Today, I have been working on the grooves in the side panels into which the dowelling will slot. This panel is pretty much finished – I just need to perform a little more sanding so that the dowelling fits snugglier.
Sanding is slow, monotonous and boring work. All the exciting sawing bits are done, to all intents and purposes.
Sigh.

I used to work in a Blockbuster video store, many moons ago, and it was a pretty awful job. The only real delight was in ordering obscure films from other branches just to annoy their sales assistants. Since leaving that den of iniquity, I vowed never again to set foot in a Blockbuster establishment, no matter how many copies of Look Who’s Talking Too they boast in their window display.

However, when I went into Camden’s Channel Films to browse the art house section while wearing a beret, sipping a decaf latte and with a soulful yet despairing look on my face, I was astonished to find a little-known black and white film which I had remembered seeing on BBC2 years ago: Acerblanca.

For those unfamiliar with this wartime meisterwerk, the plot is simple. An exiled Scotsman and one-time French sympathiser, runs the most popular blog in town where everyone wants to be seen commenting. However, when the (overly-researched) gun-toting A-list come into town, he has an important decision to make: should he continue his carefree way of life or should be reform, overcome his bitterness at an uncaring world, and write posts about fluffy, wuffy kittens?

I immediately rented the film, unfairly labelled ‘bargain basement’ and rushed home to watch it, only stopping for an evening down the pub, a few days at work and a short holiday. As the credits started to roll, I felt a palpable excitement in the air, so I turned on the humidifier and settled down to watch and remember.

Most of the dialogue came back to me immediately, and I recall my surprise at the number of ways in which AH-64A/D Apache attack helicopters could be mentioned in romantic scenes, as well as the preponderence of weaponry in those immortal lines:

“It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, especially with a Heckler & Koch MP5K-PDW sub-machinegun.”

“We’ll always have Paris. And guns.”

“You played it for her, now play it for me, Sam. And guns.”

“Here’s gunning at you, kid.”

“Round up the usual suspects. With … you know, big guns.”

As the end credits rolled and I looked out of my living room window to see another sunny Camden day, the drug dealers playing on the street and the incense gently wafting on the breeze, I have to confess that a small tear rolled down my cheek. What romance, what passion, I thought, what … guns.

I feel honored that Mark and I have been allowed final guest privileges before the new iteration of Uborka goes live. I’ve seen a sneak peek of it and wow is it amazing. No, I’m lying, in fact I haven’t seen it, I don’t know who Pete and Karen are. Who are you? What are you doing here? Does your mother know you do that in front of your computer monitor?
Surely picking Mark as my co-host is like putting Paul Newman and Robert Redford together in Butch Dyke and The Sundance Film Festival, Newman and Steve McQueen together in The Towering Bruschetta, or even Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Michael Mann’s Sheep. And speaking of classic movies I’ll tell you a little something about Mark you maybe didn’t know.
When Mark was over in San Francisco last year he made a movie, a pretty low budget one, and a remake at that. Imagine the reaction though, on the first day of shooting, when he makes some unauthorized rewrites to the scene of the day. As Phil and Paul Hartnoll toyed around nearby, rewriting Lalo Schifrin’s original score and Mos Def practiced his scary-face/lion-face in a mirror, Mark was furiously beavering away at a word processor to spice up the script and make it a little more contemporary.
The director called action and Mark played the scene out just as it had gone in the original, patiently eating his hotdog until the bank alarm goes off behind him. He hits his cues and fires the ridiculously oversized prop gun they’ve given him before striding across the street, through the mist of a burst fire hydrant, ignoring the cries of pain from the other crooks and focuses on Mos Def before uttering his revised lines:
“I know what you’re thinking. Did he write sixteen paragraphs or only fifteen? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I’ve kinda lost track myself. But being as this is a LondonMark post, containing the most long-winded, high-concept lexicon in the world, and would melt your brain clean out, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I need punctuation lessons? Well, do I, punk?”
Of course, if you ask any of his exes, they’ll tell you there’s a very different reason he’s known as Dirty Marky. And you can expect the movie tie-in boxer shorts Dirty Marky Marks to be available at a market stall near you very soon. The movie went straight to DVD, or at least that’s what the producer told us.