The Last Few Days

I've not posted for a few days. There's a couple of reasons for this. Firstly I've been out and away from my computer. Secondly, I've spent the last 36 hour in bed ill, which has been a bit crap (although I did spend some time watching the original Star Wars trilogy, which is sort of like my comfort blanket when I'm ill).
But since I last posetd I've been to my friends 21st. Which was fun, but also slightly mad. Although we did go to a cool bar (bar 38 if anyone's interested) and then to a terrible club where they were still playing the theme from s-express (which died in 1988 as far as I knew). And then we went for a kebab, which I'll always approve of.
Anyway, since then the only exciting thing to have happened is the new series of Doctor Who, which was ok but not brilliant, aimed at kids a bit too much I thought, but then, hasn't it always been a kids programme?
Anyway, that's all I'm writing for now cos I'm still not feeling too well so going to go to bed. I'll try and write somethig slightly more sensical tomorrow.

The Long Walk Home

I've been accused by one friend of making Edinburgh out to be a horrible place in my last few posts. I don't quite get why as any negative comments are to do with circumstance rather than location, but just to appease her, Edinburgh is a great place. It's a beautiful city and is a wonderous place to live. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have its problems though. For example:

Last night I had a great time with some friends at a pub quiz in the city centre. We'd done reasonably well at the quiz (we came 3rd) and a couple of questions that allowed me to prove my strange geekiness came up, a Radiohead question (name all the albums, easy) and a question linking the bible, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, two of my speacilist subjects (I'll let you work out which two). The question, in case you're at all interested, was 'what is the name of a place in the old testement, an alternative name for middle earth in Lord of the Rings and a planet in a Star Wars film?'. So I was feeling pretty good about life as i went to catch the bus home.

A third of the way through the journey, the bus stopped and I was told that, since it was past 11:00, that was as far as the bus went. Now, having lived in London when there's a pretty much 24hour access to everything, this is exactly the sort of thing that does annoy me about Edinburgh. I had to walk 3 miles to get back home, which was made bearable only because of the wondrous thing that is my ipod and a stop off at a petrol station to grab a cornish pasty and can of coke.

Despite this, it was a good and much needed night of fun and I woke up this afternoon (I've got the day off) feeling fairly good about it all.

Chatting with friends

Just read my last couple of posts and I guess they're fairly negative, isn't life crap/dull etc type of posts. So here's a positive one.
I guess you've worked out that life at the moment for me is fairly dull. I mean, while a weekend where the highlights are two films is normal enough for me, having to enthuse about the films on the internet rather than with, you know, actual people isn't. When I moved from London to Scotland it was to start a brave new adventure, but thats all seemed a bit flat lately and I was feeling a bit crap about it all.
Last night I got a phone call from my best friend who'd just got back from his 3 week honeymoon in Thailand (lucky git) and it's amazing how chatting stuff through with him made things seem that much better. And again this morning, I got online to find another of my best friends had not only read the drivel that is this blog, but was on MSN and chatting about coffee (always an important subject), holidays (ones we'd had and how much we'd like one) and life in general.
Isn't it great how chatting with friends makes the world seem like a much better place.

And talking about coffee, just want to celebrate my latest gadgety type purchase. It's a mug. Ok, I know that's hardly an impressive thing to talk about, but this mug has a cafetierre type plunger in it. That means that if, like me, you live in a place where you're the only person who drinks coffee, you can make real, proper, beatiful coffee a mug at a time and stop wasting half a cafetierre everytime you fancy drinking real coffee rather than something that only resembles coffee in the way a westlife song resembles real music (badly, in case you weren't sure).

A dull weekend - and a couple of great films

Ok, so the weekend was dull.

I didn't really get out of the flat at all as a lot of my fiends have buggered off for an easter holiday and others are busy working or pretending to do dissitations. However, it was saved by a couple of things. Firstly, I discovered the most mind numbing yet addictive game on the web which I refused to stop playing til I got in the top 10 (which I did, number 5, 204 boxes if your interested). If you want to know what I'm on about, check the game out at http://www.hyperlaunch.com/layercake/game/.

I also spent 4 great hours watching two great films. 21 Grams has been described by some of my friends as a 'depressingly boring piece of crap'. They're wrong. It's a fantastic film about how our actions in life can effect other people we don't know for the better, or for the worse. The acting in it is incredible (Sean Penn got an oscar the same year for Mystic river, but I think his performance in this is better than that film). AND Namoi Watts is in it, acting as brilliantly as ever and looking fantastic.
The second film was Finding Neverland. This film really is wonderful. It's about J.M Barrie and his life and inspiration as he wrote Peter Pan. Johnny Depp, who is always fantastic, plays J.M Barrie and Kate Winslet, again always brilliant, plays Wendy. The story follws Barrie, a man who hasn't lost his sense of wonder in the world, and tries to relate that through his life and plays. While writing in the park, he meets Wendy, a young widow, and her three children. The story follow Barrie, Wendy and the kids (including Peter) as they grow closer together and are able to work out their seperate lives into a greater whole. If this sounds a bit too much like some sort of chick flick then it's because I'm doing the film justice. This film makes you examine your own life and look for the sense of fun and wonder that I know it's so easy to lose as you get older and more cynical. Yes at times its sad, and there's kids in it (usually a real disaster for a film) but these kids can act (Freddie Highmore won best supprting actor at the empire awards for his performence). Some people will find this film overly sentimental, but I think that says more about the person watching it than the film itself.

Ok, that turned into a bit of a film review. As this blog gets bigger (and since I'm quite enjoying writing it at the moment it probably will) you'll get the idea that I'm actually a bit of a film, music, book geek, so stuff like that's likely to happen a lot. But those two films are particularly good, so you should try and see them if you haven't.

Well, that's been pretty much my weekend. Apart from watching the 6 nations and enjoying see Wales win the grand slam and us (England) beating Scotland (which is more important now that I live in Scotland than it ever was when I didn't). So a dull weekend with a couple of great films, which is what I called this post in the first place. So maybe I should have just left it there, you'd got the picture already hadn't you?, oh well.

The beginning of all things

Ok, I've had this blog for three weeks now and been completely uninspired to write anything. This is probably because I'm feeling fairly uninspired about life in general anyway. BUT one of my closest friends has been moaning at me to write something (mainly cos it was her blog that made me want to write one in the first place). So here it is, my first muddled musings on life.

And todays subject is nothing to do.
If you've seen About a Boy (ok I know Hugh Grant's in it, but its based on a Nick Hornby book so I'm allowed to like it) you'll know the idea that you have to try and fill up your time with lots of things to do. So, in an effort to keep boredom away over my next two days I have off, I have brought two dvd's (Finding Neverland and 21 grammes which are both excellent films I only saw once at the cinema), borrowed a PS2 game from the youth club I work at and am now starting my blog (which means that I'm going to have to spend even more time staring at my computer screen). So, here I am, 48 hours, 2 dvd's, one PS2 game (Star Wars Battlefront if you're interested) and one (admittedly very cool) computer with a broadband connection.
I'll let you know how it goes.