Ahoy There, Me Hearties!

Sorry to harp on about t.v. shows, but I'm going to anyway. The Brunette and I are nearly at the end of Season 2 of House - only three episodes to go. As you know, we love box sets, particularly those of American t.v. shows as there are so many episodes in each season, and so many seasons.

The West Wing, for example, ran for seven seasons, each containing twenty two episodes, each of sixty minutes duration. That's 7 x 22 = 154 episodes. That's 154 x 60 = 9,240 minutes, or over 6 days of entertainment. Law & Order Special Victims Unit is currently in its 11th season. That's a lot of television. Of course, this would all be meaningless if these programmes were rubbish but, love them or loathe them, you can't deny that they are high quality productions that demand a certain level of intellect from the viewer.

There's just one problem. I buy the U.K. box sets of House and they contain an extemely irritating anti-pirate advert thing that pops up on a regular basis. You know the one. A little fat red faced baldy bastard waves a branding iron about the place to a soundtrack of highly portentous 'Spooks'-style keyboards and drums before some smug-voiced git spends eternity passing on various international phone numbers that you can call in case you've bought a pirate copy 'by mistake'. Yeah, right!

In case you haven't seen it take a look below. You can now play it to your heart's content.



Annoying, innit?

I'm very tempted to pay a visit to my local street market to see if I can find a pirate copy of the House Season 3 box set. The quality won't be great but at least I can be sure that there won't be a bloody anti-pirate advert on it.   

Shiver me timbers,
oldblodger

All Time Top Ten Movie List

The Brunette and I went to the flicks last night (for my younger readers, 'flicks' = cinema). The film was one of those that you enjoy at the time but immediately forget as soon as it's over. This is a bit sad for the film makers really. All those months of writing, acting, directing, lighting, editing, producing etc just to have a philistine like me damn it with faint praise. Such is life.

It got me thinking about my favourite movies. It must be the time of year. We're approaching the butt end of 2009 and most newspapers and magazines will soon be churning out their lists of the high and low points of the past twelve months. The best and worst of everything - movies, books, cars, music, blah blah.

It sounds like easy journalism and perhaps it is. Coming up with the top ten movies of all time is straightforward enough if you take gross earnings as your criterion, but what if it's based purely on personal choice?  What would my 'all time top ten' consist of? Well, there are numerous genres for a start. Is it practicable to put a Hollywood blockbuster action movie in the same list as a small independent docudrama? Or to juggle a light and fluffy romcom, a stygian horror gorefest and an historical war epic?

I can compile a list of ten movies that I love fairly quickly but would they be my all time favourites? They might be at the time of compilation but on another day I'd probably put together a totally different alternative list depending on my mood.

Should my list only contain critically acclaimed films? Surely you jest? As much as I love Mark Kermode our taste in cinema is like chalk and Leggo. Film critics often deride movies as being 'manipulative', in that they play with your emotions, fool you into thinking something is true when it isn't or try to convince you that something fantastical can actually happen. Like this is a bad thing? This is what cinema is all about for me. I suspend my disbelief at the door in the hope that I'm going to be pleasantly surprised, so 'manipulation' features in many of my favourite films.

Perhaps films that I remember as having had some sort of an effect on me are the ones that should be on the list. Even this isn't foolproof though. I remember having a little man-weep during Steel Magnolias (the bit where Sally Field berates God for taking her daughter, Julia Roberts, from her). Lovely movie but it wouldn't be in my top ten.

Maybe my list should only include films that I've seen a number of times and would watch many more times in the future. But where would this leave Thelma and Louise? I've only seen that once, during my 'courting of the Brunette' days. We loved every second of it and it inspired us to drive across several of the southern US states (though we drew the line at the plummeting into the canyon bit). I could buy the DVD and watch it til the cows come home but I don't want to. I like my memory of it too much.

Here then, as of right this minute and in alphabetical order, is my All Time Top Ten Movie List:

• 633 Mosquito Squadron
• Alien
• Aliens
• America's Sweethearts
• Best Seller
• Carrie
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• Contact
• Dead On Arrival
• Die Hard 2
• Fargo
• Fight Club
• Independence Day
• Intolerable Cruelty
• Love Actually
• Memento
• Notting Hill
• O Brother, Where Art Thou?
• Planet of the Apes (the original)
• Scream
• Silent Running
• Something's Gotta Give
• Striking Distance
• Suspiria
• Terminator Two: Judgement Day
• The Bedroom Window
• The Fifth Element
• The Goodbye Girl
• The Silence of the Lambs
• The Sixth Sense
• The Usual Suspects
• Thelma and Louise
• There's Something About Mary
• This is Spinal Tap
• True Lies
• When Harry Met Sally
• Zardoz
• Zoolander
• Zulu

Okay, that's thirty nine. Seriously though, how can you have a top ten? I've already thought of another five since I typed my list. I couldn't whittle it down to ten if you threatened to cut off my gonads with a rusty hacksaw.

My worst movie list though? That's too easy. It's a list of two.

• 'Damage' starring Jeremy Irons, Juliet Binoche and Miranda Richardson. One hundred and eleven minutes of my life that I can never reclaim.
• Cruise, Kidman and Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut'. Just awful. 

Both movies were about obsessive love and both were touted as containing some of the most graphic sex scenes ever filmed for mainstream cinema. Graphic, yes. Sexy, most definitely not. Rubbish, absolutely.

I see dead people,
oldblodger

"Old Blodger's Curate's Egg" Rock Show

Isn't music radio crap these days? Or is it just me? It probably is me as I don't actually listen to music on the wireless any more. But that's because the last time I listened to a music station it was crap...so perhaps it isn't me. Ergo Sic Kumquat!

I'm seriously toying with the idea of setting up my own radio programme and, other than the fact that I don't have the vaguest idea of how to go about it, I don't see why not. It would be for people like me, if such beasts exist. People who want to leave their comfort zone and see what's really out there. I'm not talking about a station dedicated to the avant garde or freeform jazz, that would be hell on earth. What I am talking about is a place where you could go to hear stuff that you don't automatically recognise.

For example, there are numerous rock stations that proudly proclaim to spin 'the best new music and classic album tracks', but you know before you tune in that what you're going to get is Kasabian's latest ditty followed by Fleetwood Mac's Don't Stop - i.e. singles that you are going to hear a million times or that you've already heard a million times. I don't want that.

My musical education largely took place in the U.K. during the late sixties and early seventies, my tutors being the 'disc jockeys' (doesn't that term seem arcane now?) on Radios One, Caroline and Luxembourg. I consider myself very fortunate to have grown up listening to such legends as John Peel (before he went industrial), Fluff Freeman, Annie Nightingale, Johnnie Walker, Tommy Vance, Whispering Bob, even the much maligned Dave Lee Travis (to whom I'll always be grateful for introducing me to 'East River' by 'The Brecker Brothers'). They all specialised in different genres to a certain extent but they each had two things in common - their musical knowledge and their voice.

Each would tell you the name of the track, the performers, the record label and, as often as not, which bands the members had previously been with (how often do you hear that info these days?). Each voice was radically different in tone and timbre but each was rich, fruity and instantly recognisable - not something you could say about most d.j.s today - and I couldn't get enough of them.

The best thing about these guys though was their choice of music. Peel (Sounds of the Seventies and Top Gear) and Fluff (Saturday Rock Show) in particular had a massive influence on my burgeoning tastes as they were so eclectic. Peel would play Ivor Cutler one minute, the Portsmouth Sinfonia the next, followed by something more 'mainstream' like Van der Graaf Generator. Fluff was more rock orientated but he'd throw in a bit of Tchaikovsky between the Jethro Tull and King Crimson.

The vast majority of these tracks would be new to one's ears as few of the artists concerned released singles. If you liked something you had to go out and buy the album to hear it again (unless you managed to catch it on your Phillips cassette recorder that is...ooh, naughty you. Didn't you know that home taping is killing music?).

I still vividly remember exactly where I was when I first heard certain songs. I was lying on my bed in my brown-walled bedroom drooling over my newly acquired first drum kit - an Ajax - in the corner when I first heard Frank Zappa's Cosmic Debris. I was crating up empty beer bottles outside the back of my parent's pub when I first heard Jet by Wings. I was in the bath when I first heard Bowie's Starman.

It wasn't just me either. There were times when every pubescent boy in the country would experience the same Damascene moment of realisation that they'd just come into contact with something extraordinary. In the early seventies this usually involved the 'Old Grey Whistle Test', the only rock music show on the telly at the time. I was watching OGWT in the upstairs living room in my parent's pub one night when a band of Dutch nutters appeared and played a fast instrumental number that included whistling and, believe it or not, yodelling sections. I went to school the next day and everyone had scratched 'Focus' into their satchels. The local music shop, 'Record Rendezvous', was inundated with schoolkids desperate to buy Focus' Moving Waves album during their lunch break.

I wonder if kids today experience such eureka moments when they first get an earhole full of Kings of Leon. Actually, I like the Kings of Leon and I imagine that every generation has its 'stop what you're doing and go AAAWW YEAH' moment.

Whatever, if I ever get around to starting up the Old Blodger's Curate's Egg rock show my manifesto will be as follows:

• There will be no advertising, quizzes or phone-ins (but perhaps the odd jingle)
• You will be told the name of each track and artist/band plus any interesting historical trivia about same
• You won't hear 'Don't Stop' by Fleetwood Mac
• You will hear 'Green Manalishi' by Fleetwood Mac
• You will hear new bands as long as I think they're good
• You will hear lots of covers, particularly the funny ones
• You will hear genuine 'classic album tracks' - i.e. tracks that were never released as singles
• You will be able to request a track and I might play it if I find it interesting enough
• Though it is predominantly a rock show I will spin anything I like as the fancy takes me. This could be Doo Wop, Americana, Classical, Ivor Cutler, Richard Cheese, the whole of 'Zeit' by Tangerine Dream (scary stuff), Dean Martin or obscure seventies Italian prog-rock
• You will hear loads and loads of funk

So there you have it. Interested?

Keep on truckin',
oldblodger

Television Eye

The erstwhile Wham singer's name has apparently been adopted as modern cockney rhyming slang for the term 'menstrual cycle' (as in, "Cor blimey guvnor, I wouldn't get into a barney with her. She's only on her George Michael, ain't she? Cor blimey, strike a light!"). I heard about this on BBC Radio 5 Live a couple of days ago from one of the guys who writes for Q.I. so it must be true.

Following on from this, I was hoping to be the first person to come up with 'sanitary towel' for Simon Cowell but I just googled it and, sure enough, someone's beaten me to it.

Inventing modern cockney seems to be a whole new cyberspace industry. I heard my favourite rhyme a few years ago when a guy I worked with in Kensington (not exactly the spiritual home of the cockney barrow boy) said that he was going to buy some new 'Lionels' in his lunch break. Before I could say "give us a clue" he explained that he was going to buy some new trousers (Lionel Blairs = flares, geddit?). Still makes me giggle now.

I had a sudden brainwave as I was typing that. Wouldn't Lionel Blair be an obvious choice as a judge on Strictly Come Dancing? I just googled him as well and he's already been mooted for Bruce Forsythe's role, should he ever drop off his perch. Bloody hell! It's impossible to come up with an original thought these days.

These thoughts lead me nicely into today's sermon. Television - Satan's Spawn or God-in-the-Corner?

The Brunette and I pride ourselves on no longer watching the telly. Or rather, we no longer watch television channels. There is a difference. We actually spend quite a lot of time watching t.v. programmes in the form of DVD box sets, which is great as we can choose which hours of the day to waste instead of having the decision made for us by the channels.

I was going to say that we don't even own a telly but that would have been a lie. We own two, both of which are in our County Leitrim home. However, neither of these can pick up broadcast television. Our 37" LCD is in a room with no aerial, cable or satellite connections and our portable is attached to an aerial that doesn't work any more. It's been like this for the last three years and we've apparently missed out on so much.

Reality t.v., for instance. I know it's been around for longer than three years but we were never really into it before then either. I've seen about twenty minutes in toto of 'Big Brothel' over the years, which is more than enough time for one to realise that one isn't trailer trash and one needn't ever watch it again (yes, I know I'm a snob but I wonder if any of that show's under-30 fans have read any George Orwell and realised that it's a bad idea).

I've seen a couple of episodes of 'I'm a Has-Been, Get Me onto that Jungle Show Immediately or I'll Find Another Agent' and I must admit that I can see how you could get sucked in. Fortunately I weaned myself off it before the addiction took hold.

I've seen the odd 'X Factor' and 'American Idol' and, love him or loathe him, you have to admire old Sanitary, don't you? In the same way that you might admire Jeffrey Archer. Both got into financial difficulties before rising, phoenix-like, to great wealth and influence and both produce pap that'll rot your brain if you stare at it long enough.

The one reality show that we've spent any significant amount of time watching (usually at our neighbours' gaff) is Strictly, mainly because the Brunette likes it, but even this is a rare occurence.

So what do we watch? Well, we're currently wading through the second season of 'House' (I say 'season' rather than 'series' because that's what the Yanks call it and it is their show after all). Hasn't Hugh Laurie done well? He's currently the sixth highest paid star in American network prime time television - not bad for an Eton boy! It's a good show, yet another in a long list of successful American medical dramas. Beats the hell out of 'Casualty' anyway. We left Florida on Thanksgiving Day (26th November) and one of the networks was showing episodes of House all that day - we nearly didn't come home.

We intersperse House with our third viewing of 'The West Wing'. Fantastic stuff. I've also recently caught up with all four seasons of the 're-imagined Battlestar Galactica', another great political drama. I haven't managed to persuade the Brunette of its worthiness yet but I'm working on it. I have to as we now have 'Caprica' to look forward to. Maybe I could get her to watch BG if I buy her the box sets of Law & Order Special Victims Unit.

The one thing in common with the above is that they are all, of course, American. The Yanks are putting out some fabulous drama shows at the moment but, in the light of Channel 4's recent announcement of the cancelling of Big Brothel, I'm hoping that we can soon return to the glory days of British t.v. drama series. That would be the nineties then. Cracker, A Touch of Frost, Cold Feet, Pie in the Sky, Between the Lines - the list goes on. We can still do quality comedy - The Thick of It, The Green Wing, The Office, Extras and Gavin & Stacey spring to mind.

If we can start churning out a few intelligent dramas with a bit of depth again (it's possible - look at Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes) then perhaps I'll get our aerial sorted out.

Or wait for the box sets.

Keep 'em peeled,
oldblodger

Photo Books - Pure Genius

I must preface today's missive with a disclaimer. The following comments and opinions regarding a certain commercial company are entirely my own and have not been solicited or paid for by said company. Having stated that, if Blurb.com feels obliged to send me a small-yet-exquisite gift in recompense for my testimonial, well, who am I to argue?

What's the first thing you do when you arrive home after a wonderful holiday? After doing the unpacking, chucking your dirty undies in the washing machine and recovering from jetlag and Montezuma's Revenge? Okay, what's the fifth thing you do? You want to see your photos, don't you? All those happy memories sitting in your camera just waiting to remind you of the sunburn, the IHOP breakfasts, the extra four inches that you've added to your waistline after those IHOP breakfasts.

In the olden days you had to take your 35mm film to Boots to be developed so you had to wait and hope that the person doing the developing wasn't having a bad hair day, the result being that you'd be handed an envelope containing 36 black rectangular pieces of paper.

The beauty of digital photgraphy is that you already know that your snaps are half decent because you've seen them on the little screen on your camera. So you download them to your PC as soon as you set foot inside your home. You ooh and aah over them for a few minutes as they scroll past your eyes in slideshow mode. Then what? They sit in a folder, unloved and forgotten for all eternity. Sure, you can print them out but after the first couple of times you do this you realise that you've just gone through three or four print cartridges at twenty quid a pop so you tell yourself that you'll do it later. And as we all know, manana never comes.

Even if you do print them, what happens then? They end up in an album or just stuffed into a box, never to see the light of day, along with all the old black ones that you got developed at Boots.

Well, I'm happy to inform you that there is now an answer to this problem. I'm currently...er...'resting' as the acting profession has it and I recently decided to use my spare time to do something about all of the boxes of photos that the Brunette and I have amassed during our seventeen year marriage. That's a shedload of photos.

My first thought was to go online to see if any companies were offering cheap bulk orders of photo albums. I'm not a great lover of albums as I get a bit fed up with turning them around every time the photos change from portrait to landscape, but it seemed to be the most cost-effective solution. So I googled 'cheap bulk photo albums', only to see the words, 'photo book', pop up everywhere. "What can this mean?" I thought to myself. I clicked on a link to a company called Blurb.com (there are many others) and I was immediately intrigued.

There has recently been a revolution in the publishing world thanks to the advent of 'print on demand' (POD), which is a form of self-publishing (also known as vanity publishing). Years ago, if you wanted to get your novel, cookbook, autobiography or non-fiction history of Chipping Sodbury into print but you couldn't get an established publisher to do it due to it being too esoteric, too complex or just plain rubbish, you had to pay for it to be published yourself. This was an extremely expensive business, often running into thousands of pounds as most publishers wouldn't consider printing less than a few hundred copies. You would then be left with a garage full of rotting tomes that you couldn't even give away. Now, with POD, you can order a single copy (or a couple of thousand if you are mad) of your meisterwork for not much more than you'd pay for Dan Brown's latest epic in a bookshop (I wouldn't pay anything for it but you get my point).

How does this work for photo books? To cut a long story short(ish), you download a bit of software called 'booksmart' from the Blurb site and upload to it whichever photos you choose. You then click and drag your photos onto Blurb's page templates, of which there are many. For example, you can opt to cover a whole page with one large photo or you can have twelve small photos on a page, with many variations in between, including montages. And it doesn't matter if your photos are portrait or landscape.

You have a choice of three covers - softcover, hardcover with a separate dustjacket or printed hardcover. There are also several book sizes and formats to choose from (e.g. 7x7 ins, 10x8 ins, 12x12 ins, portrait or landscape) and a huge range of coloured backgrounds and themes. As if that weren't enough you can also add text, from short captions to full pages.

My first Blurb photo book was a gift for a couple of close friends of ours (photo books make fantastic presents). It was 70 pages containing 220 snaps of weekends away and parties that we'd been to with them spanning a couple of decades. I chose a black background on premium paper with a dustjacketed hardcover. All for the princely sum of 35 Euro delivered to our door within three weeks, all the way from America. Does this sound a bit pricey? Well, I thought so until I did some quick calculations. The price of developing 220 photos would be at least 20 Euro and a half decent photo album would set you back at least another 15 Euro. Same price. (You can, of course, spend less if you go for a softcover with fewer pages.) But what you end up with is so much more than a mere photo album. It's a beautiful, high quality coffee table book that is much more interesting to look at as each page is different.

It's not just for digital photos either. I've also scanned a load of hard copy photos onto my PC and uploaded them onto Blurb. The only downside with this is that the resolution isn't as high as with digital so you can't usually display them as full page photos. If you try to do this a little yellow triangle appears to inform you that the resolution is insufficient so you just reduce the size until the triangle disappears - very clever. However, I plan to overcome this problem by purchasing a negative scanner. Scanning the photo negative apparently gives a much higher resolution.

I've also put together a couple of holiday photo books. Blurb is great for this as you can scan pieces of ephemera as well as photos, e.g. train and show tickets, receipts, menus, adverts, you name it.

Enough already! As you will have guessed by now, I am becoming quite evangelical about photo books. And the absolute bestest thing about them? Once you have a bookcase full of them you can clear out all those boxes of photos from the spare room and put them in the attic.

The best invention since the DVD.

Say cheese,
oldblodger

What is This Thing Called 'Cash'?

Okay, we're back from Busch Gardens, safe and well. There are a number of new rides in the Gardens since our last visit, some of which make the older rides such as 'Scorpion'and 'Muntu' look positively tame.

One particularly evil addition is a torture-fest called 'SheiKra', a 'floorless roller coaster' that takes you up a 47 degree incline to a height of 200 feet. Once at the top you are dangled over a vertical drop for a few seconds before you plunge straight down into an 'Immelmann Loop' (don't ask me - if you want to know more check it out on Wikipedia). I was tempted to give it a try for all of a nanosecond before bottling it. It was the dangling bit that put me off. And the screaming of those onboard.

The Brunette had an excuse for avoiding the more robust rides in that she has recently been having treatment for a bad neck. I have no such excuse other than abject cowardice but I was happy to jump on her bandwagon as a display of sympathy. If she couldn't enjoy the significant g-forces involved in plummeting hundreds of feet into the bowels of hell then neither would I. What a hero!

Instead, she decided that she liked the look of a small, kiddie-friendly coaster called 'Cheetah Chase'. The short queue for the ride mostly consisted of pre-teens so I really didn't have a justifiable excuse this time, even though I didn't like the look of it and I'd had previous experience of supposedly lightweight rides that weren't.

Sure enough, what looked from ground level like a sedate trundle around a meccano set in a glorified Noddy car turned into a Formula One rip-snorting hell-ride that we both spent the majority of with our eyes closed. I realised afterwards that the problem with it was that there was no camber to the track. With the mega-rides the journey is usually fairly smooth (with the singular exception of Disney's Space Mountain, a once-in-a-lifetime nightmare) as the track is curved to take account of the bends.

The Cheetah Chase, however, is a series of hairpin bends with the odd up and down bit in between. You are thrown around these bends at speed and at no time does it feel as though you are in any danger of actually staying inside the car, centrifugal force being what it is. It was brilliant.

We also went on a few gentler attractions - the Stanley Falls, the Skyride cable car, Rhino Rally - but the best of all was the Congo River Rapids. We sat in a big yellow round thing with five other adults and three or four kids. The adults all wore plastic capes which we thought was cheating a bit. The big yellow round thing set off on its journey around a narrow course of 'rapids', banging into things and being spun around as it went. The spinning resulted in everyone having a turn at getting a bit damp. Except us. Every time we passed a water cannon (gleefully operated by bystanders on the bank) we'd catch the full jet.

Every time the big yellow round thing passed beneath a waterfall we'd be in the perfect position for it to pour itself over us and every time we hit one of the more turbulent rapids it would be our arses that would be sat in the spot where the water flooded in. At the end of the ride we couldn't have been wetter if we'd actually swum the rapids. It was the biggest laugh of the holiday.

Alas, all good things etc. We left Busch Gardens about an hour before closing time to beat the rush. We drove out of the car park and promptly got lost. For an attraction as big and well-known as this the road signs are remarkably small. We followed a sign for the I-4 back to Orlando. It was the only such sign we would see for the next twenty minutes. It was by sheer luck that we eventually found the I-4 and I can't believe that there isn't a much more direct route. Still, we made it so I shouldn't complain too much.

As we approached Orlando there was a loud ping and a light flashed on the dashboard. We were nearly out of gas (yes, I know it's really called petrol but when in Rome...). I convinced the Brunette that we had enough to get us home but as the indicator dropped onto the red line I realised that I was being a little optimistic. We pulled off the Interstate and looked for a gas station.

By now it was dark. I don't just mean that the sun had gone down, I mean that the road we were now driving along was devoid of light of any kind. No house lights, no street lights, and certainly no gas stations lit up like Christmas Trees. We finally reached a toll booth where I asked the lady where the nearest gas station was. She said that there was one a couple of miles ahead. True to her word, we pulled in to the station two miles later with the gas indicator now below the red line. Imagine the relief. Now imagine how long the relief lasted.

I looked at the pump to see how the payment system worked as each gas station in America seems to have a different way of doing things. This one appeared to have some sort of membership thing going on. There was a sign on the pump saying that non-members couldn't pay with cash. Huh!!! This couldn't be correct, could it?

"Can I help you, sir?"

A guy in a security uniform appeared out of nowhere behind me.

"Yes please. This sign says that I can't pay with cash, is that right?"

"That's correct, sir."

"Why is that?"

"Well, it says so right there on the pump, sir."

"Yes, I can see that but that's more of a statement than a reason, isn't it?"

"Well, it's because you're not a member of our club and we don't know who you are. It's to prevent you filling your car with gas and driving off without paying."

"But can't I pay you with cash before I fill up?"

"No sir. But you can pay with a credit card, though that will cost you an extra 12 cents per gallon."

"But we don't have cards and we're nearly out of gas (Regular readers will know our credit card situation via posts passim).

"Well, there's another gas station about a mile up the road. Maybe they'll be able to help you out, sir."

Suffice it to say that we made it to the next station on fumes. Fortunately it was an ordinary gas station rather than one that we needed to be freemasons to use.

What's that about? Since when did it become impossible to pay for something with cash? This country is a never ending source of wonder, sometimes in a bad way.

Ah well, back to the pool.

Laters,
oldblodger

Florida

The Brunette and I are currently enjoying a little 'downtime' in Florida, hence the gap in my posts. In a repeat of our honeymoon, over 17 years ago now, we decided to re-visit the delights of Orlando. Nine days of lazing about by the pool interspersed with adventure drives into the hinterland. We call them adventure drives as whenever we leave the confines of our hotel we immediately get lost.

This isn't just a Florida thing, it applies anywhere in the States that we visit. It usually starts as soon as we pick up the hire car at the airport. We've been to California three times together and each time we've driven away from Los Angeles airport we've either taken the wrong turn or missed the right one, resulting in our arrival at our destination at least two hours later than planned, including one memorable drive through downtown L.A. at the height of rush hour.

Same thing this time. Our flight arrived on time at Orlando International, following which we were subjected to a one hour queue to get through immigration (sooo much fun), a further half hour queue for the car hire desk and a final hour of driving up and down and in and out of roads in search of the mythical SR528 Beach Line Expressway which would lead us to International Drive and our hotel - a journey that should have taken no longer than twenty minutes. Just what you need after a nine hour flight.

This is our third visit to Florida. During our inaugural honeymoon visit we rarely strayed from Orlando, other than trips to Busch Gardens in the west and Cocoa Beach/Kennedy Space Centre in the east. We did the whole Disney/Seaworld/Wet & Wild thing then and it was great fun, but exhausting.

On our second visit a couple of years later we flew to Miami, hired a car and drove across the everglades, up the west coast via Naples and Sarasota to St. Petersburg, across to the east coast via Orlando and back down to Miami via West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton etc. A fantastic drive but, again, pretty tiring.

On this trip we decided to stick to short adventure drives and to give the theme parks a miss (did I mention that we're getting older?) though we are going back to the 'awesome' Busch Gardens tomorrow (we're not that old). We probably won't get there, of course, so stay tuned for my next installment - "oldblodger & the Brunette say hi to Savannah".

Yours, lost in translation,

oldblodger