I am Mike. Here me roar.

So, to continue from yesterday's meanderings with my job-hunting... The plan was simplicity in itself really, and a week's worth of exercise to boot. All I did was print out lots of CVs and march through Stoke Newington, down to Newington Green, on down Essex Road, hit Angel, turned around, back up Upper Street, all the way to Highbury and Islington tube, then back along that road with nice houses to the top of Essex Road again. Visited basically every pub, cinema and coffee shop, each time wandering in with a smile and a good first impression waiting to happen, asking as to the availability of any gainful employment... and being met, 98% of the time, with (often sympathetic) rejection. Shiiiiiit.

I say 98%; the people at Borders insisted that a full-time job had recently become available and fairly snatched my CV from me, while at two Starbucks I was given an application form and told that yes, they were looking for people. Hurrah for Borders and Starbucks! Hurrah for global capitalism! This way, if and when I quit my job in a few months, it won't be the act of a petulant graduate who wants to go on holiday for a week, it will be the act of a vicious Tyler Durden-esque individual vainly railing against The Man. I tell you, oh yes, that if I end up at Starbucks, don't buy the Orange Mocha Frappucino...! That is, of course, bollocks: I can barely piss at urinals so fuck knows how I'd get on trying to contaminate a refreshingly fruit-based caffeinated beverage. No, I'd clearly be Ed Norton, eaten away by the system until I flip out and create an alter ego who is remarkably similar to me but with the restraining bolts taken off. (Note to self: ask Joel if he's real.)

Anyway, yeah, that's the gist of the grist of job-hunting. I've just this second been on Gumtree and applied for a reading thing down at Tower Hill - night shifts, 7 on then 7 off, reading media and creating packs for clients. Something like that anyway. I've never worked nights, and I think in my mind I've romanticised it all a bit too much - fuck knows how or why - I think it's because it'd be like being a member of some kind of inverted everyday society. Yeah. I remember going to see Late Night Shopping at the cinema when I was in VIth form, and while in hindsight it probably wasn't that good (although James Lance was funny) it certainly made me think "I want to find some random friends and hang out in a 24-hour cafe for an hour every night". Is it easy to become a night-porter at a hospital? Maybe I should look for that instead. Or maybe I should simply not try to live my life quite so much through films.

Borders and Starbucks would surround me with things which have made my life tick by of late: books and coffee. Finally I've started reading again, thank fuck, without having to force myself - going on holiday and the necessary six-hour drives with my parents kinda drove me to take cover behind Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years Of Solitude (at Vicky and Adam's behest)... and it's a fucking great book. Hard to keep track of all the characters, but I remember liking Aureliano Segundo the most - more than all the rest of the Buendias he seemed like a properly nice guy, and I liked that. It's brilliantly written, I like the way the chapters overlap and how the characters are all developed with hardly any dialogue. And when it all descends into a study of nostalgia as the book goes on... well, me and nostalgia are never too far away and I just loved it. Brilliant book.

From that I read Goldfinger - I'd read some Bond short stories before (On Her Majesty's Secret Service, I think) but never a full-length novel. For some reason, despite having seen the film several times, I imagined Brosnan as Bond in my mind - is that a generational thing or my sub-conscious politely telling me that I think he's the best Bond? I dunno. Anyway, it's a good book but not great - runs out of steam far too early and is both misogynistic and homophobic in ways which now make me laugh, but, well, I'm pretty sure that's not the reaction Fleming was aiming for.... the gist of one theme seemed to be that all lesbians need is some 007 dick for them to be converted, and if they reject it then they die. Charming. Oh, and there are also two chapters devoted to a fucking golf match. Interminable. But other than those gripes - top quality holiday reading.

Now I'm over half-way through Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. The characters are great, I laugh out loud a fair amount because it's so cleverly written, and a lot of the longer paragraphs concern themselves with the relationship of objects and images and words... all very interesting stuff for me. It reminds me of White Noise quite a lot in the way it's written, but is either less prone to spells of pretension than DeLillo's, or is being read three years and a humanities degree after I read WN and so I no longer think the pretentious bits are pretentious. Probably that one. Anyway, it's a great book so far and, were I a Hollywood producer, I would snap up the rights, get it adapted, wave it under a few 40-something stars' noses and get the film out by the end of 2008. But.... it probably won't be as good as the book. Unlike Goldfinger.

My God, it feels fucking great to be back on a good old qwerty keyboard again. Don't know what you've got til it's gone, etc. I am feeling thirsty and unattentive so I don't know where this is going. My guess is all over the place.

France was a good laugh. The village we stayed in was a little place called La Garde Frenais, or something like that - near St Tropez and Cannes. Really pretty, great scenery (I shall endeavour to upload some photographs when my brother gives me my laptop back), international editions of the English papers, and camembert so cheap it made me want to fill a big black back with masses of the stuff to bring back with me. The obvious downside to such a nefarious scheme was that it would all have melted into one pongy, gooey, messy mass... but then I could have simply bought a baguette or three, and dipped, dipped til my stomach's content. Or just tipped it over my head and wallowed in an empty fountain somewhere. An orgy of camembert. I could even have used the word smorgasbord. But I didn't, and you'll not catch me paying 2 quid for a circle of the stuff in Sainsburys. (Ditto Yop. And decent wine. And Nutella.)

Bizarrely, on my last (scheduled) night, last Wednesday, the quaint little town of a few thousand people was overrun by a portable rave in its town centre. Completely incongruous and a joy to behold... complete with foam machine, superstar DJ spinninb techno and electro, glo-sticks, crazy lights, and a few screens providing visuals in the form of a few pieces of ker-azy Euro-iconoclasm (the tower of Pisa... leaning too far!!! The Eiffel Tower... shooting off into space!! Beefeaters.... being fellated by the Queen!! - I made that one up of course, there were a fair few Brits around so it probably wouldn't have gone down too well. Pun as intended as ever.) Little kids ran amok, and emerged from 6-ft-deep oceans of foam with smiles on their faces and, presumably, their sense of direction completely screwed; teenagers got hammered and ran around with glo-sticks, wondering what the hell had happened to their town; and the village elders looked bemused by it all. Truly, a bizarre evening.

Then on Thursday, with bags packed and coffee drunk, my dad happened upon News 24 and we saw all the hulabaloo regarding the terror alert, and the fact that Britain's new level was apparently 'CRITICAL'. (Which made me think cynically of Don DeLillo's SimuVac from White Noise, and 'Purple alert, purple alert' from some old Red Dwarf episode - I wanna say mauve....) Anyway, flight cancelled, and to cut a long story short I ended up flying from Marseille to Bristol on Saturday afternoon instead.... a day of delays. Good King Wenceslas: "Delay had fallen, delay on delay, delay on delay". Kind of.

So, from Bristol I decided to nip over the channel (Bristol, not English) to Cardiff and spend a few days in the company of Ed and Bardell and their new house - they've not wasted any time in moving from Student Digs to Young, Upwardly Mobile Professional Accomodation. Apparently it costs less, too... Now all they need are the jobs to go with it. Great to see them both.

We went to see Miami Vice last night, and had I walked straight from the cinema into a web page such as this then I had a ream of insightful analysis and pithy one-liners regarding Jamie Foxx... but, such is the nature of the film, all such cinematicity has disappeared from my head, leaving traces of well-formed opinion. I remember sporadic violence - impressive in a gritty, DV way, with muted gunshots and heavy breathing - but I also remember wishing that they'd just shown us the last hour and a half of Heat instead. I remember absolutely no character development - moreover, I remember not remembering any character development, so they really must not have done much. Colin Farrell gets a raw deal a lot of the time but he's not up to much here, especially since the last time I saw him he was unbe-fucking-lievable in The New World... apparently he finished the shoot and checked into rehab, and sure enough, he does have that Chandler-in-series-6 aura about him.

Jamie Foxx, meanwhile... well, I could not successfully watch him without cracking up; the interviews he gave to promote his recent album, "Jamie Gonna Make Love To You Nice And Smooooth, Uh Huh Huh" portrayed a slick lurve-machine with nary modicum of self-awareness - he doubtless played "Jamie Gonne Make Love To You Nice And Smooooth, Uh Huh Huh" in his trailer on-set while romancing whichever Miami floozy he'd picked up that night. All this meant that seeing him just made see Jamie Foxx, writer and performer of drops of lyrical perfection as "...in silk Chanel sheets, and it feel good baby, she looked back at me and said "you so craaazy"
After that she played me, I asked her who's pussy is this? And she screamed out 'Jamie's'", or "I can feel the mist everytime we kissed,
just didn't know a downpour like this, There's a flash flood warning,
Till we wake up in the morning, There'll be puddles in the bed" (I am not making these up - click this link if you want more Foxx lyrics: http://www.azlyrics.com/j/jamiefoxx.html - they're consistently amusing.) - rather than Jamie Foxx, Oscar-winning actor and Hollywood megastar. Which, now I think about it, probably made me enjoy the film more - especially his sex scene. Was it Foxx playing Foxx? An essay waiting to happen.

Mr. Foxx wasn't helped by some (intentionally?) cheesy scenes and soundtrack moments from Michael Mann. He plays the whole thing completely straight, which helps the film 80% of the time and hinders it the other 20. 80s revival without a hint of irony! Go get down with your bad pastel self.

Good film. But not great.

Football! Shit, there was the charity shield yesterday too - and I was in Cardiff, so walking around town I saw red shirt after red shirt after red shirt... but not a blue in sight. Was it because the M4 has been closed recently, or did the Chelski fans simply not give a shit? Hard to tell. No time to go into the match in any great detail, but I will say: Sissoko was good, and Essien was great, and Shevchenko is brilliant, and Gonzalez and Pennant looked fast if little else, and none of the Chelsea players seemed to know what they were doing after the first substitution. What formation were they playing at the end? Did anyone know? Did Mourinho know? Hmmmmmmmmmmm. So - maybe they won't win the league! here's hoping, anyway.

All this bally-hoo, and I haven't even touched upon my job-searching today. So, to be continued.

In Cannes. It has been a while since I have typed in a French internet cafe. It's a bit weird to be honest - you need to press shift to get a full stop or a number and several keys are simply in the wrong place. I am right and all of france is wrong seems the gist of how I'm feeling right now. The next paragraph shall be typed rapidly without pausing to look at the keys. Have fun translating, or just skip the whole thing if you prefer. I would. Here goes:

Itùs been q good holidqy so fqr: The drive dozn fro, Pqris zqs greqt; ze successfully ,et ,y sister qt Lyon qnd explored the city the next dqy. Itùs nice but qlqs no sign of qny fqke footbqll tops; Finqlly qrrived qt the villq lqst night qfter q fez ,ore stops (one of which hqd ,e thinking: "Switchblqde Ro,qnce" becquse the fqrner looked q bit unhinged qt dinner) during zhich ti,e ,y French hqs grqduqlly i,proved. Still shit; ,ind;

Christ that was painful to type. This whole thing is too stop-start and too da,n frustrating. My parents are driving slowly back from Italy where they have gone to collect Ben and George and Zak - apparently it's the first weekend of the Italian school holidays so all roads are rammed, looks like we're stranded in Cannes until late tonight. Back to the beach then - there are worse plqces to be stranded - where earlier I felt very much like a cross betzeen F Scott Fitzgerald and Alain Delon circa 1962 (...until I breathed out and then I moved a bit closer to Gerard Depardeiu.) Seriously this keyboard is a fucking nightmare, I've had enough. I only came on here to check the cocking cricket, too....

D'accord. J'ai pensé que je peut écrire en francais parce que j'y suis avec ma famille... but it's taken me five minutes to write that in all its mis-spelt, mis-conjugated, 'B'-at-AS-Level glory - plus the keyboard has insufficent accents, I only known how to do é or á... so I reckon I'll stick with good old English.

Yep, France - to quote Alan Partridge, the "home of French people". I can confirm that this is indeed true, as myself, my mum and my pops are shacked up for a night with some old family friends just outside Paris. We're making our way down to some kind of villa down on the south coast, via Versailles tomorrow (where my A-Level history is sure to come flooding back - I remember the decentralisation of French government following some Parisian riots, and lots of mirrors) and Lyon where we have to pick up my sister and, I hope, a fake football top. We're meeting Ben, George and the lil' nephew Zak in the villa. All in all, it's a pretty comprehensive family gathering, and I'm looking forward to it. This four-day drive down through France, however, is being regarded from the back seat with headphones in and sunglasses on as much more of a means to an end...

It's interesting to see my parents in different situations than I am accustomed to. Yesterday we stayed in Folkestone so that we could make our early tunnel thing this morning, at the house of Michael, an old school friend of my pops, and his wife Monica. Is that how I am going to be with my old school friends when I'm 63? Awkward silences galore, I tell you. I just hid behind a newspaper.

Admittedly, pops and Michael's respective conditions are hardly conducive to flowing conversation. I'm sure I must have previously detailed in this blog my dad's MS-like condition which affects his motor skills quite badly, meaning he walks very slowly with the aid of two sticks and the occasional proffered arm, and speaks equally slowly at a low volume. Michael, meanwhile, has grown progressively deaf (this is beside the point, but he has also grown progressively bald, a condition he attempts to rectify with an Elvis impersonator-style toupé (that accent again) - my Dad's gone for the Zidane-eque dignified shaven pate. Respeck). This means that my dad will say something that Michael simply can't hear, and so a few loud "yes yes of course"s are thrown out there to hopefully bridge the gap between entirely unconnected subjects. I think my dad was trying hard not to laugh at some points.

Lynn, meanwhile, was engaging Monica with the usual catch-up spiel - kids, houses, grandkids, jobs, etc - and occasionally looking longingly at the open window, clearly contemplating the friendship-ending spontaneous leap-and-run; through the window were visible trees, hills, life. Of course, my father's condition meant that the leap-and-run was simply not a viable option, so she gritted her teeth and continued - took one for the team. I continued to observe from behind my Observer.

The thing is, Michael and Monica remain very dear friends of my parents - and as Lynn pointed out as we pulled out of the driveway at half past nine this morning, at least it meant we didn't need to get up at 4 in the bloody morning. That's what friends are for, etc... such conversations and stop-overs simply represent the direction many friendships go - Geoff seemed pleased to see Michael, misunderstandings or not. They shared a few spontaneous chuckles which hinted at what once was, and made me think: in 40 years I could see Joel, or Ed, or Adam, or G, or whoever, having seen them once every 3 or 4 years, and it'd be ok. I like that thought a lot. Plus, y'know, in the era of emails and texts and blogs and all the rest of it, it's easier and easier to stay in touch, even if fleetingly... me and Ed text each other maybe once a week and it feels like contact is successfully maintained. Is this a sham? I don't know, and to be honest I don't care - the odd phone call thrown into the mix, and it's definitely a friendship.

Anyway. The friends of the family this side of the channel seem to have a greater knack of the gabble - French stereotype, is it? I don't know - and so today's Chinese buffet was a great time. The husband is a Chinese immigrant and we had a decent conversation about recent Chinese cinema while my dad tried in vain to remember a single Chinese film he'd seen recently.
"I've got one!! That one with the monk on the island... Autumn Winter Spring Summer, or something"
"That's Korean, dad"
"Bollocks. Eat Drink Man Woman?"
"Taiwanese"
It was like John Motson trying to present Jonathan Ross's Asian Invasion.

Ok, I am being usurped from my position at the computer (l'ordinateur) so that my parents might get some sleep and thus not doze off at the wheel tomorrow. Probably won't get on here again until I'm back in England sometime around the 10th. So I sincerely hope that all the lovely weather disappears and I have timed the holiday to perfection. Yes I do, I'm that selfish.

Nothing like a bit of blogging just after waking up, is there? This is the first time I've ever tried it and so far the whole thing is going quite well. My faculties are not yet fully functioning, the screen seems to be wobbling around within itself, and I keep pressing the wrong keys. I may still be asleep, I'm not sure.

The length of this post is contingent on several factors beyond my control: 1) how soon Naomi gets out of the shower, and 2) how soon Pete finishes with the sport section.

I'm back at my parents' home in Worcester for a week, cunningly coinciding my visit with those of brother, sis-in-law, niece, and sister - 'tis a veritable family reunion of sorts, with everyone seeming to eat and drink for the day's duration, and a game of Hearts never too far away.

I've been doing my Uncle Mike stuff, and it's been as good as ever - wandering around the garden with Eve on my shoulder until she falls alseep and makes these odd, contented gurgling sounds. This week she has just discovered her hands - apparently that's what happens after a couple of months, I had no idea - so seems to love just stuffing them in her mouth whenever she can. Occasionally she has trouble finding her mouth and ends up poking herself in the eye, which doesn't end well.

A drawback with being at home with numerous family members is that I have been asked the "what next?" question on more occasions than I'd care to remember. "So, Mike, what next?" - it all just emphasises how clueless I am about, well, what next. There's too much choice, so I'll probably end up doing nothing. I spent a while on t'interweb yesterday flicking around places to visit and travel to and lay my head.... as a result, I now have an almost insatiable urge to get to Truth Or Consequences as soon as possible and just sit in the hot springs for six months, reading books and occasionally getting dressed to do some karaoke across the road.

But the city remains... intoxicating.

It's all so confusing. Both of my brothers got married the summer after graduating so they didn't have this kind of shit to put up with. Sure, they had big choices to make, but they had to make them with someone they planned on spending the rest of their lives with, which is a wee bit different. Do I go nuts now trying to break into journalism and really go for it? Dick around for a year before doing a Masters? Up and leave for somewhere far away and come back goodness knows when? Sell out somehow?

Actually, the concept of 'selling out' is alien to me. Lots of humanities grads recently have been talking about 'selling out', and the fear they have of it. But no one actually talks about what selling out actually entails. Is there some market stall down by Bank where you go and sell out for a lucrative some of money? See, even if I decided that I want to sell out, I'd have no fucking idea what it meant, or how to do it.

I've been thinking a lot recently about my faith, or lack thereof - I think perhaps I can feel some kind of intangible religious belief slowly creep into my life. I don't know why or how, I guess that's the whole point of it. Anyway I'm planning to go on a retreat in the autumn to a place in France previously visited (and raved about) my my sister, and a frequent getaway for my mum throughout her career as a priest. BAsically involves sitting around for a week, not saying anything, and helping some monks with their chores. Sounds a bit full-on, but even if I come back with my little faith completely quashed, it sounds like a worthwile experience.

Ok Naomi has been out of the shower now for about five minutes. Before I go, though: Damien Duff for £5m? Chelsea are stupid, plain stupid.

So. The end of the weekend is upon us, although I'm not exactly living the lifestyle in which weekends mean anything more than closed shops and bigger newspapers. Soon, perhaps, I will be. But not now.

Enjoyed a three-day jaunt to Brighton at the tail of last week, with lovey-dovey couple du jour, Joel and Hawys. Went down on Thursday afternoon, although we cunningly conspired to miss our 3pm coach (the 38 took literally 1 hr 15 mins to get us to Victoria; insane) in order to get any exasperation and tedium out of the way early. It worked, kind of, and the 5pm coach got us there just as efficiently - in fact it was easily the plushest National Express coach I've been on - very good imitation leather seats which recline until your head is in the lap of the person behind you. And great air-conditioning.

The trip served several purposes. Got us out of London for a few days was the main thing - felt like a proper little holiday. Accommodation was free (although difficult to spell) courtesy of Joel's lesbian surrogate mother's (long story) empty pad on a hill somewhere. We also all had people to visit who live or happened to be in Brighton that weekend - boxes to tick in some cases, and genuinely glad-to-see-you meetings in others - in my case Becca, who was on fine form and showed us how to part-ay old skool Brighton-styleeee (cider under the pier, apparently).

Did some proper seaside holiday stuff, too:

(To every anecdote that follows, please add: "...and Joel and Hawys were all over each other like some kind of sexed-up rash, it was lovely/funny/sickly and made me want to smile/laugh/cry" - delete as appropriate, depending on how long we'd been there.)

Friday's weather was lush so we spent the afternoon on the beach, reading the paper and swimming in the sea - it had been ages since I'd swum in the sea and it felt great. Very very salty, too, obviously - felt saltier than normal, and I found it much easier to float in it so maybe I'm not talking shit. A shame that Brighton's beach is covered in stones, however... no-one seems to mention it, it's the town's very own elephant in the corner. In fact, the tourism industry at large seems to be somewhat deluded - all the shops along the sea-front sell buckets and spades, just in case some young kids want to, erm, fill a bucket with some stones. I did try to spark a conversation with a local about how it would be better all sandy and stuff, but he began throwing stones at me... in fairness, if it was sandy then it would probably just be that shitty grey sand which is generally quite depressing. I'd much rather hurt myself every time I walk from the sea back to my towel, thank you very much.

That evening we gorged ourselves on the produce of a local fish'n'chip emporium - the chips and battered sausage and fishcake I had were all top notch (and I consider myself something of an authority on such cuisine) but the mushy peas weren't really up to scratch; they weren't mushy, which is a cardinal sin for mushy peas. They were just peas in a green sauce. Still, the green sauce had plenty of salt in it so they went down a treat.

Stomachs filled and belts duly loosened, we moseyed on into town for the aforementioned cider on the beach. Big bottles of cider always get you really drunk, don't they? I always seem to forget. This summer has seen a rejuvenation of big-bottles-of-cider-drinking amongst myself and my friends, no doubt reflecting our increasingly impoverished lifestyles. I'm glad, then, that I really really like the stuff. It's just hard to quaff a bottle with any real sense of dignity, especially when it dribbles down your chin and all over your top.

Cider drunk, we found ourselves in a club inside what looked suspiciously like someone's house - thankfully this bizarre locale did not reflect the music of choice, although the name did: Funky Fish. Does exactly what it says on the tin, really: plays funky music all night, and smells vaguely of fish. The DJ was good actually - my lack of experience in funk clubs probably stood him in good stead as I can't really tell a good funk mix from a bad funk mix, but some of the bits between songs were better than the songs themselves. All very.... funky. Heard a cracking remix/cover (dunno) of the Radiohead masturbation song from The Bends, and witnessed a Brightonian smackdown of epic proportions: a couple torn asunder, she slapping him and then he retaliating in a way I didn't really expect, by punching her across the room. Bouncers stepped in and all hell broke loose - all in the time it took me to get a pint of XXXX (yeah, XXXX, I know - but remember my impoverished lifestyle, and they weren't selling big plastic bottles of cider over the bar).

After the club closed we had a spliff down by the beach as the rain came crashing down and one hell of a storm raged - I absolutely loved it. The lightning was proper lightning, and was stretching from sky to horizon out on the sea... and then it was all around us, humid as hell, hardly raining, but the atmosphere crackling with electricity. Brought to mind, as any minor amount of rain does, the line she screams in The Perfect Storm trailer: "YOU'RE HEADING RIGHT INTO THE MIDDLE OF THE MONSTER!!!" - something like that anyway. That's where we were headed, and it was damn fun. From there it was back to a friend of Hawys's flat for music and very very strong cider, and then home for a long, well-deserved sleep.

Saturday dawned at about 3 in the afternoon, which didn't leave me much time for ambling and rambling around Brighton before my coach in the evening. The weather wasn't too great anyway, so the three of us headed determinedly into town to find a cafe where we might chow down on the food of the retired: cream teas. And, my goodness, did we find a place... just gorgeous. Just as I tend to forget that a bottle of cider gets you drunk, I also forget just how fucking gorgeous scones and cream and jam are in between my infrequent visits to the South Coast and Devon. Just perfectly made..... melts and crumbles and dissolves in your mouth, and the jam and the cream and the butter are all there too.... ooooooooooohhhhhhhhh my goodness me, I am causing myself to salivate wildly all over the keyboard. Allow me a moment to sit here with my tongue lolling to one side.

...

Ah.

So. That was Brighton.

Today, I had a big portion of scrambled eggs and went to the cinema to see Superman Returns with Katie. Not much time to go on about it too much, but my reaction for the most part was positive. Certainly, the opening hour and 15 minutes had me smiling like the comic-loving teenager I was, cheering when he caught the shuttle, "aaaaahhhhing" when he talks to Lois, and laughing at Clark's geeky ways.

But... it was just so long. Why does it have to be that way? 2 and a half hours is simply excessive for a film of this nature. Brian Singer is a very canny fellow who knows how to put together a svelte, stream-lined superhero blockbuster; his X-Men was little over 90 minutes and felt great, while its sequel was a bit longer but still barely two hours. With this he seems to have BLOATED a bit, and stuck in about 25 minutes worth of unnecessary crap throughout an otherwise damn-fine film.

Brandon Routh, as Clark/Superman, looks and acts just like Christopher Reeve, especially as Clark. I'd read as much in various reviews, but it's so true that it's worth repeating there, italicised, and here, in bold: he looks and acts just like Christopher Reeve. I consider this a good thing, as Christopher Reeve was great as Superman. Other pieces of casting are less successful, however...

Kate Bosworth as Lois. Well. I think she's gorgeous, and her eyes are different colours which I also think is gorgeous. But she looks my age, and not a day older. This is Lois Lane, the cynical, world-weary reporter of Superman lore? No. No, it clearly isn't. This is some attractive post-grad intern who has wrangled a job at the Daily Planet by shacking up with the editor's nephew. I found it totally implausible, and as such did not really like Bosworth's performance... her kid, for example, was supposed to be five years old, but she looked more like his big sister, or babysitter, or whatever. Not his mum.

James Marsden as Lois's Generic Bland Love Interest White. Actually he was alright, didn't have too much to do - essentially exactly the same character arc as his role as Cyclops in Singer's X-Men films; instead of Wolverine slowly stealing his girl it's Superman. Plus he doesn't have to wear a stupid visor so we can see his eyes and his performance seems a million times better.

Kevin Spacey was good as Lex Luthor.

But it was just... too... long.

Kinda like this entry, really. That's me done. Hope everyone's had a good weekend.

Well, today was Graduation Day for my year. Cost over 100 quid to attend and then another 30 to hire the gown and morar-board. I cunningly refused to play ball, to avoid my parents paying shitloads of moolah to sit through some piss-poor speeches and numerous references to Desmond bloody Tutu - the only King's alumnus worth remembering, apparently. Thus, I feel guilt-free when suggesting/demanding a meal In My Honour during the mini-family holiday at the start of August. 1-0 to Mike. Kind of.

Even more cunningly, I turned up to the graduation anyway, just after it had finished. It was in the Barbican and I strolled in just as people were filing out of the presentation hall, and just in time for bucketloads of free wine and nibbles. As I had suspected, the event was a veritable social minefield - I nimbly manouevred (spelling?) my way through several people I hadn't seen in a few years, all of whom were polite enough for our brief conversation, but all of whom also found time to demonstrate just why I hadn't seen them in a few years (spittle while talking, over-enthusiastic handshake, 20-second attention span, gout, etc). I daresay I did likewise (obnoxious). Still, I had a bottle's worth of wine and saw some people I genuinely wanted to see - admittedly, one of whom I live with.

Anyone notice the weather today? It was really really hot. Really hot. I can't be more accurate, but my God I am caked in sweat right now. (Luckily our shower has been fixed.) I walked from Victoria to the Barbican, stopping in a lot of parks and outside museums and frollicking in fountains (Somerset House) and even spending money in Starbucks (Caramel Frappacino - it's a fucking meal, I tell you, and it's gorgeous).

OOOOOOOOOOhhhhhhh it's so hot. I want to do some TV schtick - to go on about Dr Who's last episode and spout some more reasons why the first season was superior. I also want to sing the praises of Rob Brydon's Annually Retentive, which is the best new BBC comedy in absolutely ages by a country mile. They should buy the rights to The Larry Sanders Show off ITV4 and screen it straight after - the perfect double-bill. A bit of postmodernism is nice in sitcoms, and this is done very, very cleverly - with the celebrities who send themselves up allowing far more shit to be flung at them than those who appeared on Sanders did. Dominic Diamond took an absolute battering, very funny. Apparently it's Russell Brand next week, which I look forward to.

I want to do all that, but I'm so hot all I'm going to do is buy some cider and go home to catch the end of Lois and Clark on ITV2.

Won't feel so rotten as soon as you've gotten some cider inside your insde - Roald Dahl, you're a genius.

Ooooh I just awoke from a 15-hour slumber: absolutely amazing, I was dead to the world as soon as my head hit the pillow - had a number of bizarre, bizarre dreams, bringing together all sorts of people from my life in a variety of weird and occasionally wonderful ways.

The reason for my hibernation was the fact that I spent Thursday to Monday frequently dancing like a man possessed at The Glade festival somewhere near Reading. It was a fabulous weekend in practically every way, and had I longer than five minutes to spend on this post I'd surely go on and on and on about it.

The music was generally very, very good - highlights were Vitalic, !!! and Radioactive Man - although I would say that there seemed to be a disproportionately large amount of breaks at the festival, when breaks often sound quite similar, especially after eight hours of them. Some more d'n'b wouldn't have gone amiss (and I don't say that very often) - a random conversation at a bar had someone explaining to me that they thought the Glade was traditionally a hippie/middle-class festival, and thus the organisers looked down on dirty d'n'b. Seemed pretty insightful at the time, I can tell you.

I hadn't camped in AGES (since Bestival last year) although it wasn't possible to spend too much time in the tent - if you tried to get to sleep in it at about 5 or 6ish then the sun would rise soon after and the tent would transform into some godforsaken canvas oven. But the other bits that go with camping - the warm bread, the melted butter, the pot noodles, the cheap cider and whiskey, sitting around between the tents and making merry - were all present and correct. It was great to see Adam again, and to make the acquaintance of several of his friends. Dan and Rob both found ways to get inside for free, the lucky bastards, and it was great to have them both. Dan used his grindcore connections to get in as a roadie with a band he's recently been on tour with - he got a different colour wristband and everything - while Rob drove to about a mile away from the site with an ordinance survey map of the area and bushwhacked it until he found a perimeter fence, which he climbed over.

And the hammocks - oh, the hammocks. Just divine. I think the hammock gods were smiling on me all weekend, as, with about ten hammocks for the entire festival to share, I found my way into one no less than five times.... a great way to spend early afternoon, or early morning, or early evening, or anytime - just floating languidly from side to side, perhaps with a pain au chocolat for company, with music to be listened to and people to be people-watched (better at a festival than almost anywhere else).

Yes, in short: what a fucking brilliant weekend.

Returning home to find NO RUNNING WATER was significantly less brilliant, however - no shower for either me or Joel, it's bad news, with both absolutely reek. And no flushing toilet either. The plumber is apparently on his way but we've heard that one before.... so, no shower and no toilet.... kinda like a festival then. Except no camping and no music either. D'oh.

...it is now.

The World Cup is over, and thus, so is my World Cup blog. I don't know quite how I'm going to fill the aching void in my life - some may suggest getting a job - but nothing will quite be the same as a month of football, with some tennis chucked in for good measure...

All this World Cup watching has kept me pretty constantly exposed to television so I've a few somewhat inane things to get this ball (not a football, sadly) rolling once again. I feel like a bit of a ramble and TV often affords me the opportunity to explore a number of tangents.

And lo! Another blast from the past is resurrected by the digital TV machine, I see. Just as More4 began showing old hospital drama St. Elsewhere the very same month that Gnarls Barkley released an album of the same name, ITV2 have tried a similar ride-someone-else's-publicity stunt by bringing back The New Adventures of Superman at around the same time the Man of Steel is cinematically resurrected for the masses. The first half of the first episode was screened last night (7pm for those of you with a digibox and in need of something to fill the World Cup space every weeknight) with the FX having aged quite badly, and Teri Hatcher looking pretty much the same age as she has done on recent episodes of Desperate Housewives. Will my pre-teen crush return? I hope not. Anyway, as the final credits rolled, the voiceover lady actually said "Superman returns... (lengthy gap) ...tomorrow night" - Warner Brothers must have paid them for that. Must have.

Meanwhile, over in BBC land, and Sports Relief is approaching - apparently. I vaguely remember being caught up in Comic Relief while a wee lad, primarily because it meant no school uniform and a cake sale at break time. I also remember my mum completely defeating the purpose of the day - and further demonstrating our family's unbelievable (and retrospectively admirable) thriftiness - by insisting on making me my own red nose from cardboard and red felt-tip. So, no money to charity, and lil' Mikey gets laughed out of the cake sale. I think this was the year that the nose was just a little smiley face with two little hands poking out - pretty basic, so I wasn't missing out on much - but I still looked like a bell-end. Anyway, I digress: Sport Relief is here, or is almost here, or has been here for a while, I don't know. I don't want to get into the day itself, as I'm not too sure what happens and would only end up slagging off an apparently worthwhile cause. I would like to note a few attendant details, however:

- David Walliams swam the channel. This means I can no longer dislike him quite as much as I did before. Fair play.

- Over the adverts on BBC, the Queen song "Don't Stop Me Now" is used. This is an undisputably classic song to soundtrack BBC sports clips, and was particularly an ever-present throughout Stephen Hendry-era world snooker championships' post-tournament "let's look back at the highlights" montages, where you'd see Tony Drago's wry smile at going out in the second round again despite being a really good pool player, and Jimmy looking a little bit more depressed than last year (this was prior to his late-90s renaissance when he, er, made a few semi-finals). I seem to have digressed again: my quibble with the whole thing is, they don't use the original Queen song, but some kind of carbon copy cover. What's the point? Take away Queen from Don't Stop Me Now - in fact, take away Queen from any Queen song - and you're left with a lifeless husk of a karaoke classic. Soundtracking our sports events! It's like a pale facsimile of previous sporting memories and I don't like it one bit. It cropped up a few times towards the end of the World Cup and I tried to ignore it... now it's happening between every freakin' show on the Beeb and I can no longer stifle my ire: either cough up the extra moolah to buy back the original song, or pick from a number of post-80s motivational/sports-worthy classics. But be warned: if you even so much as look at 'I Like The Way You Move' by The Bodyrockers, I am going to find the person who chose not to renew the rights to Queen's entire back catalogue, and I am going to hurt them - emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

Ok, I am meant to be off to the cinema this afternoon with Katie so I'll finish this shortly. My life hasn't really changed too much since before the World Cup, except that I now have another sporting catastrophe hanging over my head. I got my results back and found I got a first, hurrah, I assume I just scraped it but don't care either way... sadly, though, I found out on the morning of the Portugal match. For a few short hours that Saturday was shaping up to be one of the best ever. Then it went horribly, horribly wrong, and I forgot about my first until the Tuesday, by which time I couldn't be arsed to celebrate it. Bit of an anticlimax, really - hopefully once the World Cup is out of my system I can celebrate properly. Or maybe not. Anyway, now it just raises the question... what can you do with a first that you can't do with a 2.1? The answer is probably "more education", so I'm still hoping to procure funding for a masters after a year out.

What else has happened..... Joel (flatmate) and Hawys (mate) are now together. I could meekly claim to have 'set them up', as they met through me and on a few nights out I made drunken attempts to, y'know, match-make - but as Rob pointed out, I met Hawys through him, so he must have set them up, too. All a bit of a pointless road to go down. Anyway, I was pleased when they got together and I'm even more pleased now as it means Hawys is around a lot, and Joel is infinitely happier with a girlfriend.

Going to the Glade this weekend, with Joel, Adam and Dan and maybe Rob. It is going to be lots and lots of fun, I can't wait.

Now I'm off. But it feels good to be back, writing about nothing, once again.

At this point in my life I don't exist outside the World Cup.

It's fun.

Except for when England play.

Then it isn't fun. Not at all.

Other than that? Nothing. No cinematicity, no hilarious escapades or hi-jinks in London town, nothing.

Oh, actually, I got a haircut at a very funny place in Angel - little English spoken by the barber, which in itself is not funny, but when you're trying to describe how you want your hair cut, and all you're being answered with is a blank stare... well... I chuckled, anyway. I even had to pick up the thinning scissors to show that I wanted him to use them. Still, only a fiver.

Also developing wanderlust on quite a scale, mainly because I think it has finally struck me: university is over, and I am now free. I can do whatever I want. So what's to stop me, eh?

Well, the World Cup, of course.