I'd like to start today with a thank you to the three kind souls who have "flattrd' the blog to date (giant oaks from little acorns and all that). Your support is appreciated.
As I write, it looks like winter has finally started to head our way and in the past hour the house has been buffeted by gale force winds and hailstones and there's a distinct chill in the air. We're off to Ribchester shortly to visit some friends. It's quite hilly up there but I don't think we need to pack the snow gear yet although it's around this time last year that we awoke on our first morning of retirement to a heavy blizzard in Manchester. We're looking forward to visiting Mark and Nita who run the excellent Workhouse Marketing the best creative marketing agency in the North West.
Last time we got together Mark had a try metal detecting with me and I gave him my old machine. I don't think he's had much success to date. Pretty much like me I suppose. Yesterday I headed up to Cumbria with my detecting pal Ed. We put in about five hours on the fields where I found my Roman gold bracelet link in the summer but all I had to show for it was this small Roman bronze coin. Ed had a similar one. At least we didn't go home completely empty handed but we will have to try and come up with some new places to go when we get out again in 2012. I think I will hang up the detector, spade and wellies for a few months now unless we get a very mild spell.
I don't tend to get political at all on here usually but the impending public sector workers' strike is really getting my back up. It's not because our son and daughter in law are flying back into Heathrow on Wednesday night/Thursday morning having been delayed on their outward flight to a wedding in the USA because of fog and now face more misery on their return. No, it's because I just can't see the point. I know that it's hard to discover that you are going to have to work longer before you get your pension and you may have to contribute more to it but it's something that has been coming for years and successive governments have failed to do anything about it. When most pensions were set up the average life expectancy was much lower. It is now heading towards eighty years which is eight years longer than it was even as recently as the 1970's. It doesn't take a mathematician to work out that a scheme set up to fund a pension for say fifteen years on average will run out of money if it has to pay the pensioners for twenty three. And, as these are public sector pensions, it is the UK tax payers that will have to foot the enormous shortfall. So it is common sense to make pensions kick in at a later age. Marion is one of those unlucky women in their fifties who expected a state pension at sixty and now has to wait another five years but, however much she dislikes it, she understands why it is essential to the economy and someone, somewhere, who is organising this strike should know that public sector workers will have to accept change too (unless they want us to end up like Greece that is).
Sorry about that but I can't see the point of damaging our fragile economy to further personal aims. If they've got a proposal of how it's going to be paid for, I would love to hear it. Rant over. Normal blogging resumes.
It's the X Factor quarter final tomorrow night. We've still got our bets on the two favourites Marcus and Little Mix although Marcus's odds went up the other day and Little Mix are now favourites by some way. Which is strange considering that they have not performed since last weekend. Have I missed something in the press? If both survive this week without being in the final two it should be a certainty that one of them will win (unless Janet, the only other act to escape the sing offs so far is a dark horse). It hasn't been a classic series this one, although it's still pulling in huge audiences - like that other Simon Cowell franchise "....'s Got Talent". I said on here that Britain clearly didn't have talent but has India? Judge for yourself.
Regular visitors to this blog will spot a slight change today with the addition of a Flattr Me button. In case you don't know about Flattr, it's a new site which aims to create a way of rewarding bloggers, tweeters and other providers of internet material for their efforts. I've always steered clear of Google Ads and similar on this blog as it's basically here for my own writing practice, I enjoy it and I'm not looking to earn anything from it. However, the beauty of Flattr is that you can donate miniscule amounts and, in due course, those miniscule sums could eventually grow into something worthwhile.
To participate you need to go to Flattr.com and sign up. You then fund your account with a sum that you can afford and, if you like, agree to a monthly commitment. Say you put a fiver in on the first of the month. You are then free to click on as many "Flattr Me" buttons as you like for a month. At the end of the month your fiver is shared equally between those sites that you have "Flattr'd" so a hundred clicks would give them all 5p, ten clicks 50p and five clicks a pound. It's a way of flattering tweeters and bloggers you enjoy reading and it costs as much or as little as you want.
So there it is. Click on it if you are enrolled and donate a penny to this poor blogger. I will leave it up there for a while and monitor the progress. It's a new site and I don't expect that number of Flattrs (currently zero) to move much initially but please don't leave me with zero - it's bad enough having no friends on Facebook.
Finally back to the cinema today. And where better than the fabulous FACT in Liverpool where we enjoyed a tasty snack in the cafe before settling down to The Ides Of March. With an amazingly strong cast including Clooney, Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti the omens were good. And we were not disappointed. It's a very believable story of spin doctoring and political scheming on the American Presidential campaign trail perhaps a little in the manner of the old BBC House Of Cards series. Gosling plays the Alastair Campbell style guru behind Clooney's whiter than white Democrat Governor Mike Morris but Gosling's character Stephen Mayer's idealistic views are shattered when he discovers a skeleton in his boss's cupboard. We both enjoyed the film immensely and can strongly recommend this tight and finely plotted piece of intrigue and study of political morals. A great title too.
After Clooney's thought provoking piece we had time for a quick drink before heading into the super little Box screen at FACT for Snowtown. I've read three or four glowing reviews of the film and all mentioned that it was dark. But the quality papers' reviewers must be made of sterner stuff than me as dark is way too light a word to use for this horrific true story of Australia's worst ever serial killer John Bunting. Bunting was responsible for eleven murders in total but fortunately the director spared us much of the grisly detail and we only witness one of the killings and the prelude to and aftermath of others. But the one murder shown in graphic detail was enough to prompt two of the audience to leave early. The film tells the story of how Bunting weaseled himself into the friendship and hospitality of a single mother and her sons after a neighbour she trusted to babysit turned out to be a paedophile who abused her children. Bunting's initial blood lust is cloaked in the guise of revenge but as he befriends the teenage Jamie and grooms him as a partner in crime we see him for the sinister and horrifically violent sadist that he is. The film is unquestionably hard hitting, extremely well filmed and has incredible performances from Daniel Henshall as Bunting and Lucas Pittaway as Jamie but it's grim, grim, grim. In addition, we both struggled with the sound and felt that some of the thick Ozzie accents could have benefited from subtitles and consequently we were not always sure exactly what was going on. See it only if you have a very strong stomach and even then make sure it's empty.
