Late for a film – but not enough

I went to the cinema yesterday to watch a film – a useful respite from the bloviating heat, though I was worried I should have brought a jumper when I first walked in through the reception, where it appears they’d changed the thermostat so that they could keep ice lollies out on the counter. The screening room itself was a touch soupy, but at least more comfortable than staring at the wall in my house while a single droplet of sweat rolls down the side of my face. I’m only joking, I don’t sweat, just like the former prince Andrew.

I always arrive very late when I go to the cinema. It’s partly because I’m often unable to leave the house to go somewhere until the time that I said I would be there, which is an admittedly hateful trait, and partly because I can’t beat sitting through all those awful adverts. Endless lifestyle pitches at people who like to sit in darkened rooms and not talk to each other. Adverts for mobile phone companies shortly before more adverts telling you not to use them. Mixed messages, people. It seems very optimistic to me, expecting you to remember any product you’ve seen 90 seconds off after you’ve had the back of your brain stem visually sandblasted for nigh-on three hours.

At yesterday’s showing I arrived 10 minutes after the advertised film start and they were barely getting going. Another 20 minutes later and they were still in full stride – it was 35 minutes after the film was supposed to start that it actually did. That’s me levels of lateness, I think they didn’t start making the film until it was supposed to start playing.

What I really object to with the cinema adverts is that I’ve already paid a ridiculous amount for a ticket, but they’ve got me there like a hostage. I refuse to sit through a YouTube advert if it’s longer than five seconds, I’ll refresh that page for half an hour until I get something I can skip or ignore. I’ve refused to watch Formula 1 on the telly since it went behind a paywall – can you believe the nerve of it, a sport built entirely on sponsorship wants me to pay extra to see it.

But the cinema? The film company is bragging about how it’s made $500m around the world, with a chunk of that from all the cheeky things they’ve hidden around the sets, and the multiplex full of screaming children must be coining it in with the overpriced popcorn. It’s actually outrageous. I tell you what I would pay extra for though – I’ll give you another pound if you let me know when the film is actually starting. Still might be late though.

A load of bull

Mrs Burnett works on a micro dairy-slash-beef farm, milking the ladies a couple of times a week and making yoghurt and suchlike. Quick reminder that I’m allergic to milk and can no longer ride in my own car because it’s so stinky.

Part of the job is looking after the babies – Laura loves that part, bottle feeding the teeniest and making sure everyone else gets a good helping from the suckling bucket. There’s also a strong requirement to give the cows pastoral scritching should they require it.

A month or two back there was a sad occasion in the beef herd where a little baby bull calf was born but his mum died giving birth. I say little, this baby was an absolute unit, and perhaps as a result of his traumatic entry to the world, an absolute thicko. He ended up in with the milk herd babies as an orphan and massively struggled to learn how to drink from a bottle. I visited the farm one Saturday while Laura was milking and spent over an hour trying to coax a couple of litres of milk down his reluctant throat.

The baby bounced right back, and we gave him the nickname Chonky. I visited him a few times and got regular updates from the farm that he was getting stronger and jaipsing around with the others. Chonky was unusual in having an affinity toward people – especially unusual from the beef herd. A pure soul, always ready for a cuddle and a scratch beneath the chin, his lower teeth would jut out in a goofy half smile.

Today I had a message from Laura that she’d spotted the knacker man and his van in the yard taking a cow away – Chonky died in the night and was found this morning. No one’s quite sure why the little fellow died, but it’s hit our household particularly hard. Perhaps we’re not cut out for the harsh realities of country life – how many thousands of cows died just today? – but it was a privilege to know this sweet little guy if only for a few weeks.

Ain’t that the tooth

I do enjoy a good argument, and I have to say that I picked my spouse well when it came to enjoying a good argument together. I don’t know if she’s quite up to my level, but she’s definitely capable enough to land a solid punch to the jaw every now and then. If that’s even an accurate boxing metaphor – I realise as I type that I have not a clue.

I’ve realised today that her secret trump card is telling me I have something in my teeth, because I can’t immediately verify and I don’t quite know if she’s telling the truth or not. Easiest way to win any discussion, because play has to stop immediately while the team captain goes off in search of a mirror and a length of floss.

And it would be just as effective even if there wasn’t actually anything on my teeth, because it’s the threat of the thing that’s the thing. But would she lie? I don’t think so, she’s a very honourable woman, but I absolutely would and you can never be quite sure about people can you?

Just the possibility of a dental besmirching is enough to take the wind out of my sails, stop me in my tracks, and other tortured analogies. I probably shouldn’t give the secret away, but I’m not sure she reads this. And besides, I think I’ve got something in my teeth, my wife said so.

That's politics

I’m fascinated by this whole Andy Burnham psychodrama that’s playing out across the 24-hour news channel chirons, in the same way that I’m sure many other people throughout the country just aren’t.

An average voter somewhere in the West Midlands will wake up one day soon, realise there’s a new prime minister and not have a clue why. Not that anyone who has actually been following the news will have a clue why either, it just is what it is, the circle of public life. Knock knock, Keir who, that’s politics.

It’s all much like the old days, which is a cheery thought. If this was 400 years ago it would be painted in the history books as some sort of dreary middle class (except that dinner exist) civil war-slash-coup, Burnham marching on London with his team of admin support and someone shooting video for his socials, when in reality he’s going to jump on an early Avanti West Coast and claim it on expenses.

There’s a level of entitlement to Burnham’s putsch that I find mildly staggering (I try not to stagger as a rule), asking the actual prime minister of a country to hand in his notice while he waits to see what platform he’s supposed to be leaving from. He’s probably deciding his cabinet and a few headline policy announcements while deciding whether or not to get a sandwich from Upper Crust now or wait for later. Though if the current prime minister (at the time of writing) had invested a similar amount of time preparing for government we might not be in this mess.

But here comes our white knight on his trusty steed (an Addison Lee Volkswagen) to save us, having vanquished the racist foe up north. Part of the reason that Andy Burnham and Nigel Farage are able to be so popular is that they are frontline politicians who are untainted by any actual frontline political experience. Sure, Burnham was culture secretary, but back in the days when you just turned up at the Baftas and kept your head down the rest of the year.

Fair play to him on his regional polling win though, it’s exciting for him. First Wigan, then the world. I do get vastly irritated though by this notion of ‘tactical voting’ that people talking about at endless length on the news. As if we have to stay with whatever party the polling algorithms have allocated us. The whole point of an election is trying to persuade people to put an X next to your name, and the moment for doing that is in the polling booth – anything before or after is just nonsense.

Unless you’re the actual politician – as the (current) prime minister has learned, it’s one thing trying to persuade people, but it’s the next little bit that’s even harder.

Disaster area

I’ve got friends who have boxes set up for the end of the world – tins of food, torch, batteries, spare game of Dobble. They look down their noses at me because I just live my life from tub to tub of hummus, but there’s really no point me being that well prepared.

See, I’m fully aware I wouldn’t last more than five minutes into a disaster movie. I’m the guy that bounces off the propellor in Titanic (which I fully stood and applauded when I saw it for the first time in the cinema in 1997, it was a magical moment), and that’s fine. I just don’t have either the luck or the skill needed to get to the end of one of those. Or the eyes, with my strong prescription I’d be scuppered as soon as my glasses fell off.

Nor do I have the desire to survive, frankly. If anything bad happened I’d be like it’s my time, take me now. And they’d say sir, that’s a fire alarm. And we literally just said we were going to be testing it.

In which I'm anti-social media

I can’t believe that the kids are complaining at the prospect of a ban on social media. I’d love the likes of Instagram, Facebook and whatever Twitter is called these days to be taken forcibly off our hands. They all started off delightful and quickly degenerated into harmful nonsense, which I suppose is the problem when you open these things up to members of the public.

You could probably track quite exactly how pleasant it is to take part in any of these platforms, and my theory goes that it would be the same line of fun whether it was Threads or a wedding reception. As the government warning on something or other goes (drugs? Being leader of a political party?) – when the fun stops, stop.

If there’s one thing I should emulate the prime minister on, it’s that maybe I should get my WhatsApp messages to auto delete. Is there a way of doing it so that it’s five minutes after you received them, though? If anyone asks it’s for mental health.

Though one of the nice things about recent developments in online culture (eurgh, I just sicked in my mouth) is that we’re rediscovering how lovely it is to be offline.

I’m not quite ready to ditch my phone entirely (I was very ahead of my time back in 2009, though, when I ditched my Windows phone for a flip phone in an attempt to ‘de-tech’), but I’ve been enjoying stashing my phone somewhere in the house and reading lots of books this year.

My wife Laura has always been very good at balancing the demands of virtual and real life, perhaps I should be more like her – film camera, sewing machine and baking equipment at the ready.

The thing is, I need the internet because there’s no one left in real life who will actually listen to me. I don’t for one minute assume that anyone is particularly listening to me online, but the difference is that I can pretend someone is and continue to vomit words into the digital sphere without seeing the withering looks of disdain and irritation.

If I don’t have to worry about a stray under-16 wandering past a screen and seeing anything I’ve written then maybe I’ll sleep just a little better at night.

Don’t you dairy

I am allergic to milk – it’s really fine, but it’s at this point that people usually squeal a little ‘aaaaaaaw’ as they think of their favourite rancid dairy based product that they would be denied if they were in fact me. Forgetting of course, the Pavlovian effect of being allergic to something usually means that you hate it. Cheese literally makes me want to puke. Butter? Can’t stand it.

It’s all fine then, I just don’t have it. The problem is usually when people stash milk in stupid places. Do crisps need milk on them? No they don’t. Unless they’re a cheese flavour, but that’s a stupid taste for crisps and you would rightfully want to assume that an advertised crisp flavour would have at least a whiff of that foodstuff on it somewhere. Marks and Spencer has just started putting butter on all its sandwiches for some reason, that’s a bit annoying. I used to love a Boots chicken triple, a true meal deal bargain, but then they started putting sodding Parmesan in the mayonnaise. Ridiculous. They stopped doing it, but the damage was done.

Nowadays I have expanded the traditional definition of insanity to include going to any British supermarket and expecting there to be a dairy free ice cream that wasn’t there before. I had an amazing one in Aldi a couple of years back, it had peanut butter in it, but it was there for two weeks and hasn’t been seen since. I still go in regularly with an irrational level of hope only to storm out in a huff mere minutes later.

Sainsbury’s currently has a deal going on minty Jude’s and I’m going to be absolutely devastated when it finishes. I can’t bear Ben & Jerry’s since Unilever trashed the brand (just don’t pretend to be nice, I can cope with that) so that means my pudding diet has consisted for a long while almost exclusively of Swedish Glacé, which has admittedly done a great deal for my people. But I’ve long missed a mint choc chip addition to the milkless oeuvre. I reckon I’ve probably had five tubs in the last few weeks. If you’re going to feel sorry for me, feel bad about that.

Normalised and ready to roll

My favourite pet peeve at the moment (I shouldn’t have so many, pet peeves are for life, not just for Christmas) is any Instagram comment that begins with ‘Let’s normalise…’

It’s hideous therapy speak of course, let’s normalise not using that for a start, but it’s always followed by an abrasively matter of fact sentiment that’s stuffed with mock offence and passive aggression.

‘Let’s normalise families without big budgets’ starts the influencer who’s decorating her house on someone else’s budget. ‘Let’s normalise taking time for yourself’, says the lifestyle account that’s just spent 15 minutes setting up a tripod to catch a candid moment of them getting cosy on the sofa with a cup of tea. ‘Let’s normalise supporting small artists’ says the aspiring musician who doesn’t have an audience because they’re bad.

Let’s normalise not being normal, shall we? We seem to pushing back to the centre ground, the Platonic ideal of everyday life when it seemed like we’d only just normalised everyone being weird. Normalising assumes there’s a normal that we all need to aspire to, the let’s assumes that we can do whatever we like as long as everyone agrees to it.

Let’s just mind our own business, shall we? Get on with life, be kind, stop winding everyone else up. Let’s get offline every now and then and stop holding ourselves up to an AI-optimised ideal that exists only in someone’s heavily messed with camera reel. Let’s stop listening to stupid people who haven’t earned their platform and let’s stop engaging when it’s transparent rage bait. Let’s all look the other way and wait for the algorithm to wither and die. Normalise that…

Am I too old for this?

We went to Alton Towers today – partly to celebrate the occasion of my recent birthday, and partly to see whether we had in the recent in-between times become far too old to go to theme parks.

It’s bad enough being in close proximity to that many young people in a day, reminded of their essential fitness and fortitude, the sheer energy they can deploy at a moment’s notice, and the enthusiasm which they are able to direct at a thing they actually enjoy.

Even in the face of a monumentally damp day that didn’t stop gushing down with rain the entire time we were there. Am I too old for theme parks? I was genuinely worried I was going to end up with some variation on trench foot, or at least the advent of some dangerous black mould between my toes that would require periodic application of white vinegar.

There were two particular moments that brought home to me my advancing years – the first was on the rollercoaster Smiler, which is very much like I imagine the experience of being a shoe in a washing machine. There are two pauses in the ride experience, during which I felt an exceeding dizziness, that even in those five seconds before it dissipated I thought might be something I would have to live with for the rest of my life.

The second was on the rollercoaster Galactica, which encases your legs in vast stirrups so that you can be swept up into a prone position and thrown about on your back and front. In the middle of all this throwing I felt the unfortunate side effects of an aggressive strain of gravity, which resulted in a rippling motion along my jawline and the sensation of my entire face trying to slide off my skull and pool around my neck.

In years gone by I would not have flirted with vertigo and my facial features would have stayed in position as I was flung around the delightful Staffordshire scenery. Not too old then, but definitely getting old.

Flaying it by ear

Did you know that you’ve scientifically got a greater chance of being struck by lightning and soiling yourself in public than you have of passing a communal piano with someone competent at the keys?

I absolutely made that up, but it sounds eminently plausible because public pianos are a scourge on society. There’s one near our local supermarket where I just meandered over to buy some reduced bread and doughnuts – the essentials – and a man was sat at the keyboard repeatedly smashing his actual face against the collection of notes around the middle C.

At least that’s what it sounded like. He may have been drunk and lost all power over his digits, or perhaps he enjoys the admirable self-delusion of being able to play the instrument and no one close who loves him enough to tell him to stop.

It’s not necessarily any better on the vanishingly rare occasion when the person actually can play. It feels like an assault on the person, an invasion of personal space from a great distance. I don’t let anyone get in my head, but somehow these keyboard warriors have free rein to waltz (or boogie woogie) right on in.

And if the person actually was any good surely there would be people willing to pay them to deploy their gift in an appropriate context – a room, with people who have been forewarned and perhaps even possess an appreciation of the oeuvre.

And as a brief aside, how can we as a society be considering the banning of under-16s from social media but not communal public instruments? Whatever are, these wilful plinky plonkers are an anti-social element who need to be stopped. Or at least told to play the things pianissimo.

Step back in time

I know that if you have the ability to go back in time you’re supposed to do something worthy with the immense power, like go into the past and save the world from the perils of unspeakable suffering wrought by the likes Adolf Hitler or Cheryl Cole.

If I went back in time it would be to check messages on WhatsApp before they were deleted. Another wellspring of unspeakable suffering wrought.

Because it’s not enough simply to kill Hitler really – Germany was suffering from the impact of the Treaty of Versailles and Hitler was the opportunist herdsman who drove the country in the right direction. Well, the wrong direction, but you know. In many ways the Weimar Republic was such a roiling period disquiet that any number of other people could have risen up with the wind behind them.

And if you could kill two wars with one stone you’d have a go, wouldn’t you? You’d have return to the point at which Franz Ferdinand decided to visit the victims of his failed assassination attempt, a badly thrown grenade. The driver stalled his car right next to a dejected gunman sitting in a cafe.

But then in many ways Germany and Russia were spoiling for a fight in the run up to the first world war. Where would you nip that in the bud? Do we stop Otto Von Bismarck from unifying the German states in 1871?

It’s exhausting really, you basically need a history degree just to do something nice for people.

UN-believable developments

I was just reading about how the German chancellor is under pressure because of his failure to secure a seat on the UN Security Council.

You’ve got to feel sorry for a governmental leader, no one is every happy with anything you do – get the seat on the UN Security Council and they’ll only want something else.

But I never even knew that they held a vote for the thing, like some sort of geopolitical Eurovision Song Contest. I wonder how they go about deciding who they’re going to vote for – a round of singing, naturally, but Friedrich Merz probably lost a bit of support in the swimsuit round, he’s very stringy looking. But tall, by all accounts.

The fact that Trinidad and Tobago, Kyrgyzstan and Zimbabwe won seats over Germany must feel like a slap in the face. Austria and Portugal they can perhaps cope with, but who’s been posting all that cash to Kyiv? People can be so ungrateful.

There must be some sort of consolation prize that Germany can be awarded with to save a bit of diplomatic face. I don’t know how these things work, but you can imagine this year’s UN Christmas party taking place at a nice outdoor market in Augsburg.