Warm, Wet and Windy
25 November

Well we've headed into that two month period which straddles the winter equinox and which is the darkest time of the year.

I don't know that it has struck me very much so far. Partially, I guess, this is to do with the fact that I've been on holiday and then I've been off sick. So, it's been nearly a fortnight since I have had to get out of bed at 6:30am and continue to make something of the day. If I have been up at that time, I've been getting a cup of tea and going straight back to bed again.

The cold has been a real nuisance. It's a full throttle rheum which has clogged my head and rasped my throat but, touch wood, has not settled on my chest. What it odes mean though is that I've lost the best part of a week to lying around coughing and wheezing and not feeling up to doing very much at all. It took me over a day to finish off a pile of ironing.

However, some things have been accomplished during my time away from work. Ross and I paid a visit to Lady Green Nurseries and bought plants for the garden including some splendid heucheras. I've sorted out the draft exclusion on the front and back doors - this now means that I can stand in the kitchen without having a howling gale roaring past my ankles.

I've also done a little light sewing. Oh, yes I have. Shortly after we had our new curtains installed last autumn, one of the nets got torn along one of the top hems. Anyhow, that is now fixed and I feel the better for having cleared that little job out of the In Tray where it has resided for nearly twelve months.

The other reason for staying indoors has been the weather which has been warm, wet and windy, which is in keeping with the prevailing conditions for this time of the year.

I gather that there is a thing called a warm conveyor which brings warm, moist air up from the mid-Atlantic around the Azores. And having sucked up moisture from warm currents of the ocean, we get rain on our high ground as warm, Westerly winds bring the moisture to land.

All of which is fascinating from a detached scientific perspective but is probably of no comfort whatsoever to the people of Cockermouth who have been flooded out of house and home and business premises. The prolonged and steady downpour which triggered the flooding began at 8pm last Wednesday and ended, 34 hours later, at 6am on Friday. In that relatively brief time, 378mm (14.87in) of rain was deposited on the area. By comparison, I'm told that it takes eight months for that much rain to fall in London. But I wasn't told which eight months.

Hmmm. Flooding in Cockermouth. That's a hard concept for a young gay man to get his head round.

All of this is a very different story from the snow that fell on London and the bushfires that devastated Australia back in February.

One of Ross's (late) birthday presents arrived in the post courtesy of Amazon - a DVD of the latest Star Trek film which we saw in the cinema back in May of this year. Even on a second viewing it is a remarkably good piece of story telling.

One of the actors in Star Trek is Zachary Quinto. He plays Spock. On television, he is better known as Sylar in Heroes. Another of the actors in Star Trek is John Cho. He plays the young Mr Sulu. He also appears as Dimitri in Flash Forward. Also in Flash Forward is Dominic Monaghan, who was in Lost when it first started. Others in Flash Forward include Jack Davenport, who was Miles in This Life back in 1996, and Joseph Fiennes, who I lusted after in Shakespeare in Love. So, there's quite a little repertory company building up.

Flash Forward's first episode included a few apocalyptic moments caused by the whole planet backing out for 137 seconds - well, if you are landing a plane or driving on a motorway, over two minutes of lost consciousness is quite long enough for there to be disastrous consequences.

One of the few trips out Ross and I managed before I started feeling so grotty that leaving the house was an act not to be contemplated was to go and see the film 2012. I'd been looking forward to this film for some time - not, you understand, for its coruscating exposure of the evils of our time but as an all-out action picture.

Well, we got that and more. Los Angeles was destroyed before our eyes. Ooops, now there goes Las Vegas. And Hawaii. And that was it really. Just how much mass destruction can you observe before it stops being a spectator sport. I'm not going to say that the plot was thin or the dialogue poor or the characters wooden because really the film never set out to achieve high marks in those areas. It was really just boring by the end. Oh, look, there's a tsunami coming over the Himalayas. Hmmm.

My work colleague, Ian, made a perceptive comment a couple of weeks back when he noted that we have had films becoming computer games, we have had computer games becoming films and now this is a film which is like being inside a computer game.

Certainly, all of Los Angeles is held inside a computer. And, as you watch the earth's crust splitting open, the effects are quite astonishing. But, as the stills below show, when you freeze those moments into an unmoving image, it all suddenly looks like a computer game - a very classy computer game to be sure but a computer game nevertheless.

So, I'm only offering two and a half marks because it is possible to do spectacle and destruction and still have a heart.

I was also minded of John Martin's painting in Tate Britain The Great Day of His Wrath. If this wasn't a piece of source material for the production team at some point, I would be very surprised.

It just goes to show that imagination is the key element and you don't need computer graphics for that.