Christmas has begun. Last night there were four parties to choose from but, having done four in one night once before and then realised I was no longer in the first flush of journalistic youth, I skipped three and opted for the James Bond party at Hush.

‘Cocktails will be served from eight,’ said the invite, but when we got there it turned out that ‘cocktails’ comprised a choice of red wine, white wine or beer. I suppose you could have mixed them all together to create your own particular headache in a glass, but that doesn’t really fit the ‘cocktail’ bill.

So, no Martini, shaken or otherwise.

And what about the theme? Well, they had two TVs – one at either end of the room – showing Goldfinger and The Spy Who Loved Me, each with the sound muted so we could hear the Bond soundtrack CD they’d slapped on in the background. There was an Odd Job lookie-likie and a Hale Berry facsimile, a gun carved out of ice in one corner and… well, actually, that was it.

That’s not to say it was a bad party. I actually had a really good time, ate some unhealthy greasy food and I met up with Will, who I’ve not seen in – well, months.

I’m wondering, though, what those other three parties might have been like.

After weeks of backwards and forwards letter-writing with Sky, we turned to the web and the ‘Instant Answers Online’ tool. Simple question – how do we look at our bill online? Sky wasn’t so sure:

We tried several variations, but it was no more helpful than the telephone support centres, the letters we’ve sent or received or the ‘active’ stuff on the Sky+ box. So, we decided to see whether it was any more enlightening on any other subjects. Turns out it is. In fact, when you stop asking it about Sky it’s actually quite clever.

London Grid for Learning is, according to its own site,

‘…a consortium of the 33 Local Authorities which provides a filtered broadband connection, network services, a common learning platform, online content and support communities for all schools across London.’

So, basically, schools across our nation’s capital trust it to mediate on their behalf, blocking out nasty sites, and letting the good ones through to save our precious childrens’ delicate sensibilities.

In theory, a great idea. Or it would be if it was accurate. Seems my site is blocked, though, as according to London Grid for Learning offline.co.uk is officially a ‘Gambling Site’, and anyone trying to access it is blocked, instead seeing this rude block page.

Gambling site, eh? Could that be because I mentioned Casino Royale a couple of days ago?

I’m glad our future generation of leaders and industry magnates is being protected by such an accurate, reliable and worthy filter system that can tell the difference between a work of literature and a betting house. Aren’t you?

I had a lovely day on Saturday. I went here.

Warning: The following contains significant spoilers.

The Standard calls me up from time to time, and asks me to write apparently spontaneous missives for their letters page. It’s not as simple as it sounds, as they are usually after a particular slant, and so the letter gets passed backwards and forwards between me and them for a couple of days until we reach a compromise that’s at least half way between what they want to print and what I want to say.

They emailed a couple of weeks ago to see if I’d write something about James Bond, but I was on deadline and so this time around I turned them down. I’m glad I did. Having now seen Casino Royale, I think whatever I wrote would have come across as naive and ill-informed.

This film is very, very different to anything that’s gone before it. It’s brutal, gritty, and far less comfortable than anything Brosnan, Connery or the Bonds in between ever managed. This is the first Bond who could feel real pain, the first one who would kill in cold blood (in The Man With the Golden Gun, Bond actually explains that when he kills it is only on the specific instructions of his government, but that’s all changed with Casino Royale), and the first Bond who has had no Q to arm him, and no Moneypenny to have swoon at his feet.

If he wasn’t called Bond, and if Judy Dench was playing a character with any name other than M, you’d not even put it in the same series as Moonraker or Goldeneye and, as a life-long fan, I’m not ashamed to say it benefits enormously from such a drastic change; a change that’s clearly signalled from the very first frame, as the producers have even dispensed with the trademark gun-barrel view of him walking across the screen, and the pico-clad girls in the credits.

I’ve gone back and dug out my review of the book, and re-reading it, I’m surprised to see how much of it could apply to the film, although I was very wrong on the ‘long and rather dull’ front:

Since they announced Casino Royale would be the next Bond film, I decided I ought to read it. The films and books usually don’t correlate all that closely, but I was interested to see what might be in store on the offchance they really do keep to their word and take it back to traditional Bond.

Hmmm…

Well, it could be a long and rather dull film if they do. You see, not much happens. I’m going to spoil the story here – the story of the book, at least, although in all likelihood not the story of the film.

Our hero finds himself in Royale, a small French town famed for its casino (you can guess its name). He has been sent there by M to play the mother of all Baccara matches against Le Chiffre, a Russian spy who is being hunted down by SMERSH, the Soviet Agency that knocks off the Union’s own rogue agents before they become an embarassement. It was alluded to in the film version of The Living Daylights, the plot of which revolved around the supposed revival of Smyert Shpionam (translation: death to spies, and the derivative of the contraction SMERSH).

You can pretty much guess who wins and what eventually happens to Le Chiffre, and to be honest the whole casino gambling stuff is so well written that reading about a bunch of people sitting around playing cards turns out to be quite exciting. Bond, though, is more or less unrecognisable as the character we see in the films.

There is a long, dwindling, slow wind-down of the storyline after the plot climax, in which Bond comes across as a desperate, love-sick teenager. In fact, no – more like a sad old man who is so desperate to cling to the woman who he might possibly, perhaps get further with that he will put up with pretty much anything. This isn’t the hump-em and dump-em love-villain we know from the films. He is a flawed, insecure character who seems suddenly to fear being left on his own.

Perhaps it was done to establish the character. This is the first book of the series, after all, and the dwindling ending does go on to explain why he lives his life the way he does, and why he is so driven from here on in (before this book, he had only killed two men, and he doesn’t kill anyone – even Le Chiffre – in these 189 pages). If that’s the case, then I can excuse it but, well, as I say, hmmm…

This new Bond may look nothing like the Bond of Fleming’s novels, but Daniel Craig has got the character down to a T. He plays a flawed spy with real weaknesses, and seemingly the only departure the producers have allowed is in permitting their spy to kill and kill and kill again. The first kill of his career, which we watch even before the credits roll is particularly messy and distressing, as he half strangles a man and then drowns what remains of his battered body in a sink in a public toilet.

The Russians are conveniently dropped from the film plot (although that hasn’t stopped some paranoia-focused news sites I’ve been reading from wondering aloud whether the killing of a Russian spy in London this week was an elaborate and rather sick publicity stunt), and France doesn’t get a look in. Instead, we are transported to an anonymous central African state, then Madagascar, Montenegro and, finally, Venice, for a conveniently tacked on climax that leads us directly into the next film.

Where they’ve not flinched, though, is in recreating the torture scene in which Bond is stripped naked, tied to a chair that’s missing its seat and then battered again and again between the legs with a fat knot at the end of a thick, heavy rope (although in the book Le Chiffre uses a carpet beater in this scene).

The only disappointment, I though, was how they’d handled Vesper’s treachery. You’d be hard-pressed to guess she was a double agent in the book, but the Albanian love knot she wears in the film is such an obvious warning that Bond deserves to have his 00 status revoked for missing it. He’d clearly forgotten M’s briefing.

Even so, this shoots straight in at the top of my Bond list, and Daniel Craig is, without question, a better Bond even than Connery. I suspect that the only reason no reviewers have yet said the same is that they know if they put it in print they’ll unleash a flood of complaints.

I must re-watch the original Casino Royale now. I did plough through half of it on DVD a couple of years ago, but it was so terrible I switched it off before the end. Looking through the cast list, though, it could make for some amusing star-spotting:

Derek Nimmo, Ronnie Corbett, Bernard Cribbins, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, David Niven, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, Barbara Bouchet, Bury Kwouk, Peter O’Toole, John Le Mesurier, Stirling Moss (as himself), Dave Prowse… how could a cast like that produce something so terribly unwatchable?

The moral: if you want to watch Casino Royale this weekend, make sure you pick the right one.

Well, technically her birthday was earlier in the week, but that’s no good for celebrations, so she came over this weekend, arriving with Dan on Friday evening and staying right through.

So, Friday night I knocked off 10 minutes early and headed to the station to find all the trains delayed and full. Not entirely surprising: it’s a theme that’s been developing over time. Two hours later I got home – beating them by the time it takes to gulp down half a gin.

It was such a lazy, decadent weekend. Friday night was given over to a huge, big dinner and then flopping down in the lounge feeling too stuffed to move. Sal’s technically eating for two now, and it’s starting to show, but none of the rest of us had any excuse.

Saturday, we were hardly any better behaved. After a more than healthy breakfast, we all went our separate ways for a while, and I faffed on some more with the pinhole photography I’m trying to get a grip of. All the stuff I’ve been reading online says that your photos should be perfectly in focus with an infinite depth of field, but the best I can manage are easily identifiable, yet distinctly wooly renditions of models, eggs and the woods up the road.

I’m quite heartened to see that every site showing you how to make a pinhole lens for your digital SLR – what I’m doing – also illustrates the technique with equally fluffy results, but I can’t work out what isn’t quite right. I’m fairly sure it’s the right size, so I can only guess the needles and pins I’ve been using to pierce a succession of holes aren’t entirely round, and they’re causing the light to spill in at odd angles.

Anyhow, I gave up in time for us all to sit down to eat again – lunch this time – and then we spent the afternoon sitting down watching The Incredibles until it was time to go out and eat. The best fish pie in the world, in my case. Some apparently excellent chicken and steak where everyone else was concerned.

Fortunately, on Sunday, I half redeemed myself, heading out after breakfast (another meal) to hunt treasure with Rich. So, I packed my rucksack with the GPS gadget and a sheet of clues and we walked out on a multi-cache that we’d given up on a few weeks ago. We did quite well this time around. There were fifteen clues in total – or thereabouts – and by my reckoning we were spot on for 13 of them, despite the gadget’s tendency to spin around in seemingly random directions and throw us off course for 200 metres or more.

By the time we got well and truly lost on clue 13, though, it was already getting dark. The cars had their headlights on, the streets were lit a dim orange, and out fingers were blue and stiff from the cold, so we retreated indoors to drink tea and watch movies.

I’d forgotten quite how slow The Living Daylights is. It’s definitely the better of Dalton’s two Bond efforts, but it’s 30 minutes longer than the storyline justifies. Of course, that’s not his fault, but it does cement his position as my least favourite Bond lead.

If all goes to plan, Thursday night should be Casino Royale night. Going on what I’ve heard from all those who have already seen it, I don’t think it’ll have too much effect on Mr Dalton’s current rank.

…and this one is Veliko Tarnovo, the city of the Tzars. It was the capital of Bulgaria once. Now it’s just a beautiful hill-top town.

This one is the House of Spies in Bucharest, Romania.

Here’s another mini world. This time it’s Trakai Castle in Lithuania.

Chris of the Phin directed me towards the technique for making mini worlds from your photos this week. He’ll be writing it up for MacUser, but in the meantime I’ve been playing around with the technique. Here’s a little world made from the Pont du Gard in Provence.