Why should it be saved? In a nutshell: 6 Music is a station for people that like music, largely curated by people that like music. In much the same way, the film magazine Sight & Soundis for people that like films, by people that like films, and Edge fulfills the same criteria for videogames. But this sounds obvious; you could say the same about BBC Radio 1, Empire and GamesMaster, so what’s the difference?

Every mature industry has its prestige media; the magazine, website or channel that’s consumed not only by the public but by the industry itself. Commonly, prestige media will have low consumption levels compared to other, more populist media but high levels of critical acceptance from the public and the industry. By and large, this media will be well-respected; something for people to aim for. A good review in Sight & Sound and a rating of 10 out of 10 in Edge is something to be proud of, more so than a good rating in TotalFilm or Nintendo Power.

6 Music is a prestige product. It doesn’t just play music, it celebrates music. It isn’t trying to sell anything, or target a particular age group or subset of society. It isn’t in thrall to the big record companies; the DJs are given a high level of freedom compared to other staions to play what they believe is worth playing. From Phil Jupitus:

“I once bumped into one of my main competitors from commercial breakfast radio on a train. As we chatted, I bemoaned the fact that we only got nine free choices per show. He looked at me somewhat crestfallen and said “I get one…a week.”

The breadth of what it covers is incredible, unsurpassed by any commercial rival or anything else the BBC has to offer, covering everything from the past century regardless of genre, availability or popularity. Its DJs are passionate, highly knowledgeable people who have immersed themselves in music for decades, music buffs who will happily play the theme from The Littlest Hobo next to Public Enemy without snobbery or distinction. Craig Charles, Stuart Maconie, Huey Morgan, Guy Garvey, Jarvis Cocker, Liz Kershaw, Marc Riley, Steve Lamacq, Lauren Laverne and Tom Robinson; these are people who care deeply about their chosen subject, who love music so much that they’ve devoted their lives to bringing it to a wider audience.

BBC 6 Music is a station that the BBC ought to be proud of; that David Bowie and Radiohead would both release statements urging the BBC to support it should be proof enough that the station is well-respected, considered to be of a high quality and something that the organisation ought to be producing. Instead, it seems that the BBC’s top brass think it can just be absorbed into Radio 2, which is a bit like telling people who read the New York Times that in the future they’ll be able to get all their news and commentary from a supplement to be included in Saga Magazine. Culturally, I don’t see how this can work. I can’t imagine Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone being played anywhere other than 6 Music. Nowhere else would allow it.

There is hope for 6 Music; the BBC Trust had this to say:

“If we find that… there’s massive public concern that we need to take account of then we will go back to the director general to rethink the strategy before it’s approved”

If you want to support 6 Music, you can find a few ways of doing so here. Alternatively, if you just want to watch Mark Thompson look like a prat, you can watch him being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman.

Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking. I have played Microsoft’s much hyped add-on for the Xbox 360, Project Natal. That makes me — wait for it — post-natal. Ahahaha. Do you think Paul is insensitive enough to write a headline about how I’ve got ‘post-natal depression’? Only time will tell.

First off, a caveat: all I played was one slightly buggy smash-the-blocks game, for about ten minutes. But it was enough to reveal both some of Natal’s selling points and its flaws. The good bits were authentically good: if you’re impressed with your Wii being able to sense what your controller is doing, this is ten times more spangly. It can sense the movement of your joints, so your arms, legs and head can all be used for gameplay (I scored a particularly athletic headbutt in the game I played).

It can also ‘lock on’ to you, so if your other half finds it hilarious to stand behind you while you’re playing and do a Michael Flatley impression (as they undoubtedly will), then Natal will just ignore them. As should you.

Finally, it can spookily sense whether you’re male or female: at the demo, female players were represented by an avatar with a ponytail. I imagine that could lead to some consternation (and in America, lawsuits) if the computer decrees that you have the childbearing hips of a lady, despite being called Geoff or Steve.

What about the bad stuff? Well, the early hardware we saw seemed more than a little buggy. Frequently, a player would walk in front of the detector, only to be represented on screen by an Avatar that looked like Quasimodo’s more deformed younger brother auditioning for a job as a contortionist.

Of course, this — and the often discussed ‘lag’ that many reviewers have mentioned — could be nothing more than teething problems. I’m more worried about whether or not Xbox owners want the kind of casual gaming experience Natal represents. The project is a clear attempt to move Microsoft’s tanks onto Nintendo’s lawn, but will anyone buy an Xbox on the strength of it? And how well will it work alongside a controller?

There’s no way, on current showing, that you could play an FPS using Natal or even a rhythm game such as Rock Band, although I’d love to be proved wrong. So it seems likely that Natal use will be limited to Wii-style sports games, and we’ll all be hanging on to our controllers for sometime yet.

That said, the most interesting part of the pre-launch build-up will be when Microsoft hears back from the third-party developers, who are getting their hands on Natal in June. If Harmonix or Lioncraft can work out a really cool way to incorporate Natal into their games, then who knows?

Of course, any review comes down to one simple question: should I pay money for this? And the answer is — at the predicted £30 — hell yes. I can’t honestly see me browsing my Zune library with the flick of a wrist, but I know that when I have friends round — particularly non-gamer friends — it’ll be much easier to get them to play if I don’t need to spend ages explaining the difference between ‘right bumper’ and ‘right trigger’.

The film tells the story of Bruce Willis’ Cole, a man from the near future sent back to the past (our present, at the time of filming, the early-to-mid ’90s) to gather information about the virus that is destined to force humanity to live in quarantined bunkers underground, surrendering the world outside to the unaffected animal population. Cole is reluctantly aided in this by a psychiatrist he encounters, Madeleine Stowe as Kathryn Railly, who, while understandably sceptical to begin with, is eventually convinced that Cole’s story is true. The two of them go beyond what Cole’s mission brief specifies and instead attempt to track down and defeat The Army of the Twelve Monkeys, supposedly the anarchist group that releases the virus.

I’m a sucker for a decent time travel plot and Twelve Monkeys doesn’t disappoint, from the way in which Railly is the trigger for Cole’s initial return to the future from his initial visit to the past, when she leaves a joke message on an answerphone six years after this has happened, to the final reveal in which we see that Cole knew all along how he was going to die. It is, like any good time travel story, utterly defeatist. You can’t change what’s coming; as Cole points out, he isn’t here to save anybody — how can he be, when everyone’s already dead?

However, a weakness of the film is that it gives the game away right at the start. From the perspective of Railly, Cole is merely a very passionate, reasonably enigmatic crazy man, not very different from any of her other patients, but as the film progresses she sees more and more evidence to support his story and eventually comes around. But for us, we know already that Cole isn’t crazy. Is he a man from the future? Well…yes. We know because we see him in the future. We see him have his mission explained to him, and we see him return to the future to be debriefed. During the film’s climax, we see other characters from the future turn up in the past, and these characters aren’t just glimpsed — they talk to him and interact with him. The audience is left in no doubt; Cole’s story is true. It’s difficult to interpret these scenes in any other way; there’s no suggestion that these are dreams or hallucinations.

But what if you watched the film without all of the future scenes? What if all you saw were the scenes from Railly’s perspective? Then you’re placed in the same boat as she is, and you have to judge for yourself Cole’s sanity. His escape from a locked room early on in the film — we know how he escaped, he was transported into the future. Take that perspective away and the locked room mystery is a genuine mystery, and time travel is just one possible answer, and a particularly wacky answer at that; more likely somebody just let him out.

In another scene, Cole is accidentally transported back to the trenches of World War One, only briefly but for long enough to be shot in the leg. Again, we know that this happened because we see it, but what if we didn’t? Then, again, we’re put in Railly’s position, weighing up the evidence — in this case an antique bullet in his leg and an anecdote from a history book about a man who appeared in the trenches unable to speak French or German and who babbled about the end of the world — and forming her own opinion. The only flaw here is that the history book actually contains a photo of Cole in the trenches; a pretty generous conceit considering this photo is taken in mid-battle.

The way Railly comes around to Cole’s view is, from our perspective, entirely understandable, because we know he’s telling the truth. Take that perspective away and the film becomes something different; it’s about Railly’s descent into madness herself, and the audience is left with many more questions than answers.

My coffee-drinking habit was definitely a habit. Turns out that about a decade of drinking at least one double espresso a day, sometimes more, makes you a bit dependent on that velvet-smooth black nectar, and I’d previously worked out by accident that I could go for approximately 36 hours without caffeine before the pounding, crushing headache kicked in.

But I was OK with that; I live in a civilised nation that has coffee more or less on tap. When it wasn’t available from my favoured cafés — for instance, if it was night time, or…some other reason, I don’t know — I had a few stovepots, a few French presses, and a few packets of ground coffee on standby. I even kept a jar of instant around, in case I was snowed in for days.

So an addiction to coffee meant that I just had to keep drinking coffee. I never saw much of a problem in that.

The experiment began last week. I had been drinking less coffee than usual — my daily double had dropped to a daily single after a price rise at my local, and from there I’d been drinking a single cup of cafetière coffee in the morning to try and use up some of the grounds I’d bought to see me through the bleak midwinter. With my tolerances weakened, I inadvertently ended up taking a triple dose one day — I’d been writing a lengthy essay comparing Ang Lee’s Hulk with Leterrier’s more recent The Incredible Hulk and needed to stay in the cafe as it was going well.

That day ended with me having to walk around the streets at about 11pm to try and burn off some of the excess energy, and I was still awake at three in the morning. I didn’t feel much like drinking any more the next day, which led to the thought “I wonder if I can break the habit?”

The short answer is — spoiler alert! — ‘yes’.

The goal: for coffee to be something that I could drink without worrying that if I missed a day I’d end up with a migraine. The means: cold turkey. No coffee, no tea, no green tea, no chocolate. I decided to try a week, to see how it would go.

The triple dose took place on a Saturday, so the headache began on Sunday. On Monday, the headache was at its worst. The weather was grim and cold and I was back in the office and I could feel from every fibre of my being that all I needed was a coffee or a tea. I could smell the coffee other people in the office had, and being the Guardian, every bastard seemed to have their own French press and little pack of Monmouth coffee grounds.

Aside from the headache, I was tired. It felt as if I’d been awake all night long, my bones heavy and sagging. I ended up in bed around half past nine that night, like an elderly.

Tuesday saw the headache fading and I felt better able to cope with reality, though I wasn’t convinced that a decaffeinated reality was a reality worth getting to know. The rest of the week was similar; though the headache passed, I was a lot more tired than usual. My sleeping pattern had changed but not really for the better — I was now falling asleep earlier, but waking earlier as well. Bed around 10, awake at 5. This didn’t seem like an improvement on my previous bed at 12, awake at 7, 7:10, 7:20, 7:30 and finally 8.

The weekend arrived and I fell off the wagon, having a black coffee on Saturday morning. This was a planned lapse, though, to see if I could now have coffee without withdrawal symptoms later. On Sunday, I had a mild headache which was gone by Monday.

This brings us roughly to now. I’m still avoiding caffeine this week, and I think this weekend there will be another controlled lapse to see how I go. I’m expecting to have broken the habit, and will be withdrawal symptom-free the following week. But then what? I don’t actually want to abandon coffee. I like coffee. I would be sad if I couldn’t drink it ever again. Perhaps I’ll end up addicted again.

Perhaps I can live with that.

The novel Riddley Walker is set thousands of years after the apocalypse in a society and culture that’s grown out of the old. The novel A Canticle for Leibowitz tells a similar story. In film there’s Silent Running that, with its space-faring bottled forests, only hints at the state of the planet left behind. Soylent Green takes place as the human race is approaching its end, rather than after, but still focuses on the people rather than the event. Even WALL·E manages to make the post-apocalypse seem hopeful. It’s a mistake to think that the apocalypse itself is anything more than a catalyst in narrative terms. What’s interesting is how humanity deals with it.

This brings me to The Road, adapted for the screen by John Hillcoat (previously of the excellent Australian western The Proposition) from the novel by Cormac McCarthy. In The Road, the worst has happened. An unspecified cataclysm has cremated the planet, wiping out almost all animal and plant life and leaving humanity to scrape an existence out of leftover tinned food and rampant cannibalism. We see glimpses of the event in flashback but there’s nothing concrete, no forced exposition where characters sit around and discuss what happened and why.

It’s a bleak and sparse piece, and there’s thankfully little of the impassioned ranting at the sky — “You maniacs! You finally did it! You blew it all up!” — that you might expect from a post-apocalyptic film, nor is there any reason there should be. The end of the world is old news to these people, so the spectacle of a dead forest spontaneously combusting is, within the film, just something that disturbs one’s sleep.

Instead, this is a story about an unnamed father and son, trekking across the wasteland on a quest to reach the southern coast of the states just on the belief that it may be warmer there. The father is haunted by memories of his wife; the son is haunted by the possibility that they may not be the good guys after all, as his father insists. Though we’re treated to some spectacular scenes of ghost towns and dried-up shipyards, the heart of the film is with the father and his increasingly desperate and brutal attempts to protect his son from the worst of the world.

Performances by Viggo Mortensen and Robert Duvall as the father and an old man respectively are typically strong; cameos from Guy Pearce and Michael K. William (Omar of The Wire fame) are distracting but only if you recognise them, and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the son copes admirably with the grim script, getting a pistol stuck in his mouth every other scene yet still seeming safely grounded, though by the end of the film his relentless cries of “Papa, no!” were starting to grate a little. Mind you, I’m not really child-friendly at the best of times. In an apocalypse I’d probably have eaten him.

Generally the film is a success despite its hopeless situation but I have mixed feelings about the film’s end, where the boy — freshly-orphaned — seems to spend about 20 minutes grieving before happily joining another group — a man, his wife, their two children and a dog. On the surface it seems like it’s trying to be a happy ending but it feels tacked on, contrived and more than a little cloying. Looking deeper, though, it’s actually as grim as the rest of the film. Not only is it left open as to whether these new people are good or bad but when they reveal that they had been following the boy and his father for some time it sheds light on an earlier event that led to the boy’s father abandoning a well-stocked shelter, a decision that eventually leads to his death. Thanks for that.

Throughout the film, the father struggles to keep his boy safe and away from strangers. By the end of the film, the father is dead and the boy joins a group of strangers and it’s hard to see what the father achieved. I don’t think it gets much bleaker than that, no matter how many uplifting arrangements you play over the scene.

It was a day like most others this year so far; bad weather had rendered London public transport either totally inoperable or so packed with commuters that every train carriage felt like its destination was Auschwitz so I was walking to work, mentally working my way through The Very Best of Nancy Sinatra: 24 Great Songs by Nancy Sinatra because I couldn’t be bothered to get my iPod out and listen to the album directly, when there was, right beside me, the noise of metal grinding against metal, a noise that had no business being in any Nancy Sinatra song at all.

It being an unusually terrifying and catastrophic sound, I turned to have a nosey, and found fragments of car heading straight toward me and the donor vehicle skidding to a halt a few metres away in a cloud of dust, having eaten its way through most of the metal barrier that divided the road. Naturally I did what any coward would do and ran away before I remembered that running was what fit people did, and stopped for breath.

So there I was, just me, the car, and a guy making sweet unconscious love to a recently-deployed airbag. Not knowing any first aid as such I figured I wouldn’t be able to do much beyond give the man a comforting pat on the back and maybe an eye-rolling ‘tcha!’ noise at the whole state of affairs, so, I thought, here I go, and dialled my first ever 999, which, on an iPhone, turned out to be a bit of a faff. Unlock screen, open phone app, wait for phone app to load, press the keypad button, wait for keypad to load…but I got there in the end.

Admittedly in a bit of a panic and not yet caffeinated, I asked for an ambulance on Archway road in London, as there had been a car accident involving one car crashing into the metal dividing barrier. For good measure, I said it was the end of Archway road nearest Archway tube station.

“What postcode is that?”, I was asked, which gave me pause. Was that really something I was supposed to know? Would my parents’ generation tut at the youth of today and their lack of knowledge about postal districts? I walk along many roads during my day to day existence and I couldn’t tell you the postcode of any of them apart from the one I started on and probably the one I ended on. At best I could give her the postcode belonging to 15 minutes in either direction but that didn’t seem particularly useful. After all, the accident was here, in this postcode no man’s land.

“I don’t know the postcode,” I reply, feeling a little perplexed and imagining that the man in the car was going to end up with his brains on the floor just because I had the misfortunate not to work for the Royal Mail or come with some form of GPS. I try and throw in another landmark to see if that helps matters.

“It’s Archway road in London near Archway tube station and next to Archway Campus,’ I said, because this was true.

“Is that a university?”

Well now. Good question. Is Archway Campus a university or is it a former polytechnic? This doesn’t seem like an appropriate time to start discussing the philosophical issues of what exactly constitutes a ‘university’ and what doesn’t, and anyway I’ve no idea, because, and here’s the thing, I never fucking enrolled at Archway Campus. It’s just fucking here, where there’s been a car accident. Any idiot with Google Maps could have found the place by now. Am I expected to believe that there are two Archway roads in London that are next to Archway tube stations and opposite Archway Campuses, except one of them is a bona fide university and the other one is more of a night school? This seems unlikely.

Fortunately by this stage of the conversation not only have other people turned up, some of whom are also phoning ambulances and hopefully having better luck than I am, but the driver of the car has actually woken up, risen from the car and luckily doesn’t appear to have a scratch on him, though he seems a bit stunned, as I suppose you would. I call off my ambulance. There doesn’t seem to be any point anymore, and I’ve run out of landmarks — the only one I had left was a disused tower block known as Archway Heights but it seems the emergency services have an abundance of landmarks to do with Archway and wouldn’t know what to do with it.

So I go on my way and try and get back into the music of Nancy Sinatra, knowing that next time I have to phone 999, I’d better first phone the Post Office to find out where I am.

This seemed like a good a place to start as any. I’m a fan of both the film and the novel of the same name, there was a matinée screening performance so I wouldn’t have to traipse around central London at night only to get mugged, Thomas Wayne-style, and TV series Pushing Daisies left me with a refreshed love for Anna Friel, who was playing the role of Holly Golightly. Also, she would be appearing naked, and I reasoned that there weren’t likely to be many chances in my life of being in the same room as a naked Anna Friel, so that pretty much sealed the deal.

My initial thought upon sitting down was that I was paying far too much for far too little legroom. Row C, seat 6 — only two metres away from where the action would be but with a sullen Asian pensioner hogging my left armrest and a sullen young man accompanying three girls on the right, it took about five minutes before I started fidgeting and wondering when the interval would be. My second thought was that there was far too much perfume in the air, but luckily the air was soon full of dry ice and tobacco smoke so I was too busy choking to care.

Eventually the play began, and I spent a full 60 minutes absolutely mystified. This? This was what people pay all this money for? For this they dress up?

I didn’t understand it. Was this actually what theatre was or was I just seeing a bad play? There was no subtlety to the performances; I guess there couldn’t be, because if there was then the people in the cheap seats wouldn’t be able to see it. Everyone was shouting, though I’m reasonably confident that microphone technology is available even to theatres these days. Being right at the front meant that the actors were actually shouting over my head and staring out toward the back of the stalls, making me feel like I was about four years old.

Every tiny gesture was exaggerated, blown up to cartoonish proportions so that even the smallest innuendo became a giant, Benny Hell gag. Performances were occasionally punctuated by deep and meaningful pauses, but on stage, a deep and meaningful pause actually looks exactly like someone forgetting their lines. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt though as I’m new to it all.

Actors played multiple roles which confused me, not because I couldn’t tell the difference between characters, but because I couldn’t believe there was a shortage of actors in London. I guess it’s just cheaper to do it this way but when I spent £50 on a ticket I naively assumed that this would more than cover costs.

After an hour the interval finally happened, and I abandoned theatre. I’m not one of these types that feels they have to sit through something they’re not enjoying just because it cost them money, and the nude scene had happened so I figured I’d completed what I’d set out to achieve: see if I enjoy going to the theatre and see Anna Friel’s bum in person. Thank you, Miss Friel.

In defence of the theatre, it was hard to tell whether I was seeing a bad play or whether I just don’t click with the theatre. Regular theatregoers might love all this, and more power to them, but I just kept on thinking how I could have saved a lot of money and time by sitting at home and watching the film. But then, I doubt I could have convinced Anna Friel to pop round and drop her robe for me in person.

I’ll no doubt spend the next few weeks remembering other films I wanted to put in this list, but here we go anyway:

Watchmen

While some found Watchmen to be impenetrable, ponderous and a shocking deviation from their much-loved graphic novel of the same name, I’d put it up with The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 2. Not only did Snyder manage to boil away the novel’s contents to a reasonably tight core, he managed to deliver some of my favourite screen moments, chiefly the montage introduction and the history of Dr. Manhattan. The recently-released director’s cut of the film adds some fan-pleasing padding but the theatrical cut is still the one for me.
Trailer for Watchmen

Inglourious Basterds

Possibly this makes the list due to it being a pleasant surprise; Basterds for me was an incredible film. Thoughtful dialogue, beautifully shot and introducing some new talent, this is Tarantino’s best in a long time. I hope he can keep it up and not descend back into Death Proof self-indulgences.
Trailer for Inglourious Basterds
My review of Inglourious Basterds

Moon

My absolute film of the year. While James Cameron is pratting around spending the GDP of a small African nation on rendering some pretty videogame cutscenes, Duncan Jones shows that pure SF can be delivered on a shoestring budget if you just have good characters and story.
Trailer for Moon
My review of Moon

The White Ribbon

Michael Haneke possibly explains the rise of Facism in Germany with an artful murder mystery set in a pre-WWI German village. Dripping in tension and style yet 90% of the film is uneventful. I sat for the duration not sure why I was enjoying myself then thought long and hard about the film for days afterwards.
Trailer for The White Ribbon

Il divo

A labyrinthine exploration of Italian politician Giulio Andreotti. Stunning to watch and comes with an operatic score by Teho Teardo, it’s a complicated film that demands multiple viewings (it even begins with a glossary).
Trailer for Il divo

sleep furiously

A real Sunday morning film. A documentary about a village in rural Wales. That’s all. It’s perfect.
Trailer for sleep furiously

Encounters at the End of the World

Werner Herzog visits Antarctica and makes me want to join him. In the future when all of that shit is a tropical reef, this will make for good reference material.
Trailer for Encounters at the End of the World

JCVD

Jean Claude Van Damme’s triumphant return as himself caught up in the midst of a robbery. To everyone’s surprise, JCVD turned out to be funny, poignant and probably Van Damme’s finest work yet, though admittedly it’s not up against much competition. A better compliment would be to say that it’s one of the finest films of 2009, which it is, and not even ironically.
Trailer for JCVD

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies

A French James Bond spoof set in the ’30s and filmed to look as if it was shot in the ’60s, with great success. Genuinely funny stuff and a nice contrast to all the po-faced grittiness coming from the Bond/Bourne camps.
Trailer for OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies

Synecdoche, New York

One of the most depressing films I’ve ever seen. Kaufman ruminates on life, death, ageing and decay, and the artist’s inability to accurately portray it all. I saw this after having had my first filling, which focussed my mind somewhat.
Trailer for Synecdoche, New York

Lars and the Real Girl

Another surprise for me, as I was expecting a comedy but ended by being as swept up in Lars’ imaginary girlfriend as the rest of the town. Funny in places but mosty just very sad, it’s the first film since Mannequin to make me care about a life-size plastic model.
Trailer for Lars and the Real Girl

And now for the worst…

The Wrestler

This had critics and cinemagoers all in a tizzy but when it came to it, I just couldn’t give a shit. It’s wrestling! It’s wearing silly lycra costumes and faking fights for leering idiots with foam hands and checked shirts. I just can’t care about someone who’s so into wrestling that he’s going to do it even if it risks death. The whole thing’s ridiculous. It’s like trying to show the art and poetry and beauty of a cheese-rolling contest.

W.

A light-hearted and affectionate look at the life of the idiotic, warmongering, lying, cretinous George W. Bush? No thanks. Think it’s a bit soon.

Broken Embraces

After nothing — literally nothing — had happened in the first 45 minutes I walked out, deciding I couldn’t take another 90 minutes of this. The remaining time could have been filled with nothing but Penelope Cruz in naked lesbian hijinks but by that point I couldn’t care less.

Blindness

This one lost me when they dumped the newly-blind into a quarantined facility and expected them to cope for themselves with phones, food, etc. I couldn’t get past this. Doctors and nurses in the real world get close to contagious patients all the time, so why should this be any different? I can’t watch a film if I find it unbelievable, so this remained unfinished.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Sadly another train wreck from Gilliam though probably not helped by the death of Heath Ledger. Clunky improvised dialogue, a nonsensical story and the dubious acting talents of Lily Cole all helped to hammer the nails in.

The Reader

A real bit of Oscar-bait and not even helped by Kate Winslet appearing naked for the first 40 minutes or so, I couldn’t work out what we were supposed to be feeling about anyone in this film. She’s a cold-blooded SS guard who let Jewish prisoners burn to death in a locked church and tries to defend her actions; I’m afraid I find it a little tricky to care that she ends up learning to read while in prison. I mean, well done you and all, but you’re still a murdering Nazi, aren’t you?

I have issues with furniture. Every stick of furniture to me represents not merely something to sit on, lean against, eat off of or collect stuff in but something more than that: every table, every chair, ever chest of drawers is a weight around my neck, tying me more and more down to the same space. I think to myself “Perhaps what I need here is a TV unit”, and then am quietly aghast. Is this what it all comes down to now? Is that my life? Filling a flat with objects and then having to move to a larger flat because I have too many objects?

It may help to understand my stance by quoting from Breakfast at Tiffany’s:

“I don’t want to own anything until I know I’ve found the place where me and things belong together. I’m not quite sure where that is just yet.”
—Holly Golightly

Though I’m about as far away from Holly Golightly in spirit and manner as it’s possible to get before you start coming back, I do empathise with that statement. The buying of furniture is settling down and I don’t like thinking that I’ve settled down yet; certainly not where I am now in a rented flat with walls made of paper and no space for growing root vegetables or puppies or bees. I once had a panic attack buying a bathroom mat. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Is this it now, then? Is this where it all ends? Buying bathroom mats? I went to university and now here I am buying a bathroom mat?

I don’t want to have an emotional attachment to a nice sofa from Habitat or a lovely chest of drawers with a realistic sliding action from MUJI. I want to be able to appraise these bulky items in a second and have the appraisal always be “I don’t mind abandoning this”. The same thinking is what prevents me from spending the extra money on pots and pans from Le Crueset, and also what led to a friend forcibly buying me extra teaspoons after I’d stubbornly owned just two all my life, defeating her after she tried to stir her third cup of tea.

So I end up buying the cheapest, one-use bits of tat I can find, and if it stands up without wobbling and doesn’t spontaneously combust when I look at it then I think it’s doing its job admirably.

Moving, just keep moving

Moving house isn’t something I’ve ever done without parental supervision, but this year it finally sunk in: I’m in my thirties now and I ought to be able to move house like an adult and not a student. Last time I moved it was only about a five minute drive between houses but it took most of a day and four car trips and I don’t think I even had that much stuff, it’s just that one chair and an ironing board later and you’ve already filled that journey’s boot quota.

(I realise this means at some point I’ll have to rent a man with a van to do my heavy lifting for me but that’s unavoidable; I’ll just have to brush up a few bare facts about football and, I don’t know, Keeley Hawes or whoever’s on the front cover of Nuts these days.)

Throughout 2009 I’d been preparing to move. I had no actual plans to move but I thought that, in the face of the economic collapse of the Western world, it wouldn’t hurt to maybe get rid of a lot of the crap I’d been carting around with me to make an unexpected move a bit swifter and easier. So the games consoles, the Jaguar, the GameCube, the PS2, even my beloved Dreamcast — all gone now. Much as I liked having them around, they were eventually just ornaments, and any visitor that might have been impressed had already been impressed, so they’d served their purpose.

The DVDs: gone. From now on it’s digital-only for me, which mirrors what I’ve been doing with my music for years anyway. Books: pruned mercilessly and periodically. If it was a book I hadn’t enjoyed, it was an easy target for dismissal. If it was a book I’d enjoyed but didn’t think I’d read again, it was on its way out. These were all cheap, mass-market paperbacks anyway: it wasn’t as if I was chucking out rarities and first-editions, leather-bound, signed by the author and hand-rolled on the thighs of virgins – I was chucking out Everything is Illuminated and The Time Traveller’s Wife.

I had had no idea I had so much crap. It wasn’t even interesting crap, it was just bits and pieces, the detritus collected along the way from Canterbury to London via Oxford. Things that at one point in my life I must have wanted but couldn’t now imagine why. There are still a few dregs left, such as a bag full of candles — thick yellow church candles, that sort of thing — that I bought a literal decade ago and can’t get rid of because, you know, what if I needed them in a power cut? How many power cuts have I lived through in the last decade? I think maybe one, last year. Did I use the candles? No. I went to Pizza Express until the lights came back on. Ho hum.

I begrudgingly kept my GCSE and A-level certificates, though I don’t think they have any use any more — I can’t imagine many thirtysomethings get asked to prove they got a B in maths 15 years ago. I suppose if I ever suffer amnesia they’ll come in handy to remind me what I can and can’t do (English and Woodwork, respectively). There’s also a limited edition Blue Peter mug that I’m itching to put on ebay but haven’t quite got around to it yet. Its time will come though.

Justify yourself

So why three tables and a chair? Well, I’m having more than one guest at a time this new year and last year I had to perch on my sofa to eat dinner when there were three other people eating at the table, which felt absurd (though luckily that absurdity was superceded by the absurdity of having to eat my food with a spoon as I only found out at the last second that I owned three forks, not four). The bedside tables are now needed because the boxed espresso machine I’d been using had been sold on (I’m trying to ignore the fact that I’ve spent as much on bedside tables as I gained from selling the coffee maker) and the coffee table is because recently I’ve spilt one drink too many on the floor, having been forced to put my glass down by my feet.

So: three tables and one extra chair and no more than that. Everything in the flat must serve a purpose: anything else is a luxury.