Speaker by Various Artists

Quite funny, actually.

Imagine a romantic comedy made up of just the good bits, the scenes you tell your friends about to make them go see it. Imagine one with galaxies of star-crossed lovers, exchanging longing glances or lingering kisses. Imagine it's left out the boring bits, done away with the dud lines, the foot-tapping explaining bits, the mawkish-but-seemingly-essential-touching moments. Imagine you've recruited just about every comic actor in Britain, and all of the good-looking ones. Now imagine it's Christmas, and London is as beautiful, as beguiling, as clean as Paris.

You're watching Love Actually, whose title has to remind you that what it's really about, just in case you missed the seven or eight storylines of adoration and desire crashing stickily into each other, like a collision of children's trucks packed with chocolate eclairs. A movie that celebrates love in all its silliness, its moments of pathos, its heady addictiveness. And which, if you're anything like me, will make you laugh out loud several times.

Director Richard Curtis, writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, now has the rudder of the Love Boat and intends to make the most of it. The London of Curtis, who was born in New Zealand most of fifty years ago, is the London of the expat, some have posited. It's like a tourist's tour of the city, a business-classer who stays in a good hotel, goes out only to nice restaurants or guide-approved ethnic eateries, and who never goes to, say, the back streets of Peckham or Seven Sisters. Not only that, it's a place where the British PM (Hugh Grant) can deliver a stirring, patriotic speech that puts the slimy US pres (Billy Bob Thornton) in his place. As we also know, it's where educated types can cuss prettily at any occasion, do extraordinarily rude things, dance to a soundtrack of old pop songs, and the wily can evade the most stringent, post 9/11 security if it's in aid of a meaningful snog.

But Curtis is wise enough -- and funny enough -- to play on this, to acknowledge that his world is a fantasy usually brought on by a sugar rush and too many egg-nogs, most clearly (and amusingly) signalled when one gormless character goes offshore in search of gorgeous American babes and inevitably succeeds with honours.

Inevitably, delineating 22 main characters (according to the publicity material) and truncating what seem like hundreds of storylines is sometimes fraught to the point of pleasant failure. Some, such as porn movie stand-in John (Martin Freeman, The Office's Tim) wooing his opposite, go AWOL. Because so many short cuts are taken to get from desire to destiny, characters are presented as fully whole vessels of wit and wuv.

Who's best in this masterpiece of staying the good side of ridiculous? Alan Rickman is sublimely insouciant as the design outfit boss who's married to Karen (Emma Thompson) but attracts the eye of his flirty secretary, though the panic over his buying a trinket for his admirer is a little laboured. Bill Nighy has a whale of a time mocking the preprogrammed fun of the music industry, playing washed-up ex-druggie singer Billy Mack who's flogging a truly crappy Christmas single. Thompson and Liam Neeson carefully handle the bulk of the pathos job, Neeson in particular finding plenty of sensitivity and restraint as a father, Daniel, who is unable to reach his son Sam after the death of his wife/mother. It turns out, it shouldn't surprise you, that the doe-eyed Sam (Thomas Sangster) is just another sap who's been struck by the vicissitudes of Eros. I admit to liking all the characters, instant back-story as they are. Even Colin Firth, who's a writer who buggers off to a ramshackle villa on the continent, only to be wildly distracted by his Portuguese housekeeper. He's called Jamie, but don't expect much different from Mr Darcy, it's what he's paid to be here for. Hugh Grant's PM is, well, Hugh Grant, a politician you might, actually, want to have a drink with. He's besotted with his tea lady, but why doesn't he just shag her, like in real life? Oh yes, that's right.

Mark Broatch usually writes film reviews for The Independent (though don't expect them to get posted to the site).

He's the laughing stock of the free world. It just so happens he's also the leader of it.

The great thing about him is that he provides so much material to giggle at. Let's enjoy some classic quotes:

"More and more of our imports come from overseas." September, 2000.

"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur." July, 2002

"They misunderestimate me." November, 2000.

Of course I'm talking about US President George W Bush. Some call him Dubya. Officials, so they tell us, call him Potus - which is short for President of the United States. Last week tens of thousands of people marched through central London to mark the great man's visit to Britain, all with differing reasons and agendas. They had a few different names for Mr Bush, most of which I can't repeat here ...

Whatever you call him, last week was a good chance for protesters to gather and indulge in an evening of good old-fashioned Bush bashing; a tantalising tongue-lashing for the Toxic Texan.

"The pretzel that almost saved the world," read one sign (with picture) being carried by a young woman in Trafalgar Square. Another sign made assertions about Blair's "WMD" and Bush's "orifice". Enduring images of a Bush effigy being toppled, and then mockingly smacked by hand-held shoes, were beamed around the world - in an obvious piss-take of the Saddam statue-toppling in Baghdad.

Bush was seen as a bit of an easy target, however. Most "serious" demonstrators seemed more concerned with reminding the British public that Blair (or B.liar as he is known at these marches) "lied" to the public over the Iraq war, hoping that would strike a mortal blow to his re-election campaign.

I wonder, then, what these people make of Mr Bush's Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad?

In an audacious stunt, Mr Bush secretly flew into the country he helped to make the most dangerous place in the world, spending a couple of hours with about 600 stunned soldiers. It was so secret that White House communications director Dan Bartlett told a handpicked group of journalists "if this breaks while we are in the air, we‚re turning around".

It was obvious what London's Independent made of it. "The turkey has landed" the headline said, over a picture of Bush, resplendent in military jacket, carrying said (cooked) bird. "Moment of pure theatre for tearful President" said the cynical Times headline. A surprisingly neutral Guardian blandly stated "Bush's surprise trip to Baghdad".

Bush aides had obviously decided his worldwide lap of honour for the "successful" campaign in Iraq hadn't yielded enough photo opportunities. There was Dubya in Australia's parliament (minus a public gallery and two outspoken MPs). There was Dubya and wife Laura with Her Maj and Prince Philip (minus a Daily Mirror reporter - so we didn't get to find out if the Presidential dog ate his bacon sandwiches). And of course there was Dubya with the British public (Blair's neighbours in Sedgefield and a few footie-playing school kids under strict instructions not to do anything but smile and whoop).

What a photo opportunity his flying visit to Baghdad turned out to be, dominating the front pages of most British broadsheets on Friday.

I think we're seeing the lengths to which President Bush the Second will go to, to be re-elected. He doesn't want to follow the same road as Bush Snr - a war in Iraq and then getting booted out of the White House. As a party, the Republicans have obviously decided after lean times during the Clinton years, they quite like being in power, thank you very much.

The problem Bush and Co. face is the Democrats have a fairly large, and convincing, file against a second term for the incumbents. This includes his pulling out of treaties on greenhouse gas emissions and anti-ballistic missiles, running up the biggest deficits in US history and making the rich richer with tax cuts. International relations have been hampered by the Israel saga and, more recently, steel tariffs. Oh, and that Iraq thing.

But while the Democrats are fluffing around trying to find the ideal candidate, Mr Bush's campaign team is in full re-election mode. And despite their poor record in a number of areas - a booming economy being a notable exception - the Republicans still command solid support.

You've got to remember Mr Bush was appointed to a post after an election he didn't win. This guy may come across as a buffoon, but either he, or the people close to him, must be as clever as a shithouse rat - otherwise he, and his people, wouldn't be there.

One of the subtle changes in recent months, which I believe shows how clever this regime can be, is the gradual sidelining of the president's "hawks" - Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. This has been coupled with the rise of "doves" Secretary of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser.

Cheney and Rumsfeld, who have dropped off the international media radar of late, could be paying the price for telling Mr Bush how to win a war but not the peace. The Vice-Pres has been dogged with allegations of favouring his old firm Halliburton with $US2.5 billion of Iraq reconstruction money. Meanwhile, Rummy's hard line statements on Arab nations, like Syria, and coining the phrase "Old Europe" wouldn't have won him too many friends abroad.

Powell might have been promoted to the front bench after being the "sacrificial lamb" at the UN before the Iraq war and last year's Earth Summit in South Africa, while Ms Rice is believed to be one of the president's closest advisers. The Rice-Powell combination is a much more conciliatory diplomatic face in light of the Iraq debacle.

There was no greater sign of this phenomenon than in Bush's keynote foreign affairs speech in London last week. Powell and Rice were there in the front row, side-by-side, clapping like library monitors at a primary school assembly.

While there has been some playing with pawns in the shadows, in daylight we now have this astounding visit by Mr Bush to Baghdad to mull over. Just look at the coverage he's getting - albeit not all positive. Already it is being hailed as a masterstroke, with Times diplomatic editor Richard Beeston describing it as "one of the most daring stunts in modern American history".

My headline for the visit would read: "Bush's Baghdad election stunt (Democrats and the free world beware)!"

No, Mr President, we will not misunderestimate you again.

I expected to have a few run-ins with Englishmen the day after the World Cup Final. However I was surprised when it happened at one of the homes of English culture - the Royal Albert Hall in the snooty Kensington suburb of London. AND it was about ICE CREAM!

Yes, this sour-faced Pom had made his way to the front of the queue at the interval of Classical Spectacular when one of two women serving the frozen treats turned to me and asked me what I wanted. I told her and, ignoring the serving girl's adjacent co-worker, this grey hair whirled to me and asked angrily: "Excuse me, is there not a queue here?" I calmly assured him there was but the woman had looked at me, not him.

Enraged, he tried to stare me down but I think he realised that wasn't getting him any ice cream and he turned away. The serving girl turned back to us, but not to reassure the fuming Englishman - she'd collected my order (chocolate and sticky toffee, for the record). I suggested she might want to take my friend's order (before he spontaneously combusted) and she just pointed to her bored co-worker who was waiting for work.

Vindicated (and now in possession of ice cream) I said mockingly: "Hey buddy, you make sure you have a nice day." Obviously not used to being treated with such disdain, Mr Grey Hair said: "Don't you be smart to ME!"

It was time for the killer blow. As I brushed past him, I leaned close and said: "Whatever mate. Outside." I walked off, not allowing him to answer. I didn't see him later.

It was at Classical Spectacular that I DID hear the most gloating after England's World Cup victory, however. From the conductor as well! After the first piece of inspiring classical music Anthony Inglis welcomed us to the show, "and the home of the RUGBY WORLD CUP!". He even stopped the applause for baritone Grant Doyle to announce "he doesn't deserve it! He's Australian!"

Not content with humiliating Mr Doyle, by bringing him back on stage for a round of applause while he draped himself in the St George's flag, he later got stuck into the band of the Welsh Guards. "We beat them too! We're INVINCIBLE!" he crowed, whipping the hall into a frenzy with a rousing version of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot". He did later admit Wales can't play rugby but they can sing - which must have made Welsh tenor Geraint Todd feel a little better.

Since I was in the company of an Australian that afternoon I very quickly reached a decision about gloating Poms. I bloody loved it! I mean, if that's the best they can throw at us then they can have the Cup (for now). The other thing is that despite getting roasted (English football players please consult the dictionary for proper usage) in the Australian press all week, their English counterparts have been so busy celebrating they've forgotten to give it back! Sure the Aussies feted England after their win (remember it was one try apiece), but I would have expected the gloating to include more running down of the opposition.

The one exception I can come up with came from The Sun. Sydney Daily Telegraph journo Peter Kent had called for fellow Aussies to make a racket outside the England team's hotel to keep players awake on the eve of the final. So the English tabloid got its own back (on a reporter working for a fellow Murdoch paper!) by printing Mr Kent's phone number and encouraging its readers to vent their spleen at him. Oh, and they did. Gotta love that, but it wasn't really a vitriolic attack on all things Australian.

Even now, The Sun and its competitors have had two days to publish comparisons between Aussies and worms (like they did with Jacques Chirac) and the normally overactive press have resisted. For once, instead of running people down the papers have been exceedingly positive - with most of them offering eight-page souvenir pullouts of the World Cup feat. It really has turned this football-mad nation on its head. Not only did the rugby make every back page, it dominated every FRONT page as well and led the BBC 6 o'clock news on Saturday night.

I guess it pays to put yourself in their shoes. I got a bit of an insight when I asked one of my workmates, Christine, if she was getting up to watch the game. She said no, she'd be too nervous. "I just want to wake up and, hopefully, hear that we won. I might watch the game later." What got me was that pleading look in her eye as she said: "It would just be nice to win something. We never win anything!" Remember this is the country of Tim Henman's Wimbledon hopes and Michael Vaughan's Ashes dreams. Poor buggers.

So they're not used to winning. That was obvious at the Greyhound Inn where I watched the game in Carshalton, south-west London. After the floor had stopped feeling like a trampoline from all the English bodies jumping up and down in celebration, I steadied myself for the belligerent gloating. But it didn't come.

The English bloke in front of me who I'd just met, Darren, just kept shaking his head, saying, "I can't believe it", over and over. Not long after he was wiping a tear from his eye. I was reminded of a telly report featuring an old English geezer who had travelled to Australia for the game. Whilst proudly clutching his wife he said if they won it would be the proudest day in his life - except his wedding day and the birth of his kids, he quickly added. One guy at the Greyhound even came up and shook our hands (I supported the Aussies, quite vocally from what I remember), thanking us for coming and told us he enjoyed our support.

The pure joy they exhibited at winning was really sweet, like that of a kid bringing home their first A‚ on a report card. Their enthusiasm, also childlike, was infectious. You couldn't help but be caught up in it. And, in the main, they were really humble in victory. Surprisingly so. Maybe things will be different when the tens of thousands of Poms arrive back from Down Under, but I'm glad I was here to partake of the magic of a country in celebration.

Well, until Sunday that is. Chelsea's got Manchester United don't you know and, as far as these blokes are concerned, there's only one beautiful game.

Alternative Washing Machine, 14 November

Margaret Thatcher was right up there with the other greats of music journalism with the saying she made famous at the height of the 80s - "There Is No Alternative". Yes, she alone understood the fate of the great unwashed with their check shirts, long hair and goatees, who would reign brightly but briefly in the years to come.

Ten years on the era that spawned this gnomic wisdom found itself lampooned in a good-humoured way at 80s "retro" nights at the Box. Madonna, Culture Club, Duran Duran - all unceremoniously hauled from the burning mess of PLO bombings and Mossad counter-insurgencies as if nothing had happened.

Flash forward yet another decade - and Margaret's spirit lingers like Radon. The Alternative Washing Machine is aging: a great concept, but, like most ideas of quality - even the most underground of greatness - doomed to failure. But then that's the appeal, right? Suddenly, on November 14 (well, 15 by the time I made an appearance), the inevitable happened: the SS washing machine's journey to the centre of indie foundered like the stillborn Queen Mary 2 on Galatos' dry dock basement.

Having enjoyed the August AWM at the Paradise Bar - before its untimely closure - I was keen to sample the last one for 2003. But, I ask you, 'Counting the beat'? Has someone rewritten the dictionaries? I know a decade is a long time and (say zeitgeist experts) it never begins with the year as such but that was beyond the pale. I did arrive late - and maybe all the good songs had already been played. But Coldplay? Where was the distortion?

It was hard to know whether to feel relief or regret at the end of a dream. Still, such programmed redundancy is what makes events of this kind worth attending. But that doesn"t make it any easier. We need answers.

"Alternative Washing Machine first appeared in 1992, when opportunities to dance to your favourite pop tunes were few and far between" proclaims the background blurb at withoutdesign.com/awm, the phenomenon's official website.

That was its reason then, but now? An antidote to the acid march of House? A manageable span of time on which to hang flashbacks for the attention deficient? Or something else?

This is really a tale of two Kurts - of Vonnegut and of Cobain. One of them aged but with no love for life; once ebullient, but always managing a child-like optimism in his prose. The other having died young at his own hand (still debatable) but with the pain of an old man longing for death. Vonnegut, because Alternative Washing Machine is like his last novel, Timequake, which was about having to live the last ten years of your life all over again, exactly as it was, doomed to repeat the same faltering steps through a life on high rotate. And Cobain, because he was the pea of grunge, on which all the other princess bands would toss and turn.

Only in hindsight can the musical kernels that grew up to become grunge be recognised for what they were. And one of the only survivors of that era is the guy who, passing through the 90s, started the whole scene as casually as a cigarette butt starts a forest fire. While Eddie Vedder now looks like an old man singing his heart out at 9-11 specials, it's Neil Young who's still churning out the concept albums, riding back to popularity on the alt-country wave. Yippee ki yea mutha...F***.

It’s the week before the marathon. Weather reports at this stage are predicting a very unseasonable 74 degrees (23 C) for Marathon Day. My midweek visualization run over the last few miles of the marathon course is done in teeming rain, so I end up looking more drowned rat than I do Allison Roe. By this stage of proceedings, as well as the NSAIDs, I’m quaffing the little blue sleeping pills big time.

On Wednesday afternoon, I negotiate with the landlord, who thankfully lets me stay above the pizza shop construction zone until after the marathon rather than having to go live under a bridge that weekend. I call the moving company, the superintendent for my new building, my insurance company and all the utility companies to change my move date for what feels like the seventeenth time.

Saturday morning, the day before M-Day: I go on the International Friendship Run. Meet some Kiwis – including John, a dairy farmer from Warkworth who has come to New York, for the first time, to run the marathon. (“I guess I’ll see a bit of New York tomorrow” he says, and, in response to my enquiries about the definitely-not-for-wusses Rotorua marathon that circumnavigates Lake Rotorua, acknowledges in classic Kiwi understatement “I guess there were one or two hills.”) I later check the statistics in the marathon handbook – more than 1000 attorneys plan to run, but there’s no figure for dairy farmers, or even just “farmers.”

As Saturday wears on, my foot gets more and more sore, and I start to feel a bit sick to boot. Go to see my Russian hairdresser – who has spent the morning cutting the hair of marathoners wanting to keep cool in the balmy predicted temperatures - who tells me as I’m leaving: “In my country we have a saying: the slower you go, the further you go.” Consider writing this on my pace band. (Definition for non-marathoners: the piece of paper you wear round your wrist with your projected time at each mile marker if you run your goal pace. Like, yeah right.)

Marathon Day dawns bright and clear - runners prefer overcast - and a sunny 68 degrees (20 C) with high humidity. But, by then, well frankly my dears I didn’t give a damn. To prevent this account becoming War and Peace and War and Peace: The Sequel double pack DVD edition, let me mention just a few selected highlights:

• As we head towards the start line, they play “New York, New York” over the loudspeakers. Everyone sings like crazy.


• People decorate their running shirts. The best slogan I saw (while heading up the Verrazano bridge on mile 1): “Is this a 5K?”


• Brooklyn residents turn their speakers out onto the street and play the Rocky theme.


• Kiwi spectators along the way yell like there’s no tomorrow when they see a silver fern singlet approaching.


• Several friends are out to watch. Including Busytot and Busytot’s Dad at 1st and 96th at about the 18.5 mile mark. (I didn’t see Busytot. Must have been running too fast… OK, let me humor myself here. Please.) Another Kiwi I know, but didn’t know would be watching, comes tearing out of the crowd at 5th and 97th (about mile 23.5) screaming out my name and almost rugby tackles me.


• The first race official I see on crossing the finish line is my physiotherapist. Several seconds of stunned silence and dropped jaws on both our parts, followed by (from her) “How DID you do this?” After I fill her in a bit on the last couple of weeks, she states quite matter-of-factly “Well, we all know by now that if anything is going to happen, it’s going to happen to you.”

All in all, the marathon itself was a fantastic experience. Well, OK, the weather - and most of the race between about miles 20 and

24 - really sucked. I ran it some 15 minutes slower than the time my coach had told me I should be shooting for, but All Things Considered I am happy with that.

Later I learn that I was 27 seconds slower than rapper Puff Daddy who had run a much-hyped publicity-stunt-marathon-thinly-disguised-as-charity-fundraiser, with The New York Post giving a blow-by-blow description of his supposed four week training schedule – including his lament about forsaking partying and sex for the duration. (Why all this hoopla surrounding a sporting event? I really don’t have to tell you, do I?)

---

So I’ve run the New York City Marathon. And survived. In the days afterwards, I reach a détente with the noisy pizza shop downstairs and even buy some pasta from them, trying not to think too hard about the cockroaches that scuttle between my floor and theirs. Anyway, it’ll be “ciao, cockroaches” in a few days. And sure enough, the following Thursday - almost five months after first seeing the apartment I ended up buying - the other M-day (moving day!) dawns.

It’s overcast and rainy. Nonetheless, things go relatively well. Except for the part where my moving truck begins the drive from the old hacienda on First Avenue at 77th/78th to the new hacienda at Third Avenue and 83rd. (For the non-New Yorkers, this is about 7 minutes walking time, 3 minutes driving time.) Up First Avenue: so far, so good. Turns into 83rd St., finds itself immediately behind New York City’s slowest moving garbage collection truck.

I’m in a taxi following the moving truck, so the taxi driver backs out and gets me to the new place. Where I go upstairs, spend considerable time inspecting the latest work and kvetching with the contractors about the building rules (the painter’s Brazilian, so has as much tolerance for the building rules as I do), come downstairs to discover that my moving truck hasn’t even made Second Avenue yet, sit in the foyer and talk to the doorman at length, watch the garbage truck speed by (now it must be full), discover that my moving truck has disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle of Moving Trucks at some point around Second Avenue, and finally greet the moving truck some half hour after it embarked on the three minute drive. And I’m paying these guys by the hour. But when your apartment renovations are already some $15,000 over budget and several weeks behind and you haven’t even moved in, what’s another half hour and hundred dollars?

Soon enough all my gear is safely stowed in the new apartment. Having taken the day off work, and thinking that I feel up to the task of dealing to some of the carboload-induced extra pounds, I don’t miss the opportunity for a midweek afternoon run - my first post-marathon attempt, and my historic first run from the new apartment. Within three blocks, it starts to rain, my radio batteries go, and my legs feel like utter crap. I struggle round Central Park’s 4 mile loop as daylight turns to darkness. Where are my little voices when I need them?

Postscript: I’m now ensconced in the new apartment. It’s still being painted, still a bit of a construction zone, but it’s mine (well, mine and the bank’s, really). Have gone for another run. (Legs still feel like crap.) I love New York. Despite everything. Buying an apartment here is an adventure. Running the New York City Marathon is an adventure. Would I do them together again? Ha bloody ha indeed.