The important news to update y'all with is that I HAVE A WORKING FRIDGE.

After two weeks of faffing about wondering whether they'll fix it or buy a new one, then faffing about to get a thermostat, Mr Fridge Engineer turned up yesterday afternoon, and immediately ascertained that it was nothing to do with the thermostat but was a result of a long-term slow gas leakage.

[I sympathize with the fridge on this one. I find these days I'm very prone to gas leakage...]

One bottle of whatever-it-is-gas later, and my fridge is as cool as [insert your own cultural definition of "cool" here - my "cool" has never been "cool" except to me since about 1989].

Finally! I have cheese on demand, I have butter to put on toast, and I have fresh pasta just waiting on my every command.

Although I find shouting at tagliatelle less effective than immersing it in boiling water.

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The other big house news is that again I've passed the twice-yearly inspection, thanks to Sarah B and Keelan's help in getting it up to their professional standards rather than my amateur-bloke "oh, it'll do" shabbiness.

[Not that the landlord's agent could resist a few sly digs; for example, "I see the book pile has grown again." Yes, not that it's any frogging business of yours, madam.]

Sarah, Keelan and Luce have offered to provide a monthly clean-out, which – cash permitting – I may well take up. The only reservation I have about this is a class one; since when did I ever get high enough up the ladder that I employ domestic staff?*

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At the minute I am working my way through Doctor Who – The Creature From The Pit. A Fourth Doctor / Romana II story, long held in fan opinion as one of the "fail" serials as DW began its long slow decline. Bollocks to fan opinion – it's rather good, so long as you ignore the huge big green blob with the huge big green penis that Tom Baker tries to talk into at one point.

At least, I think he's trying to talk into it…

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* outside of consensual BDSM domestic/relationship scenarios. These, nor uniforms, will not be a service these women provide. [Damn.]
** images courtesy of shillpages

"Does the paranormal exist? I've noticed there's a definite area of my kitchen that's several degrees colder than the rest of the room. …I called an exorcist, but he said it was just my fridge." [Paul Merton]

The overarching topic of the moment is the broken fridge. After a couple of, how shall I put this, hurried visitations to Mr. Khazi – neither prompted by any of the usual foods which irritate my irritables – I wondered whether there may have been other causes.

Putting two thermometers into the fridge [just in case one wasn't calibrated - what, me, paranoid?] and leaving them there for several hours produced a reading of 10C [50f], when it should be at most 5C [41f].

I turned the knob up to full. Still 10C.

I switched the fridge off, defrosted it fully [which produced a lot of this entry's title], cleaned all the gunk out from underneath, switched it back on, and waited 24 hours for it to get back to working temperature. Which turned out to be 10C.

The fridge is part of the supplied "fixtures" of the flat, so I phoned my landlord's representatives. They sent round Aaron, the local electrician. He took one look, said "yeah, it's buggered, cheaper to get a new one than fix the thermostat" then went away.

Unfortunately here the story has been interrupted by the three-day holiday weekend, so I'm spending it devoid of refrigerated food content. Cue tin cans of everything.

Add to that the problem that come Tuesday it's not just a case of them ordering a new fridge to be delivered to my doorstep – it's an "integrated" fridge, part of a fitted kitchen; it has to be hard-wired in by Aaron – I wouldn't be allowed to touch it even if I wanted to.

So it looks like it may be a few days before I'm able to have a cheese sandwich without having to throw away the 90% of it I won't use afterwards. Okay, with the shops in my little town, the cafe, and some good friends, this is not exactly a disaster – it's totally copeable. It's just a right royal pain in the 'arris, that's all.

Although less of a pain in the 'arris than eating food that's been kept slightly warm for several days.

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Advance notice/warning that there's a new naughty story to be released, which is just getting its second proofread, hopefully as I type. Watch this space.

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Other things running round my brain this Saturday night:

* Not watching the Eurovision Song Contest. When it used to be one crap singing contest a year, it was something special, worth both loving and taking the piss out of. Now we have six sodding thousand "talent contests" on telly, from X-Factor to Britain's Got Embarrassing to Dorothy to Who's The Best At Pretending To Be Bea Arthur On LSD [note: yes, I made that one up, but I've copyrighted it so no nicking the idea, Sky One]. Why celebrate the "bad" when the bad has become the norm?

* Dinner with someone bitchenly amazing, this Thursday. If the sodding fridge saga doesn't intervene.

* Is that really Nicola Bryant, the woman who was Peri [companion to Doctors Fifth and Sixth], fleetingly in the John Lewis advert? [Yes, I found after much frame-by-frame research.]

* On which note… CELERY SQUEE!!! [This is a reference to the latest Who episode, which I won't further explain so that I don't give away spoilers.]

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Today's Big Question: Which household device*, appliance or gadget would you least want to give up? Why?

* note: this does not include "personal entertainment devices in phallic forms".

As I type, it's my 38th Birthday. Nothing bitchenly amazing has happened, since I worked last night and am at work and slacking off whilst I type tonight, I just slept the day off round my Ma's.

She did though have an Amazon box for me;

….though the last one may be a curse as well as a blessing, given its low reputation amongst Who-maniacs. [They certainly aren't infallible though.]

I don't have a hang-up about years or numbers, so I roll my eyes at anyone going "who-ooo, a step closer to the big four-oh". Hey, if we're talking disasters predicted for 2012, neither my 40th birthday nor the end of the Mayan calendar will be anything near as calamitous as Boris Johnson's London Olympics.

I would, though, like to add my annual reflection of how my birthday proves that astrology is bollocks [as if any more proof were needed]; I was born on the same day, at [AFAIK] pretty much the same time, as the Formula 1 driver Rubens Barrichello -

- He's rich. He's famous. He's very talented in what he does. He travels the world, and is surrounded by 'beautiful'* women.

Whereas I… um….

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Weird Coincidence But Not Actually That Weird If You Think About The Probability, #21419:

Some time ago I added a friend from my town's little market, L., on FaceArse. She'd just joined up and was using it to get in touch with her old school mates [from a time several decades before I was at school] and have a few reunions.

One photo which came up in my news feed for some unknown reason grabbed my attention. I clicked on it to see the full version; there was L., alongside one of her old classmates. I peered closer, and clocked the tag underneath; "What the…"

When I next met L on the market on Saturday and talked to her about it, I confirmed what I thought. The woman was Mrs. B……….., and she had been my GCSE English teacher back in Romford over twenty years ago. Still teaching in a different part of East London, and although obviously there was a difference in what twenty-something years had done, still very much looking the same.

It's hard to describe the feelings this brought to me; a kind of mixture of "ooooh…" and "AAAAARGH!!!" – this period of my life was a highly turbulent and volatile one [yes, okay, and quite a lot of the time it was also a drunk and stoned one]. Learning about 'the Scottish play' was not high on my personal agenda then, let's say.

In fact, when I mentioned all the above to my mother today, she said; "Oh yes, Mrs B….., I remember her; at the last Parents' Evening before you left school, she was almost screaming with despair at how you just wouldn't write anything. I told her to get you to write about heavy metal, it was the only thing you were interested in."

I can well understand this. It can't have been easy dealing with the teenage me [gawd knows, I only managed it with chemical assistance] and my eagerness to get myself out of the education system as fast as possible.

Also, time [and therapy] has softened my anger which I had at anything to do with school, and I can see what she was trying to do, even if I didn't agree with the way she did it; and I can appreciate the frustration of her compulsorily having to push Shakespeare onto ungrateful teenagers. I'll even acknowledge the one brilliant thing she did, which was get me to read and understand Orwell's best works.

So once the initial AAAARGH!!! had calmed down, I thought, "well, I've got the link to her FaceArse profile, shall I drop her a message?" And I don't know about that.

Part of me wants to say "hello there, I know I was a right twat then, but I appreciate where you were and what you were doing now, so thank you"; and part of me thinks that's a shit idea, the past should be left as an unvisited foreign country, and although to her there may be the initial curiosity value of "how did he turn into that tranny weirdo social worker?" what else would it achieve?

Thoughts? Opinions? Ideas? You know what to do.

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* The F1 version of beautiful, anyway: an identikit tall, slender, blonde, white, holding a pole on the grid and appearing to have the brain of a lobotomised frog. I have other definitions.

The heavy rain this morning, usually greeted with the kind of "meh" that makes me sound like I'm still fifteen years old, was for once welcomed with open arms here as it slowly helps get rid of the four or five inches of snow that trapped me indoors for the weekend and drove me slightly stir crazy.

I think I've now read every book in the house – with the exception of those dull social work ones which I never read properly for my degree and aren't about to start now – and I'm nearly up to speed on the DVDs-to-be-watched pile, currently up to part four of ten of the last Second Doctor serial The War Games.

My absolute lifesaver over the past week, though, has been the magnificently amazing Zo, whose gift of a bumper pack of Nintendo DS games has kept me sane [whilst ruining my eyesight and giving me a "stylus wound" in the palm of my right hand].

Especially enjoyable is how I've zapped all sorts of things in Space Invaders Extreme – at least until it got to the sodding impossible level four; I've been working my way through New Super Mario Bros, which has all the fun of the original whilst being new enough to be fresh; and I've been working my way through Mario Kart DS trying not to break the buttons with furious stamping.

Along with the others she included they've been very welcome: that is, apart from the Countdown spin-off game which I beat on Champion level on first try, and I Love Horses which Z rather malevolently added to the bundle knowing that giving me a horsey game was rather like sending Fox News an I Love Socialism title. [Thanks, sweetie ]

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One of the fun things about being indoors over the past few days has been the schadenfreude of watching the news as the fanatic bigots that are the Robinsons implode over in NI.

Ang has documented this much better than I have with good insight into the moral implications for their particular microcosm of society, but one thing I particularly want to point out is how Northern Ireland has always existed in a time-warp several decades behind the "mainland". This may be no exception.

Twenty-five years ago, we [the UK in general] had a Conservative government big on "family/Victorian values", ready to enact a horrendous piece of legislation known colloquially as Section 28 to enforce its "moral" credentials. Like the Robinsons, homosexuality was an abomination outside of "normal family" life.

Then, a few years later, during a campaign which was known as "Back to Basics", the shall we say "interesting" private lives of many Government ministers – including my MP at the time, which gave the little town I worked in a week of media frenzy – were revealed in sordid [and sometimes made-up] detail which convinced them, and the subsequent Labour government, that any attempt to preach sexual morality would only show them up as hypocritical.

The issue's not completely gone away – Cameron has made noises about "tax breaks for marriage" [oh yeah, like I'm really gonna get married just to save a couple of hundred quid on my income tax bill], but has fought shy of trying to take any moral high ground [yet] – but the kind of language the Robinsons have used has been out of fashion – and out of order – here for fifteen years; Iris would have found herself immediately chucked out of any of the three major parties for her stupid rant eighteen months ago.

It may well be, then, that this is part of NI's "normalization" post-troubles; one step on the road from segregational, isolationist, extreme-religious politics to one more closely based on the values that all serious "mainland" politicians now hold.

After all, DUP etc., if you lot keep insisting how you're so sodding British, shouldn't you show it by adopting the greater tolerance and liberalism that we have?

Don't you see how being fanatical about anything, outside of caravanning, canal restoration or collecting horse brasses, is the most un-British value there is?

A tentative and unexciting start to the New Year, as further white cold stuff disruption keeps me firmly indoors as much as possible.

The first morning of 2010 was, of course, a Public Holiday, which meant that the guys who gritted the roads were also on holiday [hey, fair enough, they deserve them too], which meant that I was practising for the Winter Olympics coming back from work.

Civilization, at least as far as my little town is concerned, starts to return to normal from Monday, though, with the cafe reopening after its Xmas break and G. returning to the market next Saturday. Like a flower opening its petals in the morning, slowly life emerges and makes the place feel less like an Antarctic research station1.

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The big cultural event of the season, of course, was the change from Tenth Doctor to Eleventh Doctor; I'll be careful not to provide spoilers here [and so should you in the comments] but I will say that whilst the double-episode itself leading up to it was the usual entertaining tosh [but tosh nevertheless]2, the regen itself provoked several recitations of the ancient Kenneth Williams catchphrase, when events in the old radio show Round The Horne dragged on too long; "stop 'anging it out!"

There was only thirty seconds of Matt Smith as DoctorXI, not enough to give any kind of lasting impression, but enough to whet the tastebuds; it suggested he'll be worth watching, even if it turns into a Baker [C]-type car-crash.

This marks the end of the Russell T Davies era of New Formula Who; a quick look around the forums last night suggested few of the fanboys/girls/trannies will miss him, but taking the longer view, you have to give him credit for so successfully relaunching the series; as the 1996 TV movie showed, there was plenty of scope for messing it up royally and setting back the cause for nearly another decade…3

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I don't do New Year's Resolutions, I can't be arsed with a Review Of The Noughties, and I'm buggered if I'm expending any energy at all on dates and numbers which are, after all, completely arbitrary – the calendar and the year number as we know them are constructs – partly Julius Caesar's fault, apparently, and partly a reflection of Xian domination of Western civilization [if the big JC was a historical figure, the one thing believing scholars agree on was that he wasn't born in what we call 1BC or 1AD].

Of course, the calendar and the year number have a utility value – ensuring that when you say to someone that you'll meet at St. Pancras4 at 1430 GMT on 2nd Jan 2015, you actually turn up at the same time and place and not miss each other by three years – but otherwise, it's a marketing exercise.

This generally negative attitude to New Year's may also be explained by the number of times I got very, very drunk and had to crawl home…5

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1 Which actually sounds better than festive-season-shut little-town, because at least there'd be plenty of penguins to research.
2 Plenty of loose ends and unanswered questions too.
3 This is not to wee on McGann's characterization or performance, which was fine – it was the script and direction which sucked.
4 The question of whether anybody actually agrees on where [or if] St. Pancras station is I'll leave for another time.
5 Most notably in 1990, after an all-night illegal drinking club in Stratford, mooning every few steps of the nineish miles.

Not a shitload happening continues to be the order of the day here – and a bloody good thing it is too, I may add [and indeed have just done so].

These are a few things that have passed through my consciousness over the past few days;

- C & N's wedding reception on Saturday evening. This was held in a pub right next to Sutton Hoo, and the three hours I was there now holds the record for the longest time I've spent in licensed premises without touching alcohol. The night went well apart from the very end, when I was cornered by a drunk woman who kept telling me about my "guardian angel" [apparently "a man who stands right behind me at all times, but not a relative". Who, then? Nicholas Parsons?]

The couple are wonderful, but their music choices differ somewhat, and that was reflected in that which was played over the course of the evening. Put it like this; seguing Enter Sandman with Barbie Girl is a nice trick if you can do it…

The photos have been all over FaceArse; I won't reproduce them here, but you can have this one of Paula and myself:

…and, cropped as so not to identify the person [because she's not of age and I've no permission to show her on a public bit of El Interwebz], this one to show why I was so jealous of the bridesmaids…

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- The DVD of Doctor Who – Battlefield which had disappeared under a pile for the past three months.

McCoy's Seventh Doctor is not well-regarded amongst some fans, but a careful watch shows a lot more depth than it was given credit for at the time. This story was particularly panned, and still holds the record for the lowest [first showing] audience ever for a Who episode; but it contains much that is worth it – the new Brigadier, the Who take on Arthurian legend, and Jean Marsh's much-more-subtle-than-it-looks Morgaine.

Particularly interesting is the heavily implied lesbian overtones between Ace and her new friend Shou Yuing [who should have been a co-companion] -

- although I may well just be imagining this…

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The Fish World app on FaceArse. Which is, I know, utterly useless, but in the absence of a proper fishtank here in Czech Cottage, it does a simulation pretty well.

Normally I avoid FB apps, especially those useless gift ones, but this one scores, if nothing else, for the soundtrack of bubbles and gulps, which, I've found, creates a nice background to the day's emailing, typing, blogging and CM01-02-cheating on this laptop.

Talking of background sound; ages ago I came across this site – which simulates the effect of walking into one of those seaside video game arcades, circa 1981, 1983, 1986 or 1992. The 1986 one particularly took me back to a misspent youth in Southend pushing 10p pieces into electronic money-sucking machines…

…I must dig out MAME. [Legal Note: Fish does not have any ROMS  for this application for games still protected by copyright.]

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World Champion Undergoes Gender Testing.

I have never really followed athletics at all, apart from a fleeting early-teenage fancy of Fatima Whitbread; but this story is interesting not just because of its politics, but because of the science.

As hurtful and invasive as the process has been to Caster Semenya, one of its effects is that it has highlighted the innate problems with determining gender in a small number of people.

Decades ago, they used to do a humiliating "physical examination" on athletes suspected of hiding gender reassignment; now, the process is complicated, and the IAAF's own criteria for determining gender go through a swathe of medical and psychological specialists in order to come up with a decision on whether a person is enjoying the metabolic "advantages" that come with male testosterone production, whatever their chromosomes say or whether they've got inny or outy joy-parts.

Several people I've been talked to have been genuinely surprised by this process, as they've only ever thought of gender in binary terms. Certainly it gives the lie to those who insist that God makes only Man and Woman unambiguously, fearful of what a proper rounded view of gender would do to their world views and to their control of people via their sexual identities.

To borrow the utterly wonderful Ben Goldacre's phrase; "it's a bit more complicated than that…"

I hope that Semenya's case is instrumental in helping awaken people to the complications of gender identity; certainly her heroine's welcome in South Africa will have very much heightened awareness in her own country. Reports have been that she has been reluctant to take the spotlight since the story broke, which I understand perfectly; but [however unwittingly] she could, if everything went well, be the face of a new understanding…