I would have had this one last time around, but the official video is uncharitably protected by complicated copyright rules which mean I can’t embed it on the page. But while I was watching The Greatest Christmas Songs Ever last night (purely for research, you understand), I noticed that VH1 were showing this alternative, which is just as nice and freely available. Happy Christmas, Kyoko! Happy Christmas, Sean!
Advent song for December 1
This is a lovely song. The quality of this recording isn’t great, but it makes up for that with bags of charm. If the Christmas fairy were to grant me one wish, I might choose to be living in an age when primetime TV was given over to hour-long live performances by the popular singers of the day.
2009 advent calendar
I have pondered long and hard over whether to give this year’s advent calendar a theme or a twist to distinguish it from last year’s. I wondered about clips from my favourite musicals, or country and western Christmas songs, or just 24 Christmas songs by Ella Fitzgerald. But then I remembered how many favourites I had to leave out last year, and how agonizing it was choosing which ones to ditch, and I realised I would have more fun doing the same thing again than I would having to stick to a theme, or a meme, or any kind of scheme.
I promise not to include Mistletoe and Wine again. Not in the actual, official advent calendar, anyway. It’s still November, right?
Friday funnies
I always think that the very best way of spending a Friday afternoon is giggling at your desk, trying to look as though you’re working. Here’s something to help you achieve that noble aim:
Happy Thanksgiving
I wanted to post a clip of this song, but YouTube only has a dreadful-quality clip from the film or a choice of lots of high school productions, which are sweet but kind of awful. So I’m sacrificing video for the sake of a proper recording, because it’s a good song and you need to be able to hear the words. Turn up the volume and enjoy.
The TfL graffiti challenge
TfL is running a poster campaign as part of its Art on the Underground initiative. It consists of a series of quotes which, according to the website, “provoke thought on life in the city”.
One of these is a quote from Gandhi, which I’ve seen proudly displayed at various points along my commute to work. It reads
“THERE IS MORE TO LIFE THAN INCREASING ITS SPEED”
As I spilled off my overcrowded Jubilee Line train after waiting an unfathomably long time at London Bridge, and squeezed my way on to the Central Line only to spend five minutes sitting in a tunnel, it occured to me that the expression of this particular sentiment is rather brazen on TfL’s part. I am very well-behaved and couldn’t possibly consider breaking the law myself, but I hereby offer £20 cash money to the first person to send me photographic evidence that they have found one of these posters and added the line
“ON THE OTHER HAND, IT WOULDN’T BE A BAD PLACE TO START”
Oh, Mandy
Peter Mandelson was brilliant on the radio this morning. He and Evan Davies got into one of those tedious scraps where everyone is shouting and nobody can be heard – usually a signal that it’s time to turn off the radio and get out of bed, because it’s impossible early morning listening – but somehow Mandelson managed to stop it with a very patient, very measured “Evan, with the greatest love and respect I think I’m going to have to take some time to answer your questions.”
Whereupon Evan shut up for a good ninety seconds. It was lovely, and I wish more of Today’s guests had the guts, or the presence, or both, to try it.
But you don’t want to listen to Today when you don’t have to. Here’s Barry Manilow instead.
Last night’s TV
I spent most of yesterday evening watching TV in bed, which is something I should do more often, because it’s brilliant. I got off to a bad start with Miranda, the new sitcom starring Miranda Hart, when I only realised several minutes in that it wasn’t a sketch show. Once over this initial hump, though, I started to enjoy it. There are some good jokes (my favourite is that Miranda, having been to public school, is too refined to bring herself to say the word “sex” and instead pronounces it “snex”) and, well, it takes a while to start enjoying new sitcoms even when they’re great, so I’ll give it a pass for now. Patricia Hodge was good as Miranda’s mum, although my suggestion, Penelope Wilton, would have been even better (I suggested her via Twitter; I’m not one of the programme-makers).
However. I would really love it if someone somewhere had decided to make a sitcom starring as its lead character a slightly odd-looking, slightly overweight and very funny woman who wasn’t a massive loser. Miranda’s character is 34, single, desperate for love and living with a flatmate, Stevie, who is also all of those things. Actually, it’s the last one which bothers me. The kitchen in which the scenes in the flat are filmed looks like a set from The Young Ones, and the jokes about Stevie bringing men home wear a little thin when both women are of an age when they ought to be able to have sex with whomever they like, whenever they like. I don’t mind if the BBC want to make a sitcom about a single woman’s search for love, but need she also be financially inept and a domestic disaster? Why can’t Miranda be comically bad at dating whilst living by herself, like real middle-class single women in their thirties do?
I also watched I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!, whose title deserves the correct punctuation. Last night, we were treated to the sight of a middle-aged woman lying in a glass coffin wearing nearly nothing while a selection of sea creatures and creepy-crawlies were dropped down a funnel on to her chest. Her response was admirable, and she won a full complement of evening meals for her fellow celebrities and managed to tell Dec off at the same time. Bravo her.
But while I’ve always enjoyed I’m A Celebrity, I do wonder whether the cavalier attitude it displays towards animal life isn’t a bit passé, these days. Is there any reason it’s better to kill and maim witchety grubs and cockroaches for entertainment’s sake than it would be to kill, I don’t know, puppies? It’s compelling viewing all right, but does that justify it, when we’re simultaneously watching programmes about the number of species facing extinction due to human activity?
Which got me to wondering whether it mightn’t be possible to conceive of jungle-based challenges for the celebrities which were somehow designed to have a positive impact on their environment, rather than wiping out large numbers of its insects. I haven’t got quite as far as coming up with examples, but there are many people better qualified than me to think of something. I’m sure the brains behind the show could work with local conservationists to come up with something that was at once hair-raising and sustaining, rather than destructive. I know that sounds a bit ridiculous, but I’d like to think that one day it won’t, if some of us start saying it now.
In the meantime, like everybody else, I will be eagerly watching poor old Katie Price attempt “The Deathly Burrows” this evening.
LOLz
Why has nobody told me about Lamebook? It involves pointing and laughing at real people so at best could be described as a guilty pleasure, but I’ve been giggling helplessly for an hour looking through its archive. I think this is my favourite so far (click to embiggen):
If you need cheering up, which I didn’t, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
New books!
I’ve proudly stuck to my two-year-old resolution not to buy new books, but I make an exception for book club books, because it’s not always possible or practical to get hold of a library or second-hand copy in time.
As a result, today for the first time in, ooh, ages, two shiny new books have arrived on my desk (literally: we have a very obliging postman at work). The first, Global Women: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, looks interesting and thoughtful, but the one sending anticipatory shivers up my spine is Come Closer by Sara Gran, about which I know almost nothing except that it’s scary. I like scary books, and the cover blurb is enough to make me want to feign sickness, go home and read the whole thing in one sitting:
Hypnotic, disturbing… a genuinely scary novel
and
Deeply scary, blurring as it does the bounds between everyday life and the completely unthinkable. Just don’t read it alone.
and
Sara Gran’s swift, stylish narrative quickly leads to a terrifying place where anything at all might happen
and
The sly little novel…slides its icicle shard into the warm, pulpy flesh of your dark desires. Gran’s swift finale is very, very cool.
Doesn’t it sound exciting? Fortunately I am sharing both books with other people, and for reasons of timing must read the first one first, so I can prolong the anticipation for a little longer.
I shan’t start either until after I’ve finished my current book, which is When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro. I’m not sure why I haven’t read it before, since it has everything I like in it, but now I’ve picked it up I’m enjoying it very much. My one small criticism, and that’s too strong a word, is that there is slightly too much of this sort of thing (not a quote, but a composite example from memory):
As I sit here pondering the events of this morning, it occurs to me that my curious conversation with Sarah last night might not have happened at all had it not been for an incident which took place a week ago, at the Palm Hotel.
We then get the story of what happened a week ago at the Palm Hotel, followed by the curious conversation with Sarah and finally the events of this morning. I suppose it’s a trick or gimmick designed to draw the reader in with the promise of secrets yet to be revealed, and it’s quite effective, but it does require the reader to do quite a lot of work (“what day is it now? Is this happening before or after the scene I’ve just read?”) and I think it’s slightly overused here.
Still, it’s a detective story set in inter-war Shanghai, which is so much my bag that when I’ve finished reading it I shall sling it over my shoulder and keep my lunch in it.
Glad All Over 