Four hundred pages too late

It's a shame to be four hundred pages into a book and only then realise that it's really boring. I have a choice: read the remaining hundred pages or just give up. Yes, sorry, Cloud Atlas is boring. The idea is that one soul is travelling between six different people in six different times. Which means there's six different stories. Occasionally there's a sentence thrown in like 'you know, I feel like I've lived another life five hundred years ago,' but they're unconnected and mostly, yes, boring. There's a good one in the middle about the people of a ruined world speaking in a Riddley Walker-type language. But apart from that, I wish I was interested.

Am I wrong? Everyone who's quoted on the back of the book seems to like it. And it's going to be made into a film. I'm just annoyed because I read all those words expecting something good to come of it. I could have been doing something else, you know.

I missed Doctor Who

Looks exciting, doesn't it?

I missed the last episode of Doctor Who. The one at the end of the last season. Everyone was wearing eye patches and the Doctor had long hair. I'm not sure why. I wanted to see it, but I couldn't. I don't know when it'll be shown again. The problem is, I don't feel too bad about it. I mean, I'll see it eventually, right? Maybe I'll watch the next season first.

I know this isn't the attitude. My nerd credentials have been revoked. I've been thrown out. Even when I do finally see it, in about seven months, I won't be allowed back in. I will be looked at with contempt. It was earlier in this very year that I called Doctor Who the Best Thing Ever, and now look at me. I've let it slip. There's a hole where my obsessiveness should be. It's too late for me now. Go on without me. I haven't even played the new Zelda yet. I'm hopeless.

This is my way of looking in from the outside and asking what I missed. Was it any good? I'm looking forward to the Christmas special though. Honest.

The Martians are coming

I've been reading The War of the Worlds. It's pretty dark.

"Where the road grows narrow and black between the high banks the crowd jammed and a desperate struggle occurred. All that crowd did not escape; three persons at least, two women and a little boy, were crushed and trampled there and left to die amidst the terror and the darkness."

The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells

I mean, calm down HG. It's only the end of the world. The whole thing is done so well it makes me worried about Martians. Not really concerned, but when I hear loud noises I assume it's the invasion.

Do I like poetry?

Poetry seems like a thing I should be interested in. They come in books, and they're all wordy and literary. I've tried to read poetry. It usually goes like this: 'Okay, okay, yeah, okay, no, I don't understand'. A poem has always seemed like a puzzle I don't know how to solve. There's a whole form to it. A secret language. What about the pentameters? And the triplets? And the iambs and the foots? These words give me a blank face and an even blanker brain. I always take a poem at face value without hanging on every syllable. There are poems that I like. I can't name them right now, but I'm sure they exist. And I like them for what they're saying, not for their clever clever verse structure. And then there's the poets that fill every line with references to Greek mythology and ancient Celtic folklore. What am I meant to do with this? Okay, I'll rush straight to the library before I tackle the next verse.

I'm allowed to say these things, because I'm a postgraduate.

So I write poetry even less than I read it. In the past, when I really had to write a poem for academic reasons, I would start feeling deeply cynical and take out all the line breaks. I turned them into paragraphs. Now I have a chance to take a poetry module. And if I'm ever going to be interested in it, it's going to be now with these tutors and these people. If I did write a few poems, I don't know what they would look like. I don't know if I would like them. I'd much rather write a short story about evil machines. But I might have a go.

Nobody really knows

A lot of the houses are dark. If it wasn’t for the street lamps the street would be lost in the black, and nobody would see anything at night. Maybe some people are in their houses with the lights off. James can see the next street through the gaps between houses. A back garden with high fences is lit up with big bulbs. The other streets are hidden behind each other. Are their lights on? They should be brighter. They should shine up into the sky. No, these lamps don’t light the streets. They only make it less dark. A murky pale glow that wraps around everything until morning. The back garden light in the next street flickers and turns off. James imagines a power cut getting closer, taking each house as it sweeps across the streets. Only his street is left. He stares at the light in Boy’s house. It stays on. Eventually it will go out like his own bedroom, but it’s on for now. As the night goes on all the lights will turn off. James thinks that nobody really knows what happens then, when the garden plants shiver in the breeze and the concrete glares with empty. In the playground and out into the fields and into the trees. Nobody really knows what is happening then.