Once upon a time, I was a film scholar of sorts. Not for long, just long enough to get my MPhil and then realise I couldn't afford to stay on to do a doctorate. I specialised in French New Wave cinema, and the early films of Jean-Luc Godard in particular.

I even, in an ill-advised fit of self-importance, self-published my MPhil thesis on Lulu - and when it (obviously) failed to sell more than a dozen copies, a long, slow disillusionment set in. Worse, as I travelled a bit in France, I met a few people who had crossed paths with Godard and I started to get the impression that my cinematic hero might just be a bit of a prick.

It's odd the things that can awaken your passion, and I never thought a mash-up of Gwen Stefani and Une Femme Est Une Femme would do it. It's not even my favourite Godard of the period, but it's reminded me of the sheer fun of the stuff I spent so long researching.

Work is kind of weird at the moment - I'm sort of hitting my targets and everyone sort of seems to be happy with me, but I get the feeling I'm not quite justifying my silly salary. It's not good to feel like you're underperforming and being conspicuously expensive in the current climate, and it's been sharpened by the fact we've just had our first redundancy.

I'm also a bit gutted as I was supposed to be going to Bournemouth this weekend, but my mates have cancelled on me. Looks like a whole lot of World of Warcrack unless any Londonish peeps on here want to have a bit of a shindig?

YATTA!!!!

Having worked at my current company for three years and hit a sort-of glass ceiling (ie, there's only the MD left above me, so unless he hands me the keys there's not much else left to do), I went to a second interview for a proper managey job thing yesterday.

Tragically, the exhausted looking scruff is me!


So I'm now going to be working just off Ladbroke Grove - although at the end that's not Portobello Road, sadly.

I live again!

I rejoined SG a couple of months back, didn't bother with the blog because the only reason I rejoined was out of sheer boredom at nothing happening in my life.

ANYWAY... then my Internet went down. For six weeks.

Thanks to everyone who hasn't kicked me off friends lists for being utterly inactive. Hopefully I'll be around a bit.

Um, any news, any news... Oh yeah, got a short story published at Fictional Publications - it's a bit sci-fi.