A piece on Star Wars not intended to cast me as a sci-fi geek

Tomorrow night will be, for me, quite a memorable occasion. It will be my first night of babysitting our daughter, while my wife heads out with her fellow mums for a richly-deserved night of letting their collective hairs down. Aside from the obligatory baby-related activities, my myriad (but likely to be unfulfilled) plans for the evening include trying to write a few more pages of my first novel, and watching Star Wars.

Kids today, and those geekish purists, will point out that in fact there is no such film called Star Wars, that in fact there never was – it is, as the iconic scrolling intro does point out, entitled Star Wars Episode IV : A New Hope. However, if you were a kid in the 1970s watching this film, you knew it as simply Star Wars. The fact that roman numerals weren’t taught in state schools until you were about ten perhaps also had something to do with it. So, as a child of the 1970s, this film will always be Star Wars to me.

Star Wars is one of those film that only really comes around once in a generation; something that fires your imagination and dominates your youth. It’s a simple story well known to most people that was so successful because it combined an unending passion for war films (there is a huge Nazi Germany overtone to everything about George Lucas’s evil Galactic Empire), sci-fi and adventure. And for kids like me, Star Wars was everywhere during our youthful years. I was born in 1976, so far too young to appreciate the first film (okay, the fourth film) when it hit the cinemas in ’77, but by the time Empire Strikes Back was released in 1980, was just the right age to get really excited about the film and all its spin-off merchandise, quickly replacing Lego as my toy of choice.

One of my earliest, and fondest, memories was going to Stratford-upon-Avon’s now-closed cinema (it became a Safeway, then council offices, then the Chicago Rock Café where Michelle and I drunkenly held our joint hen and stag do in 2001) on a Sunday to watch a double bill of Star Wars with Empire Strikes Back. It was one of only two occasions that my dad took me to the cinema (the other time was to Leamington Spa to watch the second Indiana Jones flick). Apart from being totally thrilled by the experience of actually going to the pictures and of being able to watch the latest Star Wars film, my other over-riding memory is of my dad falling asleep as the first film started, only waking up again at the very end of Empire Strikes Back.

Crikey, there are so many memories from childhood that are connected to Star Wars. The first time I watched Return Of The Jedi was on a pirate VHS on our first (top-loading, natch) video recorder, a Hitachi if my memory serves me. My dad had repossessed the equipment during the course of his work for a local electricals store, and it came with a poorly photocopied set of instructions and a ‘remote’ control which was attached to the recorder by a wire. How things have changed. The pirate film (it was my second pirate film – the first was ET at my friend Jono’s birthday party) was awful, awful quality, barely more than a guy with a primitive camcorder recording it from the back of a cinema. With my youthful imagination, I didn’t even know that pirates were illegal, and instead thought that people took their own video recorders into the cinema, plugged them into a panel underneath the screen and returned at the end of the picture to collect their equipment. How innocent. Boy, did I have a crush on Princess Leia in that bikini.

In one of the more odd merchandising angles from ROTJ, my mum bought me a duvet and pillow set which would have probably cost a fair bit back then, and would likely be worth a small fortune today. However, little boy Smith found the sight of a bloated Jabba The Hutt prominently printed at the centre of his duvet rather too distressing, and thus the bedspread was never to be seen again.

And then there was the day I met Darth Vader. That day, a very hot and sticky Stratford summer’s day, has left an indelible mark on my memory of childhood. There is a shopping centre in Stratford called Bell Court. It used to have a fake, weathered bell hanging above one of the entrances, and wooden benches ran next to a toyshop called Derek Lamb’s. Lamb was something of a Stratford toy magnate, running no less than three stores. There are no toy shops in Stratford anymore. In his store on Wood Street, my dad and I bought a small grey mouse to give to my newborn little sister, and in the store on High Street I was bought my first Dungeons and Dragons and Transformer toys. But it was in the Bell Court store that David Prowse, in full Darth Vader regalia, shook my hand and signed my copy of the book of ROTJ. (There were two editions of this book – a junior one in a light blue jacket, which he signed, and a presumably more grown-up version in a darker blue jacket). He signed it ‘Darth Vader’ with a black marker pen, and most people rightly don’t believe it was the real Vader signing the book; well, Prowse lived just outside Stratford, so it was, okay? I was petrified of the huge man standing in front of me, and was convinced that he was going to lift me off the floor by the neck like he does with that Rebel chap in the first few minutes of Star Wars. I distinctly remember that the black glove which he extended to me, which prompted me to burst into tears, was weathered and torn. I guess even evil Jedis find it hard to go to update their wardrobes.

After my fearful encounter with Vader, my mum and dad said that because I’d been so brave (I presume this was because I hadn’t wet myself perhaps as I’d hardly in my eyes shown myself to be what you could possibly consider ‘brave’), they said that I could choose a Star Wars action figure. I chose Princess Leia dressed as Bounty Hunter Bousch from Return Of The Jedi, which had a removable rubber helmet.

I maintain that as a child I was not spoilt, although the paragraph above may prompt you to disagree with me. In terms of Star Wars figures and vehicles, I had a pretty substantial collection, had an X-Wing, had a Snowspeeder and ST-AT. But I never had the Millennium Falcon or an AT-AT. These were reserved for the kids from more affluent families. In those days you could tell how well off a family was by the size of the Star Wars vehicle they had. If you had the Falcon you were rich, if you had the crappy little ‘mini-pods’ that didn’t even appear in the films then you were poor. I started selling my figures and vehicles a few years ago via the wonder of eBay and was amazed at the prices you could fetch; I now consider them my emergency fund for whenever I need to raise some extra cash, although it is with a pang of regret that I mail them off, hopefully to a good home.

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Thus it was with a palpable sense of excitement that I put Seren down to bed, located the Star Wars DVD boxset that my parents gave me for Christmas and sat down in front of the TV. Now, to my chagrin, the versions on the boxset are the remastered editions from the 1990s which included extra CGI footage, but I hadn’t seen them before and was amazed that I could tell, with perhaps ten years having passed since I last saw the first (fourth!) film, when something looked different. (I thought the addition of a sound effect and ‘grunt’ in the much-fabled scene where the Stormtrooper hits his head on the door frame rather unnecessary, but at least they didn’t cut it out).

To be honest, I was prepared to be disappointed in a way. Recently I’ve been watching some of the films that I used to watch in my younger days, and have found them to be far from the classic movies that I previously thought them to be. Last weekend we watched Brewster’s Millions, which I absolutely loved as a child, but which now – with the exception of some great shots of New York (we call it New York Porn in our house) – seems truly rubbish. Ghostbusters was the same. Only Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Back To The Future have retained any sort of greatness now that I am an adult.

But Star Wars was just as incredible as I remembered it to be. Aside from the comforting familiarity and warm fuzzy childhood feelings it evoked, it truly is a classic film. I have suggested to my wife that she should perhaps go out with her friends more frequently, ostensibly so that I can babysit Seren and get closer to my daughter; really it’s so that I can watch Empire and Return Of The Jedi and get all nostalgic once again. I can then decide whether I agree with the dialogue in Clerks that asserts, of the three movies, that Empire has the strongest – if darkest – ending.

Nothing to say but plenty to moan about

Faced with 1500 words and an empty page, for the first time since I started writing this each week, I am without anything specific to write about. I could write about the anniversary of September 11, my five-year wedding anniversary and my impending thirtieth birthday, and in fact I have already started a piece on this very subject but I can’t find it on my hard-drive right now. I could write about how so many things seem to be changing around me, but I’m saving that miserable topic for the week of my thirtieth birthday. For the record, on that week I will only be listening to Joy Division and Depeche Mode records, will be drowning my sorrows in copious amounts of cheap booze, and sobbing onto my wife’s shoulder.

So what I’ll do instead is have a general moan about things that have been bothering me lately. I’ve been saving up a number of these gripes and here seems like as good a juncture as any to put them all together and get them off my expanding chest.

‘Expanding?’ you exclaim. ‘How can he possibly be getting into shape when they’ve just had a baby? How does he have the time?’ Well, expanding does come off rather macho, doesn’t it? Like I’ve been working out and beefing up despite the squeeze on time just from having a dependent little madam around the place. But alas, my chest – and gut, and waist – are expanding through a complete lack of exercise and a new diet that seems to consist principally of late-night eating and convenience food.

Chez Smith we’ve always been pretty health conscious when it comes to food – no red meat, we gave up chicken a long time ago, we eat oily fish and plenty of vegetables – and we’ve been very healthy for it. We also used to go out for evening walks, Michelle was a member of a gym and I would walk to work. Well, I’d walk the part of the route from car to station and at the other end from Euston to the City – walking from Milton Keynes to London is not really do-able, although I did once think about walking home that way, but it’s a long story. Since Seren arrived each and every one of those things have gone out the window – we eat pizza probably once a week (we even started getting Domino’s delivered which I have previously considered a cardinal sin), throw a jar of sauce into a pan instead of making it ourselves, and the effort of preparing some fresh fish is just too much effort; Michelle simply can’t go to the gym and the crèche there is apparently a death trap for kiddies, and despite my nervous anxiety over catching the tube since July 7 I have found myself reluctantly riding the underground because I’m too knackered to do anything else, or working from home more often where I don’t benefit from any exercise other than the occasional walk along the landing in the house to the toilet.

At the moment I’m reading Morgan Super Size Me Spurlock’s Don’t Eat This Book which outlines just why it is that fast food is so bad for you. This book is practically a horror novel rather than a discursive factual work – you should feel sickened by the fast food companies and the crap they serve up as ‘food’ and make you never want to eat anything again. Except, for the first five chapters or so it actually made me want to eat crap food! What’s that all about? I have destroyed my svelte frame and now just want to eat like an obese hog. Anyone who heard me say in my earlier years that I never put any weight on is now laughing at my burgeoning middle-age spread. On Saturday I ate around 250% of my daily recommended saturated fat intake via a combination of pastry, breadsticks, crisps and an Indian takeaway. If I live to see 40 eating like this I should count myself lucky. (Whilst writing this very paragraph I was contacted by a colleague who said he was overjoyed that he’d managed to get his sat nav device to display the location of all local McDonald’s and KFCs and ping whenever he got close to one; on the one hand I am amazed at this, on the other appalled that someone could get so enthusiastic about being able to precisely pinpoint a source of such unhealthy food. He said that it was a ‘saviour’. A saviour that clogs up your arteries and sends you to an early grave, presumably.)

To fast food I would append the abundance of hydrogenated vegetable oil – a common trans fat which is supposedly lethal – in foods. It’s hard to avoid, and is in pretty much every biscuit or cake you can buy. I recently found it in raisins. Raisins! Aren’t they just dried grapes? Why do they need to be coated in margarine for God’s sake? Even when you try to eat healthily you end up eating processed muck.

What else? I know – travelling to Cornwall or anywhere in the South-West if you don’t live on or near the M5 or M4. That’s a bitch. I do love it in Cornwall, but the journey is a pain in the arse. The last time we did it the journey took us thirteen hours. Thirteen hours! I could fly to New York twice in that time.

The disposable nature of society, that’s something that bugs me. The development of cheap materials and therefore even cheaper garments from places like Tesco, H&M and Gap encourages you to re-buy your entire wardrobe with each and every new season, thus leaving you with the problem of what to do with the stuff you bought that you no longer wear. What a waste. And then there’s the fact that you buy something from these places, it looks great the first time you wear it, but then you wash it and it looks like you’ve owned it for about ten years. Oh, and iTunes downloads. You download that killer, must-have track, listen to it, go off it, delete it. Next!

Crap cars that their owners think could pass as sports cars if they stick on a new exhaust and ‘chav’ it up. Wrong. They’re still crap cars. In Birmingham the other day I saw an old 1980s Astra that had been customised into some boy racer Frankencar; in the front (blacked-out) window he’d added a huge sticker with ‘Astra’ in italics. Astras have never been cool – why do you think that advertising it is going to make it any cooler? Next!

Fat blokes reading lads’ mags. It looks desperate.

Girls who think that wearing ‘quirky’ fashion, uncomfortable shoes and carrying a Vuitton handbag will instantly reward them with the life of Carrie Bradshaw. It doesn’t. You look desperate too. And don’t pretend that High Holborn is like Fifth Avenue while you’re at it.

Applying for a passport and trying to get an authorised signatory from a list that the average person wouldn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of knowing someone from. Do they simply not want you to travel?

Olympic-sized trampolines in small residential gardens, thus affording the trampolinee the perfect view of my wife breastfeeding in the lounge when bouncing skyward. This I could write a whole piece on, but I may be pursuing legal advice on this in the next few weeks and therefore don’t want to weaken my case in case my neighbour reads this. But while we’re at it – balls being thrown wantonly from said trampoline, into my garden, and destroying the few plants that have made it from seed to seedling. That sucks too.

Waiters and waitresses who have the cheek to expect a tip when all they’ve done is served you a drink. And a 12.5% tip at that.

The cost of train tickets in the UK. Are they not aware of low cost airlines undercutting their train fares for the same route by around 75%?

The way that baristas in places like Starbucks or Pret seem completely unable to produce the same drink twice. Is there some great skill to making generic coffee variations that I am unaware of? There must be, as this is the only thing that could explain why it is that you’ll get served a perfect latte one day followed by another that is too strong, or too weak, or too frothy, or too creamy. ‘A bit frothy today my love, sorry about that,’ said the barista in the Starbucks I was in today. Too bloody right it was too frothy. It might as well have been topped with shaving foam.

And finally, those people who just moan about anything and everything. Don’t they hack you off? They’re never happy, always finding something to be miserable about. I mean, how can anyone live their life like that? If I ever get like that you can shoot me.

Fear and loathing and a moment of clarity

Like so many others, I found the disruption caused by the emergency changes to hand luggage on Thursday 10 August highly frustrating, but more importantly highly unnerving. Along with my wife and daughter, I was intending to make a short flight from Luton to Newquay for my sister's wedding, and arrived at Luton to be greeted at 6.00 AM by security staff handing out leaflets detailing what could and couldn't be taken on board as hand luggage.

Wisely - perhaps - the leaflet made no mention of why these emergency measures had been put in place, but whether they described it or not, in today's tense climate it was obviously linked to terrorism. And, gradually news spread like Chinese whispers from others in the sluggish check-in queues about the arrests, and what do you know? It was linked to terrorism.

I'm not intending to turn my blog into some sort of political soapbox, but I feel incredibly strongly about terrorism because I feel like I have spent the last five years living in abject fear that at any second someone could blow up the train I take to work each day, the bus I'm walking past or the building I work in. And now, once again, planes appear to be the target, just like it was five years ago when Al Qaeda terribly and ferociously embedded themselves in the wider public consciousness.

I am a stone's throw away from turning thirty, but the continual threat of terrorism hangs heavy around my neck and I feel far older through this heightened state of stress. There are days where I feel I just can't take it anymore. Days where I can't face getting on a train, hate the very act of being in close proximity to some of the City of London's landmarks; days where you need to take a deep breath before boarding a tube and feel like you're holding it until you get off again fifteen minutes later.

Cornwall is arguably more at risk of sinking into the sea than being a target for international political and religious (where does one draw that line?) terrorism, but the security clampdown affected all flights, not just international transit. Thus the act of flying to one of the most serene, untouched places on earth also becomes absorbed into this terrifying situation. I wish they'd closed the airports instead of restricting luggage and striking fear into the very heart of you as you board a plane. I have only been that terrified once before - when flying back from Orlando on the first day US airports were open after 9/11.

Only this time, in a way, the fear of flying was worse. While a part of you was relieved and reassured that our police and intelligence service seemed to have successfully prevented an atrocity, there remained the lingering fear that they'd have missed someone and that someone might decide to act quickly to cause devastation amid the chaos. But for me the situation was worse because, unlike September 11, we now have a daughter. It was, at just three months, her first flight, and we are naturally very protective and concerned about her well-being. That the news seems to suggest that babies were to be used as distractions and decoys sickens me to the pit of my stomach.

Now I know anyone reading this will probably think it irrational to worry about a tiny, insignificant little flight to Newquay containing no more than forty people, but if terrorists can contemplate bringing kids into this pathetic fight then nothing is off limits. In a way I'm glad she was not older as the sight of police at Luton Airport patrolling the queues with machine guns must be unnerving for children, let alone rational adults.

If there can be a positive outcome from this round of terror plotting – aside from supposedly averting what people are calling the single most devastating Al Qaeda attack to date – for me it is that it has forced me to reassess my priorities and make significant changes to my life to try and minimise the risk of something happening to me, thereby leaving my daughter fatherless. July 7 2005 was an event that made me think twice about my life and the amount of risk I was exposed to – even though nothing happened, August 10 2006 was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I decided that on the one hand I just couldn’t face working in London anymore. This was quite an uncomfortable decision to make seeing as I love London as a place and have always yearned to work here; but without a doubt, London is likely to be a focus of terrorist activity for as long as it remains our capital, the site of our parliament and the most densely-packed financial hub in the UK. And therefore so long as I work there, I am exposing myself to that risk. Whilst I should perhaps follow my colleagues’ example and simply shrug my shoulders and carry on, knowing that the odds of something specifically happening to me are slim, becoming a parent nearly four months ago has made me think very differently. It’s made me realise that this isn’t a risk that I'm prepared to take.

But, on the other hand, there is an economic justification for working in London. Being blunt, we could not have the lifestyle that we have if I didn’t work in London. I couldn’t command the salary that I earn elsewhere for the simple reason that I work in a segment of the financial services industry which is City-focussed. So, putting my daughter at the heart of my decision making going forward, I simply can’t dump the idea of working in London completely – if I were to take that route, I’d feel like I was not providing for her in the way that I want to.

For a few days after that chaotic Thursday, I agonised over what to do, and the stress was more unbearable than ever before. In fact when I started writing this piece, I was so unnerved by the whole experience that I honestly thought I was heading for a nervous breakdown. As so often happens, when you think there’s absolutely no way out at all, a solution presents itself and clarity is suddenly restored.

My job, I began to realise, did not actually – when I came to seriously think about it – require me to be in London every single day of the week. I took a look at my diary and realised that the days when I came to London were actually fairly pointless – apart from the odd meeting, I realised that I could be just as productive working remotely instead of trekking to London every day. I have the means, motivation and technology to work from home, and have built up enough trust with my manager whereby he knows that if I'm not in the office, it doesn’t mean I’m not working just as hard. And thus I find myself taking the brave step of basing myself outside of London and committing to only travelling into the capital when absolutely necessary, which may be twice a week or sometimes just once.

A while ago a friend and I were talking about how both companies and employers seem reluctant to fully commit to the idea of working remotely, despite the existence of enabling technology, and even though there are cost and productivity benefits to facilitating remote working. And I can see the logic in this. I enjoy working from home, for example, because I can get up, roll into the home office and be close to my wife and daughter; but at the same time I feel like I have to work twice as hard because I feel like I will come under closer scrutiny by not showing my face in the office every day. I also find working from home somewhat distracting because I want to natter to my wife and play with my daughter, which really aren’t acceptable work activities.

The compromise for me is to base myself at one of the three sites my parent company has in Milton Keynes, allowing me to escape the need to travel into London every day (and associated cost) but also giving me the chance to do something I never thought I'd be able to have again after accepting life as a commuter – the chance to work in the same town as you live, finish at 5.00, and be home by 5.30. To be able to achieve more time with my family, with significantly less stress and to maintain a certain financial standing, is a blessing that I never thought attainable, but which was staring me in the face all along. A shame it takes something as huge as terrorism to make you realise this.