Living for Disco

I had such a lovely weekend. I went to Swakopmund with some friends, went out dancing til the small hours, ate at warm and sunny pavement cafes, browsed in upmarket craft shops, climbed sand dunes and sat by the sea and chilled out. Much beer was consumed, and much good food digested. We even took a jaunt down to the Burning Shore to give Brad and Ange a wave, but the security guards looked a bit threatening. I expect they were too busy what with her giving birth and all to come out and say ‘hi’ anyway.

On that subject, I keep meaning to mention that my favourite radio station, Radio Wave, have been running a poll over the last few weeks, on the subject of whether the day that Angelina Jolie gives birth should be a national holiday in Namibia. I say yes. Any excuse for a long weekend is fine with me.

And now, here I am, in an office with a room temperature of -6, with only a fax machine with a stuck ringer, and a receptionist who insists on playing Whitney Houston’s “I will always love you” on repeat for company.

I knew there was a reason that I hated Mondays.

Working Title seem to have done a lot of fantastic films – O Brother Where Art Thou, The Big Lebowski, Wish You Were Here, My Beautiful Launderette, The Man Who Wasn’t There, to name a few.

They’ve also been partly responsible for a massive amount of rubbish. Wimbledon – possibly, next to Love, Actually, the worst film ever made. So when I sat down to watch the new version of Pride and Prejudice last night, with Keira Knightley all done up in wispy calico, frolicking with gay abandon across England’s misty fields, I expected it to be bad. I’m happy to say that I was not at all disappointed. It was truly hilarious.

Here are just a few things that I liked about it:
• Mr Bingley’s hair. It seemed to loom larger over his head with every scene, eventually threatening to engulf anyone who approached him in a teetering quiff of tsunamic proportions.
• Donald Sutherland. I’ve always been a bit in love with Donald Sutherland, but after seeing him wax poetic over an enormous pair of pig’s testicles, I’m just open mouthed with admiration. Not too open mouthed though. Those testicles were kind of alarming.
• The statues. Clearly the absence of sex scenes in the film requires losing Lizzy amidst a collection of Roman marbles. Cue many lingering shots of firm stone buttocks and strong manly chests to help prod the audience’s flaccid imagination into a sweaty, gasping frenzy. It takes precious time away from plot and character development, but hey, who cares? Everyone knows the story anyway.
• Mr Darcy. So miserable, he seemed permanently on the verge of tears, yet we know not why. Were his breeches pinching in tender places?
• The alternative U.S. ending. The luminous swans on the lake at Pemberley for instance, must be a result of the high levels of uranium present in the Derbyshire soil in the late 17th Century. And the closing scene… ‘Mrs Darcy… Mrs Darcy… Mrs Darcy…’ Pure genius. Don’t watch it without a bowl handy for those with delicate constitutions.
• Every proposal scene Working Title films include has to take place in the rain, a la Andie MacDowell, because if you’re trying to blink water off your eyelashes, you can’t help but look desperately in love. This is no exception. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
• The dialogue. I don’t know where Deborah Moggach got all that stuff about ribbons from, but dang, it’s good. Jane Austen could learn a thing or two from her and no mistake.

I watched it twice, and it’s even funnier the second time round. I can definitely recommend it.

I’d still rather have Colin Firth wading out of a lake though.

As far as I am aware, the policewoman behind the counter is speaking to me in Oshiwambo. Usually people speak to me in Afrikaans, but whatever the language, I cannot work out what she is saying.

“I’m sorry?” I say, a confused look wandering across my face.

“What date did the accident happen?”. She’s not speaking Oshiwambo at all. She’s just speaking English very, very fast.

“28 April.” I ran into the back of someone’s car. It was very minor, but promises to be a royal pain in the arse in terms of insurance, and the fact that the people who own the car don’t have any.

“What?” Clearly she is having trouble understanding me too.

“28 April.”

She writes it down on an official looking form.

“What date did it happen?”

I stare at her, convinced that she could not have just asked me that question again, and say, very slowly, “28 April.”

”NO! NO! I mean the day, the day. What day did it happen.” I realize that we are both speaking to one another as if to small and very stupid children. This could be a long process, as there are 500 more boxes on the form to fill in. In triplicate.

“Friday”, I say slowly.

“Where did it happen?”

“Near Maerua Mall. On Centaurus.”

She looks at me with undisguised contempt, and starts rapping her pen against the bars separating us. I’m starting to understand why they are there. “Where? Where? Centaurus is a school, not a street.”

I start to feel a bit teary. I cannot believe that this woman is haranguing me for not knowing the street name of the place where I had my accident. This is a country where no-one knows even major street names, not even taxi drivers. If you want directions you actually have to know where things are, which can be very problematic, if you are, say, a bewildered tourist, and are looking for directions. The conversations tend to be circular:

“Hello. Can you tell me where the museum is?”

“Ah. It is near the government house. You know government house?”

“No.”

“Ah. It is on the road near the Kristuskirche.”

“Um. How do I get to Kristuskirche?”

“You know where is the court house??”

“No.”

Ad nauseam.

We manage to finish filling out the accident report form without it resulting in my arrest, despite a minor altercation over my British driving license.

I ask for a copy of the report and am told this will cost me N$30, and that I must queue up for it round the corner in a different department, even though she is holding all the existing copies in her hand. I decide the insurance company doesn’t need one after all.

I can tell this one is going to run and run.

I’m thinking of moving this site over to the free blogging service on WordPress.

There are a number of features on WordPress that I quite like:

• You can create different pages, so I could have lots of other stuff on here. Not that I would do much with it, other than write nonsense about myself, but the option is there.
• They have a nifty little calendar.
• You can categorise your entries, so that people arriving at the site can browse through all the exciting posts you have ever written about say, pigeons, and be enlightened more quickly than they might have been if they didn’t know there was an entire category of posts all about pigeons.
• erm… that’s it, really.

The ‘cons’ of moving the site are:

• You have to choose one of the ugly and boring templates, which you cannot then change (although according to wordpress, this is so that I don’t have to tax my brain with snippets of HTML or CSS or whatever, and is therefore for my own good). I quite like this leafy autumnal template that I have at the moment, but blogger is pissing me off with its insistence in moving the sidebar down to the bottom of the page whenever I post photos, and being in other respects unimaginative.
• Because you can’t change the templates, you can’t use haloscan for the comments, as far as I can tell. Please enlighten me if this is not the case. This would mean that I would have to leave all my lovely comments on this site.

I don’t know. Who cares? Really?

Pff. I’m off to buy some chocolate.

Because it’s lunchtime, and I have nothing better to do, I had a look at my statcounter. It seems that someone nominated me for the weekly post roundup thing that Tim Worstall does on his uber-blog. And he describes me as delightful, which, of course, is as it should be, but it’s nice to be loved. This site has seen a flurry of visitors. I am quite beside myself. Fame finally beckons. I won’t forget you all though, when I’m fabulously wealthy and living it up on my own private island.

Thank you, whoever it was who put my post forward! You shall be rewarded with a bag of fresh guavas.