Kung-Fu and the King of England

The wheel of life has come full circle. My first few blog posts were written in Notepad on a ageing Intel machine running Windows ME, and now I'm back there again. I'm back in the part of the country where the night sky is blue rather than orange, pub crawls range over five to seven miles, and Broad Band is a shadowy myth.

On my way home I stopped in Bristol to visit Devonfriend Paul who will, should I ever happen to be crowned King of Scotland and England, get first refusal on the title of Fidelis Defensor and some minor but symbolic Earldom. Anyway, while I was in the Earls' flat, we watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I recomend it to anyone, particularly if you can see it in Chinese with subtitles, as that makes me glow with pride at being a multicultural sophisticate. I suppose a real man of the new intelectual order wouldn't have needed subtitles. Anyway, I liked it. The wirework is obvious, but so much so that you have to accept it as artistic license. The whole film has a dream-like feel to it. I'm not normally the kind to notice lighting effects or things like that, so I can't tell you why I thought that, except possibly that the fly around, run up trees and catch darts out of the air with chopsticks, stuff like that. Given that it's in the grand tradition of Kung-Fu films, there's amazingly little gore. Indeed, my dad would approve, on that score. There's considerably fewer removed organs than in Dumb and Dumber, and that's on TV at the holidays.

I added to my New Internationalist chic by drinking Japanese beer called Asahi. It was a gamble in the off-license, but I came up trumps: Asahi has the one quality I look for in beer above all others. It doesn't taste much like beer.

Song in my head: "Novocaine for the soul" by Eels