When have you last walked out of a film?

Ah Holy God. No! Please no!

When has a film been so tedious, so unimaginative, so stultifyingly boring that you decided life was too short to continue watching? I tend to want to finish what I start, not rely solely on first impressions and give things a chance to breathe and settle. I’m tolerant. But this week I encountered a film that was beyond even my broad Pale.

I’m not complaining. I’ve been lucky lately. I’ve seen Up In The Air this week (beautifully shot, very calming, George Clooney plays a corporate downsizer), Sherlock Holmes (a radical new approach to the franchise which works – full of action, humour, Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law), Astroboy (cartoon hero with machine guns in his butt – the 10-year-old boys I was with liked it) and Caramel (a Lebanese film by Nadine Labaki with no subtitles in English, but full of sympathetic characters and a good trick with a telephone conversation).

But my good run has just come to an end. Drowned in Holy Water.

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When does welcome really mean goodbye?

Feline loving fool - What not to name your cat.

When does welcome mean goodbye? When it’s the title of the seminar designed to ease you out of your job. Nineteen of us were in attendance at the Welcome Seminar, each clutching our “welcome pack”. We felt like extras out of Up In The Air. Which is where our futures are at present.

To be fair, the session was useful, and the women running it friendly and professional. And one was from Carlingford. What more could you ask for? Perhaps I should check out the film to see how George Clooney would have handled us.

So – a few more weeks and welcomes to the world outside, and that’ll be that. I’d better get a move on finishing writing this book, Blackwatertown. (Opening lines here.) The good news is, it’s nearly complete. I was hoping to be done by the end of this month, but realistically it’ll be February now.

Which means that, book written, current employment behind me, I’ll be available for weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, freelancing, wild book launch parties and promotional tours. Happy days.

But enough about me. In other news: Is it significant that the fool in the newspaper cutting above is a cat owner? Would a dog owner be as stupid? Or worse?

Kolmanskop, Namibia. An abandoned city.

And this post caught my eye – a set of eerie Abandoned Cities from Daily Cognition. No. 3 on the list is Kolmanskop, a small town a few miles inland from the port of Lüderitz in Namibia. According to Daily Cog’: “Windswept sand has made its way into nearly every building in the town, which was once a diamond mining town and abandoned in 1956 as diamond demand declined and richer sources of diamonds were discovered in other areas. Its only residents are now birds, hyenas and other animals.”

Next time: The book is not even published, but already I’m receiving warnings that it could annoy people. The type of readers who express their annoyance in a more physically direct way than writing a bad review. Ain’t life rosy.