Dan McNeil's Blog

I don’t watch horror films late at night.  It’s not because I believe that the poltergeists or demons or Gremlins are going to creep into my room at night (was Gremlins a horror film?) but it’s because I don’t trust my mind and what it can do to make things real in my dreams. I’m a rational person with no belief in the supernatural, but nobody appears to have passed that message to the part of my brain which writes the scripts for my dreams.  Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night and glanced over at the curtain. The lights of London were coming in through the blinds and making shapes on the light-coloured curtains in front.  I looked at the curtains and said to myself “that shadow looks a bit like a person” and was awake enough to rationalise in my head that if I were a less rational person, I could easily mistake those shadows in the half-light for a ghostly figure standing in the corner of the room. Can you guess what happened after I fell asleep again?...

The mind plays tricks on us, we all know that. For years, I had a song going around in my head – except it was only the line “Falling apart, because I know I’ve lost my guardian angel” going around and around in my head. A week or two ago, I tracked it down on Amazon and bought it. This is where my memory had deceived me. In my mind, this was a famous song from the 80s which surely everyone knew. I always found it very strange that I seemed to be the only person who remembered that line, and was sure that everyone else was just pretending to be oblivious to this song. Here is the song, courtesy of YouTube. You even get to look at some cheesy pictures of angels whilst it’s playing… … isn’t it awful? A little time spent on Google reveals that this is not the only version of the song. It exists in a couple of cover versions. First up, here’s Nino De Angelo… … isn’t that worse than the first one? Finally, in that horrible modern trend of taking songs from the eight...

It’s been far too long since I’ve written in here.  Almost every entry I write begins with those words and so I presume there’s a message in there somewhere; I should write more often.  And I shall. In 2010, I promise I shall. Christmas is never a time of great joy for me.  It’s not a time of particular sadness, but given that the rest of the world seems determined to be elevated into a happier state of being for the latter half of December, my continued normal state of humdrum feels rather left behind in the rush for tinselly nirvana. Personally, 2009 has been an exhausting year.  Starting it in a new job, only to be made redundant from said job in the first week back in January.  Then starting work at Symbian ( www.symbian.org ) in March and working through until now without much of a break.  I need the rest.  I need a week of no work, no stress and no alarm clock. At least there has been some Christmas cheer this week.  Sunday was a parti...

I’ve never come across a situation in my life when it’s useful to say “be careful”. Mostly, people say it when you’re doing something potentially dangerous, in which case “being careful” is probably something you intend to do anyway.  And indeed, shouting “be careful” at someone walking a tightrope may cause them to turn around to look at you whilst working out what you shouted causing them to lose their balance and fall off said tightrope. I see this in the same category as saying “have a safe flight” to someone about to board a plane.  Unless you’re saying it to the pilot, the person you’re talking to is unlikely to have much control over the safety of the flight, so why say it at all. I guess it’s short hand for “I wish you a safe flight” and “be careful” is short hand for “I don’t want you to hurt yourself”. But this doesn’t inject any “point” into saying it.  Just because I know someone doesn’t want my plane to crash, I am not going to change my view of the f...

I hate certain words.  It’s irrational as I don’t have any particular dislike of the change of language over time.  However, there are certain words which irritate the hell out of me, and maybe now is the time for me to exorcise that hatred. What exactly does “Yay!” mean.  It’s something people type in online conversations but it’s not something they’d ever actually say to a real person (I hope).  Apparently, it’s something you “say” when you’re happy or you want to celebrate something that’s just been said to you, but it really irritates me.  I have images of American teen movies where the hero has just saved the world in some ridiculous way and his friends all shout “yay!” in celebration.  What’s wrong with saying “that’s great news!” or “fantastic!” or using a real word? From one word, let’s turn to a pair of words which seem to have become online antonyms even though they don’t mean opposite things. The words are “win” and “fail”.  Apparently, ...

Despite having lived in London for 10 years, I hadn’t – until today – visited Hampton Court Palace.  We spent the afternoon wandering around the state apartments, kitchens, gardens and other numerous buildings and rooms. Who knew that Hampton Court Palace was home to the world’s oldest known grape vine? We also went into the maze.  Contrary to popular belief, Hampton Court Maze can be escaped using the method of “putting your right hand onto the wall and walking in such a way that it never leaves contact with the wall” but we decided not to try that method opting for the method of stopping at every fork and seeing which of the two options appears “less obviously heading towards the centre, and so more likely to be the correct route”.  Having said that, we got to the middle with no dead ends met on the way… The journey out to Hampton Court was uneventful in terms of delays and cancellations (there were none of the latter, and only a minor version of the former)....

Yesterday didn’t start brilliantly as days go, and so it was the kind of day when you really need something to cheer you up. You know how it is – a bar of chocolate or warm cup of tea isn’t going to cut it – you need something to warm the cockles of your heart. Two things happened last night which really cheered me up. We went to the recording of “Clive Anderson’s Chat Room” for Radio 2. All was light and jovial until the subject was mentioned of Elton John’s idea of adopting a Ukrainian orphan. Some of the panel raised concerns over whether a rock star travelling the world on tour, particular one in his sixties, is the best person to adopt a young child. One of the panellists was strangely quiet on the subject – despite having written a column about exactly that subject only days before. That person was Amanda Platell, the homophobic, bigoted and borderline-racist excuse for a journalist who has sold her soul to write for the daily assault on human dignity which calls itself ...