What Was The Name Of The Mother?

Thanks to a bout of unwellness that may or may not be pig-related, I've spent the day on the sofa like the unemployed layabout I already was. Of course, the natural thing to do in this situation would be to watch daytime television, or at the very least CBeebies, with a hot fruity drink, but we've run out of Lemsip and the novelty of the former is rather lost when you're at home all day looking for jobs anyway. Our still-novel broadband offers untaxing amusement for the nap-gaps, but by teatime I felt I really hadn't done enough detached gawping to do my role justice. Flicking through iPlayer, The Cell and Only Connect seemed a bit ambitious for my germful brain – but if there's one programme that should only have been enhanced by it, it was the new Shooting Stars.

Now, I don't want to say it was terrible. That wouldn't really be true and, worse, you'd have read through a fairly dull paragraph about how I'm a bit poorly with nothing to show for it but the usual moaning about ill-advised comebacks. In fact, it seemed to me to be up to pretty much the same standard as it always was (although I did miss my old favourite running gag, Vic Reeves's bombing joke). But I wasn't laughing.

Shooting Stars started when I was five and finished when I was nine and I don't think I've grown up that much in the years since. But for me, that means that the show feels as old as any comedy but Danger Mouse. Perfectly able though I might be to arrange the Lumberjack Song, Four Candles and the "The Stripper" breakfast sketch on some hypothetical Timeline of Hilarity, I had heard songs in the club style before I saw any of them. So when Reeves and Mortimer bounded back in HD, really no better or worse than they always were, their very distinctiveness turned back on them. To my mind, and unfairly, they don't sound like comedians: they sound like the tedious friend who thinks quoting Monty Python is immediately and unquestionably funny, or Joe Pasquale.

I worried about this realisation for a little while. Have I been too harsh on the last decade of the Simpsons, on Red Dwarf VIII or on The Krypton Factor's Super Round?

Don't be silly. I'm not that poorly.

How To Win Friends And Influence Hooligans

Sir Steve Bullock, Mayor of Lewisham, isn't terribly pleased about the Climate Camp setting up shop near him. He has every right not to be, of course, though given that the whole reason he's commenting on it is that the camp is on his doorstep, he'd be a more credible commentator and politician if he'd go and visit before using his position to assert a vague, unfounded prejudice. Come to that, even making a reasoned argument would win him a few points; sadly, he seems determined to assume that the Camp will wreck the site and upset the locals, against all evidence to the contrary.

In truth, it's probably fair enough that he didn't bother with even those token efforts: given that his jumping off point was an insulting and unjustified comparison of Climate Camp to the West Ham/Milwall hooligans. Fairly obviously not a winning move, but of course Mayor Steve didn't mean it like that. Those of us who weren't impressed had "missed the point"; Steve had made himself "very clear". Inevitably, he his sorry that "[his] views may have upset some readers" but considers himself wholly inculpable in the matter. After all, what possible reason could readers of the blog post "Football and Climate Change" have had to think he was making a direct comparison?

Oh. Right. Despite his failure to respond to criticism directed to his Twitter account, our dear mayor is "really quite keen on all this modern cyber communications stuff", so I'm sure he'll be pleased to learn how good the internet is at preserving ill-advised remarks.

Moving to London

Those who know me are probably well aware that I wasn't dancing the merriest of jigs over moving to London. The tube would be sticky and unpleasant, the pubs sometimes trendy and always expensive. People in shops would make me repeat things because they couldn't understand my perfectly-enunciated Queen's English. I'd be accosted in the street by Apprentice contestants trying to convince me to pay Combobulus Jacket-Buttering five quid to butter my jacket. Possibly, just possibly, I'd be beaten by the Met or knifecrimed by a freesheet distributor.

In reality, my clothing remains dairy-free and my body has the same number of holes in as it did a month ago. My other expectations, however, were all too accurate, and while they've emerged in much lower volume than I had foreseen, that's largely down to the fact that I've been far too busy having extensive dental work and (only marginally less enjoyable) dealing with 3 customer services to leave the flat. On the other hand, I can work out how to get pretty much anywhere using one piece of paper with some pretty lines on it instead of seven different badly-designed websites. I can easily sample a pretty hefty range of delicious ales, and come to that, buy just about anything I could possibly want in an actual, physically manifested shop. There are lots of nicely kept parks, the review sections of the papers have suddenly become relevant (or will once Edinburgh's out of them) and apparently there are some jobs somewhere, though I've yet to get a sniff of them.

All in all, and with the disclaimer that I've yet to be affected by the regional pricing of Boots Meal Deals, I'm pretty satisfied with London. And if I ever get homesick, there's a manhole cover down the road that was made in Brighouse which I like to think of as "the embassy".