Subject: grrreat weekend

Friday: Excellent film, meet two friends there coincidentally, go out for quick drink, really nice to see them, go home.

Saturday: brave Ken High Street for something specific in Amazon, end up buying boyfriend a wayyyyyy too expensive but nevertheless made-for-him jacket, then scamper back to Clapham to see the Moscow State Circus
------COMPLETELY FANTASTIC BOOK TICKETS IMMEDIATELY IT'S NOT THERE LONG---

stop off at pub and then restaurant for drunken lovely meal with two old friends, stagger home, sated.
Sunday: '50's cafe breakfast at 1pm, then mooch down to Sainsburys, shopping for porcini and oyster mushrooms for ridiculously expensive, disgustingly rich meal (a pint of cream? a pint! there's only two of us for Jaysis sake!)
Video, wine, Haagan Dasz vanilla with Charbonnel et Walker chocolate truffle sauce, early night.

Since writing about the… well, skirting around the issues that arose after two very specific incidents, I think I've decided to amend that entry slightly. I also feel the need to explain those… events, slightly more fully but. But. They hurt a great deal. So I don't know. Anyway, I'm taking the last line out and… I don't know. What… hmm, what is it I'm trying to say… ok…
Well, there's things like my neck issue. I have spoken of the actual physical presence of the thing, but how do you sum up eight years of abject misery and the prolonged after effects? I don't think it's possible. Which is why this whole linking thing is so good I guess. That you can refer back when something occurs to you, but… every so often I want a "psychiatrist's chair" scenario to let it all out. I was thinking about doing addenda to the asides where necessary. As to those two incidents, you know, there are so many angles from which to come - the story, the emotional impact at the time, the way something affected something at a later date, the breakdown, the change in my personality. What I want to be able to do is talk about this properly because it's important, but give it it's own space to be. Should wall off a zone and say "Don't come in unless you want to feel miserable by the time you've finished".
Oh I don't know. Forget it. This is obviously the time I need to talk about this and get it off my chest, but it would take me 24 hours to write down everything. I think I need to find a friend to talk to about it, but I don't know who to burden with it. It hurts too much at the moment, and I can't explain why. I don't even know why. Oh fuck it. FUCK.

Happy, smiley Cait. Come on, you can do it…. HAPPY SMILEY CAIT.

Uh - my ICQ seems to have completely died. It's a trifle upsetting, I think it has something to do with the internal network here having been up the creak since Friday. At least, I hope that's the case. It's been dying alot recently and I don't know why, a combined effect of firewall plus total user OD.

I must now go out and buy knickers. Please excuse me.

Ok. Aol/Netscape. How do we feel about this? Will Mozilla still exist? Do we truly believe that Microsoft *won't* win? It's like trying to fight a shadow. Hah - while we're on the subject, Rebecca was talking to, good lord - Bill Gates, in SF at Comdex. According to a ZDTV columnist, he said to her, " "You must be the most annoying person I've ever met." And according to NTK, she is officially the "most offensive person I have ever met". Heh. If that's not something to put on a T shirt, I don't know what is. I said "congratulations" anyway. You have to applaud such a fine and outstanding contribution to 'net lore.

At last, I saw Fear and Loathing last night. We were shattered, it was Kai's first performance of the new Theramin show he's done for the Science Museum, so I cycled in to town, saw the show, we went to the Polish café for strudel and extra-brewed tea (in sticks to your teeth) then cycled all the way back to Streatham. At least he'd had a few hours in between rides, me? I was completely knacked. F&L is…uh, well, ok, I think Johnny Depp was obviously revelling in the role, he was very happy indeed. Rob pointed out that yer man who played Dr Gonzo was also the guy in The Usual Suspects. Good god almighty - now that's what I call character acting.
So anyway, I thought it was good, but by the point at which Depp was sitting in a pool, the second hotel room utterly fucked, wearing a lizard tail, it had become so incoherent you sort of gave up on questions like - well, how did *that* happen then? Or - how he got out of that situation, for example? The counter argument would obviously be, well it's incoherent for a reason, innit. Well, yeeeeesss but then I'm a cinema audience so I might like a teensy bit more concrete structure. However. Fuck it, if a film's worth making it's worth making and the mere fact that Terry Gilliam and that Depp man were in it, and that it got proper money spent on it is good. I mean, it's completely insane. Moral minority groups across the world must be frothing in to their caffeine-less tea.

Sitting in the Science cafe waiting for Kai to finish his clearing up (the show was really, really good. Kai's playing was excellent), a couple sat down at the table next to mine with a tiny new-ish baby in a carrycot holder type thing. My heart was instantly crushed in to mushy pieces. On the same day there was a piece in the Indie on Sunday about how many species are being made extinct, and the idea that in about 50 years tigers, Indian lions, rhinos (oh - you name it, we all know which large species are screwed) will only exist inside enclosures. Which means they will not exist as anything other than prisoners. I know it sounds obvious but, and I am reminding myself of a Mike Leigh character as I speak, I look at a new human, and my heart turns to rubble and syrup as I listen to my hormones telling me to get-with-child as soon as I can. Then if I look at the broader over-view I'm filled with such terror for all of our futures that I think this, specifically, will be the best time humans will ever know. Anywhere outside the West (or what one calls economically buoyant capitalist democracies) will always be a disaster zone, to some extent, and… and and…

No e-mail, no life. The mail server for work has frozen so I can't talk to anyone. It's surprisingly calming.

The 'net fluster du jour on Wednesday was the trailer for "Star Wars, The (snort) Phantom Menace". Hopefully they're not going to call it that in the final analysis. It was thoroughly charming, seeing the ridiculously excited state that everyone - but *everyone* got in to. Chris was up at work early because of his insomnia, so he heard about it first, when the Americans had started going to bed. By the time we all got wind of it, there was no way anyone was downloading anything - you couldn't get to starwars.com to save your life. A fan site had various versions of the trailers, but it turned out that in fact, he only had links through direct to the trailers at the official site so that was no bloody use. Timed out every time.

The first trailer I saw was the one that, I should imagine, is now already 'net legend: the trailer with the cinema audience cheering. Flickering, looking like a badly projected black and white film, the beginning of the trailer started with the "LucasFilms" logo, and a huge cheer from the crowd in the cinema. The haunting theme, and so on. They cheered for Yoda. What a world we live in, where the only actors present from the original films aren't actors at all but either voices in the case of Frank Oz, or a pair of faux-robots.

Owen was scathing about it. He thinks it's ridiculous that people would pay to go see a film then leave again immediately after the trailer's finished! I have to say, that is a trifle ludicrous sounding, but… but. How many times recently have I had that prickle of excitement flood down my back, just from watching a trailer to a movie. Which other medium can have that instant hit of naiveity, innocence, anticipation and sheer smileyness. You only other times I've felt that are the few moments before your favourite band walks onto the stage, and they begin that song you love so much. You look at your friend and see that, like you, they're grinning from ear to ear and experiencing that sort of fizzy buzz.

Ah well. If only it happened more often, that's all I can say. My social life appears to be in near ruin currently, and I'm still not… it's that slightly awkward very "only the Brits could be this facile about sex" moment again. Yeah well, since the last time I wrote, I think there have been a couple of occasions. And no, I'm not going to link to the last time I wrote because then the true horror of the situation would become very clear INDEED. Without wanting to expand to far in to this area of discussion, suffise it to say, I'm getting a bit PISSED OFF.

Three Greek people are currently talking in melodic and bubbling sounds in front of me. Curious. The upshot of the mail server being down earlier is that I took Eudora off "check for mail" and when the problems were sorted out, had to physically ask it to check every so often. Brilliant. No more being hassled by three e-mails every 2 minutes, instead, when you've finished doing whatever the hell it is your *are* doing, you go and check. Why didn't I think of it before? How long will the discipline remain to have a self-starting system operating?

So I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum on Sunday. It was useful therapy. They have rooms there called the "Plaster Galleries", filled to the point of absurdity with Victorian 100% sized copies of famous marble statuary and religious stoneware. We didn't even know they were there, walked in to a giant room, and it was so full of intensely "created" objects, it was like being blinded but with visual information instead of light. Kai had to leave, he felt too oppressed. At the end of both of the rooms were the whole front doorways of major churches in Italy and Spain, in one room the centrepiece was a vast pulpit, complete with multiple statues, spiral steps… insane. Absolutely insane. In the other room was a roman marble carved circular tower, at least 100 feet high, if not 150 - on the top of which originally stood an enormous statue. Along the length of the tower was carved the story of a great battle. That tower has stood in Italy for nearly 2 millennia.

Most disconcerting in it's arc-ing brilliance, standing in the corner of a room, surrounded by intricately carved pieces that immediately looked like over-stated crap in comparison. Huge. Beautiful. Extraordinary. Michaelangelo's David. Surely the largest known statue honouring homosexuality in all it's body worshipping glory. Seeing it in a room, surrounded basically by clutter, I couldn't take it in. I had to keep looking away, it's was too perfect.

Thursday night I threw caution to the wind and went in to Virgin Megastore. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Well. All right, I did buy some fantastic records, though one of the main reasons I went in (Neil Hannon's new single - sucker for B-sides, me) wasn't actually out yet. Buy I did get the Beck album, "Mutations". S'very, very good indeed. It's like Lambchop only smarter. The songs are timeless. Brilliant.

Signing ist gut. I put the BSL site in to the big 3 searchers, which means that this little baby is about to go public. I'd better take out the Meta tags, I don't really want to make it too easy to find, to be honest. I still don't know why, but… uh, anyway. I'm probably going to do some other site maintenance - because I didn't really think out structuring at the beginning past the whatsit… uh… imagemap, there are little or no Index pages, which is a bit stupid, so I'll be updating those.

I seem to be writing about nothings rather than somethings almost constantly at the moment. Possibly, it's because all of the "somethings" take place in the lives of other people. Well, sure if you want I'll spill the beans on my brother and everyone else in my life who seem to be going through their own variants of private hell right now - but there again, maybe not. The vagaries of your own borders and boundaries come up again. Saw "Midnight In The Garden Of Good and Evil" at the weekend. Yeah, well, it's ok I guess. Mr Spacey, God love 'im, wasn't exactly setting sparks off the screen. Also saw "Devil's Advocate". A right load of crap, saved, if anything, by Keanu Reeves, which is somewhat stunning as statement. Al Pacino mugged like a nork.