Don't mind me. I'm just projecting...

Ah, sweet Sunday.

CS like any good Spanish girl, goes to her parent’s house for lunch every Sunday. I accompany her once every three Sundays or so. Just enough to be a dutiful son-in-law but not enough for me to feel as though I’m taking advantage of her mother’s superlative cooking.

And there is the added bonus of having the flat to myself for a few hours. Oh, the bliss.

What I do during these placid afternoons can be categorised into three sections, doing something uninterrupted, doing absolutely nothing uninterrupted and watching a flick that CS would never in a million years want to sit through. Today I had planned to indulge in the third of these activities and had pre-emptively rented ‘Open Till Dawn’ for the whole weekend. (never seen it, strangely enough)

Then tragedy struck.

First of all, it should be explained that when it comes to visual entertainment, CS and I are the most annoying, condescending guttersnipes that you’re ever likely to meet at a dinner party. When someone asks if we’ve heard the latest gossip about whatever plastic celebrity happens to be in vogue, we just look at them with a withering, superior smile and tell them that aaaaaaactually we don’t own a television. What makes the whole thing worth while is watching to the poor sod realise that he’s made himself looks like a peasant and desperately try to back-pedal his way out of it. It goes something like:

‘Oh, yeah, well good for you....television’s such crap after all.....and..em...I hardly watch it myself....er....wouldn’t own one if it wasn’t for the nature documentaries....and......the news and...... that programme about the arts, whassit called again?.... but it really is 99% garbage...so I usually prefer to read a book when I get home from work.......em...the wine’s good isn’t it?’

Man, we’re going to Hell just for that.

And what make us even more irritating is that if the conversation moves onto film, we get to tell everyone that we don’t go to the cinema much lately because we've got a DVD projector at home. Ha! What a pair of pretentious toadies we are!

Though it has to be said, the projector is pretty cool and it was half the price of a flat screen TV, so the one-upmanship doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. We bought it along with a dirt cheap home cinema just after our flatmate moved out and then converted his room into our own private ‘salon Lumierre’. It’s a triangular room so the DVD went into the closet, the speakers were hung round the ceiling and the gizmo itself got stuck on a shelf in the corner so that the image gets projected onto the hypotenuse wall. CS had just been given a double bed as a gift so that was added to the room and then she had to go and buy a pair of red velvet curtains so we could watch movies during the day. Basically it’s the most pornographic room you’re ever likely to see. All it needs is a mirror on the ceiling and some tacky flanged guitar music to get the Hugh Hefner seal of approval.

Anyway, back to tragic events.

There I was all geared up for the heady cocktail of Tarantino dialogue AND exploding vampires, when to my dismay the DVD refused to load. Upon ejecting the disk, I noticed that it had a clean crack from the centre to the circumference. Damn! So what now? Not only am I going to miss out on Selma Hayek strutting her stuff but they’re going to think that I broke the disk. Mark my words, they’ll try to pin the rap on me.

So in frustration I turned to the Internet to bewail my fate and that’s basically why this post is so long and drab. Sorry.

Hey! LtE informs me that we just got our first comment from a stranger. So shout out to Amanda B. Think of yourself as cutting a virtual ribbon Amanda. Cheers.