Arts

Film: Hot Fuzz

As local cinemas go, it couldn't be more different to my previous one. There'll be no more red and green Automaticket stubs and chandelier-lit theatre. The staff don't yet know us by name - and I suspect that'll never happen. On the other hand, we now have the luxury of more than one screen and all the latest films on their release date.

It seems appropriate that the first film we watch here is this, the closest you get to a British blockbuster.

And it's really quite good. In particular the tightly edited punctuation sequences which were reminiscent Darren Aronofsky's "hip-hop montages". Worth a look, so long as you can get past the deliberately excessive violence.

Personal

Magnolia eradication

The Magnolia eradication plan continues. The bedrooms were easy: Morning Light and Southern Stone. It's proving harder to agree on colours for downstairs though.

I'm drawn to paints that sound like the coast or a pudding. Emma says the colour itself is important. So far we've had Autumn Fern, Oyster Cove, Raspberry Torte, Noisette, Natural Calico, Natural Hessian, Vineyard Earth, Soft Caress and Gentle Fawn.

This might take a while. Maybe we should try Magnolia.

(In the meantime, does anyone want four and a half litres of soft sheen Autumn Fern 4? It's the pinkish colour in the left-hand alcove. We won't be using it.)

Personal

Everything we own

More than one person commented with dismay that the photograph of the back of the van remained the most recent entry on this blog for over a month. Although not the most dramatic of cliff-hangers the common question was always "what happened next?"

Short answer: we moved.

The whole house is painted Magnolia (there was even a tub of paint in the dustbin) so we're on a mission to bring colour into its life before the rest of the furniture arrives. As a result everything everything from that van is in the one room we're living in while the decorating gets underway.

Tech

Father Broadband

Any other day I'd have been annoyed to be woken at two-thirty in the morning. But to us the phone tinkling in the early hours was the equivalent of hearing reindeer footsteps on the roof. I closed my eyes and went back to sleep, hoping.

When we woke, Emma and I turned to each other. "Did you hear it?" ... "Do you think?"

We hadn't been dreaming. Broadband - like Father Christmas - had come in the night.