Aargh! One of my key excuses for not tidying has bitten the dust.

People have been on at me to dejunk – “just throw it away!” It’s in boxes you’ve never looked in. Boxes that have moved house at least twice, unopened. You can’t possibly need when you haven’t needed it in all this time.

Ah, I have traditionally retorted. Amongst the junk are pearls! Things I will indubitably need again even if I have not needed them recently. For example – killer example – my GCSE, A Level and degree certificates!

Only of course, this week, I found them. I knew roughly where they were and I put my hand on them as soon as I started looking.

By my own logic, almost everything else can be thrown away. Oops.

My backup excuse is wastefulness. It would be terribly wasteful to just throw these things away! Starving Children in Africa! My junk could be useful to someone… if only I had time to sort it out properly… catalogue, sort and file… Save / Bin / Charity shop / Freecycle…

Re-assure me of this: it’s normal, right, to keep every edition of every magazine you subscribe to in varying states of pile from “neat” (magazines you no longer subscribe to, often because you didn’t get around to reading one before the next one arrived, sometimes still in their plastic wrappers) to chaotic (the Private Eyes that arrive 25 times a year for the last twenty years…). People don’t subscribe to magazines just to throw them away when they are read…? Do they?

Thank heavens I never got into a daily newspaper habit.

On Saturday night, we watched Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Sunday morning, and I am writing a blog post about it.

It’s an awful admission for a Nottingham resident to make, but I’ve never seen it before, and I haven’t read the book either. I met Alan Sillitoe once when he was given the Freedom of the City by Nottingham City Council, and just had to sit in silence while other people lauded him. I have a copy of the book, but it’s an old paperback with tiny print, and I can’t summon up the enthusiasm to peer at it. The Kindle has already spoiled me in terms of being able to increase the font size when your eyes are tired.

I liked the film a lot. It held the interest, Albert Finney is quite pretty, and attempting to spot Nottingham locations I still know was fun. (Irritatingly, the WP entry tells us the final scene wasn’t shot in Nottingham at all – no wonder it didn’t look familiar!)

But these days it seemed quite a simple, ordinary story. It would be quite tame for Eastenders, I think.

So most of the historical interest came from the interviews also included on the DVD. I think it was a re-release from the BFI – I’ve wanted to see this for ages, and it was only recently re-released and available from Lovefilm.

Firstly, an audio-only interview with Albert Finney from 22 years after the 1960 release of the film. Amazing shock to hear him talk in the most plummy tones imaginable, after holding down a realistic northern accent all the way through the film. (Although I did a) find myself thinking often it was a bit TOO northern an accent for Nottingham and b) often wonder if I was hearing Paul Holmes…) The film was X-rated when it came out (it’s PG now!). There was a fab bit about the “sex scene.” There is no sex scene! There is a scene where two characters wake up in bed the following morning, and there was some debate about whether this would pass the censors as there was no obligatory “one foot on the floor” as needed for the Code. Further debate on whether Arthur Seaton was allowed to wake up shirtless. That scene now forms the poster image for the BFI re-release, as seen on IMDB.

The interview with Shirley Anne Field, who played dazzlingly pretty Doreen, was as interesting, but was actually filmed, a little on the soft focus side. She made the point that this film was the first to realistically portray working class life; the first to include working class accents that weren’t embarrassing mockney ripoffs; and the first to talk about abortion in any way shape or form.

Amazing how life has changed since.

Reading. I don’t do enough of it at home, with too many constant distractions, not least the TV and the internet. Perhaps I should get into a routine which includes a half hour of reading in bed before turning in at a sensible time?

One of my jokey responses to “I’m sorry to hear that you have lost your job!” is “I have a plan to fill my time: I will read all the books in the house I have never read; then watch all the DVDs I own and have never watched; then play all the computer games I got through the first level and flung at the wall. But first… I will drink all the liquor in the drinks cabinet!”

Well, the final part of that I have done a little, and I have played a little Tombraider. But as many people have said before me I don’t know how I ever found time to be a councillor when being alone at home all day is so time consuming!

And I’ve been really poor at doing any reading at all, and when I have read things, it has been new books, purchased for my Kindle, rather than the far more sensible and parsimonious approach of reading the tonne of titles on Mount Toberead.

Anyhoo, here are some pocket reviews.

<a href="Deadfolk by Charlie Williams

I bought this at the recommendation of David Belbin, Nottingham author of Bone and Cane, and it was brilliant. It opens with the phrase “I were standing on the grass…” and that had me at first slightly puzzled and then hooked. The whole book is written in a semi-dialect that sounded very similar to what people speak in my hometown of Leominster: genders for nouns, interesting conjugations, and a handful of dialect words you have to guess from context. As it opened, my first thought was to hope it didn’t continue in dialect, but as the story unfolded, it gripped me. It seemed authentic enough, and I’m sure I went to school with some of the characters. When I got to the end, I found the author is Worcester-bred, which is a hop skip and jump away.

Five stars, awesome, v good.

UPDATE: I find there’s a sequel, Booze and Burn. It’s slightly spoilery to say… how is that possible?!

Lifeblood by Thomas Hoover

Three or four stars for this one – gauche thriller with obvious attempts to manipulate you by bringing in loved ones in peril, and lots of appeals to biological clocks and desperate urge to have babies, that didn’t really speak to me. I was so aware of things being used to try to ramp up the tension, that I didn’t actually feel the tension. As such, I’ve been dipping in and out of this for a couple of weeks. I think I bought it because it was high up the bestseller list and under a quid, or something.

For Sale in Palm Springs by Albert Simon

Again, high up the bestseller list and very cheap. This has never been published in book form, as far as I can see, but as my blogging friend Wenlock touches on, the Amazon Kindle is allowing a whole new revolution in self publishing. (And indeed, hopefully, Lord Alexander’s Cypher will appear in a future review).

For Sale in Palm Springs is securely located within the genre of California PI fiction, and is a worthy entry. Highly readable, with one caveat: Albert Simon is not a native speaker of English. I do not know if that is the reason, but the whole tome could really have done with a good editor. Every paragraph had irritating run-on sentences at least one or twice. The whole book is written in a style that is very similar to spoken word but technically ungrammatical written English. I’m not sure how many readers this would bother, but it certainly bugged me!

The Unremarkable Heart by Karin Slaughter

This is at once good, and annoying. This was the only remotely affordable Karin Slaughter title for Kindle; when it gets down to it, you discover it’s a chilling, nasty (in a good way) short story, and, for padding and advertising purposes, the first two chapters of two other books.

The short story is ace. Both of the first chapters seem to be things I’d like to read, if and when I can afford them. The other two are: Broken and Fallen.

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach

I’m a huge fan of Mary Roach, who writes witty and humourful books about the parts of science that are often unexplored. She’s amongst the very few non-fic writers I really enjoy – almost all of my leisure reading is crime fiction, so I nearly never touch on any actual fact.

I enjoyed Stiff so much it set me off recording a piece for Pod Delusion on donating one’s body for medical science. I still have the forms to donate my own body… perhaps one day I will fill them in. Bonk was awesome, horrifying and embarrassing, and I’m so glad I read it, but not able to lend it to anyone else in case they, you know, want to discuss it out loud.

Spook didn’t quite do as much for me as the previous two, because whilst normally Roach is interviewing scientists, half of Spook was about talking to hogwash merchants of the first order.

Really, I’m just biding my time till I can afford a copy of Packing for Mars, which sounds really fascinating.

Outdoor Cooking by eBook World

No link – as the book no longer appears available.

No great shakes as it wasn’t very good. I always worry that most of my cooking when camping is useless – tins, boxes, and things I’d never eat at home, with the odd barbecue for fresh meat.

This book wasn’t really the answer. It had some suggestions, but mostly it was one of those weird American cookbooks with horrifying ideas of what constitutes an ingredient (eg “one box white cake mix”)

I think campsite cooking will have to form an entirely other blogpost some time.

There’s been roadworks on Mansfield Road in Nottingham down in the city centre for a few weeks now – when I walked past on the way to the cinema recently, it appeared they were nearing a crucial phase.

A huge, flexible, plastic yellow pipe poked out of the ground:

It extended down the street for quite a while, way past the junction with the end of Woodborough Road:

Looking at the part where the pipe went into the ground, it appeared that the new yellow pipe was smaller than an existing, metal pipe already in the ground, and the plastic one was being inserted into the metal one. (I don’t know whether this metal pipe was the previous one that was being replaced or one that has been laid specially to allow this new process)

So the end of the small pipe was fed into the opening of the old metal pipe, and the plastic pipe extended tens of metres down the road.

As I walked along the extent of plastic pipe not yet in the ground, I came across the workmen and their kit. They had a small tank-like vehicle with caterpillar tracks and a circle on a stick. It was under the pipe and holding onto it. It looked really clear to me that what was going to happen was that the little tank think was just going to shove the new pipe right into the old pipe. I asked one of the workers if that was the case, and he confirmed.

And I thought the whole idea was pretty cool, and that I should share it with you, which is what I’m doing now. And yes, I do worry about the sorts of weird things I find cool, but fairly consistently, heavy engineering projects makes me think “wow.”