Gareth · 25 October 2003
Yesterday, at a shop in an impenetrable neighbourhood of Montpellier’s impenetrable downtown – described perhaps as a rococo filigree of one-way streets which change names every other block and which allow the pressed-for-time country bumpkin a generous couple centimetres on both sides of the car with which to navigate concrete pylons and scowling university kids, and where there is Never. Any. Parking. Ever – it went like this:
—Okay, today’s the day. Where is it?
—It goes on sale at eight o’clock tonight, sir.
—How’s that?
—Look!
He directs my attention to a Cinema monitor where, at the Apple home page, we see a dorky Javascript countdown indicating that some eight hours remain before Panther may go on sale.
—Er, you won’t sell me a copy because it’s not yet morning in Cupertino?
—Quite so.
—Look, I drove all the way in from the country! From far! From like North of Pic St Loup! And this neighbourhood is impenetrable, besides!
—That’s not so far.
—Take my hundred and fifty damned Euros and give me the damned box!
—Sorry, I can’t.
—May your pants brim with jackals!
I’m paraphrasing.
Last night, it went like this.
Those who haven’t yet seen the second series of The Office and who like me figured that some sort of sophomore slump was inevitable – they couldn’t possibly sustain comedy quite so cruelly on the nose – will I expect be filled with grim joy to discover that the second season is approximately two hundred percent meaner, darker and funnier than the first, and that the queasy mix of loathing, sympathy and embarrassment one has for the characters is just, like, way more.
I think they have come upon a problem similar to that apparent with The Simpsons when it hit its stride: in order to stay funny, they had to make Homer into more and more of a goof; eventually the goofdom bar was being raised at the cost of everything else. That said, what they put office manager David Brent through in these six episodes is goof sublime.
We gorged on the whole DVD, and regretted it later, but it’s not often you get to see a sitcom that makes you laugh and double over with emotional pain at once.
Today it went like this: I re-drove the same smooth roads to fat city, penetrated the impenetrable neighbourhood, found a miraculous parking spot, whipped around the corner at 12:02 to see that the only Mac shop in the region had, on the most hyped and anticipated Saturday of its year, closed three hours for lunch.
So I went to the mall (easy access, scads of underground parking) and bought it at FNAC.
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