Racing Stripes

Having spent years with this poster on the wall of my classroom, I thought this film was a cartoon:


When it turned out to instead feature live-action talking animals, well, I was singularly surprised!

And I do mean 'singularly' - for this was the only surprise in the whole film.

In fact, this tale of a zebra who wants to be a racehorse is so by-the-numbers that it's hard to find any good reason for being told this story. Express that the other way around, and Racing Stripes satisfies all of expectations of it, but has almost nothing to offer of its own.

There are some bodily-function jokes which don't sit well with the cute factor, and the notion that Stripes has grown up never seeing his own reflection is plain ridiculous, but really so what. If forced to choose between either a good or a bad opinion of this, there's really no benefit to me in choosing the latter.

The makers of Racing Stripes may have played the entire thing safe, but who doesn't like to see animals helping each other out?

Well then.

(available here)

Rock & Chips

If there's one thing which guaranteed that TV miniseries Rock & Chips could do no wrong, it was its pedigree.

Author John Sullivan had created and written the entire Only Fools And Horses universe from the ground up, so when it came to constructing a prequel, he had every authority.

Sure there's now swearing, no laugh-track, and a huge cast of characters to keep track of, but if you believed that the Trotter boys were real, then fitting a new series of events into their already finely-woven history was always going to be both a challenge, and a pleasure.

The locations are familiar. The cast all bring both something old and something new to their parts. And Nicholas Lyndhurst as Freddy doesn't even remotely remind me of Rodney.

This probably doesn't stand up well if you haven't seen the earlier series that it prequels, but watched in retrospect it's simply special. All the more so that there are only three episodes of it, and that the author clearly had further places for it to go before his sad death robbed him of sharing them with us.

Thanks so much John Sullivan. For the laughter, the friends you gave us, and for being so true to your word.

Doctor Who: The God Complex

This is one of those stories that I found myself gritting my teeth through needlessly.

Because it kept threatening to go somewhere badly.

It's written by the guy who turned in last season's awful Vampires Of Venice. It's about faith, a subject rarely depicted with much understanding on television. It also threatens to descend into tackling euthanasia. It has a pretentious title.

These are good conversations to be having in Doctor Who, but not without delving under the surface, and even then you have to know your subject. Faith is not merely a singular belief, but a whole way of living. For example, it takes faith to believe in what your five senses tell you. Perhaps a better word might have been hope.

It's set in a building which contains a person's fears, much like Night Terrors two weeks back, but no-one makes the connection.

The Doctor enters the room which contains his worst fear, but we don't get to see it.

The rooms can move, although this turns out to be irrelevant.

Like I said, it's almost going somewhere.

There are guest-characters again, but most of them are too shallow to make us feel afraid for them. Gibbis is comic relief, while Lucy and Joe are only really seen in their possessed form.

Howie is the Doctor Who universe's latest maladjusted straw nerd, and accordingly suffers the usual ridicule. When Rory - a fictional character who routinely travels through time and space - belittles him for believing in a conspiracy theory, he comes across as, well, somewhat tiny-minded. This is Doctor Who - just how many other episodes are there about a worldwide conspiracy being true?

Aside from the regular cast, that only really leaves Rita, who the Doctor keeps on saying is very intelligent, until she commits suicide. There's a real sense of loss in the following scene.

Well, there's still the monster. He/it requires praise to survive, and achieves this by scaring its victims until they find some faith within themselves to withstand it. That's a great revelation. The idea that the monster then replaces that faith by possessing them and then consuming their minds is muddled, contradictory and contrived, but then this is a series about a body-changing alien travelling the universe in a Police Box.

Accepting that the monster seemed to be feeding upon itself as much as its victims, everything here did hold together pretty well for me. In fact I'd even say the whole thing was pretty well plotted.

The cast are not stupidly praising a monster, but being controlled to do so. (yet more zombies) Leaving the eleventh Doctor's worst fear to the viewer's imagination gets by, albeit by chickening out of identifying it. (I think it was River, but a waiting Valeyard would have been awesome) And the direction is absolutely great.

The Doctor's having to break Amy's faith in him is a good development, but really needed to feature him outright betraying her, instead of merely lying so badly.

The final scene suddenly features the Doctor dropping Amy and Rory back home. This isn't that well motivated by the preceding events, and features no reference by anyone to the Doctor's impending death. Which is a bit of a shame after all the episodes this series that have closed by referencing this plot point without needing to. You can read a sub-text in here, but you can equally not. Well, that'd be why it's called a sub-text. I guess I wanted some text too.

That the Doctor has given up travelling with a companion for the same reason before, only to later decide that he was wrong, goes without saying. Literally.

It all felt a bit odd. I suppose that the final two episodes of this series will be written by Steven Moffat and revolve around that storyline. Perhaps my sense of unease is a good thing.

After all, that's how the Doctor must feel.

Torchwood: Miracle Day

"Whichever way you look at it, this situation can only get worse."

I found the first two-thirds of this 10-part epic to be utterly compelling.

One day, people stop dying. They just do. No-one knows why.

The first six episodes then explore the ramifications of this concept in ever more extreme detail. What is death? If still alive, then can a dismembered skeleton still move? Does aging continue? Should hospitals now prioritise treating the healthiest patients first? What consequences will the perpetual taking of antibiotics have? What deterrent can replace the death sentence? How can a war be fought? What becomes of artificially aborted fetuses? Whoops, sorry, my mistake, they back off from that last one.

Each episode is saturated with these worldwide developments, and as the team struggle to find some sort of a pattern to explain events, the stakes just keep on escalating.

That's the great thing about a story with no end in sight yet - week after week our heroes can go up against ever increasing odds. As each episode finished too early for me, I found I was so up for the next one.

Truly, the strength of this series was in the details. How tragic that it's bigger picture was just not up to this.

In recent years, the series' head writer has recycled the same plot several times over. It's usually about a worldwide plague of zombies, resulting in a dystopia through which the main characters are pursued by the government. It ends with one of the main characters operating a machine that handily undoes everything for them, having to kill a relative in the process, and nobody on the planet remembering any of it next series.

Thus, in episode one, as soon as Gwen's father is saved from a heart attack, it's pretty much set in stone how the next nine weeks of zombies are going to play out.

And it's set extensively around hospitals. Of course it is. It's Torchwood.

By episode nine even Rex knows what I'm talking about.

Rex: "I ran the short story through the pattern recognition software identifying key points of similarity of prose styles."

Still, I found those first six weeks - mostly - enthralling. As I say, the range of the whole world's diverse reactions to the situation was breathtaking.

From episode seven however the story shifts its focus onto Jack - an immortal made mortal by Miracle Day - and with it the tale loses its anchor in the world. Padding follows, with Jack and Gwen spending an entire episode being blackmailed into meeting shadowy operatives who then paradoxically turn out to be friendly. An old man who's spent all his years searching for the key to eternal life, nonsensically builds a machine to protect himself from it. When Jack gets shot, they immediately drive him away from the device that can save him. The story is just not holding together any more.

I had been expecting the final episode to open with a character talking to a video camera about how the world had ended. That this didn't happen surprised me, partly because it's another staple of the story, but mostly because I had accidentally caught a clip of it on the start of the NEXT WEEK trailer at the end of episode 4.

In the final episode, the machine that handily reverses everything turns out to be a part of planet Earth. No explanation is offered for this. Jack's ability to heal himself of any injury turns out to have been the key to the world's immortality, although the population have not been healing like him, just living on. No explanation is offered for this either. And as for how Jack lost his immortality in the first place? Guess.

So much for Everything Changes's retcon of how he had first gained his immortality in The Parting Of The Ways.

The great news though is that the machine itself lives on to be dug out and used again by someone else next week.

Miracle Day is awesome in its execution, has a fantastic cast, and a strong concept driving it, but this doesn't appear to have been inspired by the mystery's solution. There's no way you're telling me that this story's inspiration was the question of what if there were a gigantic machine running through the earth that controlled mankind's biology.

The Americanisation of Torchwood has been very good news for the show, and handled extremely well. This series is loyal to the preceeding three, introduces its new characters well, and rather than simply shifting the action to the US, camoflages it by going global. Torchwood has always wanted to be as good as an American SF show, apparently to the point of selling its soul to achieve this, finally. Now why couldn't you have done that at the start of the first series?

As with the preceding TV season, I'm not expecting a new plot any time soon, but this ride is well worth it, most of the time.

Doctor Who: The Girl Who Waited

It doesn't happen very often, but this is one of those rare Doctor Who stories to feature only the crew of the TARDIS.

Good thing too. I don't usually care much about a character who I've never heard of before. This story on the other hand is extremely heavy-going stuff, because I've been following the lives of the Doctor, Amy and Rory for a year and a half now.

Tom MacRae's script meets one of the most basic time-travel paradoxes head-on - that of causality vs. the protagonists' free will - and comes down firmly in favour of the latter.

Amy: "In my past I saw my future self refuse to help you. I'm now changing that future and agreeing. Every law of time says that shouldn't be possible."

Doctor: "Yees, except sometimes knowing your own future is what enables you to change it, especially if you're bloody-minded, contradictory and completely unpredictable."

Rory: "So basically if you're Amy then."

I liked all of this - the alien world, the characters, the dilemma, the subjugation of the laws of time by the Apalapucians, and of course the Doctor's subsequent wilful breaking of them. Well, up until the story's closing moments when the script chickens out, anyway.

Of course, we've known all along that the younger Amy will survive at the end - it's a weekly TV show. For all the series' bravado, Doctor Who just isn't brave enough to break its own format like that. Farscape happily took on two alternate Creightons for half a series, but obviously this show just isn't in Farscape's league.

But then, I guess that's a good thing. Having two Amys on the regular cast of a Steven Moffat-led series would probably have led to lots of smut about threesomes, not that it needed to, so perhaps we're better off maintaining the status quo after all.

Darn it.

Clash Of The Titans (1981)

In an era when more and more old movies are being re-released in 3D, is it too much to hope that the original 1981 version of Clash Of The Titans might be next?

While I admit the story made little sense to me, the amount of trouble gone to to lay image over image over image is a thing to behold, and in 3D would surely dazzle even more so. When so many perspectives hit your eyes in perfect focus in the 2D version, you already feel as though you're watching this through a Viewmaster anyway.

So many of these shamelessly stop-motion monsters, despite being the definition of unconvincing, are also enthrallingly-crafted. They are this film's unique beauty. If you've seen Mary Poppins and had no problem with the meshing of cartoons with live-action there, then you cannot possibly criticise this.

So come on Hollywood, muck about with the depth on all these stone snakes and giant velociraptors too. Hey - it's not that long ago that you were proudly gushing on the posters how you thought this film looked 'spectacular'.

Skip the Channel 5 logo though. That already stands out way too much.

(available here)

Doctor Who: Night Terrors

They say your fears can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. In 8-year-old George's case, this is literally true.

He's scared of tons of things. So every night his parents tell him to metaphorically lock his fears in the cupboard. Well, George does that literal thing with them.

By the time the Doctor and friends have shown up, George's fears have taken on a life of their own, and have begun to suck in and terrorise the other tenants of his surrounding housing block.

As in The Eleventh Hour, Matt Smith is an enchantment to watch as he befriends a young kid before completely failing to help them.

Night Terrors wrings out its horror content with the patience of a full-length movie. Once Amy gets turned into a doll though, the fear is broken by the safety of waiting for her inevitable reversal just before the end. It would have been scarier if she had remained human.

As is often the way, the story's resolution doesn't really deliver on its earlier wonder. Just how can all this possibly be happening? The answer is simply that there's an alien who can do it. Both this explanation and the perception filter are such broad plot-devices that they can pretty well solve any mystery. It's a shame when such a well-executed episode as this gets most of the way through and then suddenly gives up.

Still, if you can accept these elements' reappearance along with yet more zombies, then this is a great episode to watch on Halloween.

Herschel's Vegas Wedding

Herschel looked at me very seriously, and took a long drag on his Superman™ candy stick.

"There comes a time in an old klown's life when he wants to stop rifling through the pack for an ace, and just find the other joker."

Couched somewhere in that metaphor, Herschel was telling me that he had at last found that special 54th card in his life, that he and she were shortly to be wed, and would I do him the honour of being his best sidekick? (normal people call this role the 'best man')

Well of course I said I'd be honored. As well as the day out, the free lunch, and the excuse not to take pictures all day (the exclusive rights had been sold to Hey-Hey Magazine), the whole deal included a free weekend trip to Vegas! Yes, VEGAS!

Herschel: "Everyone! We're all goin' tah VEGAS!!!!!"


Fig. 1: Las Vegas, which we never got to. Instead this photo was sourced from wikipedia.

Come the day of travel (the day before the ceremony), the car Herschel had sent to pick me up seemed to be taking quite a while to get to Heathrow Airport. Things were making less and less sense. Then we passed a HOLLYWOOD-esque sign on a hill that didn't say HOLLYWOOD, or even WELLYWOOD. What the giant white letters actually spelt out was...


Fig. 1: Basildon. Source: Facebook.

Yes, Basildon.

Finally the vehicle stopped, and as I climbed out of the car, I was greeted by Herschel and his intended with the excited declaration "Hey-hey - welcome to Bas Vegas!!"

Bas Vegas. Two parades of shops and a Travelodge. It was even smaller than New Zealand's Roto-Vegas. I didn't say it to the happy couple, but I now admit that I was inwardly thinking "Eurgh".

With a CBD this small, keeping the stag night separate from the hen night looked to be a challenge. I had earlier protested that for about a million practical reasons it was advisable to hold the stag a week or so earlier rather than just the night before, but Herschel insisted that such close-shave timing was "a dependable rule of komedy". I don't know, it was almost as though he wanted to wake up the next day handcuffed to a hangover in Cuba or somewhere.

Anyway, not to let my friend down, I dutifully rounded up the other blokes staying overnight at the Travelodge for tomorrow's big day. We were: the Mexican Bee, Bicentennial Man, the Street Cleaner (you may remember him from such underground superhero movies as The Street Cleaner), Zippy, George and Comic Book Nick.

I'd never met Nick before, although we had been aware of each other's work in the comicbook field for a couple of decades, to the point where he had once drawn me into a strip. Anyway, it was like meeting an old friend.

The Mexican Bee appeared to be a fan of the 1960s TV series The Prisoner and would continually quote the jury's chant from the last episode Fall Out of "I! I! I!" Or maybe he was just a highly agreeable Scot…

Iron Man, Ant Man, Elmo and the eleventh Doctor never made it. Slackers.

Anyway, we found a Pizza Express on the edge of the desert (the A1235), and several hours of male merriment later all retired back to our rooms at the Travelodge. Indicating Herschel's kphone (in fact just a yellow oversized rubber iphone), I said that he could call me at any time of the night if he wanted to talk or anything. I don't know what goes through a klown's head on a night like that.

I know this goes without saying, but the following morning, Herschel was nowhere to be found.

There was no answer from his room, and when the cleaners showed up we found it empty. I tried calling his phone, and it duly started ringing from on top of the room's DVD player. Either he had mistaken it for the remote control again, or he had deliberately left it behind.

Oh dear.

Kairologically, we were two hours away from the ceremony. The Travelodge's packed breakfasts suddenly came in very handy as I had to organise the lads from last night into search parties to head out to every part of Bas Vegas, barring wherever the girls were, to look for him. None of those many websites that I'd read on "How To Be Great A Best Man To A Clown" had prepared me for this duty.

There was a completely unexpected moment when, as I was exiting the lobby, Herschel's phone rang in my backpack, and it turned out to be the bride calling him. This I navigated by making a wheezing groaning sound, and generally pretending to be Herschel with laryngitis. I thought I was doing quite well, right up until the moment when I discovered that she had been watching me across the car park the entire time.

As she marched indignantly up the curb towards me, I put the disconnected kphone back in my bag and I remember thinking "Ah well, I'd better make a clean break, admit the truth and apologise."

In the event she cut my confession short by telling me that she had just had poor Herschel on the phone, he had laryngitis, and just where did I think I was going, when I was supposed to be helping him to prepare for the ceremony in under two hours?

Before I could answer, my own phone started to ring, so I made up a lie about being Budgie-Man and headed back towards the front of the Travelodge to answer it. Could this be Herschel? No. The search parties were starting to report in.

Bicentennial Man was the first, yet was hard to coax a straight answer out of. He had scoured Bas Vegas' shop(s), from whence he clearly had some information to impart, but insisted upon improvising around it and dropping into famous comedy voices. I think he started out doing Igor from Count Duckula before moving on to (I think) the genie from the Alladin movies. Somewhere around about the point when he got onto doing Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in The Road To Bas Vegas I gleaned that Herschel was not in any of Bas Vegas' several shops.

Then came the very loud call from the Street Cleaner, who it turned out was actually standing masterfully on top of the Travelodge behind me. No visual contact from up there. Really, he's so loud, I don't know why he bothers with the phone. Still, he won't be bothering with it any more since at the end of his call he managed to drop it. Now he has no powers, no weapons, and no phone.

The Mexican Bee had been checking out the bars, from where he initially seemed to have some good news for me. The conversation went:

Me: "Have you found Herschel?"

Bee: "¡Aye-aye-aye!"

Me: "Really? You've found him?"

Bee: "¡Aye aye aye!"

Me: "That's great! How is he? He's not planning to call the whole thing off or anything is he?"

Bee: "¡Aye aye aye!"

It turned out he was trying to select a fish from the tank for breakfast, and counting how many eyes each them had.

Zippy and George were over at MFI purchasing a desk with a covered front so that they could get around more easily, but still hadn't actually seen Herschel himself.

And finally, Comic Book Nick was at the arcade. "Alas, sensors indicate negative lifesigns of the Bozo derivative. Worse, I have had the misfortune to make visual contact with a 'Defective Comics Pinball Madness' game, which features a generic composite backglass depicting Paul the aardvark meeting Rik. Since this event is patently impossible, even within the alternate history of the issue #100 back-up strip The Five Defectors, I must conclude that this is a lazy attempt to reboot the classic franchise. Worst. Backglass. Ever."

So it was all up to me. As indeed I should have realised from the start that it had to be. I was his best friend, and now I had to prove it by out-psyching him and figuring out just where in the sprawling metropolis that was Bas Vegas' entertainment district he would have gone. And all the time the clock was still ticking.

I looked around me. Shops. Bars. Cinema. Travelodge. Car park. Whoa - back up there, cinema???

My initial rush of hope was crushed as I entered and realised that the film playing was Johnny English Reborn. Grimly I recalled how, years ago now, Herschel, Harrison and I had all gone to see the original movie in this series, only to come out sobbing at its crushing lack of humour. Throughout the film, Rowan Atkinson had been repeatedly presented with two alternatives, of which he would reliably select the wrong one. But then he'd do it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. (I could go on) Literally, in the entire film there is only the one joke. Afterwards Herschel had demanded his money back. He had been deadly serious, yet the angrier he had become, the more the assistant had convulsed with hysterics. (he gets that a lot)

So, was it just possible that Herschel had got up early and come to see its less-than-promising sequel, and was even now sitting through 90 more agonising minutes of the same? Sadly, there was only one way to find out.

So I said to the sales clerk, "Excuse me, have you seen a klown entering this morning?"

To which he memorably replied, "What sort of klown?"

Dang, so now I had to buy a ticket myself. Using my last note. To a Johnny English sequel. I felt dirty.

So I showed him a picture of the queen and he gave me a comp. (sucker)

Then I got to the escalator and saw the sign "Dogs must be carried on the escalator". Took me half an hour to find one.

Then I got into the theatre, and was relieved to realise that my twenty pounds had been well invested.

Dotted around the seats were about five people with the appearance of having just got off of a long-haul flight (a vaguely Asian-looking guy at the back, for example). However in the middle, unmistakably silhouetted against the bottom of the screen, was Herschel's distinctive wild-haired outline, albeit drooping. Dear God, what had Rowan Atkinson done to him?

As the hapless MI7 agent proceeded to wink at the wrong Chinese man in spectacles, I slunk quietly up to Herschel and sat down. I've never seen him looking in a worse condition. Coughing, spluttering, barely able to put any words together into a sentence. Tears had streamed down his face smearing his klown make-up, and his hair had gone as white as Einstein's. Umpteen plastic cups surrounded him, and down his front he had probably scalded himself when spilling that great big stain of… coffee?

I looked again at him, and realised for the first time that he was shaking. With a massive effort, and hyperventilating, he hissed words at me in an order that managed to make sense.

"This… film… is…. GOLD!"

Now I realised. He wasn't crying, he was laughing. With dumbfounded horror, I pieced together what had happened.

Last night Herschel had snuck out of the Travelodge and spent the entire night camped in here, watching the same movie over and over again, until it had broken him. In addition, with the bars shut, he'd OD'd on machine coffee, and was now more hyper than Yakko Warner commentating a horse race. The mixture of caffeine and having to locate humour in a film where there was probably little to be found had, to him, been lethal, and transformed him into this insanely happy wreck.

There was no way he could get married in this gibbering unrecognisable state of mind, which wasn't something many couples said in Bas Vegas. There was only one thing to do.

I had to get him back to normal. I had to make him miserable again. It was my duty as his friend.

Dragging him back to the Travelodge via the DVD shop, I sat him down, starved him of coffee, and put on the film's straight to DVD spin-off Johnny English Meets Monsieur Hulot. Starring Dermot O'Leary as Johnny English and Alexa Chung as Monsieur Hulot, the timing was deadly. Having been through such a massive overnight high, the caffeine-free Herschel was now beginning to hit the corresponding low. The downhill gradient in his spirit was swift.

"This O'Leary clown is a genius! Just look at the way absolutely NOTHING is happening around him!! Hyuh-hyuh-hyuh-hyehh-hyehh-hyehhh, hyuh-hyuh-hyuh!!!"

"Now see, putzette here is funny because she kind of looks like Hulot from the back. I can see where they were going with that, if only they hadn't invested so much of it in her waiting in the lift."

"Waaaitaminute, both Hulots finally reach this end of the corridor.... and Cloneboy tries to dewig the wrong one AGAIN? [screams at spinning ceiling] EUERGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!"

I poured Herschel drink after drink from the mini-bar. He kept trying to stand to pace up and down, but I wouldn't let him, enticing him back to the floor with handfuls of chocolate cigarettes. Eventually, while the masked Dr Hulot was at length trying to amputate the wrong one of English's eyes for dissection (it was the director's cut with extended bleakness), this deadly cocktail finally sent Herschel to sleep. At this point I secretly dyed his hair green again and gave him a klown makeover. He never suspected a thing.

With the cab due to arrive in a matter of minutes, I half-woke him up, got him to stagger downstairs in the lift, and successfully hurried him past the lobby drinks machine, despite his protests for "juss one more esspressso".

The cab picked us up with no hitch at all, got us to the church on time, I thrust $1,000 of Herschel's Monopoly money into the happy Indian driver's hands, and before you knew it we were sitting at the front of the church realising that neither one of us had the faintest idea what to do next.

I glanced at the pews behind, which now contained the smiling faces of the Mexican Bee, Bicentennial Man, Zippy, George and Comic Book Nick, doing his best not to look too unimpressed. (someone really should have gone back to help the Street Cleaner get down) Even my mum was there.

Now Herschel was starting to get a few ideas about maybe intentionally leaving, ostensibly because he was about to stand up in front of so many people without having rehearsed his script.

But… was that his real concern, or was it just an excuse masking a deeper apprehension? Well, I wasn't going to push him one way or the other. He was about to make one of the biggest decisions of his life. He had to make this call alone, in whatever way he saw fit, and whatever his choice, I had to be there for him.

With his intended heading down the aisle to all the organ music and everything, we retrieved his kphone from my rucksack and hastily used it to access the church's wi-fi and scroll through wedding vows. He was muttering things like "'In Sickness And In Health'?? Oh suuure, why not just give me a tenth season of Scrubs to perform?"

Looking for some legal wedding vows that included jokes, Herschel broadened his search string to 'legal apps for klowns'. As with all things legal, it was a minefield. His oversized index finger was swiping through imortgage, ilease, icopyright and even iheartilyendorse, but it was all just too late.

The reverend - an aging sideburned crooner in shades from Memphis - motioned us to stand and come up to the front. We did exactly as asked, despite the padre's wearing stripey boxer shorts instead of trousers. (the vicar had obviously been battling his own farce that morning, which we chose to respect)

Everyone was welcomed, the first hymn was sung (somewhat enthusiastically by the minister), and after literally a word about mercy, the vows began. But Herschel was still preoccupied with punching away at his phone to find an app that allowed him to klown-up his promises. Those literacy classes were really paying off.

Finally the crunch came, as the vicar slowly read out the whole of the question to him. Yes, THE question.

"Say there, Herschel Shmoikel Pinchas Yerucham Krustofski," [that bought us a few more seconds] "whah, will you promise tah love, cherish and protect her, whether in good fortune or in adversity, and tah seek with her a laaf hallowed by thuh faith of Israel boy?"

Herschel gaped at his phone, and at the top of his voice exploded:

"iwill??!??"

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Herschel Krustofski got married.


"Vivaaaaaaaaa, Bas Vegas,
Vivaaaaaaaaa, Bas Vegas,
Vivaaaaaaaaa,
Vivaaaaaaaaa,
Bas Vegaaaaaaaaaas!!!"

[finish, cheering]

"Thank-yuh, thank-yuh ver' much."

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

I often wash my hair in the bath, which involves closing my eyes, leaning forwards and submerging my head under the water.

Since I obviously do this alone, beforehand I take the plug out, just in case I unexpectedly pass out or something. In such an unlikely event, the water should drain completely from the bath. It's only sensible.

Sometimes, after sitting up and breathing again, I wonder whether I've actually sat up, or have merely passed out underwater and dreamt that I have sat up.

How do you tell whether or not you are in a dream? For me, dreams often involve something surreal happening, which I will think is perfectly normal. So I have to second guess myself, and objectively challenge a few aspects of the very ordinary bathroom around me. Is the shampoo bottle singing? If it is, can I recall it ever having done this before?

This morning I surfaced my head as usual and noticed that the bath water was still running out of the tap and into the bath. The bath had become overfull, and the excess water was now piling-up higher than the edge of the bath. The surfeit mass of wobbly water had a hard wall to it, so none of it had spilt over yet.

Clearly this was impossible. Clearly I was dreaming. Clearly I had to wake up very very quickly indeed.

I tried to sit up again. Well, I thought I was already sitting up so it was difficult to straighten up further. I tried to wake up. I couldn't.

I figured the water in real life would be just above my head, so I tried to perceive that, and after partial success began to focus on lifting myself up above the water level again.

Anyway, almost immediately, I did wake up. In my bed. It actually had been a dream.

The whole thing had been a dream.

Hence the phrase, to die bathing.

Acts 29

Since finishing reading the Bible, I've been slowly trying to also read the apocrypha, but then Acts chapter 29 comes along and makes a mockery of the whole idea.

In fairness, there don't seem to be many people who consider it to be genuine, and having just read it myself, I have to unhesitatingly agree.

After all the build-up to Paul's long drawn-out journey under guard to await trial in Rome, this next chapter begins with him simply leaving. No miraculous angel-assisted escape, no appealing to Caesar, not even any preaching of the gospel there, he just leaves. No, that doesn't run on at all.

Heck, take a read of verse one for yourself…

"And Paul, full of the blessings of Christ, and abounding in the spirit, departed out of Rome, determining to go into Spain, for he had a long time proposed to journey thitherward, and was minded also to go from thence to Britain."

- Acts 29:1

Yes, then he goes to Britain, specifically to Sandwich and Ludgate Hill. If that sounds parodic to you, and jokes about oysters and travelcards are already occurring to you, then remember that those are the modern translation names for those stops, I mean places.

Along the way, everyone is nice to him, no-one disagrees with him, and even God shows up to helpfully wrap-up what ultimately became of Pontius Pilate. There's also a miracle in verse 21 in which an earthquake reforms the waters of the lake…

"like unto the Son of Man hanging in an agony upon the Cross."

That doesn't sound like a Biblical miracle at all. With respect, that sounds more like catholicism.

I'm all for fan-fiction, but if the style is going to change so drastically, then there needs to be some acknowledgement and hopefully explanation for this. There are enough people who divorce the opening chapters of Genesis from the rest of it on these grounds as it is.

Acts chapter 29? I'm tempted to have a go at writing it myself, if only to bridge into this as some sort of additional page by Marvel UK.

Doctor Who: The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People

Amy: "Okay, well I'm glad you solved the problem of confusing."

I guess the saddest comment regarding a story about doppelgängers must ironically be how many times it's been done before.

Consequently I'm afraid that I didn't find very much about this two-parter to hook my interest. Yes, it's even got two episodes. Eurghh.

I suppose a story grounded in a theme so familiar, really needed to do the journey in a new way. Fairly early on I gave up trying to figure out which originals would turn out to be copies, and which copies originals, because I knew what a lottery it was.

The cliffhanger to episode one is a good example. From the earlier moment when the Doctor awoke from unconsciousness, the revelation that he had a clone running around, and indeed might himself be the clone, was a foregone conclusion. Likewise, when they're distinguished for us by the different shoes that they're wearing, there's again only one possible plot-twist there. Or would the double-twist be that 'our' Doctor actually was the original? Well, if it can't affect which one of them survives at the end, then does it really matter?

Racquel Cassidy is excellent as Foreman Miranda Cleaves.

Giving Amy's husband Rory someone who looks like a love-interest… uh, is this a rewrite?

I liked the ramifications of a world where clones are an underclass, as well as seeing characters attempting to outwit themselves.

Episode two's notion of the clone Doctor struggling to cope with his earlier incarnations seemed like an irrelevant detour, and didn't work for me for three reasons:

1. Most of his earlier bodies are dead. (good job they didn't reassert and promptly collapse then)

2. Quoting (or misquoting) famous lines isn't what any of those well-loved characters would do or say.

3. In the event, none of them actually did come back. For just a moment there I was hoping for an episode-long showdown between the eleventh and fourth Doctors, but no. Ach, why dangle that carrot and then give us nothing?

The story's also weighed-down by the old curse-of-the-character-who's-never-been-in-it-before-and-has-a-kid millstone. When the kid is rung up, he is just left hanging on the line.

At the end, there is just no way that the Doctor and Cleaves' gängers have to stay behind to hold that static door shut to give the TARDIS time to dematerialise. The Doctor and Cleaves' gangers take two and half minutes to say goodbye. During this the gänger-monster leaves two pauses of 42 seconds between attempts at hitting the door, followed by another one of 36. By contrast, the TARDIS' actual dematerialisation takes 10 seconds. Absolutely terrible.

The following throwaway explanation in the TARDIS of why everything is happy endings is apathetic too.

Doctor: "The energy from the TARDIS will stabilise the gängers for good - they're people now."

Cleaves: "And what happens to me? I still have this." [her blood clot]

Doctor: "Ah! That's not a problem - I have something for that!"

Sheesh, why had we all just bothered?

Capping it off is how the Doctor, after all his moralising about the gängers' right to life, proceeds to immediately kill Amy's one. This was the worst script editing I've seen in a long time, which in this show is sadly saying something.

A much better ending would have seen Amy's gänger compelled to remain behind to continue the fight for gängers' rights. After her earlier dismissal of the Doctor's supposed gänger, there would have been a painful sense of justice there, not to mention the angst of a goodbye for all three regulars. Instead the Doctor murders her. I guess he may have to change his name from 'Doctor' after all. (so much for his line above about the energy of the TARDIS stabilising gängers for good)

It is entirely possible to turn your brain off and enjoy this story, but for me the appeal of watching Doctor Who has always been turning one's brain on.

For a story about sub-standard copies of people to itself turn out to be a sub-standard copy of other stories was I'm afraid not an entirely unexpected twist.

Hopefully it's not a mistake that will be repeated.

And after all that - most terrifying cliffhanger ending ever.

SPUC Conference 2011

As usual for the middle of September, I've just spent the weekend away with my mum, attending this year's annual conference of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children.

Lots of talks combined with plenty of scribbling have seen me return home with a mass of quotations and notes from what I heard.

Here are a few of them: (I hope I've attributed them accurately)

The Psychological Pain Of Abortion workshop:

"People who have mental health issues are encouraged to have abortions, although the evidence says that abortions increase mental health issues."

Maternal Mortality and Abortion in Developing Countries: The Need For A Pro-Life Response - Fiorella Nash, Political Researcher, SPUC:

"There are no instances in which a mother's life can only be saved by terminating her unborn child."

"Countries where abortion is illegal, such as Ireland and Malta, have the lowest maternal mortality rates."

"The population density of Europe is 134 people per square mile.
The population density of Britain is 634 people per square mile.
The population density of Africa is 66 people per square mile.
Children do not equal poverty.
The real reason for poverty is corrupt rulers, not a lack of birth control."

"The phrase 'last resort' is often used to justify a course of action which cannot be justified."

Launch of New SPUC Schools Talk - Michael Hill, Vice Chairman, SPUC and Eileen Brydon, Education Officer, SPUC:

"Surgical abortion is… [in England and Wales] more common than appendix or tonsil removal."

"Babies born before 24 weeks often survive."

"Babies are often killed before induced stillbirth to prevent their crying."

"Abortion didn't end my pain, it began it."

"We are not wired to abort our children."

"Children and young people are naturally pro-life."

Workshop: Euthanasia / Assisted Suicide - What Is Our Response? :

"'Assisted suicide' is an oxymoron." (I recall that I paraphrased this)

"So is 'physician-assisted suicide'."

"Once you start looking at killing as a means to solve problems then you'll find more and more problems where killing can be the solution."

"You don't push a suicide over a bridge, the right thing to do is to talk them down, everyone agrees on this."

"The law does not say that we have a right to commit suicide."

But I Don't Wanna Go Home

At the start of March this year, when booking my latest mission trip to New Zealand, I was faced with a choice.

Schedule the return flight in two months' time on a Tuesday, or extend the trip by two extra days to Thursday, and pay a bit less?

You know what? I paid the higher fee to avoid having to spend two more days in NZ.

Actually returning over four months beyond even those dates, boy, do I feel like a mug.

Specifically, the one that my friends at work just presented me with.


I had mixed feelings about this. It's thoughtful of them to get me a gift, but it kind of makes me feel as though I might not ever be returning from the UK this time. Admittedly, I do always plan for that contingency, it's just never come to pass yet.

But... I'm only going back to be best man at Herschel's wedding, right? That ceremony won't last forever, will it? Will it? Please God don't let Herschel's actImeanspeech last forever...

So this week I spent much of Tuesday night / Wednesday morning in Auckland packing yet again. Jade seemed to believe that I was leaving her permanently too.

Well, she didn't like that. She didn't like that at all.

Here she is realising that she has to say goodbye to yet another flatmate:




At one point while I was packing, she came up to me and suddenly struck my hand before bolting away. Oh dear.

With a 30kg weight limit, the bathroom scales made it clear that I was going to have to decide what to leave behind. I'd copied my photos off of CD and onto hard drive, so those discs went in the bin. ANZ bank statements got recycled. T-shirts, a Bible, other books, my old phone that Tim Downstairs had given me… I just had to box them up and leave them behind, in case they were still waiting for me if I ever return.

Yep, it's a good opportunity to declutter.

My suit has been here ever since I first moved over in 2004. I actually decided to wear that to the airport. Over the years I've tried everything else to get an upgrade, and as shuttle driver Matthew began chatting to me about the economy on the way there, I figured it was proving itself to at least be a good conversation starter.


Still, once at the check-in desk, I didn't manage to score the hallowed seat that turns into a bed for up to 30 hours, despite how empty the (initial) flight was. However I was still 4kg over my limit, which should have set me back me $360, but they kindly waived it. Hm. I wonder how they would have felt if I myself had been 81kg instead of 77?

Then it was time to buy a few last-minute souvenirs, and to sit for a moment.

Just to sit. Just for a moment.

So I accordingly took a load off and finished the bottle of V that Julia at work had given me months ago now, to say thanks for helping her run The Dragons' Den. Auckland Airport now held a few more memories, of a few more people. This particular concourse was where I had come with, among others, Sara, Joanne, Stephanie, Cathy, Rasella, Rachel, the Oasis kids, and the entire Reynolds family to say farewell to Carmel a while back. Funny, I hadn't known any of them before this trip…

Something went wrong with this - my sixth - journey to New Zealand. Having as usual picked up my job, my church, my friends, my bank account, and my flatmates without missing a beat, my latest short-term mission trip just sort of kept on going. Like a tennis player running to return a really high lob on the edge of a cliff.

Work kept plying me with more, and ever more varied, projects to undertake.

I made a ton of new friends at church, took on a new regular responsibility there, and joined every cell group going.

My blog? Sheesh, I'm sorry, I just haven't had any time, so it's got five months behind all over again…

Returning across the globe to tend my UK life is, unusually, an interruption. Normally things in NZ reach a sudden natural breaking point, but this time I'm turning down work to leave.

Has my New Zealand odyssey really come out a success?

Yes, I consider that it has. If I actually don't come back this time, perhaps it's good to literally go out on a high.

Once through security, I had my traditional BK reward meal, and began the first flight to Melbourne with two empty seats next to me.


Had a great conversation with a neighbour called Jim. Everybody needs good neighbours. The next seat is only a footstep away. Anyway, Jim was heading back to Oz to rejoin his family. I hope when he got there they all went out to the street to play cricket and steal each others' lives.

Then a lady called Helen came up, and congratulated me on travelling in a suit. We talked. This was a big trip for her, and she actually asked me to pray for her. I promised, and privately resolved to continue to do so throughout October.


Most of the changeover at Melbourne was spent chatting with a nameless Indian guy who was off on his own travels. Yes - a random Indian guy! It turned out that he was an NZ immigration agent, and lived at the top of my road.

Unlike the first, the second flight was packed. Now the two seats next to me contained John and Paulo. Since they had each other to talk to, there was less conversation with them, but still some.

It was the middle of this second flight that I found the hardest. As night set in and my eyes began to close of their own volition, I was quietly wishing that I didn't have eight more hours to go before being rewarded with another giant flight afterwards. I took a deep breath and just waited. It was the only thing that I could do.


At Dubai I showered, and almost checked out the airport chapel. There were shoes at the entrance. I decided that I didn't want to risk offending anyone by failing to observe any local etiquette, so instead skipped it.

The Dubai to London leg was much easier. The highlight for me would have to be flying over Romania. This was the first country that I had ever flown to - in 1991 - and on some level I've always wanted to go back and shoot more film of it. My flight to New Zealand six months ago had been at night, so this morning I made full use of my Android phone to snap away at anything visible from the sky.


There were more people sitting next to me here too, but I don't recall anything about them.


Presently, would you believe, we reached… the English coast!



We got stuck in a holding pattern on our approach into Heathrow. I could see things that I could recognise! The River Thames, the O2 Arena where we had been to see Ben Hur Live, the readable roof of IKEA, Heathrow Airport… uh, Heathrow Airport? Already?!?



Throughout my three flights I had had Anika Moa's song Mother Mother going through my head, and upon reaching my house as always it was special to see my mum again. She was actually waiting outside the gate in the sunshine for me to arrive.



The cats hadn't missed me (I could tell by the way they ignored me as usual), the book I forgot to pack in March is still here, and according to Herschel I phoned him and babbled incomprehensibly for about an hour and a half, as is standard.

As always, it was good to be home.

Thank you God. I don't know what you're doing, but I do believe that you're still in this with me.


The very next day, I left again.

The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader

Having left it five years between the first two movies in this series, I've left it more like six months before viewing this third chapter.

All part of my plan. When I watched the second one on my flight from London to Auckland, I made a mental note to watch the next one on the return leg.

And as I find tends to be the case with threequels, I thought this was the best of the series.

It was fun, I followed the story, and even a miserable character like Eustace is realised by Will Poulter as someone to rely upon for enjoyment. Basically, he's a young Arnold Rimmer.

My memory of the preceding movie is fuzzy. I recall that there was a character called Caspian in that, although I can't say that I recognise him here. Simon Pegg's talking mouse is fun too, but again, I have next to no recollection of the character appearing before.

All in all, a fair way to spend two hours, especially when you have 28 others to get through before London.

(available here)
(review of The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe here)
(review of Prince Caspian here)

Thor (film)

"That's not a bad thing, finding out that you don't have all the answers. You start asking the right questions."

Q. Who goes to see a film called Thor?

A. Comic fans. Probably fans of Norse mythology too. Certainly not the general public.

The makers of Thor know this, and from the opening credits embrace their work like enthusiasts.

The bleak melodramatic world of Asgard might be quite hard to make accessible to newcomers, but for this audience it doesn't matter. It's set in the same shared universe as the Iron Man films, and embraces this to the point of making SHIELD's Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) the principal human opponent. (not to mention also tagging a teaser scene onto the end of Iron Man 2)

In fact the more I look, the more stuff emerges that only genre fans would appreciate. Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson), J Michael Straczynski, and did I really fail to spot Hawkeye, also from next year's big Avengers movie? He was the marksman with the bow and arrow, right?

And as for that guy driving the pick-up truck…



Wait a minute… his character was called "Stan the Man"?! So… he's playing the same character as in Fantastic Four 2? So that film ties into the upcoming Avengers movie as well??? Gee, well, I sure hope that Captain America (Chris Evans) and the Human Torch (Chris Evans) meet.


In fact, given how I was watching an airline edit of Thor, I have to wonder just how much else I may have missed out on here…


(available in a slightly different version here)

The Amazing Cell Group Race

"Even if you attend just one meeting, something positive will have come of it."

On 6th April those were Brett's approximate words to me over lunch regarding the possibility of my joining a cell group. (a weekly church meeting in someone's home)

He'd been inviting me to join one for donkeys' years. Initially I'd had the really good excuse that I was too busy in the evenings teaching. Now however I had to wonder just what my excuse had been since those days had reached their conclusion.

Between his and Sara's later encouragement at Quirk, I decided that that whole "attend just one meeting" option just wasn't good enough. If I was going to do this thing, then I was going to do it properly. I wouldn't attend just one meeting, rather, I would attend just one meeting of each of them. That way I could make an informed decision about which small group was the best one for me. After all, as I was about to experience, each group did cell a little differently.

And so the battle commenced!


TEAM A met at 7pm on roughly 3 out of 4 Tuesday nights, but rather than at someone's house, it all happened at Esquires coffee shop, Botany. My initial concerns on that first 24th May that I couldn't commit to regularly buying a non-FairTrade coffee were quickly answered when I realised that, yes, these were FairTrade coffees after all!

Despite the public location, straight away I felt at home. Maybe the younger, more single demographic felt more like 'me' than some of the other couple-filled groups, or maybe it was the deep personal questions, but I came away ditching the idea of even trying the others. I had struck gold straight away, so why bother inconveniencing TEAM B and upwards? Surely forcing myself to continue with my original plan, as opposed to my newer and better experienced decision, would be surrendering my spiritual life to some form of OCD?

Presently however, I heard that TEAM B hadn't met for a while, and were now looking forward to arranging a new meeting specifically to accommodate me. I guess that's when it sank in that this was a two-way process. In some sense, my visiting each group could actually be good for them. Well, that settled it. Now I was on a mission, or a 'quest' as it would be dubbed by Megan from TEAM C. Yes, TEAM B still weren't meeting again for a little while, so TEAM C seized their chance ahead of them. I decided to keep on attending TEAM A while I decided. Y'know, just in case they won anyway.


TEAM C met at about 7:30 every Wednesday night in the only couple's living-room. I say "the only couple", although without me they seemed to make up about half the group. Despite being so close-knit, they too were fully welcoming, and also delved into close personal discussion questions. I guess the real spin here had to be the music - each meeting began with a time of worship, led by a DVD. Couldn't get away with that in a coffee shop!


Legend had it that TEAM D were also secretly meeting at 7:30 on 3 out of 4 Wednesday nights, and initially they proved a little tough to infiltrate. Again, not because of any hostility (everyone in every group is a friend), but because the first week, I was told, was going to be a particularly close time of sharing, to which bringing in a visitor just wouldn't be fair on the others. Another new hopeful (a potential transfer from TEAM E) had been turned away that week for the same reason. Sheesh, this application process sounded so exclusive that now I really wanted to join. Just what were they all secretly sharing in there - each others' blood? Even more mysteriously the following week was their monthly week off, so I went back to visit TEAM C again. And with that, yes, I was now regularly attending two cell groups simultaneously.

Well I wasn't TEAM D's first moonlighter. When I finally did get in to TEAM D, after initially turning up at the wrong house, I witnessed that Paul and Kate from Team A were fifth column members here too.

And I have to admit that of all the groups that I visited, I found TEAM D to have the deepest, most soul-searching questions going on. "At what point did you own your faith?" "Is all theology heresy?" (1 Corinthians 13:9-10) "What would shake your faith?"

I was truly in awe at the level of openness and honesty on display here, and slightly ashamed that I just couldn't match that. They were disqualifying themselves really - they were just too good for me.

Well, that didn't quell my determination to join them as well anyway. However, given how all TEAM D's meetings were scheduled directly against TEAM C's, attending both groups regularly was going to be a bit of a sitcom.

Nonetheless juggle them I did. For example, TEAM C couldn't meet for two weeks' running, so those nights I attended TEAM D. Then I caught flu, so I had to cancel them both. With a trip to the UK looming, I figured that would be good for maybe another month. After that I would have to start sending in someone from TEAM A wearing my coat and a wig.


Meanwhile, TEAM E was meeting at 7:30 (realistically 8pm) on 3 out of 4 Thursdays. This was the most extrovert gang, and conversations could wander wildly between the highly educated and the extremely silly. As it also included the church's pastor, when he was leading we sometimes got the cell-group equivalent of a DVD extra to his current series of sermons.

One week, TEAM E also out-TEAM D'd TEAM D with the rather searching question "What is your worst fear?" Yeah, we all shared, in my case learning something about myself that I hadn't really before. I've known for years of the defences that I've developed against the ways girls have attacked me, but trying to muddy my admittance of it, I realised that it's broader than that - I'm really afraid of condemnation. It's just that I've received so much more of that from girls. So there it was - TEAM E had helped me to learn something about myself.

Anyway I kept on attending TEAM E, and presently got added to the leadership schedule. Yes, at some point I would have to lead it. Time to covertly recycle one of the other team's meetings, I figured.

And finally, TEAM B sadly never ran. In theory they met on Wednesdays against TEAMS C and D, but hadn't for some time. As mentioned above, they were keen to get some meetings going again, but due to busy schedules, not for a few more months yet. Ultimately, they had thrown the fight. Oh well.

So, after over three months and about 30 meetings, in the end, just who did win the Goble Super Holy Cell Group Wars™?

Well, it was an extremely tough contest, all the teams played well but, hand on heart, the judges were honestly unanimous in their decision to award the membership to… (long pause) … TEAM A! (sorry everyone, but if I'm honest, it was always going to be TEAM A)

So, tonight I was back at TEAM A yet again. Saying goodbye to them all. I'm going home to the UK tomorrow.

Disappointingly, it seems no cell can hold me.

Podcasting Services

For the past few months I've been honoured to be the happy caretaker of my church's podcasting website.

I think it's been an exceptionally good matching of volunteer to responsibility. I say this because, for its two-year life under Paul prior to my involvement, I've probably been its biggest user.

Having downloaded and listened through to every single sermon that he's put up, inevitably I've developed a few ideas on ways in which I think it could get even better. For example, I've tried augmenting the principal MP3 file with other multimedia elements from the service, such as PowerPoint slides, and short videos. Paul tells me he approves - whew!

I also simply enjoy handling recordings - I love preserving them and magnifying their audience. It's always bugged me that cession's services often contain the seeds of so much quality teaching, which afterwards cease to keep sowing.

Tonight I published my final one, at least for a while, and was pleased to get Brett's message on the air the same evening as it had actually been preached.

The main lesson that I've learnt? It's nowhere near as quick to do as it looks. (or sounds)

Paul, I have renewed respect for you and what you do.

Oh, and in case I never mentioned it before over the last two years… THANKS!

Ministry Of Works sketch 5 of 4

Our current series at cession | community church is entitled "Get Better Work Stories". That may sound like it's been copied from the NZ Police's never-ending recruitment campaign, but in fairness I think the cops in turn had stolen it from the title of Howick Community Church's sermon this morning.

Anyhew, today I was asked to reprise the 'boss' character from our similarly-themed 2007 series 'Ministry Of Works'. Not for a sketch this time though, but to read-out the church's notices. (called 'community life') At least, I don't think the idea started out as a sketch…


(rest of the service here)

Click here for sketch 1 of 4
Click here for sketch 2 of 4
Click here for sketch 3 of 4
Click here for sketch 4 of 4

(with thanks to Paul)

The Day The Rest Of The World Came Over

When stars from overseas come to visit New Zealand, it can be quite a big deal.

For example, whenever U2 come to put on a concert, pretty well everyone in the country wants to be in that stadium. Every local stranger from Bus Driver to Windmill Language Adjudicator will chat with you enthusiastically about it.

So, what happens when representatives from every civilised nation all descend upon Auckland on the same day?

The usual suspects - thronging crowds, travel paralysis, and crazy money getting burnt.

I guess I had the advantage of being a local who had had the Rugby World Cup visit me once before in England in 1991. Not really being into rugger, my one memory of that is of sitting on a stationary bus for maybe an hour, surrounded by a sea of supporters as far as the eye could see. You know what? I sat there and got some writing done.

Yesterday then I expected nothing less of New Zealand's opening celebrations at Auckland Harbour. I wasn't going to attend the match itself, but rather join with the rest of the congregating public down on Queen Street.

Leaving work in Penrose, the first bus that I saw heading for Queen Street contained maybe three passengers. Unfortunately I was still approaching the bus stop at that point, so promptly did an about turn and headed instead for the train station. Here the carriages were fairly full, but not with Londoners, so they hadn't quite figured out the art of packing themselves in yet. Funny, I always thought that it was the British who were supposed to be the shy ones…

After that train had left, the indicator started predicting another train which, thanks to the single track, could not possibly be approaching as promised. I left and returned to the bus stop.

Presently a bus arrived, fairly full. Well, this was more consistent with my memory, and indeed it delivered us all to Britomart no problem.


At Auckland Viaduct, the polite respect for personal space continued. Although it was quite possible to make one's way through the crowds, I just couldn't figure out where I was supposed to be going to. There were big video projector screens showing SKY ONE's live coverage of festivities, but despite the occasional aerial shot, I just couldn't place from whereabouts nearby these images were being relayed.


I turned left at the viaduct and made my way all the way to the front of one of the screens at Quay Street. It helped that there were currents of people streaming along the edge.

Event organiser Martin Snedden has spoken in the media of his attempts to sell the Rugby World Cup to kiwis who don't like rugby, and when the opening moment eventually came (at the exact same instant the wind whipped up), it was hard to fault his promise. There was music, there were fireworks, there were abseilers doing acrobatics down the side of a building… in short, loads of stuff that had nothing whatsoever to do with the pigskin sport.





Even the actual opening ceremony over at Eden Park featured a huge theatrical dance number, performed with the aid of transforming the pitch itself into the most enormous video-screen I've ever heard of.

Presently however the opening finished, and everyone simultaneously decided to beat the rush out of there.




Afterwards I pootled around a few old CBD haunts, checking my post at the backpackers, and grabbing a Burger King meal to have on my return journey. This turned out to be a shrewd move!




Getting onto the bus involved first finding the new stop, then pushing-in, and finally standing on board for the next hour while we… turned around. Yep, now this was exactly what I had been expecting. Fortunately, some thoughtful people laid-on some entertainment and fights outside the windows to keep our attentions stimulated. (Why must you descend into that? WHY?)

Whatever you think of rugby, or the RWC, this was an absolutely spectacular night to remember, even if you were at home watching it on TV, as flatmate Dave and I did again tonight.

Sure, this morning the papers were even outdoing the UK's Daily Mail in their overuse of the word 'chaos', but that had been a given, right from the moment when New Zealand had first been awarded the tournament.

You never know, I might even attend the next one in four years' time in London.

(if it's still there)