Towards the New Year
31 December

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It continues to be cold.

This is not necessarily news. However, even three years ago, I was noting in these pages that it was mild enough for us to dispense with the central heating during the day. Well, we wouldn't dream of doing that at present and, in fact, we are more prone to keeping it on overnight to moderate the effects of nocturnal sub-zero temperatures.

I expect that we shall be told that the cold weather as well as the credit crunch has hit High Street retailers hard. We shall be castigated because we are not being good enough citizens by spending enough.

I know that it's a bit early but I want to make a prediction. I forecast that businesses which do survive into the summer will all proclaim better than expected results even though turnover is down.

The basis for this thought is that budgets will have been drawn up at a time of rapidly increasing fuel, food and energy costs. Most firms will have lain in massive contingency plans which they will no longer have to draw upon. Hence, because expenditure will not reach the predicted levels, a lower income will still generate a profit. Hurrah!! Capitalism will be seen to work yet again.

Both cats have been spending large portions of the day indoors asleep either in their cat baskets or on our bed or on the settee in front of the fire in the living room.

It must be said that, apart from shopping for food, reading, solving sudoku puzzles, catching up on bits of TV (like Dr Who and The 39 Steps), lunching at the Olive Tree to see the lovely Ollie and (for me) meeting up with Roland for a drink, we've not done a lot during the daylight hours. There's been a little more activity of an evening.

Most disappointing was The Day the Earth Stood Still which managed to be a boring sci-fi epic about the destruction of planet earth. Driving home I realised that all of the best CGI moments had been contained in the trailer - which is always a bad sign. Can't give it more than two stars.

Very different but, thank goodness, much more enjoyable was Boeing Boeing at the Liverpool Playhouse. Last year, at this sort of time, we went there to see The Flint Street Nativity and, good grief was it really, three years ago we went to Round the Horne at the Lowry.

This show was a French farce whose basic premise was a lothario with a Paris flat who keeps three girlfriends on the go at the same time thanks to their being air hostesses who are never in town simultaneously thanks to flight schedules - until tonight. It was very slickly done and many a good laugh was had. And the women had the best of it in the end. But I was still uneasy about the basic premise. Nevertheless, it was my Rossi's Christmas present to me (as the trip to see Hänsel und Gretel was my present to him) and was easily worth three stars.

Which brought us to New Year's Eve.

It was a habit of Ross and mine to go to see a film on New Year's Eve when we lived in London. We seemed to alternate between Star Trek movies and James Bond. We gave it a go again this year.

Our choice was Twilight - Vampire romance for the teenage years. It was remarkably effective whilst still obeying most of the cliches of the genre - why do vampires always live in very stylish houses and why do the bad ones always wear incredibly funky outfits? I suppose it must be the money thing. If you know that you are going to last that long then a two hundred year investment doesn't seem out of the question.

The vampire family were all incredibly gorgeous and the bad ones were very attractive as well. I was particularly taken by James but he got killed off after misbehaving. There was a whole thing about good and bad vampires - the good ones live off animal blood and jokingly call themselves vegetarians. The humans inevitably seemed somehow tame and uninteresting by comparison.

The interplay between Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson - who we have seen before as Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) was well done. And I did like the idea of climbing a two hundred foot pine tree for a first date.

The film was based on the initial novel in a series written by Stephenie Meyer. Film number two, New Moon, is due out sometime in 2009 and I'm hoping that some things will get cleared up.

For example, does Bella already have vampire blood in her? She is marked out as being very pale by her fellow class mates even though she has travelled from the bright South Eastern states to grey, cloudy, rainy, twilit Washington State. Edward cannot read her mind even though he can read the mind of every other human around him. She has some sort of defensive shielding power which blows him across the room when he comes on strong to her. Or maybe we're not supposed to be asking questions like this.

Apparently, this series of novels (as well as Rachel Caine's Morganville Vampires novels) is a very big hit in North America and so it is, to a certain extent, here in the UK as well. As well as tapping into a theme of teen romance with a Gothic twist, there's also a theme of deferred gratification in both series. The heroine struggles to keep herself pure - that's both not a member of the undead and also a pure virgin.

Something is going on here at the beginning of the twenty-first century. And I think that it has something to do with one generation of women re-acting against the achievements of a previous generation.

These thoughts have been swimming around in my mind for a while ever since I watched an episode of Grumpy Old Women on the television some time back. Sue Pollard was railing against the habit that men have of soaking pots and pans before cleaning them. It occurred to me that most men (and I include myself in this), if they soak pots and pans at all, will have learnt this from their mothers. What Sue Pollard was really railing against was what her mother did.

And I began to wonder how much of the Women's Liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s was, in fact, one generation of women trashing the achievements of the previous generations - for it was those previous generations who fought for universal franchise, University places, careers, basic birth control and such like.

However, most women who could still stayed at home juggling house-keeping and child-rearing with maintaining an active social involvement. Women's Liberation said that it was wrong for women to remain at home. What it negated was the rich social environment that generations of women had built up from social clubs to charitable activities to simply visiting each other at home. Instead, women had to go out and get jobs. And I suspect that this has suited governments since 1970 down to the ground.

So, maybe there's a backlash beginning. Maybe the current generation is saying to the next that the superwomen of the 1970s and 1980s are not to be believed. And a part of that is not simply having sex when you want, where you want and how you want. And I can have some sympathy with that even though I'm not sure that such behaviour is what the majority of young people are actually up to - whatever they say about it.

Oh, and Stephenie Meyer is a devout Mormon which presumably means that she places her views on chastity and the like within a very specific context. We'll have to see how all of that survives the commercial marketplace, book deals, Hollywood and the like.

But it will all have to wait until next year.