Currently in Minneapolis airport, having missed the connecting flight and so waiting for the next one in about two hours. Tad will hopefully still be picking me up from Sioux Falls and so should be with Jill in around three-four hours depending...

NEARLY there...

I may not post for a few days. Jilly's dad is seriously ill and I've been busy all evening sorting out a flight tomorrow (Tues) to get me to Iowa asap to be useful or a distraction as needed. Glad I can be out there sooner than expected, but hate the reason.

As always, Net access will likely be possible, but limited, but anyone needing to speak to me urgently can always e-mail me or text me, as I will be checking when I can.

Thanks...

S o, it's the longest day of the year - and remarkably it's pretty sunny and pleasant so far. Go figure! (What's more there should be some nice toastiness by the end of the week too, so the parentals - who are holidaying in Scotland - should have a break from the rain too!)  Plenty of stuff to keep me occupied today. More articles to write and top 'n' tail, more stuff to ebay and also some ruthless 'chucking out' of stuff I don't really absolutely need.  All going reasonably well.

Dividing thoughts between musings on the great unpublished novel (Kerry recently prodded me to do more work on that and, yes, yes, I WILL), making a list of  the bills I have to pay tomorrow to avoid undoing unpleasant letterage and, of course,  sending best thoughts towards Jilly's dad who's having surgery this week. Wish I was out there, but the next trip is getting ever closer, so won't be long.

In the meantime, I had to smile at some of the cellophane packaging on one of Sunday's newspapers today. The supplements usually come wrapped in basic plastic stuff that is merely discarded, but printed on it today (around a special FILM supplement) was...

SAFETY NOTICE: Please do not dispose of this plastic bag on the street where it could dance around among the leaves in front of red garage doors for fifteen minutes and make the son of a repressed United States Marine Corps Colonel want to video it and tell the girl next door that there's so much American beauty in the world he feels like he can't take it, like his heart is going to cave in...

:)

O ne of those unexceptional days when I had a list of things to do as long as my not very short arm and I managed to get a fair amount of them done...

Posted parcels. There was an ebay item to go to Sweden, a care package to go to Jilly and an expenses claim to go to Paramount - all sent and all hopefully arriving within a few days/a week depending on distance.

Shopping done. Food and drink purchased and lottery tickets scribbled in ever-hopeful desperation. Somebody has to win, right?

Ebay items uploaded. Because I must be able to make a little profit from the fine as-new promotional debris littering the room. (Genuinely some good stuff and more to come each day - check out the list link, top right of the blog page!)

Article written. I got the Michael Bay piece finished and think I managed to balance it reasonably well between derison at the shallowness and loudness of his output and the pragmatic 'but nobody does shallow and loud better' more profitably angle.  The feature will be in the issue of Impact out at the end of July.

Rescheduled interview. Supposed to be talking to Peter Briggs about upcoming project Mortis Rex tonight, but now moved to tomorrow.

Paid bills. Actually, I didn't. But I thought about it, which is nearly the same, right?

Facebook'd. Okay, don't look at me like that, I'm weak. It's not like I'm Twittering.

Outside the rain has turned into a not-that-cold-really evening and there's the promise of more heat to come next week. Today only feels like the longest day.

W ell, that was a fun-packed few days. Two Cinema Days days of movies and also a brief foray into London for today's Transformers press activities. Let's have an overview of the best and worst, shall we:

W ell I'll be away for a few days, so this blog may be quieter than usual, not that it's Grand Central Station at the best of times. Firstly I'll be at a 50%-reduced Cinema Days (Fri-Sat, rather than Thurs-Sun and with only the one press conference)in tropical Nuneaton. There's a convenient Days Inn next to the Cinema, so that's good. I'll stay over until Sunday, travel down to Andover where my friend Dina's found a B&B for me overnight and then head back up to London on Monday for a preview of the new Transformers movie and press with Michael, Shia and Co.

Excepting the Transformers bit, which I'll rush-email up on Monday pm, this issue of Impact is done and dusted, but of course there's another issue to start from next week and another one after that before I'm travelling again. Life in the fastlane, huh?

S ome people think I became a journalist for the fame, fortune and adoring women that inevitably come with the profession and hang on my every word. No, wait. My sides are splitting. There, that's better. Yes, it's given me a few perks (though not as many as people think) huge opportunities to travel (okay, granted) and certainly resulted in meetings that have changed all parts of my life for the better. In reality, it's outrageously tedious and dazzlingly fun in far less than equal measure.  I'm hardly set up for life (or even June) and the hours are just plain silly. But one of the main reasons I do this job is for days like this weekend...

Where else could I sit and watch Spock talk with Mal Reynolds, Jimmy Olsen, John Crichton, one of the Goonies and boxing legend Henry Cooper? Being the unrepentant geek that I am, I still get gobsmacked at these meetings that seem more like a cosmic crossroads of realities than a Green Room at a convention in Milton Keynes for   (http://www.collectormania.com/) It's like seeing Barack Obama shopping at your local store while he's chatting with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and your teacher from school... it's the kind of bizarre colliding that tunnel-building scientists in Switzerland would consider TOO scary. And yet it's both satisfying and weird to see actors actually mingling and each being gently and genuinely intimidated in the presence of their peers. At one point, Nathan Fillion sees a photo that's been taken of him with Leonard Nimoy. 'Legend!' he smiles. No argument there.

It was a reasonably successful weekend. The only interview done was with Mr Fillion, who was the charmer he always is and also obliged with a photo-shoot for the forthcoming article, but I also got to have a chinwag with Ben Browder and sort out a proper chat with him in the near future. Mr Nimoy wasn't doing interviews (understandly burned out after two months of Trek promotion) but was a huge and courteous presence for the whole weekend. It all took place at the DONS Stadium in Milton Keynes which will be nice when it's fully finished! I'll be attending another of Showmasters events, the London Film and Comic Con in July and hope to see a whole slew of people there as time allows.

Right. Enough name-dropping and inner-geekiness for now. Articles to write, deadlines to meet and much shaking of head in shame that the BNP managed to spin their way into a European seat representing part of my region. Not sure who I hate more: The BNP fascist leader bully-boys who ran a superbly distracting campaign, the people who voted for them (out of loyalty or idiotically blind protest) or the government for creating a climate in this country where the BNP could ever seem like any alternative.

Then again, in this climate 'Live Long and Prosper...' sounds more like an MP's redict than a Vulcan maxim.

A nother serious blog. (I promise more trivial pursuits will be along shortly! ) But a few years ago, a friend of mine - Paul Redhead - told me that one of the conditions of being able to live in in a democracy was the absolute responsibility to vote. I argued that living in a democracy also gave me the right not to vote if I so wished, as that also exercised my right to use my vote in a certain capacity too. Having said that, I've always tended to believe that you SHOULD vote when you can, as otherwise it does limit your right to bitch and moan with any degree of righteousness thereafter. Usually.

But today in the UK, I'm sure I've joined a lot of people in NOT voting in the local elections. Because right now, it's hard to think of any politician I actually trust. In the last month or so, Westminster has been turned upside down by the revelations regarding hundreds of MPs' expenses and opportunistic fiddling of accounts etc. The 'crimes' actually fall into three categories... 1) the genuine possible oversights where an MP has put something so silly on expenses that it CAN only have happened by carelessness/lack of attention because if it was done deliberately they'd be laughed out of town (example: the guy who put in a chit for the donation  made at a church service)... 2) the wholly opportunistic claims where the rules of claiming haven't actually been technically broken but the spirit of them has been bent out of any reasonable understanding (example: those who have used holes in the system to claim thousands of pounds for extra homes - closer to parliament than they need - or have abused flight allowances or fudged household needs...or built a sodding house for their ducks! 3) the ones who in ANY other profession would have had been walked out of their place of work for 'conduct unbecoming' , kicked in the arse and dumped on the pavement or even had the police on the doorstep with handcuffs (example: those who claimed for non-existent mortgages, or went for years excepting payments they weren't entitled to, ie: FRAUD).

In the last few weeks, the MPs have been dropping like flies, usually jumping rather than being pushed, but only doing so when a newspaper is about to blow their cover, rather than out of some genuine 'I'm correcting this before anyone even thinks it was deliberate!'  In many ways you'd think that would be just fine. Get rid of 'em. Isn't the government better if all the welathy opportunists leave?  Ah yes, but in this job, you don't just leave.  (In fact, I genuinely can't remember the last time a politician was fired? Can you?) No, you gallantly say that you've actually done nothing wrong but after due consideration you've decided to step down at the NEXT GENERAL ELECTION (ie: sometime next year) to spend more time with your family... but only AFTER after you pick up lots more expenses and grants for holding out for another twelve months. (It's like a waiter spitting in your food and then demanding you negotiate the tip anyway while promsising he'll be back to do it again tomorrow!)

All this disconnect from the public and the general consideration that whatever you're caught doing as an MP, there's a fair to middling chance you can get forgiven by your colleagues and back into government after a few years in the directorship of several prominent firms wilderness anyway (Yes, Peter Mandelson, I'm looking at you! Oi, David Blunkett, don't even think about it!) means that this country has lost almost all its faith in its leaders. Change we can believe in? Not so much over here, mate.

I don't fall into the easy trap of thinking ALL MPs are crooks. I'm sure most are reasonably fair or no more opportunistic than the average person. But if the only way to force all MPs to open their books and show if they've bucked the system is to have a General Election, then so be it. It's dramatic, but it gives the public a voice and a line they can draw in the sand and at least START to regain a mutual trust. (Simon's done a great opinion/ blog about this too) I doubt merely losing Gordon Brown as leader of the Labour Party (surely now a possibility after the day's and evening's events and the mass resignations and mea culpas) will solve anything, but a forced changing of the attitude as much as the guard in general, just might.

If not, I'm afraid that nothing changes. Or worse than that, it'll cause people to buy into the like of the BNP's savvy spin-cycle campaign (that their BNP leaders are no longer a bunch of nasty right-wing nazi-sympathisers but actually cuddly-wuddly misunderstood and honest, non-book-fiddling patriots) and give them more power in a protest vote against the main parties. The BNP has tapped into a mood of genuine anger and frustration and a need to believe  in the best for/of our country (and offered questions that, yes, actually  DO need addressing/answers...) in a way that few other parties have dared. Yes, it's bait and switch of the most insidiously bigotted  kind, but when the BNP starts looking remotely more credible than the government, you KNOW you have a problem.

It's a dirty time in politics. The question is, more than ever, just what else will need to come out in the spin cycle? I wash my hands of it.

W hen I was really young, we went on holiday to the East Coast (Reighton Gap, Filey and the like) and I'd always wake up early and on most days I would take my dad's hand and (leaving the car wherever it was parked) we'd walk through the quiet sun-rising morning to get a newspaper and if I was really lucky one of the comic summer specials (Monster Fun, Whizzer and Chips, anyone?) which I'd read and reread again and again later. Wherever we were, it would be long before the hustle and bustle of the day and the crowds of other inevitable fellow holiday-makers and it was as if the world was breathing in, just for a while. There'd be tons to do later, but right at that moment, my comic and my dad were the world and the only reason to rush would be to have the breakfast that my mum was rustling up back at the ranch bungalow/flat/etc. I can almost taste it now.

Yesterday was one of those rare days when a) Britain was hot, cloudless and balmy and b) I was up early enough for the world to be on the starting blocks rather than racing headlong into oblivion. Leaving the house and not yet onto the noisy New Road Side, I suddenly flashed back to those calmer, early days. Lots of water under the sandcastles since then. But whether it was the less-than-typical weather or the hour, I couldn't help smiling at the memory. I'm sure I worried a few people doing that. (Good, it'll keep 'em on their toes ;))


Sarah Connor told her son John that the future is what you make it. But as long as it doesn't involve robotic assassins, I'd like to think the past is too.