The Roquefort Files

I had a good Christmas, I really did. Ash & I found a great new flat in “Hillside”* a few days before Christmas, paranoically calling the letting agent almost as soon as we’d left. We spent the evening before Christmas with the heating at full bore, playing with our respective new toys, then drove over [...]

Despite a few weeks of rapid-fire social engagements providing plenty of grist for the mill, I seem to be suffering from writer’s block. I could tell you at length how to scribe skirting board or build a bath panel from scratch, but throwing down a few hundred words to describe anything other than DIY is [...]

I never used to like AC/DC. It’s Johnny-come-lately Zeppelin lite for people who don’t appreciate the subtlety and invention of Page & Plant’s fusion of blues, folk and rock, or their attempt to give voice to Tolkien’s ersatz but earnest English mythology, I told myself. It goes without saying that I can be rather full [...]

We’ve been to the movies a couple of times this week, for the first time since we moved: first to the very proper Glasgow Film Theatre for some good old fashioned elitist cinema, and then to Cineworld for the more populist stuff. The art deco GFT is a great building, all geometric curves and ’30s [...]

This movie should have been terrible. Michael Bay “directing”; writing so bad the audience was moved to groan in unison at several points, and a plot copied blow by blow from from My First Action-Adventure Book for Boys. Instead, I am pleased to say that it was freakin’ awesome. It starts off with so obvious [...]

On Saturday, we went to see Spider-Man 3. On Sunday, we mostly whined about how crap it was. Ash made banana bread on Sunday evening (in time for an impromptu visit from my parents, who were most appreciative) and that one cake tin of baked goods was better than $258 million-worth of Hollywood’s finest produce. [...]

Coba Fynn played the Liquid Ship on Thursday. We soundchecked and retired upstairs for an hour or so, then filtered back downstairs with Charlie’s massive entourage of medic mates as the hour drew near. Martin and I were hanging around near the door, waiting for the rest of the band to arrive, when I inadvertently [...]

I started writing a couple of quick, throwaway responses to the comments on the last entry but I just couldn’t help myself. Here are the full-blown, ill-thought-out and rambling replies. Pirates of the Caribbean 2: okay, first thing here is the excess surrounding this film. It cost $255 million to make and to my tastes [...]

to go and see Pirates of the Caribbean 2 on Saturday evening. The fine art of the summer blockbuster has recently been reconciled to me, after about a decade of continuous disappointments, by The Da Vinci Code and X-Men 3, and so I was anticipating said nautical antics with enthusiasm. Boy, was I wrong about [...]

i.e, I’ve had an enjoyable but not particularly noteworthy week. Let us enumerate said fun but eminently normal events: Jez hosted a mini dinner party round at his flat. We came, we saw, we ate, and it was good. Jeff said something about sausages that almost reduced me to tears of laughter, but my long-term [...]