Murmurings

Most entries on this site are restricted to those on my "friends list".

Telltale Games, who built the episodic Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit, and Strong Bad point-and-click games that I so enjoy have given me a voucher code to get episodes at $5. Anybody can use this code and each time someone does I get $1 credit with Telltale so do us both a favour and go to http://www.telltalegames.com where code GQH-NCE-3J5-V7Z will get you the discounted price until 17 June.

This may be the least enjoyable game that I have played on the Nintendo DS. I thought that I would enjoy driving a big rig between cities, choosing the loads and then finding the optimal destinations to maximise sales revenues. The idea of a driving simulation with an economic element is very appealing but this implementation fails on every level. There is only ever one sensible option for delivery because there is no time pressure so one simply selects the highest offer. With no economic challenge, the game depends upon its driving simulation. I know that I am truly inept at console driving but I can tell when the problem lies more in the user interface than in the operator. The D-pad is so extreme that an attempt to steer can easily jack-knife the rig or have it bouncing off the barriers. The gear change is not reliable when pressing the right button; I fear that this is not deliberate. So, no economic challenge, and no rewarding driving. Even the graphics are ugly and the other vehicles are repetitive.

There must be worse games than this version of Big Mutha Truckers but this is a waste of ones and zeoes,

I see that we have some exciting TV coming our way next week. Programmes just added to my Sky+ schedule are an episode of Bones with Stephen Fry reprising his role as psychiatrist Dr Gordon Wyatt and Boy Meets Girl. This latter is a four-part comedy drama about a body swap between a man and a woman in Manchester.

In response to a fine post by lairdofdarkness I told the story of my mouse-catching cat in Milton Keynes.

Yesterday I syndicated smallerlifesv because I find Andrew Viner's writing to be consistently clever, well-structured, and funny.

In the Blue Room above the back of McGinty's a striking woman with long dark hair and a strong fringe stood on the tiny low stage and fiddled with her guitar as she introduced a song that she had written. Launching into Tougher Than You, Daisy May had a mezzo voice as powerful as her image although her long legs below a short flared skirt and black petticoats were something of a distraction. She diffidently introduced Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah and my heart sank at the prospect of yet another rendition of what has become A Streets of London for the noughties but the purity and strength of her voice lent this old stalwart new vigour. For a few minutes, Suman Biswas' numerous parodies were driven from my mind as I revelled in this rich sound.

Foz tore his eyes from Daisy's legs and pushed his way through the small crowd to announce the next act. The bill had promised us The Floozies but we were introduced to Daisy Windsor of the Floozies with two middle aged men on guitar and bongoes respectively. Windsor has been around for years and it shows in her assurance. She opened with the title track from her new CD Change in a Day, which she did not mention once. Her second song was Catch The Moon in which a lovely accompaniment could stand alone without the rather repetitive lyrics. Guitarist Robert Foster (introduced only as 'Robert') then switched to a flat back bouzouki to play the whistle riff that the late Keith Bleasby added to Nothing Comes For Free when he recorded it with Daisy about six years ago. Daisy misheard Robert's description of the instrument as 'flat pack' leading bongo player Brett Alexander Robertson (who was never introduced) to quip about shopping in Ikea. Daisy wondered if it had come with meatballs, shared that she had never eaten Ikea meatballs and laugned at Brett's suggestion that they are made of MDF. Standing in her soft plum muslin skirt between the two men with her head thrown back and her lightly hennaed wavy hair quivering to her laughter, Windsor was the very picture of a folk singer/songwriter.

Between earlier songs there had been breaks for guitars to be tuned up or down. Before launching into Sunrise Brett surprised his colleagues by calling a halt to retune his knuckles. It was good to see him back in action after several years and I later heard that he had switched to professional photography after recovering from a heart attack. Sunrise is a moving melody over which the lyric "it's all so beautiful today" repeats without growing tiresome.

For her last number Daisy Windsor told how she had been reminded of her schooldays in the bottle green uniform of Diss High School and the bus ride home to Scole. She hated school. "The 'Coolest Girl In School' wasn't me', she grinned ruefully launching into the song of that name. "Drum solo..." joked Brett as the set ended and Foz took the stage.

As Foz thanked the band and set up the headline act, Daisy Windsor leaned back in to say "Wytchazle, that's the band's name." Presumably this was their first gig. The landlord had already suggested that Hannah should rename as "Hannah and the Daisies".

The crowd had swollen from under 40 to over 50 by the time that Hannah took the stage with her new accompanist John Carden. They were launching a new EP Falling Into Spring at this event prior to an iTunes release on Monday. Hannah looked hot in her black leather jacket. She looked warm too and soon shucked the jacket to play in shirtsleeves and jeans. As the two musicians set up the keyboard, Hannah's red guitar, and John's plainer instrument, a green light gel was swapped out for a blue one. Beside Hannah's small frame John looked tall with a narrow leather tie and dark jeans emphasising his length. His heavy-framed glasses and short thick dark hair combined with a boyish air of carelessness. It is a pleasing contrast with Hannah's tight glossy polish.

For Trail of Stars both guitars were too dominant in the mix but the sound was sorted for Climbing on Castles in which Hannah describes the dizziness of love. For the third song they chose Skimming Stones, which I commissioned for FlowFest during the Ebb & Flow project last summer. John's harmonica part on this caught the optimism of the lyrics. Hannah moved to the keyboard for Hate This Place, which John described as 'happy hate' about leaving a job. John retuned for Long Way Home (track five on the EP), which was inspired by Hannah's tears after reading The Time Traveller's Wife. He tuned up again after this song as Hannah returned to the guitar and described how they had been introduced by mutual friends from Durham university in a London pub in 2008. Near the end of the year they built a set list and decided to make an EP to reproduce what they do on stage (by contrast to Hannah's first album, which was a studio sound with a full band). They set the dates before writing the songs.

Feels Like Coming Home had a bigger sound than previous numbers and was filled with little smiles as it built to a big finish. Fireflies was a bright change of pace as it recalled the magic of seeing these luminescent insects on a Tuscan evening. John had added a bucolic accordian part using a shiny red instrument that he had received from his parents as an eighteenth birthday gift but had not used in the intervening five years. During this song someone behind me received a phone call and held a conversation at the back of this tiny venue with no apparent consideration for the effect of this on the rest of the audience.

Hannah moved back to the keyboard to mourn the end of a relationship in Into Your Grief. This was followed by the EP title track Falling Into Spring and a final tuning up for the encore of the upbeat love song Cottage in the Country written about eight years ago and released on Hannah's album. "We planned one more," advised Hannah, "because I once had no more. What are you laughing at? Me? I'll stop talking now."

Episode 11 had a few weak spots but they were hidden by the brilliance of the pacing in the moment. ( spoilers... )

The Yellow Rolls Royce movie written by Terence Rattigan has been on our Sky+ disk for months. I do not know why I did not watch it sooner. It is a charming anthology of three short stories about owners of a Rolls Royce Phantom II between 1930 and 1941. This portmanteau approach, with the car providing only a very loose link between three doomed loves, was used by Rattigan and his director Anthony Asquith in their 1963 film The V.I.P.s. Given the success of both films, I guess that it was only Rattigan's illness that prevented them from making more. The first story is very much in the emotionally restrained style that characterises much of Rattigan's work but the gangster, his moll, and the young photographer of the second story are all emotionally articulate, and the third involves two people pulled apart by principles in a nod to Casablanca.

Today I was reminiscing about the Colony Holidays that I attended in the early seventies. Thinking about my old girlfriend Alena, I looked her up on Facebook and learned of her death less than two months ago on 12 January 2009. I have been trying to trace her for years but I had forgotten that her given name was Alenka and that Alena was a contraction of that.

We first met in August 1971 at a Colony Holiday run near Chichester for members of the Puffin Club and we became frequent penpals. A few years later I went to stay with her at her parents' home on the edge of the tiny village of Eastbury near Lambourn in Berkshire. Her father was the painter Anthony Dorrell and Daphne, her mother, was a translator who was later elected a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Linguists.

On my first visit I hitchhiked as far as Newbury but failed to get any more lifts and had to walk the last thirteen miles along country lanes through Boxford, Welford, and Great Shefford, where I stopped at the Swan Inn for the most refreshing shandy of my life having just walked ten miles in the summer sun.

The Lodge, a timber bungalow standing alone among fields, had been her parents' home for about ten years and was filled with books and mementoes of their travels throughout Europe and to China. I loved her father's study, which was entirely lined with books except for the window and the door. Every evening he would read to us for a while and I have never forgotten the words of Ben Travers' Rookery Nook, which was the play that he read on that first visit. Alena and I spent summer and winter days walking in the fields to the east of Eastbury, chatting among the books, and canoodling on her narrow bed. A few years later the family moved to Pinner on the outskirts of London and in 1978 they moved again to Cambridge.

Alena was often ill. She had been a sickly child and missed a lot of school but she read voraciously and had a vivid creative imagination. She had a fragile beauty; in a letter written some years after our romance had ended she described herself as "still having too many thoughts and too many red gold curls". Even now I cherish the memory of that golden hair and the soft freckles that covered her face and shoulders. She looked glorious and her clever funny world view was perpetually freshly entertaining to me. In the last letter that I received from her she was planning to go to drama school. I guess that that is what she did because now I learn that she became an inspirational drama teacher at the American International School of Budapest. Did she go to Dartington as she hoped?

In 1987 Alena's father succumbed to the emphysema that had troubled him for years as a consequence of his heavy smoking. I learned this a few years later but I had lost contact with Alena and could find no way to trace her at that time. In 2003 a website was created about her father but the webmaster replied to none of my emails and I let it slide. When I made enquiries about Daphne with the Institute of Linguists, I was told that she had died in 2004 [Since writing this, I learn that I was misled; Daphne is still alive]. And, as I type that, I remember that Alena's middle name was Daphne.

Alena's parents were enormously kind to me and they influenced me greatly. My plans for my basement library, which were thwarted last month by the shallowness of the house foundations, were based heavily on Tony's study. And to this day I yearn for a copy of the five-volume Mid Century edition of The Times Atlas of the World that Daphne described as 'an essential tool commended to any educated household'. They were lovely people and their daughter was a treasure. And so, here I sit deep in the night mourning the loss of something and someone already long lost to me; someone so nearly found; a prize missed by just seven weeks; and in a midnight voice, softer than a dove's, I hope I speak superbly of our lost loves.

I stumbled upon this remarkable letter from the erudite William Henry Fox Talbot to the editor of The Literary Gazette in January 1848.

Eberhart was at a crossroads. ( The story continues... )

Rumours were flying about the parlous state of the Lady Evangeline's manor. ( The story continues... )

Arthur had united all Britain into one Kingdom but the seeds of tragedy were sown.

( The story continues... )

Eberhart devoted himself to the writing of poems of love. ( The story continues... )

Eberhart is a knight in his late twenties who swore to marry only for love then fell for the widow Lady Evangeline, who clings to the memory of her late husband. ( The story continues... )

Remember my excitement about being able to transfer my DS Animal Crossing village to the Wii with the new game? Remember how the Nintendo DS is not zone restricted? An unmentioned requirement of the game transfer is that it must be from a UK DS cartridge if it is to a UK Wii. My DS game is a USA version. My Wii refuses to recognise it. My pleasure is diminished because I know that Nintendo will not fix this.

The arrival yesterday of the Nintendo DS version of Flower, Sun And Rain filled me with frustration because I had client work to do all day. I have been eagerly awaiting an English language version of Goichi Suda’s 2001 murder mystery game since I discovered his wild No More Heroes on the Wii. Now, however, I am frustrated by my complete inability to get into the game.

After a curious long introductory movie our hero Sumio Mondo, a slack detective drives across a tiny tropical island of Lospas in his Toyota Celica, which he has named 'Giggs'. He parks his knowingly uncool car in a huge car park that is largely empty. Right by the car is an item lying on the ground. Standing beside it triggers an option to enter a script sequence, which opens the item to show that it is a set of instructions and a snippet of tutorial. On the other side of his car is another item, which opens up to show yet another mechanism: the inputting of codes that are the core of the game. To select the correct one of the nine jacks with which to connect to the item I used trial and error, which the game later states to be the only effective approach. I then had to take the same approach to find that the single digit 7 was the required code.

At the far end of the car park (78 paces by the step counter that will eventually trigger rewards) Mondo's first contact stands beside his truck. Peter, the agent, asks Mondo to jack into his eye to input his birth date to validate his identity. The game text told me to check page 15 of the game manual where the answer is written "in black and white". Except that it isn't. On that page there are four blank rectangles and the advice that the player writes the code that they have chosen into those spaces.  According to the manual "Sumio's birthday is set at the start of a game after you enter a four digit number." But this is my first opportunity to input four digits. And every entry that I amke yields the 'Blank' response that indicated a wrong answer on the previous single-digit item. The game options offer no four-digit input opportunity. I do not fancy crunching 10,000 permutations.

Sadly, nobody else has yet addressed this online. And, in searching, I discovered disappointing reviews that make me wonder if I will find this worth the effort when I do get in. Does anybody have any guidance or suggestions?

Craig's Bond continues to be the brutal maverick that I had always found in the books and Judi Dench's M echoes the codependency that Fleming trailed in the For Your Eyes Only short story. Both performances are magnificent in this competent sequel exploring Bond's search for vengeance against the organisation that forced his lover Vesper to betray him. This episode lacks the impact of Casino Royale but it is exciting and largely credible. The car chase that precedes the opening credits is fast and thrilling (although it is pedestrian compared to the ferocious pace of the Eagle Eye chases) with a charcteristically droll punchline. The credits themselves are original while conforming to the established Bond brand but it is some way into the film before the significance of their symbolism becomes apparent.

With the credits done, the story bursts into a shocking new direction and we are hurled into the mixture of suspense, thrills, and international complexity that are the hallmarks of the franchise. Nobody can be trusted; not even established characters. We even doubt Bond's loyalties and motives while remaining confident that he will win through. For all that this is a reengineering of the traditions of the past forty years, there are a host of acknowledgements of past features and reprise is apparent at even the most trivial level.

The film is not without some glaring flaws: if Fields (Gemma Aterton) is just an office filing clerk, why does she appear to be wearing nothing under her short mac when she goes to put Bond back on his plane? How does an office filing clerk afford such an expensive dinner gown when she accompanies Bond to the villain's party? ( Spoiler cut for those who have read no newspapers in the last 3 months ... )

For me, the most uncomfortable aspect of the film was the clownish CIA South American Head of Section, Gregg Beam. Would any US espionage agency recruit such an appalling nitwit? And having got him, would he really be better than enough other agents to be promoted to this level. His idiocy seemed not to be some comic foil; I really do not understand the basis for his character.

On the whole, however, I enjoyed this hard-edged Bond. His maudlin boozing in Virgin Upper Class did little to soften his brutality but he was not uncaring. This really is a new character that is close to my original imaginings. Short, sharp, fierce, and funny; roll on episode 23.

( Football comment (nothing to see here) ... )