Days 2540 - 2546

Aka Monday 1st November - Sunday 7th November 2021

…I’m still catching up with this diary, so this will be a brief one…for the majority of the week I had a bad back, it started last week and just got worse this week until Friday and it was, more or less, all cleared up by Sunday. I wasn’t bedridden, but I had trouble bending down or moving quickly, not sure what caused it, but very glad that it cleared up…I also watched V/H/S/94…

…which has some nice ideas and nice looking/framed shots in this film, but they aren’t connected enough to make an engaging film, like having a story set in the viewing room of a funeral parlour is a good idea, but nothing is done with it, the story could have been set in any deserted room at night. Or the sewer cult, another good idea, a separate society just beneath our “normal” society, but it isn’t given time to build dread or fear. And I was just left feeling meh, rather than scared…I also watched a load of Christopher Lee Hammer Dracula’s, which were nicely nostalgic and helped take my mind off my bad back and other problems…I also read ‘Strange Adventures’ #1-12…

…which was an interesting read, looking at war, self-image and what we do for our family, to keep them safe and prosperous. But there us a nihilistic edge to the story and I'm not sure that it's superheroes bear the weight that is placed on them by the story…I also got this week’s New Comic Book gems:  

…collected some Lottery winnings:

…and listened to Richard Fearless'  'Future Rave Memory’, which sounds like The Caretaker taking on electronic music rather than ballroom, or in other words a droning, ambienty drive through the city…and I did today’s G2 Crossword:

…and Monday’s crossword gets the 200th week off to a grand start as we only had to cheat on one of the 26 clues. The little grey cells were on imperious form, crushing the clues, although we didn’t know that a ‘litany’ is a ‘prayer with invocations by the priest and responses from the congregation’…

…Tuesday’s grid was less…imperial. We had to cheat on a sixth of the clues (four out of 24). The little grey cells were finding it had to make the leap from the clue to the answer, like not getting ‘itemise’ from ‘specify individually’, but we did learn that Sherpa Tenzing’s last name was Norgay…

…it’s a similar story with Wednesday’s grid. We had to cheat on a seventh of the clues (three out of 24). Maybe it’s a combination of pain from my gypy back and frustration with the Tory party trying to keep Owen Patterson on the benches by getting rid of the Standards Commissioner and fixing things to benefit themselves. It’s kinda hard to concentrate on solving clues when the corruption is so blatant! But we did learn that ‘Pakistan’s capital’ is ‘Islamabad’…

…despite the political corruption preoccupying us, we only had to cheat on a tenth of the clues (two out of 21) for Thursday’s grid. Maybe we’re just getting used to living in a Johnson junta? Slightly annoyed that we didn’t get ‘snifter’ from ‘dram, but onwards and upwards…

…Friday’s grid goes mehingly and we had to cheat on a sixth of the clues (four out of 23). Given how the vote went it (with the end of Parliamentary standards ending with a whimper) seems fitting that ‘anti-climax’ (from ‘bathos’) was one of the clues we missed, along with ‘hurly-burly’ from ‘turmoil’. But we did learn that ‘quixotic’ means ‘impulsive’…

…hooray they’ve pulled a u-turn and the corruption has been slowed down a tad, although we still didn’t do well with Saturday’s grid. We had to cheat on a fifth of the clues (four out of 21). We just found this grid a hard one to get to grips with, like how could we not get ‘Trotsky’ from ‘Ukrainian-born Marxist, expelled from the Soviet Union by Starlin in 1929 and later assassinated’! But we did learn that a ‘Maharaja’ is an ‘important Hindu prince’…