Comic Cuts - 3 November 2017

I'm going to keep this relatively short as I've picked up Mel's cold. She was wiped out at the weekend and started recovering on Tuesday. I felt the first tingling's in my throat on Monday and it had developed into a sore throat and runny nose by Tuesday.

Of course, Tuesday was the day my sister Julie was moving from Suffolk to Surrey, so I had no option but to be up and ready for action so we could pick up the van at 8:30am. I was awake by 5:30, which is becoming too regular a habit for my liking and, as I wasn't likely to go back to sleep, listened to a recent radio play by Mark Gatiss based on an unfilmed Hammer Dracula script. I thought it captured the style of those old Hammer movies beautifully. You can still find it on the iPlayer for another couple of weeks.

Once in the van, and with Julie's dogs in the care of my mum at my house (we have a fenced-in garden for them to run around in), we headed off to Sudbury to empty out Julie's home. With the van loaded, we then headed for Guildford at 11.30am and made excellent time around the M25, arriving around 2.30pm. Another hour and a half to empty the van and we were away at 4.00 and hoping to be home by 6.30pm.

No such luck. On the trip back the M25 was crawling at a snail's pace around Heathrow and one or two other junctions and we had to make a choice whether to get off early onto the M11 or stick around until we hit the A12. But huge flashing signs were warning us that there were delays of up to one and a half hours on the A12, so the decision was an easy one. The M11 route took us back onto the A12 but at a point hopefully beyond the traffic chaos.

It took us an extra hour, so we rolled into Colchester around 7.30pm. Took the dogs out for a walk... or, rather, I should say that the dogs accompanied us while we went out to buy fish and chips. This was Hallowe'en night and, while I was never one to go trick or treating as a kid (I was quite happy to stay in the warm and get my chills from reading Stephen King or Ramsey Campbell), even I could admire the time and effort a lot of kids had put into their costumes.

The unwritten but firmly adhered to rule around here is that if you have a pumpkin or some sort of ghostly paraphernalia outside your house, you don't mind having little kids knocking on your door. If you don't, they leave you alone. Parents – because every group of kids had parents with them... that's the world we live in these days – stick to this rule but it doesn't spoil anyone's enjoyment (there are enough families that get involved to make sure every child in town is hyped up on sugary treats for a week!), even the old fogies like us who would rather stay in and watch Stranger Things on the TV...

... which we have been watching. We're only three episodes in as I write this and I've managed to avoid any Prue Leith-style spoilers. All I'll say is that it's as good as the first season so far.

My throat was raw on Wednesday and I woke early. Thinking it was about 5.30 – I could see the street lights were on through a gap in the curtains, and they're switched off between 1.00am and 5.00am. Awake, I turned on my laptop and discovered that it was actually only 12.30, an hour after I'd gone to sleep. But I had to get something to drink because of my sore throat and spent the rest of the night half asleep or jumping up to go for a pee. I was like a zombie most of Wednesday, dozed off at lunchtime, woke up early afternoon feeling achy and snuffly... but at least my throat felt better thanks to a packet and a half of throat lozenges.

I slept until 2.30am on Thursday, so I'm creeping back towards a decent night's sleep. I'm writing this Thursday evening and, although I'm still stuffed up, I'm not feeling too bad and will hopefully be back up to speed by the weekend. [Update: Woke up at 4.30 this morning, so I'm heading in the right direction!]

Given the week I've had, I've not managed to get much in the way of work done. I think I managed to finish off one piece before I went down with the cold bug, but I'll leave that for next week as the piece I'm working on is going to be another long haul and it will give me something to talk about once I've recovered.

Random scans this week are some old film posters that they used to give away at the Odeon. They still do, occasionally, but it's so rare that I go to the cinema that I don't see them.