1. Peter Jackson/Guillermo del Toro

2. Nick Clegg/David Cameron

3. Mark Kermode/Simon Mayo

4. Ben Goldacre/Simon Singh

5. Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama/Rowan Williams, The Archbishop of Canterbury

HSG: at this stage the only shortages seem to be exotic fruit and veg
HSG: and international mail is taking longer

BOFF: dragonfruit?

HSG: NO DRAGONFRUIT OMG WE’RE ALL FUCKED

BOFF: ok so it’s probably not too bad

HSG: yeah, i can live without kiwi fruit for a bit
HSG: i have not noticed any food shortages, myself

BOFF: any short people?

HSG: there is a midget shortage
HSG: normally they get parachuted in on thursdays

BOFF: fuck

HSG: i wait all week for those fucking midgets

BOFF: i’m so sorry
BOFF: i know i know

HSG: i’m gutted

And so on.

Just saying.

I can hear your breakfast.

I sculpt my last anus at 6pm. See you then?

Vacav Havel.

So fussy.

Your miniature elephant has eaten all the peanuts.

Your face, my ass.

I bought you a helicopter with a wolf pilot. That’s how much I love you.

I put a slug on teacher’s chair.

I want to be Keith Richards when I grow up. Only without the heroin and coconuts.

That was an unacceptable display of textspeak. Please try harder.

I like facts.

Your figurines are exquisite.

I have listened to your message four times and still can’t understand it! But I still like you.

I’ve got Hitler in a bamboo cage. Want to poke him with a stick?

Slanty.

MESSAGES RECEIVED:

Lairy

Ok! (champagne charlie)

Hangin tuff obv.

How did edwyn slag off lloyd cole?  Something about penguin classics?

I actually want a rabbnn pilot but thanks

I HAS MINI EGgs

Business

Yay! Wayne!

I’ve missed the first half of ghost busters 2. It hardly seems worth it now.

What about potato Mary?

Quit your jibber jabber sucker

I loom!

No a panda

There’s a big hayfield up near Buxton – one in particular.   It’s got a long rock wall, a big oak tree at the north end.   It’s like something out of a Robert Frost poem.   It’s where I asked my wife to marry me: we went there for a picnic and made love under that oak and I asked and she said yes.

Promise me, Red: if you ever get out, find that spot.   In the base of that wall, you’ll find a rock that has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield.   A piece of black, volcanic glass.   There’s something buried under it I want you to have.

This is my favourite example of old-school geocaching.

Luckily for me, three hours later I had an appointment to see Wayne Coyne introduce his film Christmas on Mars at the Barbican.  I was hoping for an antidote of sorts, but in fact it was suprisingly boring (imagine a student film aiming for “Plan 9 meets Dead Man meets Eraserhead” but ending up instead as a tedious semiotic montage of Nude Baby meets Giant Vagina meets Santa Claus).

Still: great nap.  Best cinema nap ever!  (Well, second best, after the one I had in 1997 during the re-released Return of the Jedi.  That high-quality hour of REM sleep – accompanied as it was by the roaring surround sound of speeder bikes zooming through the forests of Endor – remains one of my life’s high points.)

It must be said, however, that Christmas on Mars’s dullness was tempered by Coyne introducing it in person.  He’s such a jaunty, life-affirming presence I’ll forgive him almost any transgression.

So at least I wasn’t thinking about nuclear winter when I left.

Which was nice.

Eventually the secret of [The Village] is revealed. To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It’s a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It’s so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don’t know the secret anymore.

And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we’re back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets.

Lovely.