Sputnik Sweetheart

Last night I listened to the last in the current series of That Mitchell and Webb Sound. It was really funny! It's a pity that it's over now. I also finished reading Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami. The story is told by a 25 year old teacher known as K. whose best friend is 22 year old college dropout Sumire, whose main ambition in life is to become a writer and who models her look and lifestyle on her idol Jack Kerouac. Sumire falls madly in love for the first time with a woman named Miu, who is seventeen years older and already married. Puzzled by her feelings for Miu, Sumire bombards K., who is secretly in love with her, with late night telephone calls about life and the nature of love. However, one night K. receives a telephone call from a distraught Miu who tells her that Sumire has vanished on a remote Greek island. The book is surreal, funny, mysterious, enigmatic and often deeply moving. Despite only being 229 pages long the book tackles a lot of really big themes. It is definitely worth reading.

Later on I watched a TV show called Gameswipe, which was a comedy show about video games. It was really about the history and development of video games, along with reviews of popular games. It was also very funny. Some of the things in the show reminded me of some of the video games that I used to play years ago. I can still remember when they came on cassettes and it took about five minutes for a game to load. That's if they loaded at all, I remember they were often really unreliable.

After that I watched a Doctor Who story from 1989 on DVD called "The Curse of Fenric". In the story, the Doctor (played by Sylvester McCoy) and his companion Ace (Sophie Aldred) arrive in England during the Second World War, near a secret military base on the coast, where a new codebreaking machine is being developed. However, a group of Russian commandos are planning to steal the machine, however the Doctor is more interested in the ancient Viking curse that is rumoured to haunt the local area. Before long the local area is under attack from vampire monsters from the future, and a powerful ancient evil awakens. It is one of my favourite episodes of the show, and is much darker and a lot scarier than most of the other stories from the series.

I walked to and from work again, and it was another really quiet and dull day. The systems all went down again this afternoon, so I spent the last half hour reading my book. I got a sausage supper on my way home, and shortly after I had eaten someone came around to try and sell a new gas and electricity supply but I wasn't interested and was pretty irritated by the interruption, because the guy was giving his spiel for nearly quarter of an hour, before giving up, which meant that I missed the first ten minutes of this evenings Doctor Who on the radio.