Chaos, Carnage and Quatermass

The Quatermass bit is at the finish, so skip to the end for the sci-fi nostalgia.

Mills as Bernard Quatermass - one of the reasons this works so well, is because Mills seems genuinely lost throughout every scene

A few weeks ago, I wrote on here about the large screen I use for work ‘dying’ - it was a big 36-inch Benq graphics display and only 4 years old. I have 3 large Apple Cinema Displays, but they are no longer connectable to newer Mac computers (which makes me incandescent with rage - they call it ‘unsupported’). It just died on me at the worst possible moment, lights out. Nothing. I assumed it was electrical - which was the closest I could find to any solution online. - and because I had a work deadline and none of my other screens would ‘speak’ to the hard drive I was using - I had to fork out £500 on a new one with next-day delivery—money I didn’t have.

I tried everything, but all the computer people I know are Mac-based and wouldn’t touch it. I tried online, called all sorts of engineers and suppliers - nothing. Tech is now disposable. In the end I boxed it up, assuming I’d have someone take it on Freecycle. Yesterday I was looking for a copy of the manual online so I could include it with the dead screen when I gave it away ‘for spares’ (the stand is worth £50 alone), and I stumbled across a single line in a forum

“The best thing about these displays is that you can return to factory settings and a full reset by pressing the ON button for 5 seconds”

This does not appear anywhere online, in the manuals, their website or any forum I found.

Reader. It worked. I am furious.

I have ‘Everest’ (2015) on in the background while I work. I like this film; it has just the right pacing to be white noise (I’ve seen it so many times I can just let it run in the background without being distracting. Watching the video of the events in Nepal is harrowing. I’ve watched a lot of disaster movies over the years - when practical effects gave way to digital, disaster became less spectacle and more wallpaper - we become inert and unmoved. Seeing how brutal nature is, the scale and inevitability of destruction is overwhelming.

I somehow read a news article about the leaks from a new version of the video game Grand Theft Auto. I have no interest in video games, or gaming in general. My parents bought a very early 2nd-hand copy of the basic tennis game when I was about 12, and my brother and I played it for 10 minutes, then went outside to play real tennis. The clip I saw was a hyper-realistic film of a man throwing a woman against a wall, leaving a smear of blood where her head hit the plaster - then throwing her down some concrete steps. This was on the BBC; the comments were mostly very excited reactions to the realism: ‘you can actually feel the weight of the body hit the ground’. When did beating up women become fun for the family?

‘Cry of the Banshee’ (1970) is now on Amazon Prime in fully restored splendour. It’s great to catch a bit of vintage horror for the first time.

I have a lot going on at the moment. I just finished loads of very difficult work that overran all its budgets and timescales and had to deal with a printer who treated me and my client badly. It’s exhausting. I’m showing at the Hastings Book Fair in 2 weeks; I was interviewed by them for the festival podcast but have refused to listen to the broadcast. I hate the sound of my own voice and have only just recovered from an incident a few weeks ago when a group of staggeringly drunk (and apparently coked-up) pensioners in the pub tried to goad me with their Harry Enfield ‘comedy scouser’ impressions.

All of this waiting for my ‘bad’ eye to recover and gearing up for my next appointment at Urology - I am having my blood tests on Tuesday. If my PSA continues on its upward trajectory at the same rate, it will be about 14.

Also

I find myself in an unenviable position where I sold my house at far, far less than the asking price to buy a flat that needed a lot of work - which made it affordable - only for the owner of the flat to decide not to sell to me because she found out who was buying my place and she had a dispute with them from a few years ago. So now I’m stuck with a house sale I’m going to have to struggle to get out of if I can’t find anywhere to live that I can afford. The local property market has collapsed, and everything is a mess. I am in limbo. I can’t afford to keep spending money on this house, and I need somewhere that I can work in. Obviously someone will say I’m very privileged to be a property owner, but it doesn’t actually work like that. I’ve not been sleeping much this month, and a few times I had to get up in the night to throw up. I need to pay off the debt I’m carrying, use the money I spend on my mortgage to invest in my business, have a better workspace and set something aside for some very expensive but necessary dental work. I’m never going to win the lottery - I realised that on week 3.

John Mills struggling to understand his own species, let alone an alien force

I sat down and rewatched The Quatermass Conclusion (1979) last night. I watched the original broadcast, episode by episode, and thought it was thrilling, inventive, scary and exciting. I’d already seen the original Quatermass movies (and later the TV screencasts) and was a huge fan of the Nigel Kneale creation.

Conclusion still stands up - it’s an intelligent, suspenseful exploration of fear of the unknown, and fear of who we are and what we’ve become. I recently watched a documentary that includes a section on Kneale’s unhappy work life and the frustrations and resentments he felt towards the end of his life - and you can see them all here. Society has crumbled into a self-destructive mess - the old envy the young who they cannot understand or control - the young hate the old because of the mess they made of the world and themselves. It manages to do so much without revealing anything. We walk away not really understanding what happened, but not needing to know. The days of endless online discourse and still dissection are far off. It’s also about love, redemption and sacrifice. It’s a fucking masterpiece. It’s all we talked about in school for days after each episode. (I was 13).