Airline FAIL

Unfortunately it's not online and I don't have the newspaper with me, but did anyone else see Ryanair's Valentine advert?

It was pretty tasteless: an oral sex joke (a picture of a descending zip with the legend 'Going Down', referring to their prices, naturally), but it made me ponder the calibre of their advertising department.

Would you really want to associate aircraft with the phrase 'Going Down'?

Attention, female football fans

Victoria and I bumped into Gary Speed in Chester yesterday. I didn't notice but Victoria (who is Welsh) went weak at the knees (her actual phrase doesn't bear repetition on a family blog), but here's a picture of what you missed.

Meanwhile, the goverment's announced a plan to build such fabulously fast railways that domestic flights will wither away. They shouldn't exist on such a small island anyway. This is the first thing this government's done in ages that's purely, unambiguously brilliant - so obviously the lobbyists are out in force and it'll never happen. O'Leary of Ryanair called it 'insane', so it must be a good thing.

Living the high life

I've often teased Emma for being a typical Man U fan: foreign, lives a long way from Manchester etc. Now I know it's true because I've just received this text:

Just boarded. Drinking champagne. It's a hard life.

She's not flying with Ryanair, that's for sure.

What are you all doing this weekend? I'm going for a walk around Bridgnorth tomorrow, in the company of the Map Twats. Then we're going to find Birmingham's finest indie clubs to celebrate Dan's birthday. On Sunday, I'm going to finish all the marking. Then on Monday I'm off to Aston Uni for a conference on how to get an academic career. I always thought 'career' was what happened when your brakes failed…

Then on Tuesday it's off to Walsall to explain to the PGCE external examiner what a brilliant teacher I am (ho ho ho).

We are doomed

To recover from the St Pat's festivities, we ate Vietnamese food, sat in the Wellington with pints of real ale and read newspapers, then went to Star City for the premiere of The Age of Stupid. What a brilliant place for a green film: a palace of excess and consumption located next to Spaghetti Junction, a place with so much contempt for the environment that they have no information available about how to get there by public transport.

If you haven't heard about it, it's an important film about climate change. Chances are you're either entirely indifferent or bored with the subject. You shouldn't be. You should watch the film and leave with a sense of utter, utter dread, alleviated by a glimmer of hope that we can do something about it before 2015 - after that, we all get to live in a post-apocalyptic Kevin Costner film, and nobody wants that.

Actually, the film's not that good. It makes a lot of important points but makes them badly. The boo-hiss guy is a low-cost airline director, but it's a shame that they couldn't use a Western one, such as Ryanair's O'Leary. Instead, they pick an Indian as though it's poor Asian countries which have got us all into trouble. The nuclear potato is avoided utterly and the clumsy post-fall flashback structure has been done a million times in cheap SF. Pete Postlethwaite's pretty good though.

The strength is the movement that's growing out of Age of Stupid. The live Q and A beamed direct from Leicester Square was interesting, primarily for Ed Miliband's discomfiture. He had the last laugh though - every time they begged him not to build Kingsnorth, he stressed the need to experiment with CCS, clearly meaning 'I'm building it, and CCS might happen in 30 years time so piss off' while hoping that the greens would think 'Ah, he understands why coal's bad'.