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Under and Over Performing

Well, you leave your PC alone for a few days and all hell breaks loose. We’ve had Chechnyan lunatics on the streets of Boston and in MIT, scaring the bejeezus out the really clever bods and the general public in equal measure. Add to this that the whole of Texas pretty much exploded, each with the pointless loss of almost as many lives as you could count on your fingers and toes.

At this stage it’s still unclear what the bloody hell these Boston stranglers were up to and why they blew the legs and feet off many innocent civilians and also killed a handful. The media are desperate to pin this on organised terrorism, but it seems that this is no more planned than a hasty fart after a prolonged course of Ex-Lax. You and I could both probably have a pretty good stab at making an explosive from the scribbled notes of an ingenious and overtly aggressive ten-year-old, plus an hour of unencumbered ip ghosting on the internet. That the two numpties didn’t manage to blow themselves up is probably the biggest surprise, not that this wasn’t, in fact, the focused and venomous plans of some uber-villain only usually found operating an underground bunker in an Ian Fleming novel. It might have been easier for Boston and the rest of the United States in general to believe that this attack was by the hand of a foreign threat with enough guile to thwart the alleged talent, skills and budget of the armed forces that came out in literally droves, beating their chests in more and more ridiculous headwear as the pursuit went on. The weight of the problem, the lateness of the hour and the depressing length of time it took to catch the second alleged bomber would have been unbearable, had I not been concentrating on “what a funny hat he had on.”

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Regardless, this farce, starring thousands of the nations’ finest crime-solving illuminati couldn’t locate the man that was finally discovered lurking in a boat under a tarpaulin in a back garden of one Watertown resident, just a hundred feet up the road the where the press conference (that really is a funny looking hat) was taking place. Despite the warning of the man being ‘armed and dangerous’ and ‘not to approach him’, the resident in question went to have a look at the blood on the side of his boat that wasn’t there before and found a dishevelled teenager, cold, bloodstained, and decidedly free from the menace that the authorities would have had you believe he was capable of. Well done, nosey resident. Boo, hiss at the ineffectual authorities for not finding them on their own. Still, they got him and that was the plan. Well, they didn’t actually get him. They have him. Yes, that’s better. They have him. Still, that’ll do.

I still haven’t got my DVD back. I did ask for it again, and I thought she might crumble as I have been doing my utmost to behave myself and not piss her off too mightilly. There was a moment when she nearly gave in, but it passed as quickly as it appeared. I had a go, I failed. There you go. I might leave it a week.

Today was the second saturday in a row that I got out of work early, but the first saturday that I ventured to Worthington Park, to watch my nine and eleven year olds try their hand at a spot of acting. A local director of some renown, accompanied by a BBC cameraman, was shooting a short film and had politely asked if it was okay to give my two youngest kids a few lines. When we had established that he wasn’t in fact a member of the dirty mac brigade, propositioning my children with cocaine, both my wife and I duly agreed. He paid them for their time with a huge bag of assorted chocolate from Sainsbury’s. A work of genius. Cheap, but highly effective. This was their first effort (more of this in a future episode, including youtube footage, I expect) into the world in which my wife inhabits almost perpetually. They were both pleased with their performances. We all grinned happilly in the car on the way home, opening a big box of Celebrations to, well…you know, celebrate.

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