The more things change, the more you go "Oh no, not this rubbish again"

So, welcome to the first official posting in this blog's new guise as The View from Pudding Island and already with this post's title I realise I seem to have got off to a slightly grumpy start.

The thing is I thought that having lived in Greece for the last three-and-a-bit years with only occasional visits to England it would be a good opportunity to highlight what changes I noticed had taken place in "the old country".

Unfortunately I haven't been out and about as much as I would have liked so when not reading or sleeping - and lately I've found myself doing an awful lot of those - I've been watching TV. That has been my window on the world.

In Greece we had no TV. We had the capability to watch DVDs and we could watch TV in cafés, but watching the tube just never featured in our lives and I didn't miss it one little bit. I should point out Mrs C didn't always agree with me on that point.

Having shunned TV in Greece I have embraced it here in the UK. It's my new best friend, but like all best friends sometimes it does go on a bit. Leaving aside general programming, some good, some bad and more of which maybe another time, my view of my native land and the wider world is formed generally from news programmes.

Oh lord, it's depressing. It's generally people doing horrible things to each other, or wanting to do horrible things to each other, and a bunch of gurning tossers who have been around for ever all going on about what they would do to stop horrible things. So that's the news which is occasionally interspersed with cute stories about ageing pandas which resolutely refuse to reproduce.

The other snapshot I get of Britain is through TV advertising. If the news is what people think you ought to know then advertising is what people want you to know, but only so you'll part with large sums of money. Gambling, money lending and ambulance-chasing solicitors are some of the mainstays of TV advertising these days, plus occasional ads for people with either diarrhoea or constipation. In advertising circles this is probably regarded as an each-way bet.

I realise I have got off to a slightly dyspeptic start with a title for the post which could be applied to the blog itself, but bear with me, I'll try to lighten up as I go.

For those who missed it last time, I thought I'd explain one more time why the blog has changed from The View from the Olive Grove to The View from Pudding Island. Quite simply, I changed locations - Greece to the UK - and Pudding Island was writer Laurence Durrell's rather disparaging title for Britain. While it may be a bit snippy, it's still quite funny and I do love a good pudding. So there, I will almost certainly never seek to explain this again, but just to help clarify matters below there is a picture of Pudding Island and also one of jelly, I love jelly.

I didn't want to leave you without a bit of music so here's Changes by David Bowie. It seems quite fitting as there are a lot changes going on in my life at the moment.

• "Satellite image of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in April 2002" by Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC - Cropped from: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=3065. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - 

• "Rainbow-Jello-Cut-2004-Jul-30". Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rainbow-Jello-Cut-2004-Jul-30.jpg#/media/File:Rainbow-Jello-Cut-2004-Jul-30.jpg

O Sleep, where art thou?

For years I've been a champion sleeper. I'd go to bed, turn off the light, put my head on the pillow and within seconds I'd be asleep. And that would be it until the morning.

But lately things have changed. These days I normally turn out the light at about 1am and I can still usually get to sleep quite easily, but then I find myself waking up at 3am or 4am and there's no way I can get back to sleep.

If you're having trouble sleeping try to avoid
having a musician at the foot of the bed.

It's then that my mind goes in to overdrive. Rather than remain semi-comatose so that I can slip back off to sleep, my brain decides to run through all sorts of issues.

I spend a surprising amount of time thinking of things to write on this blog. Next month, I'm taking part in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge so I can also find myself pondering that during the wee small hours. And then when I've done all that I might well find myself thinking about my family and hoping everything will be all right for them.

Sometimes I start constructing imaginary dialogues with famous people I'm never likely to meet or characters from TV shows or films I've seen. I know this latter activity sounds particularly demented, but my brain seems to be intent on showing me all the things it can do when I'm not actively using it.

By this time it could be that one or other of the cockerels, or more likely both of them, begins their morning crowing routine. Because they've decided to live so close to the house following the New Year's Eve massacre their crowing is particularly insistent.

Soon after that it begins to get light which in theory should mean I get up and start doing things, but in practice can often mean I fall asleep again and don't wake up until 10am. Having been a habitual early-riser all my life, getting up as late as 10am seems utterly sinful to me.

If it were summer I'd get up in the middle of the night and read, but just now, particularly with the weather we've been having, the prospect of leaving the comfort of a warm duvet is distinctly unappealing. In the meantime I suppose I'll just have to keep on having those conversations in my head with all those famous non-existent people. Oh dear, that really does sound bonkers, doesn't it? I need to get some sleep.

The song I've picked to go with this isn't an entirely accurate description of my situation, but I like it, which is probably all that counts. Please enjoy Sleeping with the TV on by The Dictators.

* Painting by unknown master (book scan) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

At long last, the fat lady sings

SATRIALE'S; You'll meet a better class of mobster here.

Finally, finally, finally, I've seen the entire series of The Sopranos, HBO's drama of the ups and downs of life for New Jersey mobsters. It is over, the fat lady has done her bit.

I was watching The Sopranos some years ago when it was broadcast on British TV, but for reasons I've never fully fathomed, I stopped just as the show got in to its sixth and final season.

We don't have a television now, but we can watch DVDs and thanks to the kindness of a friend who lent us the entire boxed set, over the last few weeks we have waded our way through the whole show. We have seen every last bludgeoning, whacking and routine trip to "the Bing" to catch up with the antics of pole dancers.

It has been a remarkable experience and demonstrates that good storytelling makes good television. The programme was heaped with critical acclaim and even received the accolade of best television series of all time. Only as an aside, but where does that leave Triangle? (Just a British TV joke).

The thing that struck me about The Sopranos is that for all the thumping and whacking - surely at least one killing an episode - the programme was an allegory of what life is really like. Yes, really.

Mob boss Tony Soprano loves his family and at the same time wants to do the best he can in his "work". Inevitably there are tensions as the demands of family life conflict with the pressures of being an effective performer in the workplace. Family v work or family plus work or what? It's an age old problem and one that increasingly is not just something for men to wrestle with. In fact, it probably never has been one for  men alone to resolve.

You think I'm being a bit far-fetched about similarities between life in the mob and most people's day-to-day existence. Well, how about this? What is organised crime but capitalism without restriction? In an office if there's an employment problem it's time to call on the human resources department. In the mob it's time to make a bogus appointment, then bang! bang! bang! before either burying the body in the New Jersey marshes or weighing it down and tipping it off a boat at sea.

And forget mergers and acquisitions, and all that leveraged buy-out malarkey. If you're an up-and-coming Mafia capo then the trick is to point out to the hard-working schmuck who has spent years building up a profitable business that he'd be much better off taking you on as a sleeping partner than risking having his business burn down with him in it. Literally you make someone an offer they can't refuse. Take away the rules and you're free to do whatever you want if it turns a profit, which is, after all, the name of the game in business.

Whether or not The Sopranos was a masterful evocation of the struggle we call life, it remains as a solid piece of proof that entertaining television and intelligent programme making are not mutually exclusive. I'm missing it already.

Well now, there was tons of good music from The Sopranos and its theme tune, Woke Up This Morning by Alabama 3, is deeply embedded in my memory, but sometimes I like to be a little contrary. I have chosen the Flower Duet from Léo Delibes' opera Lakmé. It's not being sung by two fat ladies, but Anna Netrebko and Elina Garanca certainly are sopranos. Opera is not really my thing, but give this a chance, it's beautiful. To many of you it will be familiar as advertising music, but it's so much better than that.

* Picture of Satriale's Pork Store from The Sopranos by Stephen Hanafin [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I resolve to do whatever I want

How are you coming on with those New Year Resolutions? As good as that? Well, a week's not bad. To be fair, I didn't bother making any resolutions so that now, nearly two weeks in to January, I'm not sitting around feeling bad at my lack of purpose.

But, hey, if you did set yourself a range of targets for self-improvement then go for it. It is entirely arbitrary that just as the Earth reaches a certain stage in its orbit around the sun we decide to instil a bit of moral fibre in ourselves, but why not? Broadly speaking it's better to try and fail than never try at all.

So if you're trying to give up the ciggies, rein in the drinking and take up regular exercise more power to your elbow. I suppose it's only fair for me to point out that by the end of the month you're likely to feel a complete sense of failure and be full of self-loathing at your inability to exercise even the slightest bit of self-control, but really I don't want to discourage you.

It's easy for me, I'm an ex-smoker so I don't need to give that up and forswearing alcohol in January seems completely nonsensical to me. January is precisely the month when you need a little alcoholic fortification.It's dark, it's cold and spring seems a long way off. I take my break from the electric soup during Lent. No booze from Ash Wednesday to, er, it depends how I feel, but it is usually Easter Day itself.

Anyway, enough of my moral high ground. If I did have any New Year resolutions to make what would they be?

Well, as ever, improve my Greek. This actually has nothing to do with New Year and everything to do with being a lazy arse who should by now be speaking, reading and writing better Greek than he does. To some extent this does take us back to the idea of failure, and to be truthful beating yourself up about your own shortcomings isn't very productive.

Despite all the above, this year I have got two resolutions that I think are worth doing, mainly because they might be judged to be completely pointless. Having said that, I think I can give them a go. They are to read more poetry - let's say one poem a day, and to learn to juggle. I've had a go at the juggling before and gave up just as I was achieving proficiency with two balls - no jokes please.

Question: Can you juggle? If so did it make you want to run away to join a circus?

I like to end with a bit of music and my selection for this posting ties in with my belief that one resolution we could all do with is to watch less television.