The problem is, it looks like somebody has been rushing things at Timegate because while the game works fairly well (apart from some odd quirks) the multiplayer backend is as ropey as I’ve seen in a while. The cardinal bug is that after a 32-player match ends everybody gets disconnected from the server almost every time (it happens on official servers too, so it’s certainly Timegate’s problem). This means that for a small community with rarely more than 100 uk players online at any given point, it’s pretty hard to get a good, balanced game going – for more than one round at any rate. So the community gets booted from one server to the next, over and over and over.

Then there’s the server browser and our old friend Games For Windows Live. The server browser is poor (dear Christ all they had to do was realise that they’d have it right if they just COPIED WHAT STEAM DOES?) and the overall transparency of the system is negligible. You can’t see your ping ingame. You can’t see your server history. And then there are the swathes of people who couldn’t even get the game started, apparently due to the pisspoor proprietary nightmare that is GFWL.

The moral of this story – if there is one – is that developers shouldn’t rush into a release date. And they shouldn’t put any faith in Games For Windows Live, which seems to be a crushingly unreliable way to play games online. More on that one later, perhaps.

All things in their proper place, it seems. And back-to-back ceremonies in October to wet my whistle at too.

Why? Probably because the CoH gameplay is based around real things – real combat dynamics and plausible weaponry – whereas DoW2 is based around things that don’t actually exist. This might also explain why the DoW2 campaign is brilliant – being based on a ridiculous fiction – and the CoH ones are generally a bit limp by comparison. Mind you, if Relic had built an rpg-lite co-op campaign into CoH I might have found it a bit more entertaining. Maybe.

Just so you know.

It’s time people stopped thinking of Britain as the country that invented railways and started to get the horrible crapness of the ones they have driven into their conciousness with a kind of cultural bedsore or something. I suggest changing the name of the country to the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and Shite Railways. Stamp that on everyone’s passport so that French people will sneer at us (more) when we visit the continent. So that the Germans will look at us pityingly, and the Italians will push up the service charges for us in their restaurants. That’ll get people going alright. And then we can vow never to change the name of the place back until we get something really awesome and rail-related to expunge the stain on our railway honour.  Like a train that cures cancer. Yeah.

That ought to do it.

That’s right. Wii sports. Pushing the envelope. Now go home and think about that for an oxymoron-cockslap, Nintendo. And come back with a console I can pretend to take seriously next time.

1. Happy people, who are apparently happy to be on camera

2. Genuine displays of talent. Tudur Phillips in the Dawns Werin, clog-dancing with a hammer was particularly awesome

3. Entertainment. As opposed to moody people, crap drama, shit reality shows and re-runs.

4. Welsh people. Having low-budget, apparently quite unabashed fun.

Lucky for you people in Wales, it’s on all week. Os nad ydych yn deall cymraeg – dim problem! Mae llawer o pobl doniol i gael o flaen a ty hwnt i’r gamera…

To be quite frank, although Pullman’s reaction seems a little strong, it’s a matter of far deeper principle than the scheme’s apologists suggest. It is not ‘Orwellian’, nor is it terribly sinister, but the scheme is so impossibly wrong-headed that only in the modern media climate could it be credible. It’s not that the scheme to certify everybody who goes into a school is in itself morally wrong, it’s that it attempts to paper over the real issue. How, exactly, does a certificate prevent child abuse? Certificates do not intercede between children and those who would abuse them. Instead of placing an emphasis on intelligent, responsible supervision of the children in our schools, the certificate attempts to reassure us that everyone who has been ‘certified’ is ‘safe’.

It is very, very worrying just how many people have casually accepted this notion. The cases reported in the news have shown, time and time again, that it is only through involved, competent social care that we reduce the real risk to those most vulnerable in society. Instead of investing stupid amounts of money in a bureaucratic nicety which tells us that everything is safe, we should be investing it in support of the people who are actually responsible for children’s safety. I mean teachers, social workers, perhaps even the police. But that doesn’t make a Sun headline now, does it?

One more thing: by continually undermining the truly responsible people in society, such monolithic papering-over-the-cracks projects only serve to cheapen their roles. The ASBO and the stop-and-search power destroys the credibility of the policeman on his beat, just as the Vetting and Barring scheme implies that the people we employ as teachers can’t be trusted, or indeed held responsible. It solves nothing. It helps nobody. And it puts up another barrier between sections of our already divisive and ill-managed society. The fact that it keeps much-loved children’s authors out of our schools should be the least of our worries.

Ever since the ubiquitous Ms. Rowling turned the ‘young adult’ fantasy market into an alarming cash-cow, one that made the publishing houses of the world quake every time it mooed, there’s been no shortage of hangers-on hoping to scoop up the sales from people who have a weakness for hobgoblins and people shouting ‘shazam’ on a regular basis. If you’ve finished all forty exhausting volumes of the Potter umpteenlogy and can’t bring yourself to go through it again, you might even be thinking about buying Who is Charlie Keeper? to fill that tombstone-sized space you keep reserved for the escapist book in your life. My advice is: don’t.

You see, Charlie Keeper is about a young girl who is transported to a fabulous parallel universe of magic and delight called Bellania, where she must learn the local equivalent of Quidditch (K’Changa), overcome various menacing presences, learn to control her innate magical abilities, and indeed . It’s enough to keep you wondering when some of the characters are going to pull on eerie latex masks and start screaming “call me Dumbledore!” whilst wrapping themselves in the curtains. In short, Charlie Keeper wants to be the next Harry Potter so badly it gets abdominal cramps.

Unfortunately, there are a few obstacles in its way: some of them simple, like the use of the apostrophe; others more complex, such as an inability to write dialogue that would appear convincing to, say, a Birdseye Fish Finger. A frozen one. Finally, there are the occasional disturbing moments where Mr. Alexander attempts to shatter literature’s fifth wall – the one that separates books from fan-fiction. I am still slightly uncomfortable with discussing these in detail, but I will let it suffice to say that when you make your twelve-year-old heroine go through a scene that wouldn’t look out of place in an erotic novel, you’ve probably seriously misjudged either your writing ability or your audience.

That said, underneath the wearying abuses of grammar, the lack of proofreading and the stilted, poorly-conceived dialogue, there is a halfway decent story skulking about. One suspects that, given a patient editor, a course in how to write and a few years to sharpen his skills, Alexander could have made this into an acceptable book, or at least one I could pretend to take seriously. There is a sort of coherence to the fantasy worlds he creates, and some of his better imaginings – tree-singing, perhaps, or his one interesting villain, Mr. Crow (at least until he opens his mouth) – might have stood well given a more considered framework of plot and writing ability. Yet even these are surrounded with a sort of hazily-thought-through expository mush that renders them unengaging and somehow trivial. If there’s a young adult in your life, I would strongly reccommend that you refrain from buying them this book: there are many fine authors out there producing witty, entertaining and thought-provoking books for a teenage audience and you should buy them instead. If you consider yourself to be a young adult, you’ll probably just find this book to be an insult to your intelligence.

Then we met the teams. I knew who the poets were and didn’t much care who the non-poets were, so by the time that everybody had been compere-ed to death by Ms. Wark, who read off everyone’s accomplishments as though she was supposed to care, but didn’t – I was bored. And then the questions started. I can recall Andrew Motion being applauded for a cripplingly dull non-sequiteur on the subject of Robert Frost and Edward Thomas and then I think I blacked out.

It seems like somebody (everybody? Surely not?) at the BBC has no twerping idea how to make literature, and poetry in particular, into television. It’s not just the dearth of regular programmes with a literary focus, it’s that you get moments like TBQ which are so evidently uncaring that you have to wonder if there’s anybody out there who has any idea – any – about how contemporary literature and television could ever be brought together. The poetry season at the BBC is a breath of fresh air that’s now blowing to a close and so it’s back to the wilderness for us poor rhymers, and even BBC4 won’t have room for us. I get the feeling that given a camera, a car and a corner of Powys I could’ve done better, and that’s a frightening thing indeed.