Books in August

THIRTEEN REASONS WHY
A guy receives a package of tapes in the mail. Turns out they're from a girl (Hannah) who killed herself recently. The chapters switch (seamlessly, I must say) between what's being said on the tapes and what our hero is thinking/doing as he listens to the tapes.
If I don't really know what to say about a book I'll have a read through the Amazon reviews, here are some highlights:

fattychocolate says; "It's a sad genre (suicide) but is poignant"

Charlotte says; "I found tears pouring down my face when I finished it, lol."

eeksqueak says; "...I just wanted to tell poor old Hannah to grow up. Having said that, I doubt she would have coped at all well with the trials of college and adult life, so perhaps it's just as well she topped herself sooner rather than later."

Mostly I read them for yuks, but it does remind me of good points, bad points and what the book was actually about. With Thirteen Reasons Why it was mostly bad points. Hannah is bitter and off-putting; the guy listening is completely wrecked by the tapes and spends the book wandering around town sobbing, clutching a walkman. What good has it done to send out these tapes? None. Spiteful egomaniac doesn't get her way, so she kills herself, but not before arranging a complicated revenge for the people who annoyed her/talked about her/failed to read her mind and cater to her needs. The premise is intriguing but Hannah is just so unlikeable. One of the thirteen reasons is SPOILER ALERT, that she saw someone being raped and didn't do anything about it. This happened in two other recent books. I guess watching rape is the new being raped in YA fiction. Maybe the whole tape thing is Hannah's bitchy, roundabout way of alleviating her guilt for keeping schtum about the assault she witnessed. Probably not though.


WAKING THE WITCH
The latest Women of the Otherworld book takes the series back to its supernatural-solving-crimes roots. It's not the most thrill-ridey mystery novel but Savannah, who first appeared as a child in Stolen and has grown up throughout the series, was enough to keep me reading. What's she like now? Ooh, she has a motorcycle! She's so sassy! Look at her in her wife-beater. Et cetera. It's certainly a few notches above stultifying lupine rut-fest Frostbitten, which I read back in January. Waking the Witch is blessedly rut-free! I really like Kelley Armstrong's books but her sex scenes are just awful. They're too long and have involved (among other things) a middle-aged man opening a pair of french doors slightly and sticking his thing through the gap, to the surprise and delight of his partner. Call me a prude but I really prefer the action to cut off before the french doors open and resume again when it's all over.



THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS
Murder! Disguises! Espionage! Barely more than 100 pages long! Now don't raise an eyebrow, I'm not afraid of long books. It's just that the sense of achievement I get from finishing a long book is the same feeling I get from finishing a short book, so may as well go for a short book, save time, be more triumphant. It was okay. Very dated; today's audience expect more from spy novels. Hell, even audiences in the fifties and sixties; James Bond would wipe his amphibious car with turn-of-the-century ditherer Richard Hannay. This story is very straightforward, narrow in characterization (where are the femmes fatales? Where are any women?) and setting. Just don't bother with it.


THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA
This book was on sale at Oxfam in Ilkley for only £1.25. An unheard-of bargain. I've been Zuckerman-only so far on Roth (apart from Portnoy's Complaint). I was reluctant to give any of his other characters a try incase they're not as good, but I needn't have worried because this is bloody brilliant. I wouldn't say Philip Roth shits all over every other living writer, but he certainly pees on them a little.


TEMPTED and BURNED
Thank God these two are the last of the House of Night books for now. Any more talk of warriors, crow-men, nuns and "brown pop" and I'd probably cringe myself into a coma. Yes, I am about 15 years too old for these books. Thanks for asking.


LORD OF THE FLIES
Until now, everything I knew about Lord of the Flies I learned from season nine Simpsons episode "Das Bus," so I was expecting something of a black comedy. Intended as a remedy to jolly adventure tales of bluff, hearty British boys making their way in the world of pirates and savages and the like. Leader Ralph is caught between mundane, sensible Piggy who clings to his civilised ways and bloodthirsty Jack, who just wants to paint himself and hunt. Lord of the Flies looks into how long the bluff heartiness holds up when no-one's looking. Answer: not very long. It's pretty great. The ending is fantastic.

Books in July

UNTAMED and HUNTED
These books are simultaneously hard to read and hard not to read. Untamed introduces the big villain of the series Kalona, who is topless and has wings. Hunted is about Zoey et al. hiding in the tunnels of Tulsa from the aforementioned Kalona and his army of giant crows. Zoey has nuns on her side. Let me explain to you that I will try anything when it comes to series of teen books in the hopes of re-creating good experiences from the past, specifically Cate Tiernan's Sweep series which is something that I picked up at random one day at Borders in Leeds (R.I.P.) and turned out to be the zenith of all literature. So that's why I started reading House of Night. Now I just can't stop. I have to know what happens. Who will die? Who will Zoey's next "consort" be? What will the dubiously named Kramisha's next prophetic poem foretell? I must know!



THAT SUMMER, SOMEONE LIKE YOU, KEEPING THE MOON, THIS LULLABY and LOCK AND KEY
I do so enjoy these Sarah Dessen books. I even have a playlist on my ipod that I like to listen to while reading in order to complete the experience(it's mostly Pains of Being Pure at Heart songs and a bit of Allo Darlin'). The best of the bunch was That Summer which one of the cover blurbs compares to The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. They're alike in subject matter, but it's like comparing a bowl of batter to a big fancy wedding cake. That Summer is ham-handed (I mean this in the most affectionate way possible) but it's got a lot of heart and the lead character doesn't have a love interest-refreshing! The other four novels are pretty similar. Absent fathers, ditzy moms, the waffle house, Spinnerbait, some perfect dude showing up to make life worth living. They're formulaic, but it works.


DEAD IN THE FAMILY
This series used to be about a psychic waitress solving mysteries. Her realtionships and vampire doings were secondary to this. Now the books are all about her blah relationships with her family and her vampire friends as well as a lot of bollocks about Vampire/Fairy/Werewolf politics. It's embarrassing! And as Sookie herself rightly points out, "Human politics [are] tedious enough" Enough nonsense already. Take heed, psychos of fictional Louisiana! I want a bloody corpse to show up.


CRACKED UP TO BE and SOME GIRLS ARE
One of the first things I want to address about these books are how pleasing they are to behold. They're a good size, the cover art is vividly coloured and the feel of the covers is rough but not stiff; so they're basically perfect to hold and to look at. Cracked Up To Be is pretty good. I wasn't wild about it but it was a serviceable teen novel. The best thing about it was the characters, they were realistically annoying and bratty but not in an unlikeable way. Some Girls Are on the other hand I was wild about. It was very tense and had me reading long into the night, desperate to see how it all pans out. The book concerns a girl who is bullied by her former friends. She's just as bloodthirsty as the bullies so for every time they fill her locker with hamburger meat (this also happens at the beginning of L.J. Smith's Secret Circle. Is this something that happens in schools or could the author be paying homage to Smith's seminal trilogy?) she pushes one of them down the stairs. It's bloody brilliant. There are plenty of tense moments and a nice love story which is all you need.


THE SHORT SECOND LIFE OF BREE TANNER
I guess Stephenie Meyer churned this out after milking the Eclipse cash-cow. It was completely lame but thanks to the buy-one-get-one-free book offer at Tesco I didn't pay for it. I am a sucker for reading it, though. It's a short, dull story about a newborn vampire wondering why she's been created. Who am I? Why am I? Deep. She develops a crush on one of her fellow newborns who promptly disappears. I guess she's supposed to be that unpleasant little urchin that Twilight-Dad and Twilight-Mum try to protect at the end of Eclipse. A weak fart of a book.

Books in June

I knew I'd be spending my July holiday with my nose firmly planted in some YA so I stuck with sensible adult books for June. It was another month of clearing some long-time to-read pile residents.


THE NIGHT WATCH (4 years)

I bought this book when it was first released and started reading it right away. Unfortunately it was so boring I stopped fifty pages in. I decided to give it a second chance because I love Sarah Waters's other books, especially Fingersmith and The Little Stranger (which was a scary book, I love a scary book). I finished it this time but it was still dull. The story is told in three episodes presented in reverse chronological order; this just didn't work because the inter-linked stories were not interesting. It was totally anticlimactic.


LA BETE HUMAINE (5 years)

I've had this book for ages. I went through a phase a while back of reading stuff by French authors and moved out of the phase before I got around to reading this. Recently I saw it listed on a forum as a top neglected classic so I figured I'd give it a go. It was pretty much a gore-fest. I don't think there's a character in the whole thing who'd think twice about killing another person and that got a little silly. If you've got time read both but I would recommend Thérèse Raquin over La Bête Humaine; by the same author, it deals with pretty much the same stuff but more simply and therefore (I think) more effectively.

THE TIME MACHINE-H.G. Wells (19 years)

I've got about a hundred of these classics. I read lots of them (mostly the girly ones like Little Women and Anne of Green Gables), some were unreadable and still are to this day (Lorna Doone) and some of them (like this one) my 7-year-old self dismissed as "for boys". This is a short read. Your main guy travels forward in time, makes friends with some weird kids, discovers some underground cannibals and sets a forest on fire before hightailing it even further into the future. Some of the stuff he sees further into the future is pretty chilling. And he SPOILER ALERT just disappears in the end which is also chilling. Is it worth reading the bit with the cannibals and the forest fire to get to the chilling stuff though? Probably not.


THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS

I loved this! It's been about a month since I read it and I still have dreams about it. Nearly everyone in the UK has gone blind from looking at a meteor shower. The Triffids take this opportunity to slap people down and feast on their corpses. Shudder. It's a good, creepy, post-apocalyptic yarn.

Mouthface

I must admit I was pretty sad when facehead supreme Sunshine was evicted from the BB house. I thought she was utterly dreadful but she was one of the more memorable characters. I imagined that a vision of Sunshine's enormous, bobbing, praying mantis face would spring to mind whenever anyone mentioned Big Brother 2010 in the years to come.

Rachel (not to be confused with early evictee Rachael a.k.a. Bob-a-Beyonce) is the new Sunshine, same whining, same intense loud-itude and a similar though not identical cranial anomaly:

Sunshine had so much face you could barely see her head; with Rachel it's the mouth-to-face ratio that's off. There's another difference. Sunshine was deliberately obnoxious which indicates an underlying intelligence. Rachel is dumb as a box of rocks. She's so annoying because she's oblivious; of her volume, of people telling her to shut up, of how retarded she looks when she jumps up and down screaming.


Another thing I'd like to address that I feel really needs to be addressed in the house is the issue of Mario's disgusting T-shirts. I've made a collage of my...um...favourites?

So left-to-right there's the collage shirt (you can't see it in this picture but it says Ribena on the right elbow), the one with the butterflies embroidered on it, the one covered in a twee curtain print and the sickly polo shirt. There's also a close-up of his new moustache, and I toyed with the idea of including a picture of his giant left nut but I thought that would be too much. If you really need to see it I suppose you could click here. It hangs down weirdly like a second penis!
Anyway back to the T-shirts. Are these T-shirts cool or expensive? I don't get it. They're worse than the shirts they wear in Jersey Shore, the ones with the spangles and the wings on the back.

Books in May

This month I was going for quantity over quality and trying to take a sizable chunk out of my to-read pile; I've got books on there that have been languishing for a decade. I read ten books in May but the to-read pile is still towering. Well, it's three piles, all towering together. After each title I've put the length of time the book has been in the pile.

MARKED (5 months), BETRAYED (2 weeks) and CHOSEN (5 months)

Every time I go into Waterstones the books in the House of Night series are there looking at me; the gothy cover models giving me the stink-eye and the one-word titles in their slashy font screaming, "You know you want to!"
They're not awful. Okay they are, but they're also weirdly compelling. Zoey comes to House of Night to learn how to be a Vampire (with lessons like drama and fencing and horses), leaving behind her unrealistically horrible parents and instantly becoming the darling of the school. The books are in first person so we get every nugget of embarrassing nonsense that pops into Zoey's head. She's real complex, one minute she's admonishing people for being rude or for using bad language, the next she's grinding on some dude and murdering youths in the street. Not a girl, not yet a woman, not human, not yet a vampire. So that's the awful part. I'm trying hard to think what I find compelling about the books.

DIVINE SECRETS OF THE YA-YA SISTERHOOD (5 months)

Concerns people being bafflingly fascinated by a group of insufferable ASBO-grannies. The Ya-Yas (I think there were four of them) are just a mess of noise, sweat and alcohol. The main Ya-Ya's daughter has postponed her wedding until she has read their history. The whole book is about her attempts to pull herself together. I guess she's having some kind of mid-life crisis. Grow up, all of you!

THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH (2 days) and THE DEAD-TOSSED WAVES (2 weeks)

Forest of Hands and Teeth was great, fresh and fast and exciting. I've read many many books about the supernatural for this age demographic and I think this was the first one about zombies; you can't exactly work up any sexual tension between a spunky everygirl and a crumbly, bite-y zombie the way you can with a vampire or a werewolf. I liked the balance of romance and peril.
With The Dead-Tossed Waves it was a different story though. It's much longer than its predecessor and this is usually bad news in a YA sequel. It's not as long as say the new Vampire Diaries books or the latter Twilight books, and certainly not as terrible, but it's not paced as well as the first book. Still interesting, but not compulsive.

DEVIOUS (5 months)

Another month, another It Girl book. Better than the last one but that's not saying much. I won't forsake the series like I'd originally planned, but I'm gonna lay off for a while.

YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY (6 years)

I just plain did not like this book. It was very very annoying. It seemed pretty long while I was reading it too, like oh my god am I still reading about this ass and his obnoxious friend as they cut a swath of pointlessness across Africa and Europe?

A SHORT HISTORY OF TRACTORS IN UKRAINIAN (4 years)

I bought this book for a book club that never happened, which I don't want to think about properly because it seems like it could be a depressing metaphor for my entire life. The book's been lying around ever since, annoying me until I decided to pick it up. I wasn't expecting to enjoy it but I was expecting to finish it in 10 hours or less. I was pleasantly surprised; it's a very short and readable tale of a family unexpectedly brought together by a recent immigrant who has hoodwinked their elderly father into marriage. It was a million times less corny than I'd expected.

4 BLONDES (8 years)

Another book that wasn't as corny as I expected. It's four stories, each told in different ways, I guess I'd describe it as Gossip Girl for grown-ups. The story I remember most fondly is about a model whose fame is one the wane, and who finds it harder every year to carry out her summer ritual of latching on to a rich guy and staying at his beach house. She's trying to find happiness before it's too late and hides her desperation with a kind of appealing aloofness. Anyway I liked it.

Vampire!

I've put together a handy guide to help you identify vampires, using my knowledge of L. J. Smith books and vague memories of reading Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. If you know someone who's displaying any of these symptoms just stop being friends with them, unless you want to be drawn into a world of intense brooding and self-importance.

Symptom #1: DOESN'T POO
That's right, vampires have no need to go to the toilet. In The Tale of the Body Thief, vamp-sex-pest Lestat swaps bodies with a normal human and practically the first thing he does is take a huge, minutely described crap.

A Further Sign: HAS RETURNED TO HIGH SCHOOL
If they're able to go out in the daytime the first thing vampires do upon arriving in a new own is enroll in high school. Ostensibly so that their vampire nest/coven can pose as a normal family, like in Twilight. Another reason is of course to bag a teen companion. Teenagers are young and largely unaware of, or at least unconcerned by, their mortality. They are thrilled rather than terrified by the threats posed by vampires:
-Chasing
-Hypnotism
-Biting
-Goring
-Wrinkles induced by extreme brow furrowing, see Vampire Diaries:

Speaking of Nests: HAS GROSS WHITE-TRASH POSSE
I'm mostly thinking of the crews of grubby, unkempt undead in Near Dark and The Lost Boys. Near Dark was the worst though, "If you wanna be part of this group you gotta blah blah blah blah"

I understand the need to connect with people who are like you in some way, it's just too bad for vampires that most of their kind are mental or wankers or an adult trapped in the body of a child. Is adult the word if you're 100+? Is there something beyond adult? Elderly? Meta-old?

Weird but True: FEAR OF DAVE GROHL
Especially if he's sans beard, see below:

I dunno, maybe he's some kind of paragon of virtue or maybe he's a vampire hunter and shaves when it's hunting season to make himself more aerodynamic.

Also: LOOKS LIKE DATA
Looking like a character from Star Trek: The Next Generation is quite common in the Twilight films, but the best example is 1920s Bill Compton from True Blood:

In Local News: SPATE OF ANIMAL ATTACKS
No it's not your vampire friend, it's the werewolves that inevitably follow a discovery of vampires. Do you know anyone who seems like they're on steroids if there's a full moon? Werewolf. See Tyler Lockwood/Smallwood of Vampire Diaries:

That's everything I can think off of the top of my head, especially now that I've brought up werewolves and can't concentrate on anything until I have obtained this book from my childhood:

Where a girl knows she is becoming a werewolf because she starts absent-mindedly eating raw meat while chatting with her mum in the kitchen.

Facehead

Every living person on earth has a head. Usually you'll see heads sitting atop a neck, sporting a face in front on the bottom half. Nothing to be concerned about. Occasionally though, you'll spot a facehead. This is where the face is so large that it eclipses the head, the head becomes incidental to the sheer scale of THE FACE. I've drawn this diagram to help you identify a facehead:

Lady Gaga pretender "Sunshine" from this season's Big Brother is a classic facehead.

She is so proud of her massive face that she bleets from it constantly at top volume, waves it around and thrusts it at lesser faces. Imagine that thing flying towards you, screeching about shopping lists and making a bad romance; that's the Big Brother experience this year. Oh, I love it. Nothing in the world fills me with more pointless anger than Big Brother.

We're almost two weeks into Big Brother, I'm enjoying it. My favourite moment so far was when Mario snuck away from the other housemates to trash the pizza party that John James was preparing; Big Brother stalling John James in the diary room all the while with ever more desperate conversation, "So...what will be your pièce de résistance?" It got even better when the other housemates discovered the destruction and just decided to eat the pizza from the floor.

Friday was the first eviction, good-bye to bargain-bucket Beyonce Rachael and her shiny shiny legs à la Bo' Selecta Destiny's Child. Lardilicious!

For anyone who's never watched Big Brother I've outlined Nicky's eviction night emotional rollercoaster:

SHOW BEGINS: Feel intrigued. Who will be evicted? Looking out for interesting placards in the crowd.
LINES CLOSE: Angry now. Caught up in mob mentality and baying for blood. Express this by chanting.
EVICTEE ANNOUNCED: Disappointed. My predictions never come true. Am I that out of touch with public opinion? Disillusioned with life and humanity.
THE EXIT: Fixate on evictee's face as he/she leaves the house. Schadenfreude. Also shame.
THE INTERVIEW: More shame. As interview progresses start to think evictee isn't so bad, actually seems quite nice!
SHOW ENDS: Lament loss of brilliant housemate and all-around fantastic person.

Anyway I have high hopes for this year's Big Brother. Haven't decided on a favourite yet though, any suggestions welcome.

Eurovision 2010

I really enjoyed Eurovision this year. I'm so sad it's over! Here are the performances I liked.

SPAIN
Generic dude singing his generic song flanked by toy-costumed dancers. Boring, right? WRONG. Enter famed pitch invader Jimmy Jump a.k.a. some douche in a red beanie, who stormed the stage and joined in with the dancing toys. Security didn't remove him right away because:
a) He moved with such natural grace that the only way you knew he wasn't a real dancer was the shit-eating grin.
b) The Spanish performers were such pros that they didn't even let this guy bother them. They welcomed him into the dance!
So kudos to everyone involved. Watch it on YouTube!


NORWAY
This wasn't a highlight of the show just a highlight for me. I took this boring ballad as an opportunity to go to the kitchen and make cocktails for everyone. Then I thought about how Eurovision comes but once a year and I should cherish each song, no matter how dull.

CYPRUS
One year everyone had giant drums onstage, another year the wind machines were turned up to 11, then there was the fire year and so on. The theme for this year was 1990's fashion. I think Cyprus's entry was the best example. He had the 1995-style floppy-hair-and-large-white shirt-look of the late Stephen Gately; right down to the choker necklace thingy.

Despite repping Cyprus this guy is actually from Wales and kept exposing his torso; on which he'd written HELLO MUM.

SERBIA
In Eurovision there's no point rooting for your own country (well, in the case of the UK anyway) so pick your favourite and back them till the bitter end. My favourite this year was Serbia. It was a bold and jaunty number with sassy lyrics led by a character from Final Fantasy. We had the lyrics as well as the English translation scrolling across the bottom of the screen. It was something mental like, "This is the Balkans, bitch. I'm so naughty and shameful. Here in the Balkans we kiss three times. So suck it."

If this isn't amazing I guess I don't know anything about music. YouTube! I think that's a semi-final performance but you get the idea. I've listened to this song about 18 times now. Rad!

BELARUS
The commentator led us to believe that something pretty spectacular was going to happen during this performance so we were watching closely, waiting for it all to kick off. The song had almost ended and we'd given up hope when OH MY GOD! I was holding out for a key change or some wind machine action and did not expect all the female singers to sprout huge, sparkly wings. This delayed gratification approach did not impress the voters. The only country to place lower than them was the UK. Awkward!

FRANCE
What I want from France's song, nay, what I NEED from France's song is to be left elated, confused and patronised. 2008 was a good example; Sebastien Tellier rode onto the stage in a golf cart brandishing an inflatable globe. It was baffling. Even though it was mainly in English I couldn't tell you what that song was about in a million years. This year's French Eurovision song is also their World Cup song. It's very rowdy and dumb. You can probably guess how I feel about the ubiquitous football competition enroaching upon my beloved Eurovision. Damn you, World Cup!

RUSSIA
Notable for the spoken word bit near the end. The singer started staring at a picture in his hand and a voice off-stage said, "What are you doing, man?" To which the singer replied, "I'm looking at her picture. What should I do with it?" and the voice told him to burn it! Skip to 1:16 to see it. It's even weirder on second viewing. According to the YouTube comments it's supposed to be funny, in an ironically overwrought kinda way. It's really growing on me!

GERMANY
Eventual winner Lena for Germany was another 90's fashion entry. The choker, the berry lip colour, the Bjorkiness of her voice. It made me want to don a Kangol hat and listen to (What's the Story) Morning Glory?

Books in April

THE ANATOMY LESSON

The third book of the Zuckerman books sees our hero plagued by a mystery illness that forces him to spend his days sprawled on a play mat, getting soused and receiving visits from an array of ladies. In the latter half of the book he leaves the mat and heads out to Chicago to interview for medical school. What a nut. Of course he's in no state to interview for anything so after a slow start, a mad pitch of lunacy and bullshit builds when Zuckerman's out and about.

THE ONLY ALIEN ON THE PLANET

Most online reviewers of this book allowed the appalling cover art or the lack of extraterrestrials to ruin this book for them. Idiots. It's a book intended for teenagers about a boy who never speaks and the classmates who try to befriend him. I found this book very refreshing. It has all the typical elements of a YA novel but never gives in to melodrama, it's very wholesome and grounded. The romance is subtle and tense but it doesn't eclipse everything else that's going on. I don't want to say too much about it for fear of ruining it. Buy this book and read it. They have copies at Amazon for a penny! Thanks to Jane for the recommendation.

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

I started reading this book about five years ago but gave up on it after ten pages or so. I read the first part of the book quite closely this time to see what could have made me abandon it all those years ago, but I still have no idea about what could have bothered me. Perhaps it was the way the story was told. I thought it was ingenious but it could so easily have been irritating. Chapters from a kind of magic realist novel about the history of a Ukrainian village interspersed with the story of an American in the present day trying to find the village, told by his tour guide. I really enjoyed this book. I loved the relationships between the characters. Hooray, I liked a book.

I MARRIED A COMMUNIST

I Married a Communist is beautifully written and as stout a novel as you would expect from Philip Roth, it's just not very interesting. There's little humour and it's so serious it's almost earnest. Uh-oh. Last time I disregarded a book by one of my much-loved authors he died. I hope Philip Roth is made of sterner stuff than George McDonald Fraser.

Eurovision Imminent

Tomorrow is Eurovision. In my family Eurovision is second only to Christmas in terms of excitement and money spent on food and drink. The show is on in the evening and we traditionally build up with a long day of Scrabble, Kettle Chips and houmous. Hummus? Whatever. Norway is this year's host country. The contest is being held in Oslo.

The show is divided into 3 sections.

1. There's a couple of hours of songs which is the best part. We note our favourites so that we can root for them during the arduous scoring process. Each song is preceded by a 30 second (or so) film showing us something good about the host country. They're supposed to be like tourism advertisements but they're so weird sometimes that the message gets lost.

2.After all the songs have been sung there's a recess while everyone votes. The host country puts on a stage show. It's usually a mixture of deranged and dull so this is a good time to go to the loo or grab a drink or take a nap.

3. Next is the arduous scoring process. Each country votes for their top acts and awards points. The host country links up one by one (via satellite probably) with each participating country and they give their scores in both French and English. This takes a while as there are 40-odd countries participating. In the distant past the winners would be decided by a panel of judges. Recently they tried phone voting but that didn't work because no-one voted for the UK because everyone hates us. Now it's a combination of phone voting and a panel of judges.

Remembrance of Eurovisions Past

2006 - My boyfriend got sick and missed most of the songs including this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z75mLlg4uO0
Thanks for rocking, Lithuania. Lordi won this year's contest. One of the stand-out moments for me was when the hosts linked up with Holland and the scores-man remarked, "Ha ha ha, you look like Will and Grace!"

They really really did!

2008 - A.K.A. worst Eurovision ever. Kevin was off at a party celebrating his brother's recent wedding, Lucie was too drunk to show up and Ellie was hepped up on pain killers and fell asleep on the floor after about 15 minutes. So it was just me and Ellie's boyfriend left to awkward around for four hours. It was almost as bad as the time I had gastroenteritis and missed Christmas.

2009 - This was the first Eurovision we watched in high definition. Also the first Eurovision without Terry Wogan's wry brogue commentating throughout. Graham Norton did a good job though, I think! Can't really decide who's better.