You're a beautiful woman probably...

Another rant, I'm afraid. I think I've said here before that the Tyne and Wear Metro doesn't provide the service it should, or that it used to. I have quite a list of grumbles: fares going up well above the rate of inflation every year; distorted station announcements with the beginning cut off for months at a time; ticket machines that don't work and no published timetable for the supposed investment in new ones; dirty and overcrowded trains; services that finish just when you need them most; having to wait 20 minutes on more than one occasion with the board saying "Next train 2 minutes" for the whole time and no spoken announcement. From the dismissive replies I've had to a couple of letters about Metro's shortcomings, I get the impression that the Metro management is not really interested in customer service. The thing that gets my goat the most - and this applies to the buses too - is that there are no trains on Christmas Day or New Year's Da...

There's a TV newsreader that arouses mirth or complete bafflement in me whenever I see them. The mirth is because this person's diction is so bad that the news reports often end up unintentionally hilarious. The bafflement is that anyone would employ a person who speaks so badly to read the news! This person has a speech impediment like Jonathan Ross, but that's not all. It's coupled with a tendency to gabble incoherently for a few words at a time, so that the content is reduced to gibberish. Any news story is now impossible to follow because I'm listening for the next bit of 'Stanley Unwin' . Anyway, this person usually pronounces "Yesterday" as "Yisterday", something I've never heard in any regional accent. I choked on my cereal a few months ago when a story about the Nissan Ka somehow came out as "the Nissan fuckaa" . More recently, we had a sentence apparently about the "decisiona moth bollock orus-plant" ...

I often find that Christmas arouses "non-traditional" feelings in me, such as gloom and irritation. Since late adolescence I've found the whole thing a huge chore, and the traditional bonhomie of the time often strikes me as fake. Commercial interests have had their way in getting us all to believe that it starts earlier every year, to the extent that even local authorities now put up street lights in November - several weeks too early in my book. It seems so unfair on the many people for whom Christmas isn't all sweetness and light - I have an aunt and two work colleagues who've all been bereaved in the last few weeks: I'm sure all the exaggerated cheer is going to seem bitterly ironic to them. Recently it struck me that one reason for my finding Christmas such a pain is probably SAD (Seasonally Affective Disorder). I can't remember ever enjoying winter much, and the excitement of Christmas probably fades for everyone from the age of about ten, but the...

Recently I bought a DVD set of the ABC/Thames Television series Mystery and Imagination . Although this dates from the late 1960s, I'm (just) old enough to remember it. I particularly recall being scared out of my wits as a child by a scene in which a long-dead man was discovered preserved in a locked room, with cobwebs over his eyes! I now find that this was a tale called The Tractate Middoth from an M R James story, and that this programme was sadly lost (or thrown out) from the archives years ago. The surviving episodes were released this year on DVD, and watching Dracula (the remaining one I was most keen to see) got me reminiscing on its various versions. Probably the scariest was the original Nosferatu (1922). Full of German Expressionism, this virtually invented a lot of horror film conventions such as long shadows, stark lighting and grotesque variations on the human form. Being a silent film, it's less accessible than one with a soundtrack and doesn't hold up ...

Six months after buying a Blu-ray player (and recently joining the "full HD" TV club) I thought I'd share my opinions with anyone reading this. Plus points: 1) On a full HD TV, most films and programmes look and sound better than they do on DVD, considerably better than they do on Freeview TV, and slightly better than on BBC or ITV HD. 2) Given the right kind of connection and TV, a Blu-ray player will “upscale” your DVDs to 1080p (the highest HDTV standard available in the UK ) better than most DVD players 3) Blu-ray players are now available at a similar price to DVD players (unless you think that £40 is enough to pay for a DVD player) Minus: 1) The choice of Blu-ray discs is still small 2) There is usually more than £3 difference (i.e. what I would consider a reasonable differential) between a Blu-ray disc and the equivalent DVD 3) Blu-ray discs can be slow to load and navigation is often more awkward than on DVD. This is hard to forgive, as disc designers hav...

By all accounts, Microsoft's Windows 7, released on 22nd October, is everything that Windows Vista should have been. Why, then, is Microsoft ripping off customers who bought Vista, and not trying to win their loyalty by offering a reasonably priced upgrade? I forked out a lot of money two years ago for Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. Several times I thought of downgrading to XP because it was so sluggish on a dual core desktop machine with 4GB of RAM. I stuck with it, installing a Service Pack that did not speed things up at all, and the frequent security updates that mainly exist to paper over design flaws. I naively expected Microsoft to be reasonable with its pricing when the upgrade to its new OS appeared. A month before its release, the cheapest I can find an upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate Edition is £169.98 - £10 more than the full version! Just what's going on?

Here are the 15 films I find most memorable. Once again, these are in order by the (approximate) date that I saw them. I should add that I love all of them except number 10. I think this is an awful film that infuriates me in the way it threw out almost everything good in the original novel, and gets universally extravagant praise purely because Stanley Kubrick is treated as a god in the world of film. Other films to which I've taken a strong dislike are Pulp Fiction (we don't need film-makers trying to make violence seem "cool"), The Evil Dead, The Descent and The Straight Story (the last one for completely different reasons to the others). 1. A Taste of Honey 2. The Knack and How to Get it 3. Bedazzled (1967 version) 4. The Wicker Man 5. Cabaret 6. Planet of the Apes (1968 version) 7. Carrie 8. Pardon Us (Laurel and Hardy) 9. The Terminator 10. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick) 11. A Room with a View 12. Pleasantville 13. The Sixth Sense 14. AI - Artificial ...

On ThePickards blog, Jack Pickard suggests we should "name fifteen books that [you] have read that will always stick with [you], and also do the same thing for films that [you've] seen. In each case, we don’t have to be talking about favourites, merely stuff that has stuck with you for some reason." I've put the books into rough chronological order based on when I read them, rather than when they were published. 1. The Silver Chair - C S Lewis 2. A Passage to India - E M Forster 3. Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A Heinlein 4. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole - Sue Townsend 5. The Shining - Stephen King 6. Caution! Inflammable! - Thomas N Scortia 7. The Front Runner - Patricia Nell Warren 8. The Death of Grass - John Christopher 9. Urn Burial - Robert Westall 10. The World According to Garp - John Irving 11. A Smile in his Lifetime - Joseph Hansen 12. The Cider House Rules - John Irving 13. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - J K Rowling 14. Da...

We went to the theatre (National Theatre, Olivier auditorium) during last weekend's trip to London. England People Very Nice by Richard Bean, an episodic play about waves of immigration into the Whitechapel district and their effects on the locals, was entertaining and very well staged. I particularly liked the lighting effects, the projection of different settings and animations onto the basic box set. The performances were also uniformly good. The play itself was a bit more questionable, throwing out mixed messages. In the early stages - about the Irish and the Jews - it was "the poor, abused immigrants" but then the issue was thoroughly confused by the story of the Islamic militants and the Somalis who are given accommodation (according to the play, the tabloids etc.) ahead of the indigenous population. Of course, this is a controversial area. If the tabloid newspapers are to be believed, there is a widespread perception that Britain is a "soft touch" whe...

I've posted a few photos of my recent Spanish holiday up on Flickr - have done Granada and hope to add some of Seville in the next couple of days.

I'm just back from Spain, with that extra self confidence I only get on holiday. It's hard to describe - a feeling that your life can be more than the humdrum existence at home, and that you're a brighter and more attractive person than you normally feel. It didn't work for me in last year's UK holiday, but I think Spain has a special magic. We spent ten days in Andalucia - flying to Málaga and then going to Granada (as advised, by bus) the next day, spending three nights there and then getting the train to exotic Sevilla, finally taking the train back to Málaga to fly home the next day. (Quick quiz: how many nights did we spend in Seville? ;-)) In part, of course, that feeling of well-being and optimism is down to the heat and the sun and, as this week so far has been nice and warm (if not always sunny) on Tyneside, I think that's prolonged the holiday effect. If anyone is interested, I took more than 1,400 photos (!) while I was there, and will be posting a sm...

I was pleased to see in the Saturday papers that Christopher Lee is now Sir Christopher. I've resisted the temptation to go for a tabloid style title for this observation ( Fangs for the Honour, Arise Sir (Count) Christopher)...I'm sure they were all trotted out yesterday when it was first announced, and it would only annoy Sir Christopher anyway if he were to read this. It was nice to see an underrated talent recognised. He is now 87, and probably more successful in terms of international recognition than he's ever been. While he would probably admit that he isn't the world's most versatile performer, he is a great personality with a sense of humour and ability to move an audience ( Curse of Frankenstein , The Mummy etc.). He has also (it has to be said) been the only convincing actor in the role of Dracula. Sadly, Peter Cushing was never honoured in the same way. An even greater actor, capable of projecting a completely cool and callous persona (as in his Fran...

Being a bit of a cynic, I wasn’t really surprised by the recent revelations about MPs’ expenses. I felt a vague sense of sympathy for Speaker Michael Martin when he was “grilled” in the House of Commons the other day, but he really did have to go: it must have been as obvious to him as to others that he had completely failed in his job. The House of Commons should feel collective guilt for their appalling attempt to exempt themselves from the Freedom of Information Act but, in supporting this, the Speaker was going against the principles of democracy and, for this alone, deserved to be ousted. Some MPs seem to feel it’s their birthright to take money from the public purse. I was amazed by the tone of some of the statements from Tory MP Anthony Steen , boasting about his large house and then asking “What right does the public have to interfere with my private life” – completely failing to acknowledge that it was his (and others’) misuse of public money, and their subsequent attempts ...

Comment sent to BBC via their web site this evening: This morning on BREAKFAST there were at least two (I think three) clips in the feature on Morrissey where 4:3 footage was "stretched" to 16:9. I am not a follower of Morrissey, but this picture distortion was immediately obvious to me. For a professional broadcaster, this is simply shoddy. I'm sure your editors and engineers have heard of zooming and cropping - or, of course, they could have used pillarboxing with vertical mattes. The analogy that always comes to my mind is wedding photographs - no-one would consider accepting these if the bride and groom were shown 33% wider than in life, so why does the BBC (that we expect to uphold broadcast standards) do this? This isn't the first time I've seen this on the BBC. I get slightly irritated when I see spelling mistakes in BBC captions too (which seems to get more frequent), but they've probably got more of an excuse for that. The people who put out TV "...

I've wondered what the bird is that's been waking me (in a rather soothing way) at 5am for the past few weeks. Every few seconds the musical notes go and it sings "Wicka - wicka - wicka", like a car alarm. I've read that song thrushes are very keen mimics of repetitive sounds and, if you hear a song that uses repetition, it will be a thrush. Could it be one of the same family that nested in our garden (in the fork of our drainpipe) a few years ago? I'm more inclined to think that it's one of the blackbirds that are ubiquitous in our area. I know they're great mimics as well, and I've spotted one recently on top of one of the tall blocks of flats dotted around our housing estate.

We've heard a lot lately about the desperate financial straits our country is in, and how eager the Government is to save money. All this is very worrying, and it certainly needs to try to ensure we're not deep in debt for a whole generation. There's one area where definite and large savings could be made with only a relatively minor degree of political embarrassment - i.e. by the Government admitting that its plans for a National Identity Card are misconceived and vague, and scrapping the whole project. The aims of the project are very vague , and the Government has been publicly criticised by its own advisors for trying to do too many things. Every citizen who knows anything about information technology knows that all of our recent governments have been technically naive on databases, and have an appalling record in both getting large databases to work (at a cost anywhere near their original budget) and in securing confidential data. We are told that the scheme will pro...

I really wish companies selling technology-based household appliances would adopt the above motto. For some time I've fancied a DAB clock radio for my bedside. I've put off buying one for years because none seemed to have a design that came close to what I need: a clear display and simple alarm operation. Now I've been given one and, sadly, it's even worse than I'd expected. As a radio, it's great - good sound quality and much better reception than I've ever had on FM; as a bedside alarm clock it's almost useless. So what are the problems? First, the display. Why does apparently no-one make a DAB clock radio with an LED display? This is fairly obviously the only kind suitable for bedside clocks. It's easy to see in the dark, even by short-sighted people like me, and it doesn't keep you awake by casting its light across the room. Every DAB clock radio I've seen (including the one I've got) seems to have an LCD display. This needs a backl...

I'm feeling a little bit guilty about splashing out on a Blu-ray player, since I'm still waiting to hear the results of my job evaluation that may mean a cut in salary. Blu-ray discs are still much more expensive than standard DVDs too. However: our two-and-a-half year old Cambridge Audio DVD89 has been playing up, showing shadows on light parts of the picture and what looks like randomly increased contrast (the dark parts of the picture suddenly look too black). I've also been trying to use it as a CD player and, despite favourable reviews of its audio quality, have found it cuts off the first couple of seconds of each track on certain CDs. Obviously that's enough to ruin the "musical experience". I first had the idea of replacing the player when I saw that there were Blu-ray players from Sony and Panasonic that got glowing reviews - at under £200. Apart from the fact that I'm now sceptical in general of reviews in hi-fi magazines , at least they weren...

We went to see Cabaret at the Sunderland Empire last night. This touring production (directed by Rufus Norris, featuring Wayne Sleep as the EmCee and Samantha Barks as Sally) really just served to show how brilliant the film was. On the plus side, the stage show generally looked excellent, with appropriately tacky sets for the Kitkat Club and more subdued colours and lighting for the boarding house. Samantha Barks as Sally shows great promise and gave an impressive performance in the musical's better songs. Unfortunately, attention to detail was sadly lacking. Anyone who knows a word or two of German can tell you that their translation of "Miss" is not pronounced "Fraw-line", and yet here, we had at least three supposedly German natives saying it that way. While that would be understandable in an amateur production, in the professional theatre it just isn't good enough. The problems didn't end there. The whole thing didn't seem to "gel":...

New Year's Day can be pretty grim - one way of lightening things is to go out for a walk (which I'll be doing soon); another is to listen to some good music (my plan for later on). Catching the famous theme from Brief encounter on Classic FM one Sunday morning reminded me of how wonderful I think Rachmaninov's Piano Concertos are - and there are more reasons than that film why Number 2 is his most popular. Later on, listening to Radio 4's Desert island discs (and exercising my prejudices, thinking that some of the guests' musical choices are unbelievably poor) made me think of my own list of favourite records. Try it yourself - if you have any love of music at all, it's quite hard to get it down to eight! Debussy's La mer (strangely enough, not all about his mother...). Debussy was a pioneer of a whole new musical sound, dubbed "impressionism", and this is probably my favourite example. Finzi's Severn Rhapsody . An encapsulation of everyth...