And if rain brings winds of change let it rain on us forever.
I have no doubt from what I’ve seen that I have never wanted more.
With this line I’ll mark the past as a symbol of beginning.
I have no doubt from what I’ve seen that I have never wanted more.

VNV Nation, ‘Solitary’

Hours till departure: 12. I write this, the sound of my key-strokes echoing around the room like an epileptic tap-dancer. For Thursday saw the descent of a plague of baseball-cap wearing locusts, in the form of delivery men from Fleet Shipping, who did descend and cart away my possessions – all forty-nine boxes of them, totalling 3.77 cubic metres. And that was after three manic days of cleaning house, which saw ten bin-liners of junk thrown into our rubbish bin (and, if the truth be told, next door’s bin as well, when ours got filled – not quite as anti-social as it sounds, since there’s no-one staying there at the moment. Our patio, on the other hand, gets lumpier…).

The cleaning process was actually kinda fun in a bloody-hell-so-that’s-where-that-went kind of way. Having been here for over eight years, that’s a startling amount of junk to filter through, and I confess to having ground to a halt on a number of occasions, purely to wallow in nostalgia. Some of the stuff that cropped up was like a time machine, winging me back to the days of the Scala, anime conventions, and the days when acquiring a copy of Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the highlight of my month. Cue no agonising at all there – far worse was the problem of whether or not to take my vinyl; unplayed for a good five years, but still…

That trauma finished a full ten minutes before the removal men arrived, and I showed them full professional courtesy by staying the hell out of their way, while they dealt with everything from the skull, through the long-sword, to the large stuffed Hello Kitty (though out of deference to their sensitivities, I did dress her in her regular jim-jams, rather than the PVC fetish outfit). Sitting downstairs in the living-room, listening to them thumping around up in my room, it was weirdly like having burglars — albeit very polite ones, for whom you make cups of tea. I kept poking my head round the door to see how things were progressing, and then running off to hide in another room. That’s a decade of my life going out of the house in cardboard boxes. Let’s just hope they actually were removal men, rather than cunning thieves with an inside line to the forwarding company…

I must confess to choosing them largely on the basis of them having a neat web-site, though there was a phone conversation as well, from which I got the impression that they knew what they were doing. Mind you, subsequent calls have had a disturbing quotient of finding myself talking to a phone drone; there appear to be two competent people there; fortunately one of these was the bloke supervising my packing. But the die has been cast, the boxes have been taped up, and the sword carefully enclosed in bubble-wrap and then tied to poster tubes. Let US Customs try and work out what that is all about.

Hopefully, the next time I see them will be in Phoenix, though I will be keeping a weather eye on the shipping forecasts for the next four weeks, to see if there are any reports of cargo ships going down in the North Atlantic. It’d be nice if they had some kind of satellite tracking, so you could follow the progress of your shipment on the Internet, but that’s perhaps a little progressive. I’ll just cross my fingers and look forward to, with luck, a Christmas spent opening forty nine boxes of non-giftwrapped junk.

And so I find myself with what seems like an unshrinking pile of stuff to sort out, as the weeks become days become hours. As yet, I still haven’t actually got a visa, so this trip will be technically “temporary”, even though as far as I’m concerned, I now live in Arizona, and will only ever be visiting London. They won’t let you change from a tourist visa to a legal residency one from inside the country, so when I hear that the necessary papers are here, I’ll fly back, go get them authorised at the American Embassy, then fly back. This is entirely useless, but looking at the ongoing saga of their election, what the hell do you expect? The worst thing is that, until the visa comes through, I’m a tourist and so will be unable to work. How will I ever be able to cope?

Meanwhile, the omens continue to roll in. This is the 150th TC editorial. Tonight sees the death of Victor Meldrew in One Foot in the Grave. It also sees the first million-pound winner on the British version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. [Why do I think this might just be connected to the previous one, which – purely by coincidence, I’m sure – happens to be on another channel at the same time…] Tonight, on the way back from the last “farewell drink”, with Rob Dyer, I fell asleep on the train and missed Tulse Hill, for only the second time in my almost decade here.

What all this means is entirely another matter, but I present them here for your contemplation.

And with that, I depart, for a glorious future. Not without some trepidation, for fear of the unknown is a terrible thing. But I do so with hope, and expectation, and anticipation, and a tremendous sense of joy at the possibilities and love that await me in America, not to mention the wonderful friendships that I have here, and will maintain despite the distance. For the world truly is shrinking.

You shall hear from me again, soon…

Dir: Lorenzo Doumani
Star: Katherine Heigl, David Lipper, Meredith Salenger, Randy Quaid.

“Let’s get ready to bumble!”

Killer insects have been responsible for some classically bad movies in the past: the entire killer-bee genre, for example, or J.P.Simon’s extraordinary Slugs, which took a Shaun Hutson novel and removed all the artistic qualities therein. Bug Buster operates in a similar way, except without a source novel to plunder, so resorts to scenery-chewing and not one, but two, actors who’ve never done anything outside the starship Enterprise: George Takei and James Doohan. But like many bad movies, there is a saving grace, and in this case, it comes in the form of Randy Quaid. He plays General George, a pest eliminator – or, as his ultracheap TV adverts put it, “elimina-torrrrrrr” – who is lurking in the background for the first two-thirds of the film, foreshadowing events with a glorious mix of machismo and bullshit. His commercials alone are enough to keep you watching.

This is fortunate, since the rest of the film doesn’t have much on this front, beyond poor Katherine Heigl going through more insectoid torture than most fledgling actresses should have to. She plays Shannon, who has been having nightmares involving giant cockroaches crawling over her skin – and let me put it this way, I couldn’t see any CGI being used. While not quite up to the standard of infamous Hong Kong nasty, Centipede Horror, you still have to take your hat off to her. Such are the traumas that have to be endured when you are in a movie with a monster which is not in the slightest big threatening or dangerous; the “Ick!” factor must be upped instead, and Heigl is the unfortunate heroine.

Anyway, she and her family (including another has-been from television, Bernie Koppel from The Love Boat) buy a hotel, and move into the sleepy California town of Mountview. At least, it was sleepy, until Steve (David Lipper) and Veronica (Meredith Salenger) go for a dip in the local lake, despite “the old wives’ tales about people getting their legs gnawed off in the water”. And, lo, before you can say “Wasn’t she in Lake Placid?”, Veronica has duly been nibbled by something slimy, and I don’t mean Steve. The local sheriff (Doohan) closes the lake with admirable promptness – as he says, “You saw ‘Jaws’, didn’t you?” – until he shoots a “scarfish”. The local vet, who moonlights as the local doctor, local forensic pathologist and, for all I know, local priest, helpfully informs him it’s a fish out of its water, and also has a giant cockroach in its stomach.

Realising this is not 100% normal, she calls her old teacher, Professor Fujimoto (Takei, shown right). He gives a new meaning to the old saw about “phoning his lines in”, since he never appears in a scene with any of the other characters, only talking to them on the telephone. Back at Shannon’s hotel, the lounge act have turned up; charmingly named ‘Trailer Park Trash’, their set is interrupted by the sudden, roach-related death of their sax player (played by cult movie guru Johnny Legend). Shannon is so upset, she…goes to see Fall of the House of Usher with Steve. As you do. But by an amazing coincidence, two audience members also suddenly go icky in an insect style – what are the odds against that? Cue an amusing cameo from MTV-jockette ‘Downtown’ Julie Brown as rabid reporter Katie Cunning of FU2 news, who is immensely irritating, yet is equally spot-on the mark, as a caricature of immensely irritating local news reporters.

“I can’t help wondering if there’s any connection between the roach I found in the fish, and the ones I found in the humans,” says our local vet/pathologist/whatever. Well, duh! Shannon continues her unusual therapy for her traumatic experiences by…taking the world’s bubbliest bath, watched by the town loonie, though her only reaction is to grab propane curling-tongs. Before you know it, she’s taking a shower too, in preparation for her next date with Steve – hey, why let a few deaths get in the way of your social life? Although in mitigation, if I had to let bugs crawl over me for the sake of art, you’d not get me off the soap for months. Veronica cunningly distracts Steve by having her leg go all septic (the one nibbled in the lake; it seems like a lifetime ago, but is really only three beers) and the unfeeling bitch then goes and dies on him. Sheesh.

Bugs are now pretty much everywhere: Veronica starts hatching, Shannon’s nightmares come true, though the insects attacking her are vacuumed up by Steve [as an aside, I’ve done this myself in New York – it’s about the only way to get rid of the roaches there], and her parents are ambushed while making love. Cue Katie Cunning again, though her horror is as nothing compared to the viewer’s, at having watched The Love Boat‘s doctor have a shag. “This whole thing has gotten way out of hand,” says a deputy, but I don’t think he’s referring to the movie in general. However, there’s only one man who can help…

“He was a war hero in Vietnam.”
“What did he do?”
“He survived…”

As the man himself says, “When General George opens up his can of whup-ass, there’ll be roaches in Siberia feeling the heat…” Associating with the General is nothing if not educational: “They appear to be amphibious…that means they can live in water and on dry land.” On the other hand, I wouldn’t put too much reliance on his scientific accuracy; five minutes later it’s, “Vampire bat: its bite’s deadlier than a king cobra…kill you like that…” Minor details like there not being vampire bats in California, and their bite not being poisonous anyway, don’t get in the way. But pseudo-science and cliche is this film’s stock-in-trade, as the following exchange shows:

“So you’re saying that once they get inside the body, they spontaneously lay larvae which destroy human tissue as they multiply at hyperaccelerated rates?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying!”

Things gallop cheerfully on to the inevitable conclusion in the roach lair – an old mineshaft, should you care about such things – which sees Oscar-nominee Quaid (1973’s The Last Detail) rolling around on the floor, engaging in a fist-fight with a papier-mache insect. Difficult to say whether he or Heigl were the most humiliated in making this film. There’s a Scooby-Doo moment, in which Scotty proves that ye canna change the laws of physics (ok, he doesn’t, but I always wanted to write that) before the obligatory ending that isn’t, leaving scope, more in hope than anything else I suspect, for Bug Buster 2. In your dreams, Doumani.

This is shallow, laughable and badly-written. There’s no doubt about that. But in its defence, it never stops moving, with something always going on. Heigl is cute and personable, and any producers reading this should also note she is clearly willing to do anything for a role… Randy Quaid is quite magnificent, and it’s a shame that he only turns up properly for the last third of the film, as he sets things ablaze and the character could easily sustain an entire movie. The effects are pretty decent, even if there’s some confusion over the difference between “cockroaches” and “millipedes”…hey, they’re all bugs. Mindless, gloopy and passable fun, if taken with the prescribed dose of alcohol.

Working days left: 0. Days till departure: 20. That’s it. Elvis may not quite have left the building, but he’s certainly had his exit interview. After more than a decade, I have no job. I am unemployed. I presume this means I have to spend all day tomorrow sitting on the couch watching Richard and Judy and The Teletubbies… Funnily enough, I won’t be – ironically, I’ll actually be going back into work! Yes, they can’t keep me away — or, at least, they can’t keep me away from my presents, for tomorrow’s visit is largely to acquire the gold watch or whatever it is they’ve got for me. My manager was sick today, and couldn’t make it in yesterday, so my goodies are lurking somewhere out of reach…

Sunday night’s storms had a spooky, portentous feel to them, as if the gods were saying to me, “Fine! Go on then, leave! See if we care!” — either that, or they just wanted to provide a gentle reminder of what I’m going to miss i.e. foul weather, cancelled trains, and the armpits of my fellow commuters. Either way, it’s an appropriate bookend, since my time in England has been sandwiched by tempestuous weather. These gales were the worst since October 1987 – scant weeks after I started work down South. That great storm was the day before my parents came down to visit me for the first time…and lo, my parents are about to come down once more, to visit me for the last time in this country.

Monday was certainly a strange little day, right from being woken up by the noise of rain hitting the window horizontally, with a sound like a Keith Moon solo. The office must have had only about 40% of the people in, it should normally have, and even at lunchtime, the streets were eerily quiet, the Post Office almost deserted, and Benjy’s sandwich bar seriously overstocked with unwanted cheese ‘n’ ham rolls [That’s one thing I may miss in America: cheese and ham sandwiches which contain no salad, no coleslaw, no mayonnaise. Just cheese and ham.] Mind you, it worked in my favour: I’d scheduled my leaving do for that night, and the attendance was unsurprisingly low, what with the people who hadn’t made it in at all, and those who opted not to risk staying late. By 8pm, there was one other person in the pub. By 10pm, I was out of there, so there was none of the “painting the walls with Guinness and blackcurrant” which occurred the last time I changed jobs.

And so I now begin preparations for departure, which is scheduled for less than three weeks time. I suspect that the days are going to fly past between now and then – partly because any attempt to clear out my junk will likely degenerate into me sitting in the middle of a pile of magazines, reading them. Does anyone want seventy old issues of Empire magazine? I don’t do the throwing out stuff thing – with the possible exception of my ties, which are going to suffer the sort of mortality rate last seen among the post-asteroid dinosaurs. Otherwise, expect lots of agonising over whether or not I should ship my LP records out: I haven’t actually listened to any of them for the past five years, but…but…but…well, we’re certainly talking sentimental value, if not in most cases financial! But I shall be stern. I shall be harsh. I shall undoubtedly be burdened with far too much. And I wouldn’t have it any other way!

As mentioned on the home page, updates during November will be “sporadic” to say the least – there may be the odd editorial, but don’t expect much more. Normal service should be resumed towards the end of the month, when the jet-lag has worn off, from my new home – how odd, yet also how wonderful that sounds – in the warmer (certainly), less windy (hopefully) climes of Phoenix, Arizona…