Alternatives
20 October

Well the Indian summer has finally departed.

October, until now, has been the most benign of months. Friday brought the first, real cold day of the year and today, Sunday brings harbingers of winter, cold, damp miserable. The central heating is on morning and evenings now. I've started taking the winter vitamin supplements. Curtains get closed earlier and earlier.

Ross and I have made the best of things by taking in some more of the Biennial. After the first night, we'd promised that we would make sure that we could see some other stuff. Well, the weeks have rolled by, so I put my foot down to make it happen. The alternative was to sand and paint over the stained, damp spot on the kitchen ceiling so it wasn't much of a contest.

We took ourselves off to the Pleasant Street Board School to see some more of the International Show. It was very cold. We were glad we'd donned our winter warmers and two pairs of socks. The alternative would have been gelid misery.

There was lots to get excited about...

• Remy Markowitsch and Michael Lin's Bibliotherapy meets Robinson Crusoe had a strange resonance in this city which made its wealth from 18th Century trading practices - the egg/pod sculpture bursting through the ceiling was astonishing as was the faux classroom;
• Stephen Powers' Waylon Saul used advertising hoardings as a way of presenting a disrupted narrative;
• Barry McGee's bizarre illuminated signs sprouted all over the outside of the building;
• Robert Wogan's claustrophobic stainless steel labyrinth led to a central video installation of a real time exploration of the deep interior of a deserted ocean liner and
• Todd James' wayward installation disturbingly combined cartoon, graffiti, found objects, animation, commercial signs and more to reflect back all sorts of nuances about the world outside.

From there, we trucked down to Tatsurou Bashi's Villa Victoria which turns the Victoria monument into a hotel bedroom. It was splendid - even if only for the chance to get that close to one of the great monumental sculptures of civic Liverpool.

In the meantime, I've been down in London doing some training work at UCL. The ensuing bunce should pay someone for some further decorating work in the New Year. Possibly the master bedroom

I drove down and stayed the Sunday evening with Gill and it was a delight to see her again and catch up with all the news of her any various mutual acquaintances. She emailed me today to say hi and talk about the pleasure of long term friendships. I totally concur.

Monday night I took in a play, Vincent in Brixton, on transfer from the National to the West End. Fabulous reviews. I don't see it. I was alright but, frankly, very ordinary. Clare Higgins was eminently watchable and Jochum ten Haaf made an excellent stab at portraying a disturbed genius before he was either. Paul Nicholls also graced the cast in a supporting role. He's an interesting young man. He seems very sensibly to be building a career and working at this craft so that he has a work life span beyond his youthful good looks.

Tuesday ended with a meal with Chris and John. It started as lunch with Chris during which I found out about his most recent change of job - he's moved between three high powered jobs in the last twelve months. This fast became a quick drink after work at which we were joined by John. One drink became several. Food or incoherence beckoned and so we opted for the food. And thus an evening of immeasurable conviviality passed. Driving home on the Wednesday with the remains of a hangover was not fun. I was in bed by 8:30pm. A tired little bunny.

I do miss those gatherings. As I said to Gill earlier in the week, I've not really met any new representatives of my own folk up here in Liverpool yet. Still, the time is nigh for putting down those extra roots.

There had been a number of possible alternatives to the meal. I'd hoped to make contact with Robert but he was busy elsewhere as 21 year-olds tend to be. I might have gone to see another play. Somerset Maugham's The Constant Wife would have fitted the bill but it had closed on the previous Saturday. Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession would have been an acceptable substitute. There was also Keith's latest play design but the schlepp out to Stratford felt too great. The most expensive stopgap would have been to buy some of Christof or Jordan's time - actually stopgap may be a singularly unfortunate choice of word there.

When I got back to Liverpool, there was news from my dad. I have to report that he has been told by the doctor that the lesion in his throat is a small cancerous growth which requires treatment. The alternative is that it will get worse and eventually require an operation that may necessitate the removal of his vocal chords. The radiotherarpy treatment has a 90% success rate offering 3-5 years of remission. At 78, that sounds OK but, in the still of the night, I'll bet it's still a bitch.

Saturday gave us Sam Mendes's latest film Road to Perdition which is very, very good. However, I have to say it (along with many other people). The poor lad suffers from Orson Wells syndrome in that his first film American Beauty was sooooo good that anything less than a ground-breaking masterpiece was going to be a let down. And, whilst Road to Perdition is very good, it's not that good.

The film is, above anything else, a treat to watch. Ross agreed with me that the composition of many shots and sequences is positively painterly. I loved the way that the visuals were allowed to tell their own story without the constant necessity for speech. And within that most of the violence in the film is never shown. Mostly what you see is the reaction to or effects of violence.

Tom Hanks has a real everyman quality about him like a latter day Jimmy Stewart. Even playing a bad guy, the humanity comes through. Paul Newman is the stuff of which legends are made. Granite in resolve. Clear that the violence of his life will only lead to his own damnation. And Jude Law gives us possibly the nastiest hitman in the history of cinema. Sporting some very nasty dentures, you can almost smell the halitosis and body odour.

There were cliches galore but for the time of the film that mattered little. However, unlike Leone's Once Upon a Time in America which uses the same gangster setting to mythic and emotive effect in its analysis of the USA, Mendes's film is much more low key and domestic. Still, one of the best films this year.

And finally, back in August TV programme The Bill featured a gay kiss between PC Luke Ashton (played by Scott Neal who was in Beautiful Thing) and Sergeant Gilmore (played by Hywel Simons), an out gay character in the show. The kiss was part of an ongoing plot line centring around Luke's uncertain sexuality. Predictably, there was an orchestrated outrage as 170 viewers wrote to register their unease with the scene - with most of them saying it was not suitable before the 9pm watershed.

However the Independent Television Commission says the kiss was acceptable, as it would have been had the scene featured a hettie couple. Viewers were upset children could have been watching but the ITC says there was no breach of programme rules. It said: "The programme code does not distinguish between the sexual orientation of characters, but asks that any sexual behaviour be appropriately limited and inexplicit before 9pm. "The kiss was not totally unexpected. Given the developing storyline and the nature of the encounter, the ITC considered that the scene was acceptable."