We had friends over for dinner last night and had a fine time. I am not social enough these days because I like to spend my limited number of nights off with my wife, but I really enjoyed chatting, eating and drinking some wine. Of course now I am 46 I have to accept that that kind of fun will have consequences and after initially feeling all right in the morning (still drunk perhaps), my brain was squidgy and I was tired and I knew that nothing was going to get done. I think it was worth it. But this is another reason why social gatherings have to be limited. Or at least even slightly boozy ones. In working terms today was going to be a right off.
But I realised this early enough and decided to veg out with some TV. I watched the first series of "Grandma's House" (and yes I am a little bit late to this party), which I enjoyed very much. I guess it's not a million miles away from what I had wanted to do with Relativity (and it even had Rebecca Front in it), but it was enjoyably dark and clever, whilst still having some proper laughs. The characters are well observed and despite the many jokes at the expense of Amstell's acting abilities, I thought he was very good in it. It totally passed me by at the time and I am guessing that they aren't doing any more after the second series, which I still have to watch. But give it a go if you haven't already.
I've also started watching Breaking Bad from the start again and got through about five episodes this evening. It's even better the second time round, but worryingly there are massive chunks of it that I have no memory of whatsoever. I'd like to think this is because of the way we consume entertainment these days, not properly concentrating with half an eye on our mobile phones, but I think it's just that my memory is screwed up. I don't mind it when I forget the plot of some inconsequential film I've seen six months before, but with something as good as this TV series you'd think more of it would have stuck in my mind. On the bright side I can enjoy this show for a second time without being entirely clear about what's going to come next, although my memory isn't so shot that I can't recall who is still alive in the final series, so that takes away some of the jeopardy.
I am managing to start thinking about the new Meaning of Life series (which is lucky as I am recording the first one on 17th November - no script yet) and as I lay in the bath this afternoon, my hungover brain considered how truly awesome it is that human beings understand the Universe enough to work out what happened 13.8 billion years ago to kick the whole thing off. Not that we know everything or understand the whys or wherefores or who or what kicked the whole shebang off. But the level of understanding we have (however accurate it might turn out to be) is truly astonishing, given that we (or at least the stuff that we're made of) was part of the explosion in some form. If a bomb went off you wouldn't count on some of the charred wreckage that it left behind gaining consciousness and managing to investigate the crime and get even close to telling you what had happened. Even if you were prepared to wait 14 billion years. If anything you'd think that the passage of time would make the inanimate object's job all the harder. But here we are, some star dust that has pulled itself together enough to start to understand where it came from (if not entirely sure why- if there is a reason). Yes, we're selfish pricks and we've fucked up the planet and some of us leave public toilets in a bit of a mess, but man, we're pretty impressive bits of debris sometimes.
