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I went to see Digger at the cinema the other evening. It’s a strange film, especially in the sense of how you can’t really write anything about the movie without ruining it for anyone who wants to see it, which then cuts off any possibility of writing anything that encourages anyone to go and see it.

I saw yesterday that Marina Hyde and Richard Osman has gleefully written the thing off as the biggest flop in cinematic history – and if you do something like that, may as well go big – but I suspect it’ll probably be a slow burn word of mouth type thing that lots more people will end up watching.

There’s a difficulty though in something that satirises the state of the world, because no one who needs to see it will actually go to watch it. And it’s not entertaining enough to enjoy in its own right in the same way that an adult can watch a Pixar film and get whole different layer of enjoyment out of it that goes over kids’ heads completely.

Tom Cruise’s character has a lengthy 30-minute (it feels like it) peroration in the middle of the film that has you checking your watch because you’re thinking ‘Ha ha, but obviously this is aimed at everyone except me’.

But it’s certainly not a bad film – I’m sure it will garner some sort of cult status over the coming years and find a home on some streaming platform or other. There’s a tough line to tread though, between the sort of artful filmmaking that lets the viewer get lost in whatever is happening and the sort of arty nonsense that likes to show all of its working on screen. I’m still not sure which side of that Digger falls into.

Three Christmas cheers for Joss Stone

I was having a lovely morning until I was made irrationally furious by an advert that popped up on my Instagram.

Adverts pop up on my Instagram all the time, in fact I’m more surprised when a photo taken by someone I know pops up on Instagram, because Meta has decided that I don’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to carefully curating a measured feed from people who existence I’m generally aware of.

The advert in question was for a Christmas concert of some description that’s being held later in the year by songstress Joss Stone. She was big a decade or two ago, I remember that. Very soulful, nose piercing, no shoes. I never bought an album, but I could sit through one of her songs.

“Hello England,” says Joss. She’s sitting in an easy chair with a red ball gown of some description and no shoes, obvs, and she’s very excited about her upcoming Christmas performance. “I’m coming to bring some Christmas cheer,” she explains. There are some details, which I confess I don’t remember in any great detail, at which point the advert has failed in its purpose but at the same time we must also be aware that it’s not really for me, despite what Instagram might think.

Poor Joss can barely get two words out – it’s the ‘Hello England’ that winds me up. Americans can just about get away with that sort of thing because we know that they’re geographically challenged. They don’t know where anything is and they can’t say Worcestershire. But Joss should know better. Unless the Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish are purposely excluded from her festive shindig, in which case fine. Let alone any other nationalities that might wish to pop along.

And then it’s the notion that Joss Stone is the sole purveyor of Christmas cheer. I should imagine she’s lugging it around in a bum bag because that dress doesn’t look like it has pockets, but thank goodness she’s coming over from whichever permanently sunny tax haven in which she resides to lighten up our gloomy little lives.

It’s the same mentality that drove Gal Gadot to do that ghastly video rendition of Imagine with her celebrity chums during Covid (Joss might have been in it even) as if the mere sight of them were enough to draw us out of our morose introspection.

I shouldn’t be too hard on Joss Stone, I’m sure she genuinely is excited about singing Santa Baby at the Swindon Arts Centre in November (all made up) and the light and joy she’ll bring to the world, I can be generous enough to grant her that benefit of the doubt.

But this next little while is about knuckling down and pushing through to the end of the year, all celebrities should have the good sense to hibernate in the sub-tropics wherever their second or third homes are until we’ve got the stomach to deal with them again in the spring.

Contains scenes of a persuasive nature

I don’t really watch television any more – not because I’m particularly cultured, it’s more that I gave up my telly licence through sheer petulance when the BBC made me redundant last year and even then we’d only kept it to watch Race Across the World on channel two.

Not to say that I’m not hooked on the streaming services, but the thing I find overwhelming when I visit my parents at Christmas is the adverts. The approach feels like something the Americans perfected on Taliban prisoners during their little sojourn in Afghanistan the other decade. It’s all relentless flashing and loud music, while I sit in a prone position on the slightly too soft sofa down one side of the living room trying not to slide off the cushions.

I’m actually writing this now while I try and ignore the adverts that Channel 4 is visiting upon me in return for watching people make cakes. Weirdly the programme itself tortures itself trying to make sure that participants don’t mention any form of branding while they’re on the show, presumably so that any makers of yeast extract or rich dark stout – whoever they may be – would be compelled to actually pay for one of the intensely traumatic 30-second spots intended to flog their wares.

If anything it’s all a rather nice advert for sitting down with a good book and a blanket.

France in my pants (sounded better in my head)

Me and Mrs Burnett have just completed a few days wandering across France – driving an electric car, of course. I spend much of my working days extolling the virtues of the EV, so it would be naughty of me to hop in something that belches partially combusted hydrocarbons as soon as I was off the clock.

I keep getting told that it’s impossible to drive long distances in EVs, despite many times having completed long distances in EVs. Is this what it’s like to be a woman? Apologies if my lived experiences don’t match up to your hastily assembled preconceptions. It’s all been fine, though, driving to the south coast and back along a circuitous route taking in Toulouse and various other places. There was a bit of fuss trying to find somewhere to charge in Tours, but it also took us a remarkably long time to realise that the quiet looking shopping centre we were hoping to juice up at was in fact entirely abandoned.

It’s the weather that took me by surprise though – a delightful treat swapping out the chilly sub-20°C chills of home for the blanketing thrills of 30°C France. The many mosquito bites spotting my legs are the price I pay – for some reason I’m irresistible to the bugs of Montpellier in a way that I have never in my life experienced. I once spent two weeks in Thailand and came away with just a nibble on my elbow where my companions had been munched on. I was repellent in so many ways as a younger man.

And now as we make our way back to the frozen tundra of Oxfordshire I shall look forward to rummaging out my thick jumpers and counting down the days until I’m allowed to put the heating on. I hate this next little while, the slide into winter, but at least I have the warm glow of chasing the sun.

The motion of the ocean

Isn’t technology incredible? Not only am I steaming (metaphorically) across the English Channel at a rate of knots (a rate known to the captain but not me), having just enjoyed a delicious tasty meal of rice and vegetables, I’m able to relay this news to you via satellite internet.

Don’t get me wrong, it seems like an outrageous misuse of resources that I’m beaming these meagre thoughts to your face via the shallows of space, but I’ve always been of the belief that just because you can, you should.

We’ve taken advantage of a competitive price for the lounge on the ferry, surrounded by a light sprinkling of middle aged couples who complain about everything. It’s quite the luxury. I’m three Earl Greys and two glasses of sparkling water deep and I’ll still have two hours of driving at the other end. That’s just the kind of risk taker I am. First things first though, another helping of rice.

Smell like you mean it

I was just out strolling the mean streets of my blandly suburban Oxfordshire town admiring how the return to school has brought an impressive deluge of traffic back to the roads when I passed a group of boys on their own way to school.

They reached about waist height on me, rustling in their fresh blazers, all four of them with the same haircut of curls piled on top and brushed forward that looks like a bad 1950s toupee but must be popular on someone or other at the moment. It’s all very different to my day, but then I did start secondary school over 30 years ago. We had none of the bravado or swagger these boys were taking up the whole pavement with.

But when they passed, that was a whole different story. I found myself choking on the familiar scent of mass market body spray. It’s nice to smell that Lynx is a universal rite of passage (Axe if you’re from somewhere less enlightened), though I do wonder how many pollinators are being thoughtlessly slaughtered every year by these roaming clouds of fertiliser. I could see flies dropping in their wake as they swanked their way to an opening salvo of English, French and Feelings (curriculum’s very different these days).

I staggered home and immediately began writing a blog post about it, but at least I have survived to tell the tale.

Making an entrance

I passed a van on the motorway earlier that had such a weird slogan emblazoned on the side that I thought about it for easily the next 10 miles. “Your global partner for entrance solutions” it said. Does it mean doors? Is that an entrance solution? Certainly if you’re on the outside a door would be an entrance solution, if you were stuck inside somewhere with no sense of egress about proceedings you would find yourself looking for a global partner for exit solutions.

It gave me something to do, it’s been a long journey. Scotland is really far away, who knew? I was up there for the last wispy smoke trails of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Is that its pedigree name? It’s such an amorphous thing with no one in charge, I can’t get my head round it. There must be some blandly marketed entity at the centre of it all, with the Official Fringe sponsored by some sort of global partner for entrance solutions.

I’ve never been up to the Fringe before, and it’s all anyone in comedy can talk about for six months of the year. I’ve kind of hoped I could just tick along without ever having to step foot near it – I have an instinctively contrary nature that hates anything that everyone else likes. And the Fringe is no longer on the fringes, it hasn’t been a punky outsider for at least three or four recessions. All comedy roads seem to lead through the Scottish capital.

I went up to see the shows of some people I know, and it was both desperately enticing and tremendously off-putting at the same time. I’ve got the pencilled outlines of a show I’d like to work on buried deep in my comedy notebook, and I can really see the attraction of taking something like that to somewhere like Edinburgh. But at the same time it’s this huge sink for hopes, dreams and your life savings. And why would anyone put themselves through that if they didn’t have to? If I did find it in me to go to Edinburgh myself, perhaps I would have to find some sort of organisation with globally gained expertise in making a splash, but I wouldn’t even know where to start.

A peek at the back end

I get access to these back end analytics so that I can look at all sorts of numbers to do with my little website, it’s sort of exciting, but at the same time massively discouraging.

And yet it wouldn’t be falsely modest of me to encourage you in some small way by saying that you – if in fact anyone actually is reading this – are part of a very exclusive club. And to think you get access to this world class content – billions don’t – for absolutely free.

But anyway – I was moping through my analytics and counting things on one hand, when I saw that someone had ended up on my blog by searching for ‘BTS Grammy’. Notwithstanding the Grammytically incorrect use of the singular to describe the auspicious music (and recorded audio. And horrendous noise) awards, I was surprised that such a search would bring you in this direction.

And so I googled it myself, failing to spot a link to my website in nearly 30 pages of results but confident it must have appeared at some point. Not near the top, but at some point at some point. I even looked through the news results until around page 18 then got massively bored.

It shows you, though, the dedication with which BTS fans approach their craft – so desperate for any novel insight into their heroes’ Grammybdication that they would wade through literally dozens of pages of nonsensical tastes of the same soft serve news bites.

I don’t imagine they stayed long, but what I choose to imagine is that it’s a sign of how influential my little blog is becoming, moving up in the world. Grammy for best internet diary? I wouldn’t write it off. Except nuts, I’ve withdrawn myself in solidarity haven’t I. Knew that would bite me in the thing.

Be nice? Dolly would

Usually when a celebrity dies – and call me callous here if you like – I don’t give it too much thought, usually because the person hasn’t done the thing you connected with them over in at least 20 years.

There’s usually a nostalgia to the mourning of public figures, people having to confront the fact that a part of their lives is long gone.

I think too often we conflate the artist and their work – why do we only try to separate them when it turns out we don’t actually like the person who’s created something we love? People should be allowed not to be the things they’ve done.

But there was something about Dolly Parton that upends all that – the world feels poorer without her presence in it, someone who was aware of the power of kindness but also the power that she wielded.

And weirdly, it’s almost impossible to find someone who genuinely disliked her. I’m not talking about the people who took irrationally against her music or her image, but people who knew her and interacted with her. It doesn’t seem to have been an act. There are plenty of notables around these days you could point to and well imagine that they aren’t quite the same person when nobody’s watching.

So a moment of acknowledgment for the passing of Dolly Parton isn’t pining nostalgia for a time gone by, but rather just to note that the world is slightly poorer for her absence.

Pooing in the shrubbery

I am still here, I should say. I went on holiday camping for a week and felt remarkably disinclined to spend any time jabbing at my phone to relate the experience. It was camping. For a week. I think you can guess at the experience.

Then it was back to work, but a sudden slip, trip or fall by my sister-in-law saw her enjoying an extended stay as the guest of a rapidly revolving cast of either completely disinterested or massively overworked nursing staff and the odd doctor who would swish in unannounced and bark things.

It meant I got to spend a lovely pleasant week with my niece, who suffers a little from anxiety but enjoyed the company. She took to sleeping on the landing just by my door, which was very cute.

There was a bit of fuss hunting round the garden to see where she’d pooed in the shrubbery and a few issues just getting her to muster up the courage to leave the house and go for a stroll, but we got there in the end.

She’s a dog, I suppose I should clarify, but I was enjoying stringing that out.

Cake or death

I met my parents for lunch at a fancy garden centre in the Cotswolds today – it was one of those vast, cavernous affairs where the garden was an afterthought. Each area themed like something out of the Crystal Maze – Richard O’Brien came bounding past at one point with a load of 34-year-old IT workers from Reading shrieking “To the gilet zone!”

The clientele was very different to my usual sort of garden centre, we weren’t in Dobbies anymore. The age skewed rather higher, too. The women inside were all beautifully coiffed and twinsetted, you wouldn’t have surprised me at all if you’d told me there was a Mary Berry lookalike competition happening in the useless but compelling kitchen gadgets section.

I’m rather more used to going to garden centres with actual plants, with tools you might expect to use rather than a chromed ceremonial wheelbarrow or decorative spade, and those big revolving jobs full of seeds. There was a ‘rare and unusual’ plant section in this garden centre, but they were in a refrigerated cupboard, as if anything organic had to be kept separate for our protection. Lovely selection of olives and charcuterie too.

The cafe was a delight though – I enjoyed a delicious pistachio and lemon cake with a rose water flavoured icing, washed down with a locally blended pot of Earl Grey. Tea and a bun, really, just with added ponce. The fillable water carafes were a nice touch, a token on the way to making us feel like we were getting our money’s worth.

An ambulance appeared at the window over our shoulder at one point, but given the demographics you’d have to assume they have one on permanent standby at one end of the car park. Gardening isn’t for everyone, you understand.

Grammy get your gun

I’ve just seen a news story that BTS are planning to boycott the Grammys next year because of the introduction of a new Asian pop music award, which the group of Korean funsters complains reduces music to region and language.

Given that there are Grammys for categories as diverse as Best Spoken Word Poetry Album (a whole album! Just the thought brings a tear to my eye) and Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album (is it by weight or by number?) as well as something entitled Best Música Mexicana Album (including Tejano) (we wouldn’t want to leave Tejano out… I’m going to have to look it up now in case I’m saying something awful) (no wait, it just means Mexicans in Texas sort of) – is Best Asian Pop Music Performance really that bad?

Perhaps the Behind The Scenes lads think that they’re going to miss out on the really good awards if they get lumped in with the Asian crowd, which is a valid concern for struggling up and comers such as themselves, but I’m not au fait with the nuances of regional pop music (oops, I’ve just done it myself) to really be across the details.

But the decision I’ve come to is that I am also going to withdraw myself from the 2027 Grammys in support of my colleagues at BTS because I think it’s a very important principle.

Though having said that, if BTS have taken themselves out of the running, maybe I’m in with a better chance of winning the best Asian pop performance without them… a tough decision to be made.