Happy birthday alltheleaves! Have a lovely day. Hope it's as sunny over there as it is here (and that you're able to catch some of the lovely rays...).

Despite forgetting something crucial this morning and having to cycle home and back again during my lunch-break in the blazing sun in order to collect it, I am having a good(ish) day. Not least because I am now the proud owner of a complete Press Gang box set that just cost £25 on Amazon, reduced from £79.99! I watched one episode this morning when my boss was at a meeting, and it was just as awesome as I remember it. Also, Lynda's baggy red jumper, short black flouncy skirt, black tights and shoes and black over-sized man's jacket are, sadly, more or less a typical stellanova-ensemble circa 1989. Dear oh dear.

1. Happy birthday to the wonderful glitterboy1 and happy belated birthday to the lovely felinitykat! You both rock.

2. It's sunny again! And I am in work, trying to write a very silly article, even though I would prefer to be outside. On Saturday Patsington and I went on our first safari to the rural lane on the other side of the park in nearly a year. The sun was shining, there were beautiful birds everywhere, the fields were full of flowers, and in the ruined 18th century churchyard at the end of the lane was a horse and a (fairly newborn) foal, one of the cutest little things I've ever seen. It was a scene of rustic bliss.

3. Ever since I devoured them all on my honeymoon, I have been meaning to post about the genius of Philip Reeve and his magnificent Mortal Engines quartet. They're possibly the most well-realised feat of the imagination I've ever encountered in fiction - he's created that rare thing, an utterly original fictional world, in which most of the world lives by the principles of "Municipal Darwinism" in giant moving "traction cities" that consume smaller towns. The story races along, Reeve deals with big questions of morality and social justice and memory and what makes us human in an intelligent and thought-provoking way, and, most of all, the characters are complex and real. Amoral, messed-up Hester is one of the greatest anti-heroines ever. And the books are incrediby moving; just thinking of one scene at the end of the last book makes me tear up. In short: read them. And wonder why the hell Philip Pullman's pompous Dark Materials are heralded as works of genius and these book's aren't.

4. Patsington was interviewing gideondefoe on the phone this morning and had to stop the interview for a minute or two because a shouting, puffed-up Ju Ju was having a fight with the identical young cats known to us only as The Twins in the front garden and had to be rescued. We are a very professional journo household. BTW, the new Pirates! book is hilarious.

5. You know when a book looks like it'll be really entertaining and then just...isn't? Take Anna Godbersen's The Luxe. Gossip Girl meets Edith Wharton! It should be so awesome! And yet, it's not, mostly because the author can't write. Bah. Also, check out the "Luxe in the 21st Century" section of the website (it's under Extras). I weep for the future.

Hello, I'm emerging out of the ether again. Remember the days when I posted all the time? Sigh. Anyway, anglaisepaon and starfishchick say five things make a post, and I think I can manage that.

1. We had almost a week of gorgeous summer and now it's lashing rain again. Oh cruel Irish weather, why must you taunt me so? If last summer is anything to go by, this manky weather will continue for the next year, so I suppose I should get used to it (as if the last 32 years wasn't enough time to get used to this country's horrible dampness). Last weekend's weather was ridiculously nice, and against all expectations it even lasted into the bank holiday Monday and, well, most of the week, which I had to spend cooped up in an office, but at least I got to lie out in the park at lunchtime. Oh God, it's thundering now. Brilliant.

2. The current series of Doctor Who is pretty great (I hope you've all been reading my recaps over on Pop Vultures), as is the increasingly deranged Battlestar Galactica. Last night Patsington and I caught up on the last three episodes of 30 Rock. God, I love Tina Fey. I MUST snag an interview with her to tie in with the European release of Baby Mama. By the way, can anyone think of another female TV character who, like Liz Lemon, is depicted looking scruffy and speccy sometimes and be-contact-lensed and foxy when she dresses up to go out, in the manner of an actual human being? Especially in a sitcom? Because I can't. Even the funniest sitcom ladies usually look either groomed and sleek or "comically" dowdy most of the time.

3. I just read Persephone's new reissue of Penelope Mortimer's 1958 novel Daddy's Gone A-Hunting. It's enormously readable but VERY bleak, the sort of novel about women's lives that makes me incredibly grateful for feminism. I've wanted to read her stuff since I read Valerie Grove's excellent biography of her onetime husband John last year, and I want to read more, but I think I might have to read something relatively cosy before I start another one, because two novels about despairing, frustrated suburban wives in a row would make me lose my will to live.

4. Lots of wedding guests very kindly gave us cheques as wedding presents, which had been irresponsibly sitting in a box in our kitchen for the last two months, and the other day Patsington finally went through them all and took those that were made out to him to the bank. However, as he discovered when going through them, all the ones from his relatives on his father's side were made out to Patrick and Anna [Patsington's surname] or even, in one case, Mr and Mrs Patrick [Patsington's surname]. He took them to the bank anyway and was told that the other person would have to sign the back of them before they could be lodged. Except that person doesn't exist. Anyway, apparently as a married woman my identity is so vague in the eyes of the banking system that I can actually sign my ACTUAL NAME on the cheques and that is enough. Hmmmmmmm.

5. I adore Coronation Street, but it's been a bit grim lately, apart from the joy that is the wonderful Becky. Actually, the average episode of Corrie is still funnier than a lot of sitcoms, even with upsetting storylines about babies dying, but still. And Silver Street, the radio soap on the BBC Asian Network, is also pretty depressing, what with Zak being unjustly arrested as a suspected terrorist and Fatima's horrific accident. I've got a couple of week's worth of Archers podcasts to catch up on - Lord knows what's been going on there, it seems to be a bad time in soap land. Although I must give a huge, albeit belated, cheer for Pat in The Archers and her wonderful turn in court last month. I almost cheered aloud in the park as I listened to her stand up to the snide prosecuting barrister without ever losing her cool. More uplifting moments like that, please, soap producers.

I have spent the last three days in la belle France! And two delightful people got married to each other, and there was a fantastic party in the middle of the gorgeously sunny French countryside, and there was a lot of insane dancing, and the next day we all went off in a bus to Monkey Forest and a baby monkey took food from my hand. So basically it was a pretty perfect weekend, even though I packed really badly and forgot everything from my camera to my makeup bag. Congratulations barsine and beau of barsine!

How much do I love artsy German indie electro-popsters Wir Sind Helden? A LOT, that's how much. I've been seeing references to them in German magazines and feminist blogs for years, but only heard them for the first time recently. And oh my God, how did it take me so long? They are so fantastic and last night Ju Ju and I had a bit of a German dance party as we grooved around the kitchen to the sounds of Die Reklamation.

Not only do I absolutely love this song (I can't embed the video), but back in 1995 I created (and never finished) a graphic novel about an indie band who sell their souls to the devil for fame, and a few pages of it, and I am seriously not exaggerating, looked exactly, PANEL FOR PANEL, like a bit of this video. My heroine even looked like, and was dressed identically to, Wir Sind Helden's lead singer/guitarist Judith Holofernes.

I love this song, and its supercute Tintin-esque video:


And this video (and song) just makes me happy:


Because I am a sheep, give me a few "five things" list suggestions!

I was wondering why I love crazy German ice-skating soap opera Alles Was Zählt, which I've been watching avidly online since last week (every single episode is available! It's awesome!). Then it dawned on me. We've got a plucky young ice-skater from the wrong side of the tracks who is discovered at random and chosen for the ice team of a fancy gym, only to become the rival of the owner's glamorous, evil daughter, whose hunky boyfriend is kind to our heroine. Our heroine's brutish stepfather has forbidden her to skate and when he finds out she's been deceiving him, kicks her out of the house and she is forced to go and stay with the owner's family. And when the hunky boyfriend gives her the new skates she needs, they initially hurt her feet so much that when she has to take a surprise skating exam (long story), she needs her scruffy old skates - but the evil rival has stolen them from her locker! So she has to skate in the painful new skates! But she's so awesome that she dazzles all the judges!

In what other medium would we find such a tale? Why, in old-school girls' comics, of course! The whole thing is straight out of Mandy or Judy! And that, I think, is why I love it. That and the fact that every episode ends on an awesome cliffhanger.

My longer Doctor Who review will appear on Pop Vultures, but my shorter one is: brilliant. And ( HUGE SPOILER )

And Catherine Tate wasn't bad at all. And Bernard Cribbins was in it too! Fantastic.

I am back! Yes, Patsington and I have bid farewell to lovely sunny gelato-filled Italia and returned home to, well, quite warm actually Irlanda. Unfortunately, I seem to have picked up sonme vile lurgy and am all bunged up. Bah. But anyway, it's not that bad to be back, apart from work of course. I've been doing more big features in recent months (as opposed to my usual job of doing lots of relatively short ones on top of my editorial work and my four books pages) and had a very big one to do as soon as I got back, but as most of my colleagues have never worked as features writers, they don't seem to realise quite how much time a 2000 word piece based on two very long interviews will take, so the designer calls me every five seconds to see is it finished yet. A freelancer would have been given at least a couple of weeks to put that together - I had three days, including doing the actual interviews AND I also had to do loads of my usual editorial work AND put together two mini-interviews for the fluffier sections of the publication.

Anyway! Enough moaning. The wedding is over, and with it all the hideous wedding-related stress. The ceremony itself was lovely, although I did kind of charge up the aisle at top speed, leaving my poor parents far behind me. We hadn't been able to decide on the perfect arrival music for our musicians (leedy and Busta J, and my friends Angeline and Pól) so in the end Patsington serenaded me with one of his own songs what he wrote for me. The readings were from John Donne (I have loved this poem since I was 15) and WH Auden (look, it mentions frogs!), and then we were married and Jenny and Lisa sand 'This Moment' by the Incredible String Band, which my parents sang at their own wedding, and the Reverend Bill said "you may kiss the bridegroom" and I did and walked down the aisle with our arms around each other feeling very happy.


And then came the reception, which was initially lots of fun but got more stressful after the feast and the (very nice) speeches. Oh, I was so pleased with myself for exerting a near-fascistic level of control over the musical sections of the evening (although I did ask a couple of friends to do DJ sets, I wasn't too bad), spending days putting together the perfect dancefloor playlist on my iPod. Unfortunately, this meant that I had to deal with the technical problems of the sound desk acting up, as well as constantly checking with my DJing chums when their sets were going to end. This was all surprisingly headwrecking. But it all worked out, and everyone danced like mad to everything from Stevie Wonder to the Slits, and I got to play Huggy Bear's seminal riot grrrl classic 'Her Jazz' (the Huggies would probably not approve of being played at a wedding, but still), and my sister Busta J and I achieved our dream of getting everyone to do synchronised dance moves (to our childhood favourite, Paul Simon's 'You Can Call Me Al' and Five's Joan Jett sampling 'Everybody Get Up' which is one of my all time favourite guilty pleasures) which was awesome (there are photographs of all this, unfortunately). One of my friends said 'It's like being at a brilliant club with all your friends!' which was the best compliment I could have received.

I was SO tired by the end, though, and P and I staggered up to the (vair, vair fancy) Shelbourne Hotel, where the staff had left out champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries, and we felt terrible that we were too knackered to appreciate it all and collapsed into bed. Of course, I couldn't collapse before I had taken out the ten zillion pins that were holding up my very impressive hair (a v fancy stylist who works a lot for the magazine did it) and worked out all the knots from the backcombing. Oh the romance of it all.

So there you go, I am married. I don't feel any different, even though I've read lots of articles saying "oh, you think it won't be differen when you're married if you've been living with someone for years, but it is". Actually, it isn't, and I'm not really surprised, becuase as Patsington said during his speech, we've both felt so right together for years, and the wedding was just to celebrate something lovely that already existed.

Thank you all for your congratulations, by the way! I shall post again later about things that have been rocking my world – the genius of Philip Reeve, the sheer joy of campy German soap operas (you can watch one online about rival ice skaters, one rich, one poor, embroiled in a fierce class war!!), gorgeous Italian food – but I haven't had my breakfast yet, so it will have to wait.

Hello! I am in Florence, on my actual honeymoon, which has been absolutely fabulous so far - as was the wedding. Yes, on Saturday afternoon Patsington and I got married, and it was a lovely, lovely day and thanks so much to all of you who came. Anyway, we flew to Pisa on Sunday night and got the train to Florence the next day, and it's just as beautiful as I always thought it would be. Yesterday we went to Santa Croce and I looked at the Giotto frescoes that Lucy and the Emersons look at in A Room with a View. We also strolled over the Ponte Vecchio and climbed up to the Piazza de Michelangelo and gazed out at possibly the single most beautiful view I've ever seen.

This morning we walked out the door of our apartment building (a lovely 17th century palazzo) and took about three steps across the road to the door of the Academia, where we saw Michelangelo's David, which really is pretty impressive in real life, even after a year of studying Italian Renaissance art, which I thought had made me kind of immune to its charms. Now Patsington is having a lie down (although I suspect he is using this an excuse to read the third of Philip Reeve's absolutely and utterly amazinmg Mortal Engines quartet - I took them with me and Patsington started reading the first one as soon as I finished it. He stayed up ridiculously late for two nights finishing it and the next one, and now he is demanding the third book even though I haven't finished it yet) and I am heading off on a solo stroll. Wish me luck!

During a conversation in the office last week, it was revealed that several of my colleagues not only never let their bottoms touch a loo seat in the office, but that they never sit down on a loo seat ANYWHERE OUTSIDE THEIR OWN HOME. Like, not even in their friends' houses. They hover, or cover the seat in loo paper. Now, I consider myself to be a person of ordinary hygiene, and I would not, obviously, sit on a toilet seat that was dirty or, in the case of public loos, a bit grubby or dodgy-looking, but as the only part of most people's anatomy that comes into contact with a toilet seat are the tops of their legs and the side of their bum, it has never crossed my mind that there's something gross about sitting in the same place as long as the place itself is clean. To be honest, if it's a question of revoltingness, surely touching the doorhandle of a public lavatory cubicle (or anywhere else, if you really start becoming germphobic) is much more disgusting, as people are likely to have touched it before washing their hands. Am I remarkably unsanitary for sitting down on the loo in my friends' houses, or are my colleagues, well, kind of mad?

And yes, when I said I wished I could post more often, I didn't think I would be posting about people's bathroom habits. But there you go.

In other news, spring has hit the park, which is a blaze of crocuses and daffodils. It's manky and rainy now, but yesterday afternoon was gorgeously sunny, and I walked around it listening to Vampire Weekend and feeling very summery and happy. More afternoons like that, please, and fewer afternoons worrying about stupid work crap.

Remember the days when I used to write regular, normal LJ entries? Sigh. Anyway, I'm emerging from the ether to remind y'all that I'm still alive, albeit very stressed. Here is what I have been doing over the last couple of months/

1. Procrastinating
2. Stressing over wedding preparations
3. Grooving to late-'70s Talking Heads, aka the best music in the world
4. Trying to write a book
5. Kvetching about work
6. Baking bread

Sadly, that's about it. Some day my life will be, if not particularly exciting, than at least unstressful enough to allow me to write regular tedious LJ posts about my freakish feline. Bet you can't wait!

Oh, and here's a very entertaining piece about the decade's most misogynistic films. Enjoy!

Can anyone recommend some excellent arts/culture related sites? I need to talk about them on the radio next week, and I'm sur there are plenty of excellent sites that I don't know about.

It has not been a fun week. So let's listen to Zooey Deschanel singing to cheer ourselves up. I love this song.

So, on Sunday, I finally got my hands on Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s long-awaited League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, in which a government dossier is discovered detailing various adventures of the League past and present. And it is absolutely and utterly amazing. Not least because one of the central plots in the book is based on the literary universe with which my sisters and I were obsessed as kids: Frank Richards’ original Greyfriars stories. Oh, yes, leedy, when our heroes first open the dossier and see the “note” written on it to “H.W.” refering to his old “Greyfriars compadre R. C.” I got very, very excited. And just WAIT til you see what Moore has done with it…
( Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1984 )

Anyway, the whole thing is pretty insane and kind of aweome, and I’d love it even without the Greyfriars stuff. But that felt like a present – if you’d asked me what fictional universe I most wanted Moore to do properly, it would have been Greyfriars.

Two exciting things!

My first ever post is up at the glorious Pop Vultures! Click here to read my profound thoughts on the crapness of Kylie in this year's Doctor Who Christmas special.

And in other thrilling news, my bread turned out pretty well! Slightly denser than I would have liked, but still, very fluffy and delicious and it smells absolutely fantastic. I feel ridiculously proud of myself.

Oh, and happy new year!

Sniff. It's still Christmas (well, still the Christmas holidays) and I am sick. I've been slightly sick since Thursday morning and properly sick since Friday afternoon. I have, of course, a hideous head cold, like almost everyone else I know, and the only reason my poor runny nose hasn't fallen off is because it's been smeared in so much Vaseline. Patsington and I had a tiny party on Friday, and on Friday afternoon I was feeling so awful I was debating which would be ruder: cancelling a party two hours before guests were due to arrive, or sneezing, snuffling and whinging my way through the party itself. I decided that I just had to buck up and ignore the runny nose and sneezing, so I did, and (hopefully) a good time was had by all, including me (apart from when I sneezed about fifteen times in a row, which exhausted me so much I had to sit down). Anyway, I am quite annoyed by my sickness, which is spoiling my precious time away from the office. My aunt gave me cool bike panniers for Christmas, and I had great plans to go on an epic shopping trip around all the fancy little food shops in Dalkey, loading my panniers as I went but I'm so wobbly about the limbs that I'd be a liability on a bike. I went for a walk around the park yesterday and had to have a lie down when I returned, so there will be no cycling for me.

Today I am baking bread with my own germy hands. Actually, I haven't baked it yet, i've just mixed the yeast batter and put it in the hot press (airing cupboard to non-Irish folks), where it will have to sit for another hour or so. I have only tried to make bread once before, and despite following the instructions of Saint Nigel (Slater), it was a horrible salty, squashy-centered disaster. This time, however, I am following the instructions for "the easiest bread ever" from the Guardian's recent baking supplement, which involves creating a separate yeast-n-flour batter (which Nigel's recipe didn't) and leaving it to rise before mixing it up with flour-salt-and-butter. All very mysterious, but I hope it works - Lord knows it can't be any worse than my last attempt. I'll let you know how it goes...

Very, very sad news: Terry Pratchett has early-onset Alzheimer's. Having happily devoured almost all of his books this year after sneering at and mocking them for nearly two decades, I was really upset to read this.

I am back from London! Where I bought a wedding dress, ate a lot, hung out with my hospitable sister and her beau, visited the surprisingly moving Highgate Cemetary and went on a huge walk, bought loads of cool books, and stood near Kevin Shields at a gig (he seemed quite friendly and ordinary, not the near-mythical recluse of my imagination) and had a lovely dinner with lots of lovely LJ folk. So, all in all, quite an eventful few days. I hope the rest of the week is not eventful at all, as I have taken it off work in order to knit, buy Christmas presents on line, and (tomorrow) visit my wedding reception location (Fallon and Byrne's, to those familiar with Dublin) and discuss exciting things like menus, etc. And also to watch the latest Project Runway, possibly my favourite programme in the world after 30 Rock these days. This series is shaping up to be particularly awesome, what with the usual assortment of bitchy divas, weepy babies and total freaking lunatics (I think viewers of the show know who I'm talking about here). All that and the glorious Tim Gunn! I'm enjoying my little bit of time off very much.

What good luck!

I found the perfect dress for my wedding in a vintage shop on Portobello Road yesterday - 1930s, silk, silvery blue, perfect fit, incredibly beautiful, only £120.

What bad luck!
Having guarded it well all afternoon and evening as we dined out and went for a drink, I returned back to Busta's flat, unwrapped it carefully from its tissue wrappings - and discovered that when the shop assistant had been writing in the freaky shop's log book thing as she was packaging the dress, the dress had obviously come into contact with the wet biro ink and there were a few tiny biro-ish dots ON THE FRONT OF THE SKIRT. Did I burst into tears? Yes I did. However, I calmed down and an inspection this morning revealed that (a) unless you're actually looking for the patch of tiny dots, they're not really noticeable and (b) hopefully they will be cleanable. So it's not a total disaster. But I am still very disappointed that the perfect dress (and it really, really, really is) is no longer perfect.

I'm off to London in a couple of hours! And I will see some of you there. I am currently debating whether to risk bringing my knitting on the plane - bamboo double-pointed needles, so they won't set anything off, and really they're no more pointy than a pencil, but who knows whether this is enough? I'll ask when I'm checking my bags in, I couldn't bear them to throw away my nice new bamboos.

Anyway, I suppose I'd better go and, like, pack, and have a shower and get Ju Ju ready for her trip to the cattery at the vet. But before I go, I'll leave you with this: Stevie Wonder doing 'Superstition' (one of the greatest songs ever) on Sesame Street circa 1972. Note that (a) Stevie and his band perform the whole song, which lasts for 6 minutes - you wouldn't get that on kids' TV now (b) Stevie is surprisingly hot and also totally into performing on Sesame Street, which is awesome and (c) best of all, there is what one commenter on Jezebel (whence this link came) described as "the rad little kid on the fire escape just ROCKING the fuck out." Pure unadulterated joy. Enjoy.