The name’s Ache... Back Ache.

My nemesis...

I went to see the latest Bond Movie last week – in our local village hall. By the time it was over, my back was definitely breakin’, not stirred.

So, Community Cinema is a thing. If, like me, you’d never heard of it before, it’s a rather clever scheme whereby you get to watch some movies that have just stopped showing at your nearest mega-screen cinema complex, but at a sensible price, and in your local village hall (other local indoor meeting establishments are available).

Additional benefits include not foolishly convincing yourself you can drink an entire litre of cola just before the film, no requirement to consume a container-full of popcorn so large it actually does come in a bucket, and, in our case at least, an interval that included a raffle.

Surprisingly, it had taken us 9 years of residence before we decided to dip our toes into the wonder of very local cinema and catch the latest Bond Blockbuster, SPECTRE, having singularly failed to sort out doing so in the considerable period of time it was readily available to view at assorted, large, cinematic emporiums across South Cumbria.

Ominously, the publicity suggested bringing a cushion, but I assumed this was probably for hiding behind when the film got particularly tense. It is a 12 Certificate, after all, and at my age it’s not good to be suddenly startled.

Having slithered our way through the snow last weekend, we ended our treacherous on-foot journey a whole five minutes after starting it and were greeted, in the mighty space that is the local Educational Institute’s biggest room, by a end-wall-filling screen, and the sort of data projector that could turn the standard dull Powerpoint presentation into a lethal assault on the senses.

All well and good, and the speakers looked pretty beefy too, but there was one small, hard, problem – the seating. If you can picture those dreadful, folding, plastic and metal chairs from school in the 1970s, then you’re pretty much there – except these seemed to have been specially modified by sadists to be extra uncomfortable.

As 007 pursued his latest, even badder than the baddest of bad guys across the world, (carelessly parking his Aston Martin in a river, which I’m still finding somewhat tricky to forgive), my discomfort grew. Even Mrs G’s generous loan of her cushion couldn’t alter the fact that the biggest trail of destruction occurring was to my spine, and not whatever James was blowing up, shooting, or attempting to get into bed with, on screen.

The interval raffle provided brief relief (if no bottle of wine or body lotion gift set), but by the time Bond was enduring a particularly unpleasant torture scene, I was pretty sure that his on-screen pain level and my seat-induced back-attack were probably pretty even on the hurty front.

So, to summarise: Community cinema is great, the Bond movie was good, but I think I’ll need to upgrade my seat next time.

The name’s Chair. Arm Chair.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 22nd of January 2016. The paper retitled it as "Spectre of back pain hit hard".

It hasn't appeared on their website so far, but if you want to keep an eye out for it, head here. Interestingly, the Opinion section on the site has now started including items with categories of Our View, Letter, and Debate, so it's notably busier than before.

In a further interesting development, having finally obtained a couple of back issues of the print version of the paper, it seems last week's "Schaf Shuffle" wound up with three titles: My original, the one used online (and covered here), and a print version with "Weatherman's intriguing style".

My usual pedantic nature shone through whilst watching Bond, with a rising need to question why he cold have a massive train-destroying scrap with a bad guy, but in a series of carriages apparently bereft of any other passengers, then get beaten unconscious, only to be well enough to bed the Bond girl five minutes later. Still, he is James Bond, so just about anything is possible, right? Licence to suspend disbelief...

(CD A-Z tonight: The mighty ELO! It's time to Face The Music...)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog