You Don't Want To Be Here.

This is a message for the small proportion of you who may not have clicked on this site by accident.

It's me, Wyndham. Hello.

Look, I may as well tell you this now because by the end of the day I'll have probably forgotten the three hundred-odd user-names and passwords I need to leave a post on Blogger, and if I don't do it now it's never going to be said and I'll be probably be sorry.

I've gone. Gone here.

The black wallpaper was getting me down, and I would put my tiny plastic telescope to my eye and look enviously across the rooftops at Bib and 100 and several others on Wordpress. So I now have lovely new virtual lodgings here. But don't go to look at them yet, go here first.

Yes, here.

It's all white and pastelly and tidy, and occasionally amusing, so why not have a look.

Here.

It's all marvellous so you really should drop by. As usual my posts will contain something for everyone - particularly if, like me, your favourite topic is me.

So let's just get this straight then.

I'm gone, not here.

However, you will find me at the all new adventures of wyndham.

I'm glad we're clear on that.

See you there. Here. Whatever.

The Cold Shoulder.

I’ve been getting this strange feeling in my shoulder recently, not unpleasant or painful, more like a tapping sensation. Once, never more than twice, every so often. Tap. Or tap, tap - like that.

Tap, tap.

It’s quite unnerving when I whirl around on my heels to discover nobody there. You’re probably thinking trapped nerve, he's only got a trapped nerve, and you’d be right. In a few weeks it will have ironed itself out and I’ll forget it ever happened at all.

But it’s difficult, every so often, not to attribute it to some stranger power, as if some modest supernatural force, fed up with all the histrionics of that dread harpy of Death, the Banshee, has opted for a more discreet introduction to yours truly.

I fear that one day I’ll turn round to find a tall gentleman with a gleaming scythe, and not much going on in the way of eyeballs, who will ask me politely to sign his clipboard here, here and here, and bid me follow him down these stairs, sir, yes, it is rather hot isn’t it, now that you mention it.

That could have happened today, when I felt the curious sensation yet again. During a hectic day’s work at a music venue in Manchester I decided to go for a little walk by myself into the large hall that houses the stage.

I threaded my way carefully through the web of cables and haphazard equipment, my feet clicking gently on the floorboards, and it was so cold I could watch my breath vaporise in front of my nose.

And then: tap, tap.

There it was again, and instead of wheeling around with fright I was ready for it, angrily slapping my shoulder with my hand several times to quieten it down and exclaiming "for fuck’s sake,” very loudly.

Then a moment later – a soft cough. And I turned to see a person looking at me curiously.

“I was just making some coffee and I wondered if you would like one," she said.

Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time.

Poor Dexter has a terrible bug he picked up from several thousand other children at nursery which has involved a sleepless night and much sickness.

But never fear, the best Dad in the world has been on hand to nurse him through the following day.

And it all went very well. He seemed to be recovering rapidly under my expert care and attention. A sip of water here and there and some dry toast in the morning and he seemed well-enough to emerge from a duvet on the sofa. Soon enough he was running around like normal, and it seemed like together we had vanquished the sicky bug.

Until about 6pm when the bucket was put to good use and I had to run around with bits of tissue, wiping various bits of fabric and clothing and the floor, and we seemed to be back to square one.

Veronica returned half an hour later to enquire what he had eaten.

"Oh, not much, a little bit of dry toast in the morning."

She nodded, and waited while Dexter peered at her from under the duvet.

Then, perhaps two or three minutes later it occurred to me that he may have had something else to eat, about an hour ago.

"And a Cadbury's Cream Egg," I said.

"Unbelievable." She shook her head as Dexter fell into her arms.

About half an hour later I re-evaluated the whole thing and it occurred to me that actually it was only half an egg. Yes, exactly so, half a Cream Egg.

Wyndham's Video Vault: Capricorn One

So, here we go then – a remake I could definitely live without.

I’ve never really been bothered at Hollywood’s tendency to attempt to improve on perfection.

I turned the other cheek while everyone around me frothed at the mouth when they took Get Carter, The Italian Job – could have been worse, to be honest – and then The Wicker Man from us. Although I was forced, with that last, to shake my head sorrowfully in the direction of Neil Labute.

It’s really been no concern of mine if Ben Stiller or Owen Wilson or whoever wants to update some dismal old series, although I’d prefer it if they put some jokes in occasionally.

Every now again it's actually an improvement on the original. Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky will always, to me, be superior to its ponderous Spanish original Open Your Eyes although that could be me being bloody-minded in the face of a psuedish onslaught from various friends who inexplicably often refer to the latter as Abres Los Ojos and have, in all probability, seen neither version.

And I kind of think we all know that no good will come of remaking Cache, particularly as the undisputed King of Hollywood Bland Ron Howard is involved. Don't get me wrong, LA movie executives are very good at many things, but making ambiguous, inexact movies which involve a certain amount of - oh, let's face, it - loads of subjective interpretation, is not one of them.

We shall just have to expect the worst and get on with our lives.

But I also read on Dark Horizons that they’re remaking Capricorn One.

Remaking Capricorn One pains me. It irritates me beyond belief.

Capricorn One is the little movie that could.

Pretentious films like Hidden come and go with a startling regularity in my top ten movies, but Capricorn One is always in my top-three and always has been, even through my difficult student period when my top-ten consisted of films I mostly couldn’t sit through more than once, or even partway through. Or not at all.

I’ve always loved Capricorn One, ever since I saw it on a double-bill at the Harlow Odeon with the movie version of Porridge, and something just clicked inside me.

It’s the film that made me want to be a journalist,** and for a while I was, although the reality of being a junior reporter in a New Town was somewhat underwhelming and I never stumbled across a massive conspiracy involving a fake Mars Landing. However, I had something approximating Elliott Gould’s hair.

If we’re talking Elliott: most people, if they were insane enough to want to be like him, they wanted to be Phillip Marlowe or Trapper John. Me, I wanted to be Robert Caulfield and flirt with Karen Black's Judy Drinkwater and race across town in that runaway car and get locked in the slammer by The Man and be given twenty-four hours to get the Big Scoop and not forty-eight - “I saw the movie too, it was twenty four!”- and go up in that biplane with Telly “I think you’re a pervert” Savalas - without a doubt the only man in the whole, wide world who could down three tooled-up military helipcopters using a cropduster.

Capricorn One is a film that falls under most people’s radar unless they happen to be watching Bravo at midnight, and I’m glad about that.

It has a cracking Jerry Goldsmith score and a highly improbable cast – one part Altman, two parts Escape To Athena. Elliott Gould, Hal Holbrook, Sam Waterston, Brenda Vaccaro and OJ Simpson. And David ‘Bosley’ Doyle. And, god help us, James Brolin is terrific in it.***

Plus, it’s got cracking, knowing, tough-guy dialogue* and a tinpot budget which doesn't take us to Mars and back, and it’s a classic 70s conspiracy movie, but fun - tight and sassy and relentless, with jet-black helicopters, and an overlong scene involving a Dr Seuss book for the ladies.

It’s the writer-director Peter Hyams’s finest moment by a long, long way. Although I have a soft spot for his film The Star Chamber – also being remade – and, to a lesser extent, Outland.

To this day, I even remember the first line from the Capricorn One novelisation. “If a city is a lady, then Houston is a whore.”

And now they’re going to remake it and it’s going to be called, with a depressing inevitability, Capricorn Two.

*Lookee here.

** The other ever-present film in my top-three is Sweet Smell of Success and now I’m taking a bash at PR. Thank the Lord I’ve never rated Showgirls.

*** You don’t have to have been married to Babs Streisand to get a part in Capricorn but it probably helps.

Sad News Indeed.

Robert Adler, we salute you!

A New Era. Yet Another New Era.

Me: "I've been thinking that I worry too much about the blog. And I think I should just sit down and write any old shit."

Veronica, absently: "Yes, you do."

A groaning sound can be heard. It could be our old Edwardian home making itself comfortable on its aching, century-old, foundations, or it could be the sound of something dying inside me.

Me: "No, I said I'm going to write any old shit."

More Lame Excuses.

It's traditionally that time of year - from February to November - when I find it very difficult to come up with any material.

And I have also been inexplicably busy despite my best intentions. But it won't last.

I would point out some choice posts from my archives, but we all know it's grade-A shit.

Please bear with me.

Now this, this looks far more interesting. I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to a fantastic pay-off post.