded. I felt deflated, and let the evening, and the sprawling city, envelope the bus. For Chelsea too, the dream ended, defeated by the Reds, across the Pennine horizon.

The wind that blew 3 days ago still haunts me, whistles around the office, and the platforms of the Northern Line, magnifying the nonsense and numbness of the life I'm living. The here and now is very definitely not enough, and only today did that feeling take on semblance of being a positive thing. The big plus is that there's no friction with Helen. Despite the anxiety and tension prevailing on the wedding day, we seem stronger for it, just knackered. Whatever becomes of we, and where our private windswept moments led us, this weekend was far from lost.