Last year coming back from India, where I spent New Year, I was feeling quite energised and positive. I wanted to achieve quite a lot, and whilst I was probably too ambitious, I hoped I’d be in a much better place than I eventually ended up in (literally and figuratively – one of the biggest disappointments was the failure to move out of my flat and into more congenial surroundings). Work ended up owning me from around May onwards, and whilst I think I accomplished much I can be proud of in the day job, everything else fell by the wayside. A family health crisis didn’t really help much either, however I’m grateful that we got what was perhaps the best possible news in the circumstances just before Christmas, which was a much happier occasion as a consequence.

So, slow start notwithstanding, I am hoping to have a more productive 2012, professionally and personally. At work, the project I’ve been working on for the last six months or so will be launching in earnest and at that point I think I’m going to need a new challenge, whether that’s a new project, new role, new employer or all of the above. I also want to get more involved in the development community. I managed to get to dConstruct and a few Pub Standards last year, but I’d like to do a lot more in 2012, in particular getting to few hackdays and the like. I’m also going to SXSW again.

Personally, I feel I let my health go a bit towards the end of last year, so I need to get back into a regular exercise routine and improve the diet. One of the reasons I want to move is because of my flat’s dingy, poorly-lit kitchen, which has sapped me of my lifelong love of cooking, something else I’d like to get back into the habit of doing more of. There’s the novel to get back to, and I have several notebooks full of short story ideas I really need to start turning into actual stories. Travel-wise I want to be spending a lot more time outdoors generally, and if I can get back into reasonable shape, maybe start doing the climbing thing again. In the past I’ve done pro bono volunteer work as a web developer for various organisations – that slipped quite a bit in 2011, so it’s something I want to start doing again. Ideally I’d like to do some ‘local’ stuff as well – make some sort of contribution to the community. I have a few ideas for some potentially socially-useful stuff I want to build as well.

Anyway, that’s broadly the plan. A lot of the detail is going to be dependent on whether I manage to get into the flat I’m trying to buy – a saga that made the last few months of last year particularly frustrating and looks set to do the same to the first few months of this one – however, I don’t want that to eclipse the rest of the year, so I’ve got plans C through E in case it doesn’t come off. Happy new year, let’s hope it’s a good one, without any fear.

A few years ago I attended the UK premiere of Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water at the Frightfest film festival, and as a fan of the League, was pleased when Dyson and Mark Gatiss turned up to premiere their short film The Cicerones before the main feature. As Dyson explained, the film was an adaptation of a short story by Robert Aickman, one of his favourite authors. I’d heard the name before – I think Ramsey Campbell had cited him as an influence in an interview once and I almost certainly must have read several of the horror anthologies he edited later in life, but I was otherwise unfamiliar with his work. Dyson’s obvious enthusiasm, coupled with the effectiveness of the short (it’s available here) intrigued me, however.

Dyson’s thesis in The Unsettled Dust: The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman is that Aickman is the best writer you’ve never heard of, and if you’re in the unenviable position of never having heard of Aickman, there’s a good chance that’s true – I can only describe my introduction to him as relevatory. You can detect his influence on writers of fantastic fiction of a certain age – Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D Klein, Neil Gaiman, just to name but three, but Aickman wrote most of his stories in a pre-genre market, and so succeeds in eschewing many of its conventions, thoroughly thwarting the expectations of the modern reader. Aickman’s ‘strange stories’ (his preferred term for his fiction) are intelligently and skillfully written, deeply psychological, laced with a keen awareness of human fragility and weakness and a pervading sense of melancholy. They’re strangely affecting, haunting works, deftly and expertly constructed by an obvious master of the form. When you’re broadly familiar with the canon of a particular sort of literature, it’s a rare thing to suddenly discover an author so complete.

“But there was something supernatural?” responded Gamble, often a little too much the cross-examining barrister when all the circumstances were considered.

“Yes,” said the old man in his quiet and simple way. “At least I think so. It was concerned with this.” He put his fingers in his left waistcoat pocket and produced a coin or medal. It was dull rather than bright as it lay on his palm in the dim light of the bar, and a fraction smaller, I should say, than a penny.

The barman got in first. “Can I hold it?”

“Certainly,” said the old man, passing it over. “But it has no intrinsic value.”

“Just a lucky charm?” said the barman.

“More a token. The visible symbol of an invisible grace.”

“My mother has one. Given her when she married my father, by my gran, who got it from the gypsies. I suppose these marks are the Romany?”

“No,” said the old man. “That’s Russian.”

“Have another drink,” said Gamble, “and tell us about Russia.”

“Tell us the whole story,” said Dyson.

– THE HOUSES OF THE RUSSIANS

As Dyson’s programme shows, Aickman was, unsurprisingly, an extremely cultured man with a wide range of interests – trained as an architect, he wrote extensively on art, theatre, music, food and wine. He was chairman of the London Opera Society, and his writing aside, is probably best known for founding the Inland Waterways Association, which was responsible for restoring and maintaining much of England’s once-derelict inland canal system. This cultured world view clearly informed and strengthened his writing. That his books have been largely out of print for most of my lifetime is a crime against one of the greatest British writers of the twentieth century, so it’s good to hear an author of Dyson’s stature expounding his virtues on national radio and hopefully going some way to redressing the balance.

“They’re ringing to wake the dead.”

A tremor of wind in the flue momentarily drew on the already roaring fire. Gerald had turned very pale.

“That’s a figure of speech,” he said, hardly to be heard.

“Not in Holihaven.” The commandant’s gaze had returned to the fire.

Gerald looked at Phrynne. She was breathing less heavily. His voice dropped to a whisper. “What happens?”

The commandant also was nearly whispering. “No one can tell how long they have to go on ringing. It varies from year to year. I don’t know why. You should be all right up till midnight. Probably for some while after. In the end the dead awake. First one or two, then all of them. Tonight even the se draws back. You have seen that for yourself. In a place like this there are always several drowned each year. this year there’ve been more than several. But even so that’s only a few. Most of them come not from the water but from the earth. It is not a pretty sight.”

“Where do they go?”

“I’ve never followed them to see. I’m not stark raving mad.” The red of the fire reflected in the commandant’s eyes. There was a long pause.

– RINGING THE CHANGES

Several of Aickman’s anthologies were republished by Faber a year or two ago, and are still available. The Unsettled Dust: The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman is available to listen to in the UK via the link above.

• Change a diaper
• Plan an invasion
• Butcher a hog
• Conn a ship
• Design a building
• Write a sonnet
• Balance accounts
• Build a wall
• Set a bone
• Comfort the dying
• Take orders
• Give orders
• Cooperate
• Act alone
• Solve equations
• Analyse a new problem
• Pitch manure
• Program a computer
• Cook a tasty meal
• Fight efficiently
• Die gallantly (putting this one off for as long as possible)

Looking at the list, I’d say the cut-off point for actively bad is somewhere around Green Lantern/Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon, and the really good begins around, mmmm Senna/Monsters, maybe? There were some real disappointments in that bottom fifteen. John Carpenter’s The Ward is kind of okay until you remember you saw it eight years ago with better actors, a better script, and, it pains me to say, more distinctive direction. I’ve previously enjoyed most of Michael Winterbottom’s output, but The Devil Inside was simply tedious. No Hammer film with Christopher Lee in it has any right to be as dull as The Resident. And why is it so hard to make a competent, watchable sequel to Predator? I really wouldn’t have believed Vincenzo Natali had a movie as bad as Splice in him. Fortunately for them all though, I made the mistake of watching The Human Centipede early on in the project, and that piece of complete shit remained firmly rooted to the bottom of the list all year.

The top fifteen I guess are fairly uncontroversial. All were, I think, critically rather well received outside my own head. The Vaughan/Goldman partnership delivered again with X-Men: First Class, and Fast Five may indeed be the ur-summer blockbuster action movie, displacing Bad Boys 2. Submarine looked like it was going to be a tediously dull indie Brit flick, but was one of the funniest things I saw all year. Danny Boyle has, seemingly by stealth, become one of my favourite directors, my disappointment with A Life Less Ordinary being so great as to have occluded the fact I’ve really, really enjoyed all five of his last films, something I only realised as the credits rolled on 127 Hours. I’ve written about The Social Network here before. Best film of the year was Joo-Hoo Bong’’s Mother, the director previously responsible for the incredible Memories of Murder and The Host.

There were plenty of enjoyable films in the middle section as well, and as many utterly competent but slightly dull. The biggest problem with enjoying films, or at least me enjoying films, is their general lack of originality and the filmmakers’ palpable aversion to risk. And whilst I can be as pretentiously high-brow as the next Philosophy graduate, it’s not like I’m a terribly demanding audience – my twelfth favourite film of the year is the fifth installment of The Fast and the Furious franchise, for God’s sake, and the only reason Thor didn’t rank higher is because I’m aware that I have massive nerd-blinkers where Jack Kirby homages are concerned.

Anyway, roll on next year. Man, that leaked Avengers trailer looks sweet.

There are many reasons to be dissatisfied with the Kindle, even before you get it out of the box. I’m not a fan of DRM in any product, but it feels particularly unwelcome and obtrusive in the case of ebooks, as well as being utterly pointless.

Then there’s the pricing, which seems ridiculously high for a few electrons even when you’re paying less than the cost of the dead tree edition, but is particularly galling in the many instances where the Kindle edition is more expensive, particularly as for most people it’s likely to be seen as the most inferior format.

It’s the publishers who tend to get a bit of an online kicking for this, however as Charles Stross observes, Amazon is also to blame for the pricing. The online retailer actually licenses the right to publish an ebook from the original publisher, setting the price point themselves and prohibiting the original publisher from selling the book in ebook format at a lower price point anywhere else.

Finally, there’s the argument that books as objects have intrinsic, aesthetic merits in their own right. The smell of the pages, the feel and heft, etc. – recently highlighted in Penelope Lively’s “bloodless nerds” comment. I’m something of a bibliophile myself, so I’m partial to position, however my passion for books is actually the main reason I decided to buy a Kindle. I simply own too many of them – I’m still paying for storage a year after my last move, and that’s mainly books – and so for the last year I’ve been actively trying to prune my collection down to nice editions of my favourite books, key reference works and stuff I’m nigh on certain I’m going to want to read again at some point. At the same time, this has made me reluctant to make new purchases I’m fairly certain I’ll only want to read the once, and then have to drop off at the local Oxfam. The local libraries have been useful in this regard, but I read a wide-range of material, and I like to skip around sometimes, putting stuff aside for a while and coming back to it later – not a good habit if you want to avoid late fees.

The Kindle certainly addresses the space issue. It’s slim, compact, weighs less than a chunky paperback, and sits unobtrusively on the coffee table or sideboard, occupying the same dimensions regardless of whether its memory is swollen with literature or a virtual tabula rasa. Cost, as noted above is still an issue, however there’s usually at least some small saving to be made buying the Kindle edition, and whilst having a physical book to show for your purchase is usually seen as being an advantage of the dead tree edition, as I’ve explained, it’s the other way round for me with most purchases.

There were other, more surprising things to recommend it as well. Free internet access anywhere you can get a 3G signal. I already knew about this, but didn’t realise quite how much I’d end up actually using it. Once I discovered Instapaper, it became my preferred way of consuming articles from my daily round-up of RSS subscriptions. The Kindle’s browser is pretty shit, true, but sometimes all you need is GMail and Wikipedia, and realising you’ll never be separated from either no matter what city in the world you find yourself in feels profoundly awesome and empowering (although I’d still probably need a sat phone at my parents’ house). Fuck you, roving mobile data charges.

The Kindle’s whispernet functionality also allows for seamless integration with Amazon. It’s pretty amazing to be discussing a book you’ve never heard of with someone, and to find, purchase and download it before the conversation has even finished. You start hemorrhaging cash all over the place, of course, but it feels like productive, worthwhile spend. It’s also the case that many public domain works have free Kindle editions, so you can hoover all the classics you’ve been meaning to read, but always found something more vital to spend your money on instead.

It’s not terribly user-friendly. The controls are clunky, awkward and feel antiquated. A number of people tried it out at the office and it was amazing how many of them initially just assumed it’d be a touch screen device. The screen is good for reading text off, and that’s about it. As a product, it doesn’t feel like it has a terribly long shelf-life – that something will be along imminently to replace it.

I could forgive all that though. What really annoyed me was I owned it just two days before it packed up and died. Producing it from my rucksack on the tube, eager to read the next chapter Richard Herring’s How Not To Grow Up (of which I was 20% of the way through), I flicked the on switch, and watched as the screen began to resolve, only to suddenly freeze. No attempt to reboot having any effect. Scrolling through the one-star reviews on Amazon I found this isn’t an infrequent occurrence, and rather a common issue that goes back to their release. Kindles are really quite fragile, it would seem.

Amazon’s returns policy was also annoyingly over-complex. I needed to return it in its original packaging, which of course I’d already thrown out (remember the whole lack of space thing). And whilst they’d pay for the return, they’d only do so via DHL, who I’d have to arrange pickup with myself. DHL could give me a day, but not a time, or even any indication of whether it might be an am or pm. As such, I ended up having to pay for postage and packing myself rather than take a day off work.

So yeah, I came out of it feeling a little burned, to be honest. And whilst when it works its a nice little bit of kit, as I said above – it doesn’t really feel like they’re going to be around for long. Naturally, I lasted about a fortnight and then bought another one. So far, this one’s last a week, but I still flinch slightly whenever I turn it on, which doesn’t really recommend it. And whilst the positives still stand, the shine has also worn off on them, and I’m more aware than ever of the negatives.

So, my first experience of the Primavera Sound festival was, on the whole, pretty awesome. Primavera is one of Spain’s largest music festivals, and takes place annually in late May/June at the Parc del Fòrum In Barcelona (Primavera is Spanish for Spring, by the way – so in England this would have been the ‘Spring Sound Festival’. God, our language sucks sometimes). It’s got a lot going for it – alively and exotic host city, seafront location, a great line-up, the chance to watch Pulp perform “Common People” at two-thirty in the morning to a hugely-psyched crowd in 18 degrees heat with a Balearic breeze at your back…

Of course, they nearly fucked everything up with a ludicrous attempt to run a ‘cashless’ payment system on-site using pre-registered ID cards. This wasn’t actually made clear until you arrived at the festival to exchange your ticket for the card and your wristband, by which point the Portal site where you could register and put payment on was down. You could, however, put credit on your card at the actual festival site, which we did, only to find out that most of the bars couldn’t accept the cards because their internet connections were down.

Fortunately, the organisers rolled with the punches and managed to get a cash-based workaround going by midnight, which it turns out is when Primavera really gets going anyway. Some of the bars had working connections by the following day, and they got by on a combination of both methods until the end of the festival, allowing me to blow all my hard-earned savings on overpriced booze. Phew! Close one.

Anyway, saw Cults, Bearsuit, the Walkmen, Interpol, Flaming Lips, Wolf People, the National, Explosions in the Sky, Belle & Sebastian, Pulp, Warpaint, Fleet Foxes, Money Mark, PJ Harvey and Mogwai, some of which were better than others, but all of which were extremely enjoyable (although Jarvis was on particularly good form in Pulp’s first major gig in nine years, it has to be said). The packed schedule meant there were inevitably a few clashes, so I missed a few things I really wanted to see, but hey.

Whilst myself and 70,000 others were enjoying ourselves at the festival this was going on just a few hundred yards from where we were staying. Los indignados are protesting against high unemployment and the governments proposed austerity measures. The Plaça de Catalunya protest is one of several occurring in a number of major Spanish cities, which started on May 17th. The inciting incident appears to have been an attempt to dismantle a part of the camp, possibly to erect a big screen ahead of the Champion’s League final (that;s what I heard)We didn’t see much of it, except for a fuckload of helicopters over the apartment on Thursday night, a massive influx of protesters on the Friday as half the city seemed to come out for them in response to the police action, oh, and I was shoved rather roughly by a cop on the Saturday night when he lost patience with my extremely drunken attempts to explain (in English) why I needed to be let through his cordon (POWER TO THE PEOPLE!).

Tron also undeniably carries a certain amount of geek cred for using virtual reality as metaphor for actual computing processes and not utterly fucking it up. As long as you don’t look at it too hard, Tron maintains an admirable level of versimilitude that you generally don’t get in Hollywood movies that have anything at all to do with computers. And then of course there’s Kevin Flynn, an aspirational programmer figure, the archetype for the Silicon valley nerd who strikes digital gold only to get screwed over by THE MAN. How many ZX81s did Kevin Flynn sell? Loads, probably. It also greatly helps that he’s played by Jeff Bridges, one of the finest actors of his generation.

There’s a nostalgic note to my affection for Tron too – it’s a relic from a time when Hollywood studios were more concerned with producing ambitious and original stand-alone science fiction films rather than establishing franchises. For some reason, I give it extra props for being a Disney film as well; the studio that now epitomises in many ways Hollywood conservatism for me, was, in 1982, very much in the business of utterly blowing children’s minds.

So, if one accepts these are the reasons why Tron is so awesome, how does Legacy stack up against the original?

Well, that versimilitude I mention above goes straight out the window fairly early on. This isn’t too much of an issue, I guess, as most punters don’t actually care about or understand any of that anyway. But still.

The plot is possibly the laziest implementation of the hero’s journey ever, and Sam Flynn the most generic of protagonists. Even more damningly, most of the really interesting ideas are lost amid the vast oceans of exposition and arbitrary action set-pieces. Legacy also obviously exists to establish a new franchise, and it’s entire core premise is lifted directly from the first film. It cannot be viewed as an original, innovative stand-alone work under any kind of lens.

On the plus side though, it still has Kevin Flynn, still played by Jeff Bridges, even cooler with age having essentially morphed into the Dude from The Big Lebowski. Bridges seemingly can’t help but add a touch of class to whatever material he touches, even when he’s the one who has to deliver the aforementioned clunky exposition.

More importantly though, it looks good. Really good. The aesthetic’s not as clever as the original, in which we had a world that looked like it was literally constructed out of pixels, and where physics worked differently – in Legacy, it’s a much more ‘realistic’ virtual reality. However, Legacy manages to sufficiently emulate the look of the original, whilst simultaneously creating something new and different. It’s a world that looks suitably alien, not like anything else – somewhere you actually want to explore. And that’s not something I get from, say, Avatar.

Final note: it also sounds amazing. The score is the one genuine improvement on the original – I’m sure Wendy Carlos’s was great, but I don’’t remember a note of it. Daft Punk meanwhile, perfectly soundtrack what a world based on a 1980s science fiction film and situated inside a computer network would sound like. And that’s my professional opinion.

Nobody tells you you still have to do your washing after you’re dead.

Once, sometimes twice a week you rise up from your grave, leave your regular haunts and shamble down to the nearest launderette to wash the mould and dirt out of whatever shroud or Sunday best you were buried in. All at night, of course, after the living have finally finished for the day.

It’s not really fair, if you ask me, to have to go on maintaining a wardrobe long after your actual mortal remains have rotted away to almost nothing, but there you go. It could be worse. At least I died in a town. In rural areas they have to wash by hand in rivers and streams, wailing all night at the indignity of it.

I don’t really remember how I died, or who I was before. I know I was probably murdered – strangled (I can see the bruising around my neck when I look at my reflection in shop windows), then weighed down with bricks and tossed into a canal, clearly never found. I generally spend my time floating up and down the same length of towpath. I have this pink balloon with me, so perhaps I was coming back from a party. I look like someone who was in their late teens, early twenties, and this is a university town, so maybe I was a student or something. To be honest, I don’t really care anymore. It’s just one of those things you occasionally find yourself wondering about, but can’t be bothered to investigate properly, like how much the sky weighs, or why you never see a baby pigeon.

My nearest launderette is in a small sidestreet with a newsagent one one side and a shoe repair shop on the other. The rest of the houses are redbrick terraces, all residential. The sign outside says ‘Elmly Mills Launderette’ – I suppose that’s the area. There doesn’t seem to be a church anywhere nearby, which is another small mercy. Anywhere near a cemetery must get pretty crowded.

As I approach, I can see a small crowd of us forming. I always feel underdressed on laundry nights. Most people are buried in suits, or their wedding dresses, whilst I’m in my canal water stained party frock, looking like a drowned rat for all eternity. The older-looking ones don’t say anything, but I can sense their disapproval. It’s obvious how I ended up like this. Perhaps some of them think I was asking for it. I wonder if I used to worry about this sort of thing whilst I was alive, whether this is some sort of residue.

I wait for a while with the others, and after a few more arrive there’s an almost imperceptible click. The door creaks open and we file inside. Buildings were never alive and have trouble differentiating between living and dead occupants, but if enough of us turn up, they generally get the idea eventually.

Inside the launderette’s cramped, and there are only the twelve machines. Some of us will have to wait. I head straight down to the end though, and manage to get the last machine in line. A few stragglers dejectedly settle down near the entrance to wait their turn. Those of us that have machines all start to strip – the dead don’t have anything to change into, and any embarrassment, shame or lust any of us might have felt at doing this when we were alive died at the same time our bodies. Cold, pale and naked, I bundle the frock into the machine, and shut the door, selecting the ‘warm delicate’ cycle. Then I settle down on the narrow bench that runs down the centre of the room, still holding my pink balloon, wishing Hello magazine had a dead people’s edition.

I suddenly notice the boy sat next to me. I say boy, but he can only be a few years younger than me. Skinny, blonde – pale like all of us. I don’t mean Caucasian pale – death bleeds all the colour out of you, leaving a sort of slatey grey. He has bruises around his neck like mine, except his look to have been caused by rope rather than a grown man’s hands. His head doesn’t loll though, so he can’t have gotten it right, much like, I imagine, most other things in his life. I find myself pitying him.

He must sense me looking, because he turns his head slightly in my direction, and looks me in the eyes. I try and smile, warmly, or as warmly as a dead person can. And then he smiles back. It’s been a while since anyone’s done that, and something sparks in me I’d forgotten about. Not love, or passion – all those things are done with. It’s just a reflex, more like nostalgia. It feels good to be reminded life must have had its moments, even if I can’t remember a minute of the detail.

We take each other’s hand, and together we wait for the spin cycle to start.

Varanasi is over 3,000 years old. Supposedly founded by the Lord Shiva himself, it’s mentioned by name in the Vedas, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, some of the world’s earliest literature. Siddhārtha Gautama‘s feet walked these streets before and after he attained enlightenment. 10km to the north-east is Sarnath, where he gave the first sermon. In the Hindu faith, this is the holiest of holy cities. To die in Varanasi is to achieve instant enlightenment, and escape the cycle of death and rebirth. People come from all over India to die here, using the last of whatever wealth they’ve accumulated, sleeping on the floors of the city’s many temples, waiting for the inevitable. Afterwards, their bodies are taken down to the holy river and burnt. Hundreds of bodies are cremated in Varanasi every day.

Entering the old town from the Cantonment area, the streets suddenly constrict, becoming the traffic-choked ventricles of the city’s crumbling stone heart. Cows, rickshaws, bicycles and motorbikes jostle in a chaotic melee through a warren of roadways dreamt into being by civic planners who were dead two hundred years before the founding of Rome. the smells are as chaotic as the sights – hot tar, exotic spices, rotting garbage, cowshit.

The city hugs the left bank of the river Ganges, that vast brown serpent that winds its way through the physical landscape of northern India and the Hindu imagination alike. Thought to have sprung from the feet of either Shiva or the Lord Rama (an avatar of Vishnu), it’s associated with purification and healing. Also one of the most polluted rivers in the world, it’s the city’s primary raw sewage outlet and the recipient of hundreds of cremated human remains on a daily basis, whilst upstream factories are dumping toxic waste such as chromium and other heavy metals directly into the river. Nonetheless, to bathe in the Ganges is to wash away one’s sins, and many of the city’s inhabitants do so several times a day.

The official government rate for hiring a boat is 60 rupees an hour, but no boat owner will ever agree to that. After the obligatory bargaining the boatman down from the lofty heights of a figure constituting my budget for the entire trip to something that sounds only reasonably extortionate, we push out onto the river. Despite what I know about its contents, it’s still an awe-inspiring sight. At Varanasi the Ganges is nearly half a kilometre across and 60 metres deep, and we’re still nearly a 1000km from the ocean, where at its mouth it’s 350km wide. Even with the multitude of vessels carrying tourists, mainly western couples and Indian families, it looks intimidatingly vast. Mothers reach down into the waters and splash their children and husbands playfully. The boatman sees me watching, and misunderstanding my concern, leans in reassuringly: There are no crocodiles in this river, my friend, he says. I can’t imagine why not.

Presently, we come to Harishchandra ghat, one of the two main burning ghats. Two cremations are in progress, one nearing its end, the other just beginning. A third body is being prepared by the friends and family of the deceased. Bodies are washed in the Ganges before being wrapped in white muslin. If the family can afford it, a decorative shroud might also be wrapped around the body, the most common colours being bright, vivid oranges. Women are only rarely allowed to attend funerals. Considered too emotional, in the past there have been instances where, overpowered by their grief, they’ve thrown themselves onto burning pyres. Rather than take that chance it’s left to the men to perform the required rituals.

My boatman is well-versed in the cod explanation of Hindu ritual learnt rote by guides to give to western tourists, punctuated by English-friendly catch-phrases. His favourite is “burning is learning”, although “cremation is education” is also popular. I ask how much a pyre costs. He replies 25,000 rupees. That’s about £350. The decrepit old women I’ve seen sleeping rough in the temples don’t really look like they can afford 25,000 rupees to me. I ask what happens if you can’t afford your own pyre. The boatman cheerily replies if you can’t afford that, then you can be placed on a pyre with six or seven other bodies, sharing out the cost.

At this point the third body is ready for cremation. A relative gingerly approaches the pyre with a smouldering branch. He circles the pyre seven times, and then lights it. The flames creep slowly upward. I’m told the process typically lasts between two and three hours, after which any remains are tipped into the river. My boatman points out that the fire is no ordinary flame, and is in fact the eternal fire of Shiva, which needs to be retrieved from the temple that sits just above the ghat. Apparently, the eternal fire of Shiva retails for around 200 rupees.

The body that had only just begun to burn when we arrived is going quite well now. The shroud around the head is gone, exposing a blackened skull, flames licking the last of the burning flesh from the bone. Smoke billlows upward into the sky, forming the trails I saw earlier, and blows across the river and the gathered boats in the slight, morning breeze.

I breathe in death.

It’s New Year’s Eve, 2010. A time of ending, and new beginnings.

The Scandinavian nations are often noted for their style and efficiency, and this was made particularly evident by way of contrast with the UK, my journey there involving a Central line closure, trains breaking down on the Victoria line, an uncomfortable hour on the overpriced and misleadingly named Stansted Express, the byzantine experience of Stansted itself and the customary indignities suffered by traveling on Easyjet. Shattered in most senses of the word, I was finally deposited in Copenhagen airport, where the the fractured pieces of my self were swept, gratefully, into the matronly arms of the Danish public transport system.

All of a sudden, trains became fast, comfortable, reliable things from some near future utopian science fiction. I never had to stand, and I spent about a half of what I paid for a Stansted Express ticket the whole time I was in Copenhagen. It even snowed whilst I was there, and roads, train stations and airports all magically managed to remain open, with nary a histrionic tabloid headline or montage of snowbound misery in sight. Signs, whilst written in a language I didn’t understand, tended to be mostly helpful anyway, and on the rare occasions when they weren’t, all I had to do was stand around looking befuddled for a few minutes, and a devastatingly attractive Danish woman would realise I was a foreigner in distress, politely ask in faultless English if I was lost and subsequently direct me to wherever I was going.

I think this has less to do with the “Scandinavian obsession with design” my guidebook kept banging on about (although I went here and it was very good), and rather the deeper sense of societal inclusion that characterises mainland Europe generally, and the Scandinavian countries in particular. I was there over the weekend, and on a Saturday the shops opened at ten and closed at four, whilst on a Sunday they weren’t open at all, although most of the major state-run museums – including the excellent National Museum – were (they shut on a Monday). The Danes clearly have a concept of leisure time that doesn’t revolve around just shopping. On weekday mornings the shops didn’t open until ten either, and before then the streets were mostly filled with brightly-garbed joggers and cyclists rather than commuters. I started to think a lot about how askew my work/life balance is these days and made all kinds of unrealistic promises to myself about the changes I was going to make to my lifestyle when I got back.

All of which lent the city a healthy, positive air. Copenhagen is an attractive city in itself, albeit in a modest rather than striking sense; it never really felt cramped or hectic, and there were lots of open, public spaces to retreat to if you decided you needed the quiet. The people were friendly. One thing I discovered was that the Danes have a particular affection for the English, who they see as countrymen who wandered off a thousand years or so ago, have gone a little bit wayward, but are, nonetheless, essentially still Danes. Several people I talked to expressed genuine concern over the increasingly objectionable program of public sector cuts facing the UK, and hoped I’d be all right.

After four days, I came home, feeling positive, relaxed and generally optimistic about the future of the human race. I’d been on UK soil approximately 90 minutes before I twittered this:

“After several days spent in a country that works, it was nice of Tfl to so thoroughly lower my expectations straight away. Thanks guys.”

Regular readers be assured, I am now back to my cynical, emotionally unavailable self, and once again believe the human project to be utterly doomed to spectacular, irredeemable failure. Cheers.