If you live in the UK, and have a long memory, you may recall what’s probably been its most prestigious fanzine, FA (or Fantasy Advertiser, as it was once known).

It’s now been revived, online, with much the same sensibility and standards as before. However, it’s early days and is always looking for contributors.  If  you fancy writing a review, or an article, or anything comics-related, then check out http://comiczine-fa.com/ and contact Martin Skidmore, the editor.

End of plug.

live-at-eindhoven-ep

(There’s a nifty embeded link I should be able to use, but bloody WordPress won’t let me embed it. Gah.)

Our back garden, as taken by Douglas today. Freezing fog again.

Run downstairs and turn on the heating. Go back to bed for an hour.

8am – Oh, actually, two hours. I must have gone back to sleep. Leave Douglas asleep in bed.

Get up. Look out the window. There’s freezing fog, and the fog horn is blaring. It’s very still and absolutely icebound. The birds have already gathered, waiting to be fed.

Run out and empty out bird seed and a packet of sultanas for the birds. Give them water. Break the ice on the pond. Run back in with what I swear is the first beginnings of frostbite. Feed the cats. Have breakfast. Drink the first of innumerable cups of coffee. Stand at the back door and smoke a cigarette.

11 am. Finish off the first draft of “Jeannie Hiefer”. I’m pleased with it. It’s something new for me, creatively. Back it up on the web, in case something horrible happens to the laptop. Feed the birds again. Give them more water. Glance at the outside thermometer. It’s minus 11. Slide and nearly fall on my arse on the iced-up doorstep. Decide that, actually, it might be a good idea to clear the ice and snow away.

Douglas decides to get up.

12 noon – Manage to clear the thinnest, most pathetically small path through the snow to the front door. Gah, I’m so unfit. Have lunch (soup and an apple)

12:30 – We decide to decorate the Christmas tree. Cue much sighing and tutting from me. Douglas takes so LONG doing this sort of thing. Here’s my idea of decorating a christmas tree. Stick baubles on at random, drape lights on anyhow. Stick presents undeneath it. This is not, I have to say, Douglas’ idea of how you decorate a tree.

15:30 – We finish decorating the tree. Yes, it’s taken THREE BLOODY HOURS. It does, however, look rather splendid, and it makes things seem a little more Christmassy (something that, so far, has been sadly lacking). We take bets on how long it’s going to be before the cats decide that it’ll make a good climbing frame and send it toppling to the ground.

Decide we’ll watch a film.

18:30 – Finish watching the film. I chose to watch Bela Tarr’s Weickminster Harmonies, which is very long, slow and depressing. How festive of me. I dropped not-very-subtle hints to Douglas that I’d like Tarr’s Satantango as a Christmas present, so I’m hoping he’s taken me up on that one.

19:30 – Eat dinner. Read for a bit (Jose Doneso’s The Obscene Bird of Night)

21:00 – Watch two episodes of the Sopranos (up to season 6, finally. Tony’s just come out of his coma)

23:30 – Go to bed

No, it really wasn’t a productive day.

*£££££££££££s*

Beans on toast for us for the next year then.

I cheered myself up by watching The Christmas Session on BBC4, featuring the very wonderful Bellowhead:

*

Farewell Don Van Vliet, creator of some of greatest and most original pieces of music this century. Can we expect the first of the endless posthumous “discovered” albums shortly?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/dec/18/captain-beefheart-died-provocative-unpredictable

*

The snow is endless. It disappeared entirely for a few days, and it felt like spring. Now it’s returned, certainly the worst that we’ve seen for a decade.

It’s strange, how people feel obliged to engage in one-upmanship when it comes to bad weather. I do it myself: “This snow is nothing compared to the weather we had when I was little. I can remember how it used to drift up to the top of six foot walls, and you’d step in the snow and it’d go up to your waist.” But then someone even older will feel the need to better this: “That’s just a wee drop compared to the winter of 1947. The snow reached to the top of telephone poles. We had to get food drops flow in to us.” And probably there’s some ghost hovering in the background whispering “Ah yes, but I remember the winter of 1740.

The first is that Alan Garner is work on the concluding part of the trilogy that began with Weirdstone and Gomrath. It’s doubtful if this new one will be a children’s book, as those two were, but it’s unexpected, and elating news.

http://mgsdevoff.blogspot.com/2010/10/ten-ten-ten.html

The second is a revival of Glass/Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach that will be commencing a world tour in 2012. It’s such an expensive, rarely-performed work, yet it’s one that revolutionised both theatre and music. I’ve never had the opportunity to see it performed live, and would kill for the chance. That’s my 2012 holidays sorted out then.

http://philipglass.typepad.com/files/eob-announce-pr-120610v5.pdf

In actuality, both of these are a recognition that their creators are getting on in years – it’ll almost certainly be Garner’s last book, so can be seen as a tying up of loose ends, while Einstein will similarly be probably be revived again while its creators are alive. So it’s bittersweet news in a way. But still, I’m thrilled

“Mmm,” thought I. “The wildlife’s closing in. We’ll be getting deer next.”

Tonight, roe deer are sheltering in the small collection of pine trees that stand to the back of our building.

Obviously I have predictive powers.

Tomorrow: expect my report of the polar bear that’s been found to have taken residence on our workplace traffic roundabout (I was going to say a tyrannosaurus rex, but hey, I don’t want to stretch credibility too far.)

This morning: A chaffinch huddled at the windowpane. Frozen solid. Stuck, in fact, to the glass. That one went in the wheelie bin. Last night’s temperature – minus 16. The windowpane still has a few encrusted feathers welded to it.

Also this morning: a fox trotting around the building, looking famished. Actually, thinking about it, it was a bit of a waste of that chaffinch. It could have served a useful purpose.

This afternoon: A curlew flies into the window and stuns itself. A box of photocopier paper is emptied and the bird sits inside the box dazed for a few a few hours before it’s released and flies happily off. Well, maybe not happily: daytime temperature today – minus 10.

It’s been a cruel week. Freezing fog’s been folded across the sea for most of the day. At night it heads inland and follows the path of the river through the town. It’s so cold then that the moisture freezes in the air and you can see the waft of frozen droplets in the parabola of the street lights. It is bitter, bitter, bitterly cold.

But it’s also spectacularly beautiful, with lucid winter light and the sort of cold sun that turns the sky blue without providing the slightest semblance of heat.

It’s only beautiful from indoors though, where you’re warm, and safe, and protected. Everyone’s already developing cabin fever.

p.s. quick quiz. The title of today’s entry comes from which song?

We imagined him at home, bashed and bleeding, with two black eyes and broken teeth. So we phoned him.

It turns out that while he was in the supermarket, a woman pushed him to the ground, stole the loaf of bread from his shopping trolly, and put in in her own basket. Then she ran to the checkout.

Yes, there are bread shortages in the Glasgow area. These snow falls are hitting hard.