I also bought myself a nice shiny new vacuum cleaner, which has so far been introduced to the bathroom and the bit of the kitchen that’s not underneath a pile of random stuff. The dust collector thingy has about half a carpet in it, it seems — and the carpets themselves are a different colour. Looks good, and makes me realise just how pathetic the cleaner that came with the flat is.

So, today I have no engagements or plans other than roasting a small chicken and some potatoes and carrots. I’ve got all the stuff to make stuffing, so I shall stuff the chicken and it will be delicious. I shall also make gravy and do things properly. Yum yum. No you can’t come, unless you bring your own potatoes as I only got enough for the one portion.

As for the writing, I hope to bash out another three thousand words today, thus bringing me up to 10,000 which will give me a little breathing space for next week which is going to be horribly busy. Fortunately my recorder teacher’s always thinking of how to make life easier and has moved my viol lesson to the same day as the viol consort (both at her house) so I now actually have a free evening which is almost like being given another 1,500 words on a silver platter.

The story itself is coming together nicely. I’m now up to the main three viewpoint characters and I’m gradually building the idea in the background that there’s something very odd going on with the priests. It won’t be long before one of the viewpoint characters finds out what it is, and then the readers will have been introduced to the central crisis, which is going to upend the world (not quite literally) and cause a great deal of consternation. It will also get Eiran and Princess Aru into the same place, allow Eiran to get some proper magical education and lead to the deaths of Eiran’s mentors, in order of acquisition.

He will get a happy ending, but I haven’t told him that yet.

Tony Blair today warned that the cost of climate change is so high, Sun readers should brace themselves for higher taxes

Okay so that’s not an exact quote, but it’s close enough. Personally I’m finally relieved to see that taxes are now being allocated by newspaper readership instead of on income like they used to be.

But such issues aside, I do seem to be finding a lot of people on LJ lately including Ciry and Chili from NWTSweS, a great pleasure. I should have tracked them down a long time ago.

Supposedly I have a concert on Friday with the Society of Recorder Players. This is find and dandy, and I can actually play the music for a change (it’s tenor stuff and none of the tenor parts are particularly complicated — especially the tenor part for Country Gardens which, save for the occurrance of one dotted quaver, one semiquaver and one triplet, is so dull as to be difficult to practise. Unfortunately it is, as with many tenor parts, fairly important when you look at the overall sound of the piece).

Although I do moan about boring tenor parts, I am fairly grateful I’m not playing descant. Not only are descant parts frequently more complicated, but if you get something wrong… let’s just say everybody notices.

Now I need to get hold of someone from the SRP and find out what they tend to wear to concerts.

LibriVox is to audiobooks what Project Gutenberg is to text. What is it about? Well, it’s a simple recipe. Take a public domain work — the wonderful PG contributers have ensured that there are many to choose from. Get a microphone, your computer and some recording software. Read the work aloud. Put it on the internet. Simple. Well okay, not quite that simple, but LibriVox have clear, sensible guidelines and lots of help and advice available.

LibriVox hosts a growing catalogue of public domain audiobooks read by volunteers from all over. Some are read by one person, some by many. Dramas may even be read by many different people, one for each character. Sure the quality varies, but it’s there, it’s understandable, and it’s free.

And now, it’s got my voice on it too. Something useful I can do while working on my speaking skills? Sign me up!

So far, I’ve done a few poems, a very small part from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde, a couple of chapters of Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood by George MacDonald, and what will be the third English recording of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – once I go and edit it, that is.

So maybe that last is a bit redundant, but nobody’s read it with an English accent yet.

I should also mention that the project has been in existence for one year now, and they have an anniversary podcast. According to the blooper segment, as well as being plagued by all the diction and pronunciation problems which affect me (not to mention equipment malfunctions), there is also a chronic problem with cats interrupting the recording.

Not just the watching of the film, but the appreciation of it. The acceptance of its story, the suspension of disbelief (as far as the film itself allows that of course, some don’t!), the catharsis, the inevitable aural assault of the sound system that’s always rather too loud, and the endless stream of adverts which always seem to run for much longer in the cinema than they do on television.

Perhaps I could do without the last two, but I hope some sense of my point is getting through.

The film in which all this happened was Jet Li’s Fearless. It’s a big flashy martial arts film and it’s really rather good, but it’s clear they cut a lot out — more than an hour, I’m told, including everything with Michelle Yeoh in it. The result of this is that the plot takes some leaps in places which I don’t think all of the audience could follow, which might explain the restlessness. Although it might not — teenagers with mobiles are restless to start with these days, and nobody seemed to be able to decide where to sit.

There might be something about films in Mandarin with subtitles, too, but I’ll take that over dubbing any day.

So I mentioned a concert in the title. It was indeed a concert, and I went to help out as it was one in which I didn’t have to play. It was, it must be said, a concert at a much higher standard than I can currently play at. Musica Donum Dei is a group in which my recorder teacher plays. The programme was a nice selection of Telemann (my favourite, a suite for recorder and strings), Bach, Scarlatti (the usual stuff from Scarlatti — a very surprising harpsichord sonata) and Handel. Was a lovely day, and the cycle ride to Holme Pierrepont Hall is quite pleasant in good weather, especially once past Trent Bridge and out into increasingly rural settings.

I’m not going to say too much about the plot as it would spoil it, but suffice it to say that Clive Owen leads a gang who hold up a bank, Denzel Washington is the hostage negotiator who has to resolve the situation, and Jodie Foster gets involved when things start getting really interesting. Not really what I was expecting — much better than I was expecting. It’s definitely worth seeing if you’re at a loose end, or at least putting on your Lovefilm list when the DVD is out.

Just watch the language if you don’t like swearing — it contains quite a lot of it, although in a manner which appears to be quite fitting with the characters, setting and events.

• Futurama is coming back to TV with 26 new episodes! Woohoo!
• I need to learn treble recorder after taking grade 4 descant. Descant is simply too small and squeaky.
• I need to write! Lots and lots and lots and lots…
• Pearl barley makes awesome casseroles. Obviously throw in, say, some lamb neck and lamb stock and onions, sage and rosemary as well. Dry pearl barley is unlikely to be nice, even if you have cooked it for 2 hours in the oven at 190 degrees on that scale that begins with a C.
• I’ve got the RP bug again. Bye bye time…
• I got a patch accepted for OpenTTD. Nothing special, but it’s always nice

1. In the USA during the Second World War, approximately 5% of the population were Nazi agents, well-organised and in constant contact with Germany.
2. Said agents had little difficulty travelling back and forth between the USA and Germany.
3. All such agents have excellent American accents, but very poor German ones.
4. A person sitting in a transparent aeroplane is impossible to see while in flight, for some reason.

Not that this is going to be a real entry — an update on actual happenings might follow at some point when I know what’s going on myself.

So here we go:

Four jobs I’ve had in my life:
* Seed packer
* Shop assistant
* Office dogsbody
* Software engineer

Four films I can watch over and over:
* The Slipper And The Rose
* Monty Python And The Holy Grail
* Lola Rennt
* Contact

Four TV programmes I love to watch:
* Futurama
* The Simpsons
* Firefly
* Doctor Who

Four places I’ve been on holiday:
* Berchtesgarden, Germany
* Lidköping, Sweden
* Cumbria, England
* Blair Atholl, Scotland

Four websites I visit daily:
* PoliceSpecials.com
* Giant in the Playground Games (the home of the Order of the Stick)
* BBC News
* Wikipedia (English version)

Four places I would rather be right now:
* On a beach in Norfolk
* Somewhere with an ADSL line that isn’t a hall of residence
* The passenger seat of a police car
* In the bath

Okay so I missed off the last bit, because I’m not trying to pass this on to anybody. I’m just bored!

I’m not going to write too much about the film, because at some point I’m going to reveal things which should not be revealed except through the act of watching the film instead. Let me instead say that the film is absolutely brilliant and should therefore be watched immediately, by as many people as possible. Serenity should also, but Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (and that’s just a brilliant title) will appeal to a great many more people.

Get to the cinema now.