oh la la literature...

Managed to appreciate a little bit more of the literature festival this week. When I'm old grey and retired I'm going to spend my life "doing" festivals.... edinburgh, hay on wye, cheltenham.... it woudn't be a bad life....

anyway, I digress. Managed to squeeze in a little bit of Dave Gorman and Stuart Maconie. Dave was excellent in nhis usual way, if a little "tortured" on the issue of his use/love of mathematical charts to highlight his points. Whilst I accept that he lives with his life on a daily basis (obvious point) and therefore may get a little sick of the over-emphasis on his use of charts by enthusiastic interviewers, the bottom line is that many of his fans are bascially geeks who also like pie charts and venn diagrams. We all agreed that he was a little bit too critical in this issue. I'm a big venn diagram fan me. They are a great way of describing things, visually if possible, but even in speech, they get the point across really well. Can't help it, just love'em.

After listening to Dave's speech I was amused to find this book on Sunday which I had to buy Paul. Dave, I'm sure, wouldn't be as amused, but it cracked us up.... I heartily reccomend it to any music lovers out there.....

Stuart Maconie was saturday nights entertainment, his discussion on the "north" was typical Maconie... intelligent, articulate, sharp and very very entertaining. Great guy, you just want to be his mate and hit the pub with him for a quality evening of witty banter and stories of the Clash and Edwin Collins..... :-)

Keane's new album...

it's good but they do seem to have absentmindedly ventured down an 80's cul-de-sac.

I'm well aware that I need to read the popular press etc with a healthy dose of cycnicism, but sometimes it really hits home how they manipulate and distsort reality for a "sellable story". Last night I attended a Cheltenham Literary Festival event with Russell T Davies and John Barrowman. It will a really entertaining hour and an half, with some very funny moments, laid back chatter and some ceriously camp comments which hopefully went over the heads of many under 16s in the audience.

During the Q&A session (I think) there was mention of Prince Charles being asked to have a cameo in Dr Who, which he turned down. This has since been mentioned in the press (see here - this is a toned down version from the report earlier today). Trust me, I was there, it was a JOKE. we laughed. The concept of treason didn't occur to anhyone in the room.....

so whats been going on...

well Married Life (capitalised of course) is great. Didn't think it would feel any different really but it does. It feels, well, more permanent I guess!

First two weeks of married life (post honeymoon) were spent mainly apart, with me working away in Spain for 8 of the 14 days, but this week I have been home all week and its been nice to return to a bit of normality.

We've had all our pressies delivered, we've tried to write lots of thank you cards (and failed!), we've spent today painting the kitchen blue so that the crappiness of the the current decor didn't let down our new kitchen equipment.... its been a ball.... (actually we don't really do the whole DIY thing, so whilst it now looks lovely, it wasn't a barrel of laughs....).

What else has been going on....? Hmmm, well we watched Grizzly Man on DVD last weekend, We watched it because Paul took the opportunity whilst I was in Spain to hijack the film list on LoveFim - dammit. But I actually really enjoyed the film, which was odd, disturbing but also really intriguing. So if you haven't watched it, I recommend it....