poppy alexander change and decay in all around I see

Calke Abbey, Mr Trebus, Gormenghast - we visited Calke on the way back up North a few weeks ago. It's not far off the A50, and we've been looking for interesting places to break the journey. On the face of it a perfectly normal National Trust property: a big country house, classical columns at the front, nice grounds with avenues of trees, nice cafe. Get inside and it's something quite different.

Video transfer: - I've been trying for a while to get a cheap system set up to transfer some old college videos from svhs to dvd. I've gradually accumulated bits and pieces including a VideOh! PCI card, which I put in my Windows pc. The card worked, but the software it would work with was very limited. I read it would work with Linux, so I've bought a better motherboard (ASUS P4B533-VM) for the Linux pc (still only 1.8 MHz, but I'm hoping to get a cheap chip to get it up to 2.4 or 2.8, the Asus sute has a list of compatibles) and I've updated my Ubuntu to version 10.

Car boot sale: warming up for Christmas. It's getting busy now, a lot of regulars are in from the fields (this Sunday sale is held in an old warehouse). A lot of: toys, ornaments, shoes with small wheels in the heels. What is the point of these? You can't skate in them. They might work if you held onto the back of a bike and lifted your toes up I suppose. Bought: 3 gilt picture frames, a Haynes manual for the Clio, a usb extension, an optical mouse, a pair of shoes with small wheels in the heels.

Celtic festival of Samhain begins, probably. A bit hazy, but assumed to be Celtic festival to mark the end of the growing season. Now to celebrate the farming year's end we have Hallowe'en, also a festival focussed on death. Quiet round our way, but this year we did get several sets of skeletally costumed children (the last two years we had none, and had to eat all the chocs ourselves. This year we were cleaned out, even the emergency Alpen bars).

I rate this top of the stuff we saw in our several-day stay at the Edinburgh fringe at the end of August this year. A vigorous physical theatre piece with a large stage, an international cast of nine (speaking a range of nonsense languages) and a strong atmosphere which livened up the underlying bleakness of the plot.

This is classic Baxter. It spans millions of years, all the characters die, and by the end not only has everyone we know ceased to exist, the human race itself has de-evolved. No super-race of the future in Baxter's vision, humanity evolves eventually into little monkey like creatures that are symbiotic with trees.

Saw 'Moon' at the Cornerhouse in Manchester. Another home cinema screen, like FACT (though that has trendy sofas) and the cinema in Oban (not trendy at all). 'Moon' was ok, enjoyed it. Not mindbogglingly new but perfectly acceptable, like a reasonably good Twilight Zone episode. Started out hinting at Solaris, went on to Space Odyssey, finished up a bit like a cross between BladeRunner and The Truman Show. With a hint of that Arnie film - no, not that one, the unmemorable one, 'The 6th Day'.

I miss Primeval, the weekly hope that someone might get eaten by a dinosaur. The premise wasn't all that subtle: Walking with dinosaurs did well - lets do running from dinosaurs. It did better as a kids show in spite and probably partly because of not being initially aimed at kids. Once evil Helen stopped flashing her cleavage and just started being Cruella de Ville, and the scripts started mixing in slapstick and sibling bickering in that old Scooby way it started to pick up.

Here's my basic categorisation scheme for movies: A is obviously top stuff; B is typical B-movie material ie I like it but I'm not saying it's especially good. C is just about passable, D is dreck. I put Blade 3 at C, along with Chronicles of Riddick. The titles are great, but then they often are in bad films, as if someone realises the product isn't so hot and ups the budget on the packaging.

Sowing and planting season is just beginning to turn into harvesting season, and it's quite exciting. The weather is not so bad as last year, so the slugs haven't been so bad, though still a problem. They've had all the lettuces bar two in a pot which they haven't found yet.