Rewind
8 June

Ross and I are about to depart for Llandudno for another sojourn on the North Wales coast with opera thrown in.

But first, I need to wind back and bring you up to date with the major landmarks of the past fortnight. Ross and I took a trip over to see my parents. This was in celebration of my dad's and my birthday.

Now that we have the car, it was easy to suggest that we had a trip out and so we tootled off to Ness Gardens.

We had the best of what sun there was and time passed pleasantly enough.

Ross's parents came to visit us on the following Jubilee Bank Holiday weekend. We took a trip out to Rufford Old Hall, which was most pleasant, and Ross's dad positively gushed about the way that we've brought the garden on over the past few months.

I saw very little of the official Jubilee celebrations. I was the same with the Silver Jubilee and the Diana/Charles wedding. I don't begrudge other people having a party. I just don't want to celebrate myself. I'm not specifically against the monarchy. I just think that there's a proven case for the alternatives being very much better.

There has also been an exhibition of Corinthianism in the Far East during which the England football team played and beat the Argentine team. Michael Owen was tripped up in the penalty area, giving us a clear view of the pertness of his behind. David Beckham took the penalty and got very excited when he scored. He lifted his shirt up and showed us his tummy. Mind you, the player clapping his hands above his head appears to be even more excited.

Big Brother is not very interesting this year. I'm afraid that all of the contestants are so unremittingly unpleasant that I don't wish to spend time in their company though I do keep tabs on what is happening via the Channel Four Website. Even the site of Spencer's bum is unlikely to keep me tuning in for very long.

There's been a few artistic events. Two concerts at the Phil. A lunchtime chamber concert featuring a wind ensemble playing Barber's Summer Music and arrangements of Ravel's Alborada del gracioso and Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. The Gershwin probably came off best. It was the same with the evening concert. Junichi Hirokami was disappointing with Rachmaninov's Symphony No 1 not really finding a coherent whole in the, admittedly, fragmented form. Better was the filigree textures of Ravel's Ma Mère l'oye suite. Best were the jazzy syncopations of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with Steven Osborne positively virtuosic on the piano.

Of the films we've watched, The Others has been the least enjoyable. It started at too hysterical a level and had nowhere to go when the tension was supposed to increase. And it was all too obvious from the offset that everyone was dead and didn't know it.

The Time Machine was much better. In fact, I very much liked it. Ross remained lukewarm.

He thought the special effects were good but didn't rate the story. This was completely changed from the book which is a parable about the social theory and the perfectability of human kind. The book changes the motivation of the time traveller to one of trying to find a reason why he can't change the past after his fiancee is gunned down in New York's Central Park (the location is changed as well).

Still it was nice to see Guy Pearce again and Jeremy Irons got to do his evil incarnate act once more.

And the special effects were appropriately spectacular.

Finally comes Larry Clark's Bully which is not a nice film at all but is nevertheless a very powerful one. Based on a true story, we follow a group of young, aimless US citizens whose lives are made unpleasant by one of their number who is a bully. So, they kill him and get found out but don't see that they have done anything wrong.

The young-ish cast are uniformly impressive. Brad Renfro must have jumped at the part as a good chance to ditch his squeaky-clean teen idol image. Here, he fucks, swears, does drugs and slits his best friend's throat. Nick Stahl gave an excellent performance as the bully friend. Bijou Phillips is chilling as the young woman who sets the whole thing in motion. Special mention for Michael Pitt as a drugged out pothead, last seen as a willowy WASP student in Gus Van Sant's Finding Forrester.

Most of the criticism I have read about the film homes in on its exploitive quality. But I don't see it entirely. It's certainly no more exploitive than the sort of shirt-off, early-teen, he-man poses Brad Renfro was asked to do in his earlier career. And the exploitation of the young people's bodies is actually telling us something uncomfortable about their lifestyle. All of the young women dress scantily to flaunt their sexual availability because that is the basis of their power. And the film shows that.

Why does Marty kill his friend? The title of the film would suggest that it is because he is a bully. Some may argue that it has to do with the drugs all the young people use. Others may see it as a symptom of rootless, valueless middle class America. You could even see it as being to do with the repressed homosexual urges which the script sort of flirts with. I think all of these issues are there but they are not the reason that Marty commits murder. He commits murder because his girlfriend urges him to and, like many young men throughout the ages, he gets way out of his depth and into big trouble by doing what his woman bids him to do. How many fights in town on a Saturday night start with a young woman saying to her man "That bloke's looking at me funny"?

After, young Phillipe's poor showing on Eurovision night, I have been asked about the line of demons which I claimed to have seen brandishing cash outside the local winter sports shop thus suggesting that hell had frozen over. Well, I was mistaken. They were naked Ice Hockey players.

If that has you all of a lather, then hold fast, there is more to come.

My Rossi worships at the shrine of St Leonardo. For him and for you, I present Leonardo di Caprio's willy. Personally, I've always preferred Brad Pitt's bum. However, my nocturnal musings have, of late, centred upon Philip Olivier from Brookside who easily counts as prime male totty. Oh, to be that football.