Harry Potter and the Old Lady's Shoe

I heard the crash of a foot, my head snapped to the source of the sound and I saw a little old lady staring down at her slipper, the kind that old people call a shoe. She then scraped her foot vigorously along the ground, narrowly missing her oversized handbag as her leg flew into the air, she may have overdone the scraping a little*. As she hobbled along past me she muttered “Hah! Killed that wasp.”, it was the most beautiful thing I’ve witnessed in a very long time. I felt that justice had been served to that particular menace to society. I have to wonder how many wasps she'd tried to splat before she succeeded with 'that wasp' though. At least she got one of the blasted things, I suppose. I hate wasps. And pear drops, they’re disgusting.

The other thing I wanted to talk about was Harry Potter. I’ve been re-reading them, and in the first book, I found this “there will be books written about Harry- every child in our world will know his name!”, which made me smile, JK Rowling wouldn’t have believed, when writing that, that her creation would have such phenomenal success. I don’t think there has ever been anything like Harry Potter before, and I don’t suppose there ever will be again. It’s a shame in a way, Harry Potter got everyone reading, and showed the power that literature can have, but it’ll probably never happen again. It takes something really special to make the world notice in the way Harry Potter did.

*I understand this makes it sound like the old lady kicked her leg so hard that it came off, but I’d just like to assure you that no old ladies were harmed in the making of this blog post, her leg is most definitely still attached. (unlike the wasp's)

New Music.

So, recently I’ve been trying to find new music to get my teeth into. Occasionally, my search has been fruitful and I’ve discovered a load of decent new bands. It’s just nice to listen to something new from time to time, but it’s hard to find something when you don’t really know what you’re looking for. My music taste is odd, to say the least, and I generally don’t like chart toppers until they’ve officially fallen out of fashion and into history. It’s not out of any presumption of being different, or better, it’s just that I’m so out of touch with everything that goes on in the outside world that I don’t hear these tunes until they’re retro. To me though, music these days appears to be mostly just noise. What’s dance about? There’s no rhythm, no possible way that anyone could find a dance to go with it. Mostly. There are bands from most genres that I like, in all fairness.

But there has been a sort of new wave of music recently. People are taking up their acoustic guitars again, and I love the sweetness, the ring it has. It’s not just because I have an acoustic, I’ve always admired them, and it’s not that I don’t really like electrics, it’s because acoustics have character and soul. They’re more natural than those strange noises that feature in dance music, or even in some rock. I’m going through a chilled out phase, and I like it, but it’s inconvenient when I’m at parties, or in the common room, because I never know the music. I still listen to classic rock, because it’s just plain awesome, and it’s actually, in general, a lot more relaxed than modern rock, there’s a reason it’s called classic, and there’s a reason that it has survived; it’s good, great in fact. Led Zeppelin are probably my favourite classic rock band, because they’re so versatile, they had so many styles from ‘Rock n Roll’ to ’D’Yer Maker’. You can see their influences in so many areas of music, even today, especially with certain singer-songwriters. For example, Scott Matthews. He’s one of the musicians I most admire, and probably the most underrated as well.

I don’t even know whether half of the new things I’ve started listening to are general knowledge. I could be listening to the number one in the charts right now, and I wouldn’t even know. Although I doubt it, it’s usually Lady Gaga, and I’m not a huge fan. That’s another point I should make actually. She’s dominating whatever market it is that she belongs to. In some ways that’s good, getting back to the old days when bands were consistently good, and consistently topping charts, but in some ways it’s not, music is as diverse as any other media, and maybe it should be allowed to flourish in all corners. Or maybe people stopped dominating because our attention spans got smaller, we can’t focus on the same band for as long. Maybe it’s because people just download the one track they want now, instead of just buying an album. I don’t know. All I know is that music is always changing.

So, I suppose what I’m saying is; try some new tunes! You never know what you might find. Personally, I recommend the following:

Scott Matthews (Any song from Passing Stranger), Blitzen Trapper (Black River Killer), Bon Iver (Skinny Love, Flume, Re:Stacks, Blindsided), Isak Strand & the Resin Band (Josie Jo), Joseph Arthur (Could We Survive), Miike Snow (A Horse is Not a Home), Patrick Watson (Big Bird in a Small Cage), Ray LaMontagne (Sarah, Hold You in My Arms, Shelter), Thom Yorke (Harrowdown Hill), Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Y Control). That’s all I can think of for new music, but try out old bands too. Listen to songs you haven’t listened to of familiar bands. There’s bound to be something there. Also, yes it is Miike, with two ‘i’s, Snow.

Also, a tribute to my brother, bless him, the legend that he is. This is a conversation we had recently:

“MATT,” (we were shouting, as he was upstairs and I was downstairs) “LIE TO ME!”

“LOVE YOU!” I assumed that he’d misheard, thinking I’d said that I loved him. For those who don’t know, Lie to Me is a program, you should watch it, it’s one of the best things on TV.

“NO, LIE TO ME.”

“I JUST DID!” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I laughed so hard, touché, Matt, touché. My mother also laughed manically. She was in the toilet, it was a little creepy, I won’t lie.

Ciao!

Incoherency, Garlic Bread and Banking.

My brother has officially lost the ability to speak. Whether the fault lies with his becoming a teenager, or with hours upon hours of computer games, he seems to have finally sunk into incoherent mumbling. This was brought to my attention today when he was trying to call me down for tea. All I could hear was “RO-EEE. GAAAABAAA REE-EE” How on Earth, as someone not entirely in touch with modern teenagers and their language, was I supposed to decipher any sort of meaning from a series of moans and mumbles?

I shouted for him to tell me again. He tried. This shows two things, the first is that I at least can put a sentence together and be heard and understood, which shows that it must be him, and not the distance from which he was shouting. The second is that he understands English, and that whether or not I had slipped into a parallel universe, English is (or was, who knows, the world is a constantly changing place) the accepted language of use. So, therefore, it should not have taken four attempts for him to relay a relatively simple message to me.

If you’re interested, what he was trying to say was “ROSIE, THE GARLIC BREAD’S READY”. How annoying. I had something else to rant about, but in my excitement at being annoyed and consequently writing about it, I’ve forgotten what that was. How annoying. At the moment I’m watching Grand Designs and looking at University Courses. Also, I got an email from my bank today, apparently some information is wrong and they can’t activate my account. Very annoying, I spent a good half an hour on the phone the other day trying to open it. There was a man who spoke infuriatingly slowly in an Irish accent on the other side of my phone who kept congratulating me on tiny details of my life. An example of this is:

“Do you have any middle names.”

“Yes, it's Alice.”

“Good for you.”

Why is that good for me? I’m honestly totally indifferent. Had I been born and not been given a middle name, I wouldn’t have spent my life thinking “I can’t help but feel that a tiny part of me is missing.” or even, had I been given a different one, would I have mused “That’s not who I am, Lord, I feel so lost.”. my point is, my middle name really has had very little impact on my life, and I haven’t a clue why I should be told it was good. It’s like praising someone on receiving the local newspaper. To be fair, I probably shouldn’t be angry at him for being courteous, at least he was making an effort, unlike the rest of most of society today.

That’s all folks.

Toy Story 3!

I watched Toy Story 3 in 3D. Toy Story was one of the great films of my childhood, and I was so excited when I found out that they were bringing out another one. It was amazing, the 3D was ace! The glasses were a rip off though, but next time I go to see another 3D film, I get a discount off my ticket for reusing the glasses, so it was sort of worth it. It’s not like the red and green cellophane surrounded by a vaguely glasses-shaped piece of cardboard anymore, gone are the days of miscoloured dimensions, now we have sunglasses. I actually think they’re pretty stylish too, but what do I know? The glasses were a thrill, I was dubious at first, “No red? No green? They must be mad! What kind of Universe do they think we're living in?”, but they were not mad. They worked, and I could watch a 3D film which contained the full range of the visible light spectrum!

So, the glasses were cool, and the film was brilliant too. It was funny and didn’t ruin the Toy Story reputation for me, unlike other sequels I could mention (Shrek 2 - dire, Shrek 3 - an abomination that actually made me angry, which is hard. (It’s not hard, but the film was excessively bad). The only thing that stopped me getting out of my seat and throwing popcorn and small children at the screen which was so offensive to me, was the fact that I was with friends and the dronkeys were cute. I’m not going to watch the fourth one for fear of setting myself on a violent rampage, plus I wouldn’t be able to relinquish the grudge fully enough to bring myself to watch it. I digress). So, yeah, it was cool.

I know what you’re thinking, “finally, a blog post that wasn’t composed of just anger” I thought I’d branch out, who knows, maybe it’ll stick! It probably won’t though, sorry, I’m an angrily natured being and it takes a lot (of bright primary colours or shiny things) to make me anything other than angry.

The Proper Use of Bicycles and their Affiliated Handlebars

I was walking home from school the other day, annoyed and fed up, which is usually the result of school and the unutterably dull journey home, when I saw a bike. The bike was being ridden by a girl who, I’m sorry to say, I must describe as an oaf. She was rolling along at about 0.5 miles an hour, neglecting her handlebars. There is a reason that handlebars were invented. The man who invented handlebars would be literally turning (hah) in his grave. Why, when you have perfectly functioning handlebars, would you decide to use your own body as a counterbalance in lieu of the aforementioned handlebars?

As you can imagine, I was irked by this (sorry for the harsh language I am about to use) twit. I scowled hatefully at her, screaming “FALL”, in my head of course. She did. Now, there are two scenarios which could be drawn from this, the first is that she is a fool of the highest order, the second is that I have the much sought after power of telepathy. The two events are not mutually exclusive. I have since concluded that I have not got supernatural abilities, through rigorous testing, but I am fairly certain that she is a fool, because after she fell off her bike due to the misuse of the handlebars, she proceeded to get up and not use her handlebars. It doesn’t take a genius. Natural selection, you have been foiled again.

Football is bad for my soul.

As you may well have realised, yesterday was the long-awaited England match. I went to watch it with my family at my grandparents house.

I should not be allowed to watch football. I turned into a monster. By the second half I was wishing all manner of death upon the American team, who may be perfectly agreeable and charming people in the flesh. But I doubt it, because they're American, and they scored. In fact, I was so angry at the point of the American handball that I suggested, rather loudly, that he had his arm amputated rather than getting a yellow card, as then it wouldn't get in the way again. I think I may have scared my family, especially my nan. Sorry nan.

This could possibly be seen as perfectly normal, if I was accustomed to watching football. I am not. I never watch it, I didn't even realise it was the World Cup until about three days ago, when I was told by an exasperated friend. I'm not a football person. It's not in my blood, at least not on my fathers side. He hates it, and I can see why. I don't like being tense, it makes me... well, tense. I have resolved to stay away from any further matches. It's not even a good game! Now badminton, that's a sport. *ducks to avoid sharp objects thrown by football fans*

So, for this reason, I have come to the conclusion that football is bad for my soul, and so I shouldn't be allowed to watch it. EVER.

Of Tooth and Toothbrush

First post!

Recently I have begun the process of getting braces, which would be simple if I weren't getting them from Stafford Hospital, but I am, so it's not. Before I'm deemed worthy of having the braces, I have to go to lessons on cleaning my teeth and not eating hard things. I've been to one, and there is a further one to go, but the first was traumatic enough.

I had to clean my teeth while she held a mirror up for me. Honestly, I've never used a mirror to clean my teeth before, after all these years, I think I know where most of them are. What was more unnerving than watching my own contorted face gawping back at me, was the woman staring at me while I brushed. I kept thinking to myself "What if I've been doing it wrong all these years?"

After this ordeal was over, and I'd successfully dribbled down my front (how embarrassing), she told me that I had a good technique. I replied saying "I've been doing it a while", to which she laughed politely, but was clearly irked. Maybe she's heard that one before? A little later, she revealed to me that her toothbrush was often flat by the time she used it, because her children and husband usually got here before her. Nice. So, here I was, recieving a lecture on dental hygiene from a woman who shares her toothbrush with at least three other people, when she began to insult my toothbrush, the poor thing.

I mention this, because it brings me to my tale of buying a new toothbrush. I went to my local tesco direct, which is essentially a petrol station with a fruit isle, and purchased what has to be the best manual toothbrush I have come across. It was mint scented, yes scented. And just in case, in your excitement, you forgot what mint smelt like (easily done when confronted with such an item), there was a mint leaf scratch n sniff on the front. Unfortunately, however, when I scratched, I sniffed no mint. I think the man in the shop scratched away all the sniff in his lust for mint-scented-packaging. Darn you, tesco man, darn you to heck. (Madagascar reference)

So, now you know of my toothbrush, which has damn fine bristles, if I do say so myself. Thank you for reading.