Buckle up!

Ricky Gervaise. Not my cup of tea. Not even my pot of piss. Went to see him in Edinburgh a few years ago, where he was appearing doing stand-up in a show called ‘Science’. This has since become the benchmark against which all my other shite experiences that cost money and were profoundly unsatisfactory are measured against, replacing the previous benchmark of ‘My Crying Game Hooker Moment’. But, credit where credit is due, during one part of the show, just about at the point where it lurched from unfunny to unfunny and offensive, he used the term ‘buckle up’.

This has since passed into common…actually too common…usage in the household. Most recently it was used as the opening titles for the film ‘Girl with the dragon tattoo’ unfolded on the cinema screen.

Now, it’s probably fair to say given the popularity of the book that it was more likely that the audience for this film have read the book the film is based on than the audience viewing any other movie adaptation, apart maybe from the ‘Da Vinci Code’. But some, even most, does not mean all and looking round the theatre, there did seem to be rather a lot of ‘old dears’ in the audience.

I am not one to stereotype, I leave that to readers of the Daily Mail, but I’m guessing that if you were to ask a pensioner if they would like a trip to the cinema with their grown up children to watch a film which has been marketed as an intelligent thriller, they would say ‘yes please, and pass the Cadbury chocolate éclairs’. If, however, you asked them if they would like to come and see a film that has graphically depicted scenes of sexual violence towards women, they might choose something else to watch, or at least chew…my recommendation being a stiff sherry. By which I mean gin.

Anyone who has read the book knows about the violence, and you could sense the ‘buckle up’ moment coming as those who had read the book wondered how the scene would be dealt with. I was rather hoping for a ‘Reservoir Dogs’ style move the camera off scene, lots of horrible noises and let the audience supply the awful images in their imagination.

Nope. Instead it was full on awful.

What was odd was that the ‘revenge’ scene was just as brutal. Normally when some vile criminal gets his comeuppance, one punches the air. True, this is normally because it’s always fun to watch the Batmobile run somebody over, but also because the filmmaker understands that one goes to the cinema for entertainment, rather than trauma.

The argument for graphic depiction I suppose is that one should be unflinching in the depiction of the sort of vile act that makes the audience flinch. OK, but I think that if you are going to be graphic, you have to make sure it’s not gratuitous. The problem with the movie was that it wasn’t good enough to offset those scenes. If the rest of it had achieved the same intensity, then it would have been contextual, and for the shocked audience would have felt more consensual.

I’m not saying it was a bad movie. It’s not, it’s OK. It’s very uneven though, some actors have Swedish accents, others don’t bother. Daniel Craig is very good, and the other leads are good, the scenery is marvellous, even if it doesn’t look as good as the BBC or the Swedish ‘Wallander’.

Actually, there’s a lot of nastyness in the film, as there was in the book. As well as violence against women there’s murder, dysfunctional families, infidelity, catacide, torture and lashings of Nazis, and unrepentant Nazis at that. It’s just that it kind of gets buried under the on-screen brutality.

When the lights came up on a full house, everyone seemed fairly pleased with what they had seen. At least there appeared to be very little muffled sobbing. Maybe people do like to see adult themes tackled head on. I rather like to see Batmobiles tackle super-villains head-on and I know that’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

It’s a good film but, if you do go see…buckle up.

The Feast of Leftover

The period between Christmas and New Year is, perhaps, the most orphaned time of year. By which I mean it is perhaps the time of year with the least significance attached to it, it is merely a period that we pass through, on our way to time of resolutions and renewed gym memberships.

This is perhaps because this slack period does not have a name. It is not really Christmas, nor is it New Year.

More probably it is because it has not yet been the work of a memorable piece of fiction. Throughout the year seasons and seconds are celebrated, especially so at this time of the year, where the simple wave of a remote control could summon any of the three versions of ‘A Christmas Carol’ playing, leaving you to settle on Alistair Sym, Patrick Stewart or muppets as your Dickens vehicle of choice. Myself, I favour Bill Murray’s outstanding performance in ‘Scrooged’.

New Year finds favour with filmmakers, featuring prominently in everything from ‘Radio Days’ to ‘When Harry met Sally’.

Or maybe it’s just the mood. Everyone is bucolic and possibly melancholic. Or maybe they are back at work and so sullen. It’s been days now since anyone had anything approaching a normal meal, featuring vegetables, and one is usually still in the process of trying to get through the Christmas booze so that one can be temptation-free come New Year and the inevitable detox.

Hence, I have decided to celebrate this time of year, which I christen The Feast of Leftover.

There are many reasons to be cheery during this period. The first is that cheeriness is not mandatory. The second is that one can lie on the sofa with one hand stirring a tin of Quality Street in the hope that there may be a toffee left among the wrappers, for hours, and not have this used as evidence in a speculative diagnosis of depression. The same goes for still sporting pyjamas and a dressing gown until well after lunch. Which brings us on to booze. It is acceptable, at this time of the year, to have a glass of port, or two, with a cheeky slice of fruit cake. On very few other occasions does such behaviour constitute ‘lunch’ but, on this occasion, one can get away with it.

Not that it is all sloth and inebriation. There are presents to be enjoyed, books to be read, high scores to be racked up and weapons and car upgrades to be unlocked.

Best of all, there is the Feast itself. If one is lucky enough to have surplus food one should also realise that it is a sin to throw away food. That is why this time of year features an unusually varied diet, as one seeks to use up all the food in the fridge before ‘normality’ returns. And it’s Christmas food too, leading one to question the wisdom of ordering so many picked walnuts. By which I mean any.

If you are excited by the prospect of having a cheese board for dinner, then this is the time of year to go for it.

The Feast of Leftover is also celebrated in our shops. This is the time of year to purchase your Christmas decorations and cards (tip: put them somewhere handy, not somewhere ‘safe’, so when you come to look for them in eleven months, there’s a chance you’ll actually be able to find the bloody things and not have to buy more), retail Christmas leftovers on sale at bargain prices or, actually, prices more suitable for what is a bit of plastic dipped in glitter. Tempting this year were the small artificial Christmas trees on sale for a couple of quid at a DIY store. I wanted to buy loads, take them home, set them up and then stomp through them pretending to be a giant, or recreate the Battle of Endor.

However you choose to celebrate this time of the year, be it with cheese, pickled walnuts or pickling your liver, may I wish you a very happy Feast of Leftover.

Now, having just seen a gap in the greetings card market, I’m off to fetch the card and crayons.

Enjoy Downton Abbey responsibly

There are many ways in which a chap can explain his enjoyment of Downton Abbey, the reboot of the class war which aims for the grandeur of ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ in its heydey but, because it is intended for an ITV audience, is pitched rather more at a ‘you rang my lord’ sensibility and which, after all, is Julian Fellows’s attempt to do what Aarion Sorkin did with ‘the West Wing’; spin out a movie idea into a series.

As a Gentleman, one needs no excuse for watching quality costume drama, one can justify one’s close observation by criticising the wearing of a fob watch before supper, or explaining that a particular variety of gin was not actually available to the upper classes until a decade later than the scene depicted. As a gentleman however, you will need to have your excuses ready for watching a programme on ITV. Hardy dependables such as ‘my finger slipped’ or ‘the bloody remote’s not working’, such as are employed when one is discovered watching ‘babestation’ (an act of contrition if ever there was one as, has been remarked upon elsewhere, ‘babestation is essentially a reason for a complaint to Trading Standards if ever there was one’). Like late night viewing, one needs to keep the tissues handy, although one can always, when blubbing at an unexpectedly emotive scene (death of a beloved pet, anything involving rickets and a sickly maid), claim unexpected dust.

As a Player, one will be familiar with ITV. This is how you keep up with the football scores and know when Iceland have Pot Noodle on three-for-two. You will, however, have to have your excuses handy for watching a costume drama, as if discovered you may be accused of being a homosexualist, or educated. On such an occasion it does well to have a box of tissues handy, as one can claim to be knocking one out over the still lovely Elizabeth McGovan, prior to an evening of classic 80s DVDs featuring her when she was still tubby. On no account should you be caught crying while watching Downton Abbey, the shame will stick to you, like a dried tissue, forever.

There is though, one cast-iron excuse for watching Downton, and that’s the Downton drinking game.

There are two versions, ‘child’ and ‘adult’.

For the children’s version, you pick a single character and drink what they drink for each episode. I know what you are thinking – always choose a toff, as they drink more and better. A sound idea in principle, but sometimes a mistake. While a toff can do well in the cocktail and wine with dinner stakes, nobody gets through gin like a servant. Tip: if you know that the storyline may feature a maid who suspects she is pregnant, choose her and bulk-buy the Gordon’s.

The adult version takes a little more effort. You have to drink what everyone in the scene is drinking. This can involve shifting quite a few cocktails and glasses of wine, all the while ensuring that you match the servants gin for gin.

For the Christmas special I decided to go with the adult version, as this was the one time in the year that I had sufficient quantities of wine, spirits and no-work-the-next-morning to play the adult game. I think I was doing alright up to the shoot, but then I think there was drinking, or maybe it was one of the extras in the background having a snort? Was it a shoot or a hunt? I know that people drink an awful lot while hunting because a) without killing a fox you’ve got to get your jollies somehow b) nobody gets in the saddle and gallops over the countryside sober and c) when your horse rears and tosses you into some farm machinery that was parked the other side of a bramble hedge, it’s better to be pre-anesthetised.

The upshot was that the game was an unqualified success but I now need to watch Christmas at Downton again, as I fear I may well have missed a few, if not all, very major plot points.

(The alternative is to take a drink of your choice every time some costume drama incident happens. Depending on your character this can be, for instance, somebody saying ‘iPod’ instead of ‘gramaphone’, or downing a shot every time you spot repressed longing. If it’s poofs, that’s a double! If it’s lesbians…down the bottle and Game Over.)

From vine to wine, it's all fine

This has been, in every way, a ripe year for British fruit. The harvest has been bountiful and the fruit itself, taking an invented figure, at least 20% plumper and juicier than average. On the Imperial measure, that's at least one third of a smiling child more than normal and on the Summerisle scale, it means that demand for virgin sacrifices is down one on previous years.

The branches have hung heavy with fruit and the hedgerows were busy with birds at first flitting from branch to branch, then lunging from branch to branch before finally crashing heavily from branch to branch as their now almost spherical forms provided inspiration for any passing app maker. While in the supermarket the bumper harvest brought about by unseasonable, unreasonable but very welcome warm Autumn weather went unnoticed because while more of a product should mean it gets cheaper, rocketing diesel prices meant that transporting the stuff from farm to shop was getting more expensive, it was very noticeable in the fields, in those little roadside stalls you get when you travel the back roads, in the increase in demand for sugar, glass jars and other jam making accessories (jam making kitchens, the crystal meth labs of the English middle classes), and in back gardens.

Especially mine. This was the year that Jeremy, my vine, came good.

Not to say that in previous years he's not tried, it's just that this year he's had help.

Previously, Jeremy has fruited, with tiny buds slowly turning into grapes and those green grapes turning a luscious deep, dark purple (causing me to look again at Jeremy's tag and try to recollect if I had intended to buy a white-wine, sorry, a green grape vine, and had accidentally grabbed the wrong stalk in the garden centre. Of course it may have been that three or four years ago I was going through a red wine phase, which would certainly explain both my choice and my inability to either recollect my intention or to grab the right vine if green grapes had been my intention), I looked on them with pride, turned my back, heard a grey whoosh and turned back to see no grapes and a grape-laden squirrel shooting up a tree, just out of twatting-with-a-spade range.

This year, however, a more relaxed attitude to regimenting the garden has led to the borders growing in a 'wild garden' fashion. The idea was to encourage wildlife such as butterflies and bees, while freeing up valuable drinking time by avoiding excess pruning or trimming. Have no fear though, my lawn has been kept in pristine condition and could, at any time, have been pressed into service as a surface to play croquet, bowls, cricket, polo or, after one particularly close pass with the mower, snooker, on. The move towards wild gardening has led to the arrival of sentinel cats who, apparently, like nothing better than to curl up in the long grass and snooze away the afternoon, watched resentfully by squirrels who are now too scared to enter the garden. Hence the vine has been unmolested and hence there has been a bountiful harvest of grapes.

The cats are tolerated not just because they are even better squirrel deterrent than me running round the garden in my pants swinging a shovel round my head and screaming my dread squirrel-slaying war cry of 'Die Tufty Dieeeeeeeeeeee!' but because they don't crap in the garden. I have nothing against cats in and of themselves, after all, spinsters need love too, but I do have an objection to animals that crap in my garden. Obviously, these cats are fastidious and have decided that nothing puts a cramp in your nap when you are entirely covered in fur quite like poo. This is plainly a view shared by the fox that also took up residence for a short spell this summer, and who could be seen snoozing in the sunshine, moving only when the setting sun threw a long shadow across the lawn and he was required to pick himself up, wander a few yards into the sunshine, and drop down again. I thought for years that foxes drew their energy from bin raids and leftover chicken tikka masala, but apparently they are solar powered. So an uneasy peace reigned in my back garden in the summer of 2011, with the fox, the cats and myself all studiously ignoring one another's existence. I've no idea if the truce will be last and fear some sort of fur, fangs and faeces version of a Tombstone showdown moment next time round.

For this year though, all was calm, the only sounds the uncorking of lunch, the occasional sizzle of a sausage on the barbecue and the sound of my tomato plants, and Jeremy, growing. If ever there was a year for growing tomatoes, this was it. It's amazing that water plus sunshine can equal fruit, and free fruit at that. The things grew even taller than I am, and by August I had had to construct a Heath-Robinsonesque framework of bamboo canes held together with gardening twine to support the vertical and horizontal growths. By the time the crop was done I think there was more bamboo than tomato plant but the result was pleasing not only in the sense of getting free food, but of course the blokish sensation of having built something. The tomatoes tasted great, although the choice to go with two varieties, one that is traditional red when ripe and one that is yellow, caused some early confusion in trying to determine when a yellow tomato is ripe - answer: when it's very yellow.

Getting back to vines though, lets be clear, a vine has but two purposes; shade and booze. In sunny countries, like England in 2011, they are just the job for curling around your pergola or hastily lashed together framework of bamboo canes in order to provide welcome shade. Shade under which one can, if one wishes, set up a table and some chairs, and perhaps serve some cheese, with the wine of your choice. That's breakfast sorted, now all that remains is to call into work with a croaky voice, kick back and make the most of the day. Jeremy is not quite up to this yet, he was curled around my shed instead, but he is up to making wine! With a little help.

I have a friend who makes wine. Well, let me clarify, I have a friend who makes alcohol and alcohol products. To him, nature is something to be washed, peeled, sliced and then put into a bucket with a pound of sugar and some yeast, left in a shed for a couple of weeks, strained, matured in a bottle for as long as his patience can bear, and then drunk. He has made alcoholic drinks out of cherries, pears, rhubarb and, rumour has it, on one occasion a fox that was not quite quick enough after crapping on his vegetable patch. But never grapes. His vine has, mysteriously, always failed to produce grapes, even this summer.

So, I had a harvest of grapes but no knowledge of how to make wine, and he has all the gear and a good idea, but no grapes. So it was that we entered into an agreement, I would harvest and supply the grapes, he'd do all the hard work and we'd split the result half and half.


The process of wine making only fuelled the expectation of the result. I delivered the grapes to my winemaker and left him to undertake the initial stages. This resulted, a couple of weeks later, in a large bucket of grape juice. We then spent an evening straining the stuff into another bucket, while the dregs were retained. My wine buddy had a plan for those. The resulting strained wine juice was added to another bucket, sugar and yeast was added, a mysterious instrument called a hydrometer was used, more sugar was added, the lid was put on the bucket and the whole thing was returned to the shed.


Sheds have featured largely. Jeremy put on a growth spurts this summer and wrapped himself around my shed, while the fruit has turned to wine in a shed. With this in mind, various names for the wine were considered and rejected ('Vin diesel', 'Van Bloody Ordinary', Vin-mto', 'Grim grape') before we settled on the inevitable 'Shed red'. I think that the close involvement of sheds at every stage has leant a certain something to the wine itself, as it fermented away I was imagining that it would have notes of compost, porn and creosote.

Of course, as with all this home made stuff, potency can be a problem. I tried a glass of his rhubarb wine on holiday and lost the power of speech after half a glass, the use of common sense after the rest of the glass and the use of my ability to climb stairs after a second glass. Good stuff. I think.

Come decanting day, we had moved out of the bucket stage, which was something of a relief. While the reality of actually making something usually demystifies the product, and while the sieving, pouring and standing well back as the yeast and sugar got it on was tremendous fun, there is only so much romance to be had from a plastic bucket. But glass demijohns and tubes - this was much more like it.


The resulting wine is actually a rose, a beautiful pink, like the blush of a convent school girl just having her first inappropriate thought about the captain of the netball team. This was rather unexpected considering how dark the grapes were and one wonders exactly how dark the grapes are that produce those really deep red wines, I suspect most of them are beyond the visible spectrum.

I was told by my winemaker that the result tasted like a Beaujolais nouveaux. This would make perfect sense, as that is a wine synonymous with being drunk practically before the corks are hammered into the bottles. The idea for shed red, like all home made wine, is that you make it, bottle it and then forget about it for at least a year.

However, given all the excitement about this vintage, we had to try it. I would say that the result is...interesting. It certainly packs a punch and resembles nothing so much as a light and fruity lunchtime wine crossed with battery acid and the sort of spirit that one buys at a car boot sale to clear your car windscreen of frost, or possibly a home made cure for removing warts, stubborn stains and all traces of life in any awkward family member. Having said that, we finished the bottle.

I believe the correct term for the resulting wine is 'young'. Like all wines it should be allowed to mature and I have to say that putting it away has already improved it tremendously, in that I don't have to drink the stuff. At present, it's enough to look at it, sitting there gathering potency, and feel a warm glow of achievement and not just a little frisson of anxiety about what the stuff is going to taste like in a years time.

The skins and stalks, by the way, were not wasted. Rather, this was used to make grappa. Grappa is, as anyone who has ever shuddered their way to a pulled muscle after sipping the stuff will know, notoriously vile. If it tastes goodj, you're not doing it right. It's supposed to be made of the leftovers when you have made wine and it is supposed to be rough as a mountain goat's arse in Lithuania's goat shagging season. Thus, the bar had not been set high, or had been, depending on your point of view. When the Shed Red was bottled the grappa was still in the bucket stage of the process, so we all trooped out to the shed for a sip. Itw was sublime. I think that served chilled, ideally so chilled that you don't actually taste it, it would actually be excellent.