TTCSM at last...

...or should that be TTC-SM or even TTCM?

Not quite with me? No shame in that at this early point in the discussion.

Let me take you back some twenty-four hours from now. British Summer Time was about to be unleashed upon us and, hence, a myriad of domestic clocks, timing devices and assorted electronic machinery in need of moving the critical hour forward.

'Spring forward, Fall back' as we all know, even if the phrase be too American for my tastes. We 'do' Autumn over here not Fall. (Yes we know leaves 'fall' - barely needs remarking. But it's hardly sufficient cause to name a whole season after the obvious bio-mechanical fact is it? 'Season of mists and yellow fallingness'? Doesn't quite pack the punch of the original I think you'll find.)

Anyways back to clocks et al. There is, essentially, a binary choice here - either fix the clocks before retiring for the night or else leave it all until the next morning. The next morning has some advantages - not needing to wait up late being chief among them.

Actually, there is a third way, as so oft there is. My old monastery, when in the old days stuffed to the rafters with none but French refugee monks, simply refused to have anything to do with the - to them - nonsensical notion of moving clocks back and forth. They simply stuck with Parisian time throughout the year, ignoring what else was happening in their exiled land. (Simple for them of course, but played ruddy havoc with any taxi driver summonsed to attend at ten of the hour and finding he had arrived a whole hour too early or too late. Not good for business or for temper!)

The difficulty though - returning to the main sub-subject - in putting off the task is that other persons about the household tend to interfere, altering some clocks but not others, never actually saying which ones they have changed, leaving the whole matter a thing of pot-luck and random chance. (Dare one - and one does so dare - associate such fallibility with the female mind and will?!)

Not my bag at all - leaving things to chance - I imagine you would have readily grasped had you been keeping up with these scribblings of mine!

The chosen line then is to fix everything before retiring, simply announcing that all has been dealt with and kindly no questions on the matter.

So far so reasonably simple and sensible.

But then a snag. 'Tis virtually impossible to keep tabs on those devices that have an in-built 'Oh it's BST, better jump forward the hour' prompt and those that don't. Modern computers tend to be ahead of the game here - as, scarily, in most things - some boilers can cope and even the odd mobile telephone, if properly programmed, knows when to act. But many don't.

Grandfather clocks for example, that take several minutes alteration of pulleys and levers to change, most certainly are unable to attempt the task unaided.

Chief of all, of course, is the clock in the bell tower. Designed and built when a United Kingdom was hardly a glint in a Prince's eye, it never knew BST nor would have cared much to acknowledge it if it had.

There was a time when a local 'lad' could have been relied upon at the small cost of a proffered fiver to climb the rigorous steps to change the hour-hand when needed - as was last night.

Grimly, though, the Elven Safety people have decreed that no such lad may be lawfully employed for such a perilous purpose, unless and until he has attended five assorted training courses, been equipped with the latest thinking in hard hats by state registered and approved purveyors of said items, completed six risk assessments - three of which having to be signed off by separate departments within the Elven Safety Castle - passed a final examination and been declared a fit and proper person to undertake the task by authorities sacred and profane. (Not to mention been provided with all items of Elven Safety equipment considered necessary for such a purpose from the strictly limited parish funds!)

So there one inadvertently was in the position of a quasi Captain Marvel called upon as the only one fit and willing to do all the daring and required deeds.

...That was but a brief introduction to the topic in hand. Back therefore to 'TTCM' and/or 'TC-SM' and/or TTCSM.

The really, really smart ones among you may have this sorted by now. All it takes is a tolerably simple trail to follow.

Part the first - Rector has decided he needs must stay up late in order to resolve the whole BST/clock thing. Part the second - some activity is required to keep him awake and fixed to the task unto 2.00 a.m. Part the third - let's have a look at what's on the television.

Well! One hardly dare describe the options available at such a late hour. A dozen or so idiotic 'reality' - how unreal, how unreal - shows, the occasional alluring repeat of a 1970s drama one had forgotten had ever been made, some semi-decent - if one were awake enough to be concentrating - history documentaries...etc., etc.

Actually the 'etc., etc.' is discreet code for some pretty ropey soft pornography, freely available into the small hours on even the most tame of channels. And when one says 'ropey', what one largely means is that it is awfully off-course in a strictly physiological sense.

On the whole - though not of course an expert in such matters I must insist you accept - 'soft' pornography is far more sensuously erotic than the 'hard' version with its constant and unvaried diet of genitalia mixing most frantically - and so loudly, they all seem to have to shout with fake delight! - with other of the similar or like kind.

A fellow seminarian once wisely remarked that should one ever be tempted into the bleak world of 'hard' porn - as viewer no more! - all that were need to extricate oneself from such a sinful snare would be to play the whole thing at twice the intended speed. The net result most assuredly would be complete collapse of any improper lust as one wept with laughter watching human bodies 'at it' like so many frantic turtles praying to be ahead of the incoming tide.

'Soft' - not the word you would really be wanting to over-emphasis in front of the 'leading' as it were man - pornography can be (on the other hand one is reliably informed) rather stimulating, as in "I do somehow wonder what circumstances could lead one to have such revelatory bonding moments with a total stranger and were one to find oneself there how might one behave?"

But where it fails is in attempting to show what it cannot show - actual genital contact. The end result would often seem to be a woman somehow latched on to a man's penis that must be located, implausibly, somewhere on his lower abdomen, rather than the groin where it most properly and exclusively belongs.

A good school chum of mine once did remark that his whole sexual career had been horribly set back some considerable years having feasted on such misleading stuff. It was not, he said, until he went back to the 'drawing board' as it were of plain, simple anatomy that he figured he had been all innocently setting sail for the entirely wrong harbour. (No Nigel, the umbilicus is not the target drop!)

We are - I admit - not yet on top of (how the metaphor sustains) of the real subject here. To cut right away to the chase, waiting for the late hour, avoiding the reality and unreality of most of the available programming, one stumbled across a late showing of that seminal (sex again I fear!) film 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre'.

Note the purity of the reference. The original film was called precisely and no less that. Chain and Saw were given as two separate words: not hyphenated, not conjoined. (Bear that in mind the next Pub Quiz night!)

Now this film had long been a boogie monster waiting to be confronted. I have always loved horror films in equal measure to detesting ghost films. Real ghosts do scare me, as in my belief that they must at heart be sad spirits not yet able to seek their rest and that so saddens me.

But TTCSM was, one was informed, just too awful for even the most ardent of horror fans. Barbaric beyond relating, a must-avoid.

Having now, after so many years of avoidance, actually seen it I must though most heartily disagree.

Plainly played for laughs, with completely improvised dialogue throughout, an utterly implausible re-enaction of a terrible true event - Ed Gein - with endless, endless screaming from the [spoiler coming!] one surviving female, unreal chases where the chaser has to keep falling over in order not to catch the chasee, a side-splitting scene in which a semi-mummified gran'pa is unsuccessfully urged to relive his personal apotheosis as a serial killer and strike down the girl with a hammer he can barely hold....one can barely continue for the tears of laughter.

Even the actual visible gore is slightly less gruesome than a bog-standard modern police drama. It's a great, great film. But horrifying? Not a chance!

Apparently the idea for the film - the use of chain saw as a weapon of death - came to the Director fellow when he found himself trapped inside a heaving hardware store. Glancing over at the machines on offer and reflecting on the easiest way to carve a passage through the madding crowd, his eye and inspired mind rested on the chain saws for sale.

That actually is quite creepy.

The 'Upper Slaughter Garden Centre Chain Saw Massacre' - a film crying out to be made!