He's over here . . .



And she's over there . . .



Well, it's been a week since Pepper and Paddy met officially, and he's had the run of the house ever since, so their meeetings have been regular and, I'm sorry to say, unhappy thus far. Here's what usually happens: Paddy is dashing about like a fool, attacking his own tail, playing with his toy mice, leaping onto things that seem too far away but turn out not to be, basically making his own entertainment and apparently growing about an inch a day, and Pepper will come in from outside or enter the room and, instead of keeping a respectful distance, bless him, he'll approach her, keen to make friends. And she will contort her face into that of an alien and hiss at him, in other words: back off. He'll make any number of submissive, cute shapes, but these will have no effect. She's taken to the box, which I put up last week to see how many videos I could fit into one for transportation to the charity shop. She leaps in and stays there, observing Paddy's juvenile antics from the safety of a sentry box. Eventually, she settles down and sleeps in there.

It's frustrating, in that it's so obvious he wants to be her friend or surrogate son. The encouraging thing is that, even after she's attempted to slap him down when he's crossed the line in the sand, he still goes back for more. He has that unquenchable optimism of youth. She can hiss and growl and smack all she likes, he's going to make peace at some stage. This gives hope, but it's a shame to see Pepper looking so grumpy and put out. After all, we got him for her!

I guess it's only been a week. (It feels much longer.) Occasionally she almost seems to ignore him, which is the best we've got so far. It's a long game. I've stopped intervening when she bawls him out, as it's their problem, they need to sort it out. The more they run in to each other, the better. At one stage in the week, we left the pair of them on adjacent stairs (Pepper was on the top, spread out, he was on the next one down, sensibly curled up), and some kind of uneasy detente was temporarily reached. But as I write, she's chased him under the raincoat that's hanging on the doorknob of my office and he is beseiged there. In the words of Rodney King, why can't they just get along? Encouraging words again gratefully received. They are our favourite two cats in the world and we want them to love each other as much as we love them both!

It's not that bad

Suitably whipped up with anticipation, we braved the polite Christian ladies handing out leaflets about our lord Jesus Christ outside and attended one of the first showings of The Da Vinci Code at the Odeon, Leicester Square. Let's get this out of the way first: I like the book. Not being a voracious lover of fiction, I read it two years ago spurred on by all the talk, not expecting to like it - just reading it out of a broader cultural interest. It had me from page one. All the cliches apply: page-turner, unputdownable, a rattling good read. I even read Angels And Demons straight afterwards (not as good, but set in Rome, so fun for anyone who's been). I was under no illusions about its highbrow literary merit, but it struck me that Dan Brown could tell a story, and at least it had a vaguely intellectual core: art, religion, history, that type of thing. I didn't care whether it was true or not, I enjoyed the Catholic conspiracy at its heart, and I fell for the Leonardo clues, eagerly looking up the paintings and examing the positioning of hands and so on. A visit to Paris last March was made more interesting by having read the novel. What harm could it do? What irks me is the way The Da Vinci Code has become shorthand, within the media, for crap. It certainly has narrative holes, and I've read The Rough Guide, with all the inaccuracies and falsehoods helpfully highlighted. That's good sport. In Angels and Demons Brown invents a disgraced British tabloid reporter who apparently worked for the Tatler, then got a job working as the Rome correspondent for the BBC. Preposterous, and indicative of how lazy a researcher Dan Brown can be. But a page-turner is a page-turner and the snobbery against his popularity from the chattering classes is undeserved and patronising to the millions that have enjoyed the book. I like the description of it in the latest New Yorker: "an anti-Christian polemic disguised as a beach read."

The film, ably directed by safe-pair-of-hands Ron Howard, mostly on location in London and Paris at night, with evocative results, is a perfectly serviceable middlebrow thriller. Few going to see it will not have read the book or heard about the conspiracy at its heart, so the big finish will be one of the least effctive since Titanic. This doesn't matter. The tale is well told, and Ian McKellen, as Professor Teabing, brings a welcome sense of camp fun. Paul Bettany is great as the mad monk Silas, too, the character singlehandedly causing a PR panic at Opus Dei, whose conservative Catholic members aren't all like that you know!

The big flaw with the film - apart from the poor desicion to cut to actuality of Mary Magdalene and the Crusades, which is a bit hokey - is Tom Hanks. He just doesn't cut it as a suave intellectual. If he turned up, even with his long hair, to deliver a power point presentation to me about ancient symbolism, I'd be hard pushed to take him seriously. And everyone who's read the book knows that it should have been Harrison Ford. Brown even describes Robert Langdon as looking like Harrison Ford. So where was he? That's the conspiracy.

Some of the reviws, including that of Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian (a man I like and respect) have been based on petty prejudice and mudslinging. The Da Vinci Code is not that bad. Put that on the poster!

A Sharpe Entrance

I told you I don't mind being late on things, but this is ridiculous. Sharpe, based on the swashbuckling novels by Bernard Cornwell that I will never read, has been on television since 1993. Time to watch one of them, then. This latest, something like the 14th, Sharpe's Challenge, was on a few weekends ago, and a clean slate on the schedules tonight allowed us to sit down and luxuriate in what is surely the perfect addition to the Hornblower-loving household's armoury. It's Hornblower on land. Sean Bean made his name in the role of Richard Sharpe, once a grunt, now a retired Colonel, or so it seems, and I understand that Cornwell has actually adjusted physical descriptions of the character in later books so that he's more like Bean. What an honour. This adventure, post-Waterloo, which we're about an hour off finishing, still tired out by the constant chaperoning of Paddy and Pepper, is set in India - and filmed there, I'd wager (look, I've gone all 19th century!) - and assuming it's archetypal Sharpe, it's fine by me. Lots of caricatured British officers willing their own comeuppance upon themselves by being fat, posh, obstinate and drunk, every woman melting at Sharpe's very presence, swordplay galore (good to see Toby Stephens in a pantomime villain role again, fencing against our man in the midday sun) and endless gunpowder being poured into musket barrels. No need to go into plot. Needless to say, Sharpe will sort it out, with his Irish pal Harper. Quite brutal - with men having nails driven into their skulls and then having their heads chopped off - and sexier than I expected (that general's daughter, played by Lucy Brown, captured by the dastardly renegade Indian Maharaja, seems to be there purely to have her dress fall off) - but solid ITV1 stuff built around an iconic performance. I enjoy Sean Bean in Hollywood films, assuming he's allowed to play Yorkshire. I once saw him on Parkinson and he appeared to have no personality whatsoever, unable to form sentences. He comes alive for the camera. The perfect actor.

The Guardian are giving away free wall charts all week. All credit to them for resisting DVDs and teach-yourself-Spanish CDs, but today's Garden Birds chart - the one I was looking forward to (after all, who needs one on sharks?) - is incomplete. Where's the nuthatch?



That's better.

So much to answer for

Final part of Granada's See No Evil: The Moors Murders on ITV1 last night. This was a controversial one, in that many still alive remember the missing youngsters and the appalling revelations of 1965, when Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were caught. (Although such connections pale next to recent TV dramatisations of the work of Harold Shipman and Beverly Allitt.) Some would say I have an unnatural interest in real-life killers. I dispute that. A few years ago, prompted by Happy Like Murderers, Gordon Burn's impressionistic account of Fred and Rosemary West, I started obsessively reading non-fiction books about serial killers, through a desire to understand what makes seemingly ordinary people kill, and kill again. The best of the books I've read have taken a forensic, criminological interest in the cases (Brian Masters writes well on this subject, he did Killing For Company about Dennis Nilsen, and The Shrine Of Jeffrey Dahmer), but this angle almost always falls down when dramatised for TV or film, partly because an abusive childhood is too easy to hold up as motivation, and insanity is difficult to portray. For instance, I've read books on Ed Gein, and yet the only direct film about him, Ed Gein, though slightly chilling and commendably restrained, had little to add, and much to subtract from a greater understanding of this disturbed individual. And Ted Bundy, which I had the misfortune to see in Edinburgh the year it came out, was played for cheap thrills and was an insult to the memory of his victims, and to the study of the criminal mind. Great if you want to see screaming girls in bikinis.

One thing the ugly Bundy film didn't attempt to do was psychoanalyse. Although See No Evil is in a completely different league - never lurid, fastidious with the facts, and most importantly done with the blessing of the victim's families (we even see the all-too-familiar photo of Keith Bennett used a prop, in a frame on a sideboard) - it similarly sidesteps any speculation about motive. We don't really know why Brady was such an appalling sexual sadist, or why Hindley aided and abetted him. She subsequently claimed it was through fear of what he would do to her family, but the public at large refuse to believe this because of her peroxide hair. What writer Neil McKay did brilliantly was to concentrate not on the unknowable, cold Brady (Sean Harris, previously seen as Ian Curtis in Twenty Four Hour Party People) or even, despite pre-publicity, the iconic Myra (a stunning Maxine Peake), but on her sister, Maureen (Joanne Frogatt) and her malleable husband David Smith (Michael McNulty, seemingly in his first role). This was its masterstroke. It wasn't about Myra, but about Maureen, who suffered enough in her own life, with her first baby dying before her sister's secret life was revealed, and then she had the stigma of being married to "the third Moors Murderer", because David had witnessed the killing of Edward Evans. David's gullibility was very convincingly done. You believed he would find Brady a thrilling character with his long words and his gunplay and talk of bank jobs. He had nothing. (Or at least, he didn't realise how much he had ie. a loving wife.)

There's no way a responsible broadcaster could show the murders of the children, but See No Evil avoided showing even a suggestion of their abduction. Only the murder of Edward Evans, 17, was shown, and only in brief flashes and bloody aftermath. The justification, dramatically, was easy to explain, if you accept that showing Brady's sadism was a necessary plank in the drama (otherwise - he's a wierdo rather than a monster). I actually doubt the necessity to show these scenes. When Brady casually confessed to Smith that he'd killed "three or four. I haven't finished yet. Teenagers mainly. Any younger, it's too much fuss," it was enough to freeze the blood. Did we need to see him with a bloodied axe in his hand?

This was by and large an intelligent and respectful drama, with wind-battered shots of Saddleworth as a fallback option at every turn (how could they not look dramatic?). The performances were spot-on, and the period was keenly captured in set design and in its washed-out layers of brown and beige - all the better to point up the red of a lipstick or the light in Brady's photographic dark room, eerily recreated when he kills the boy. The shot of Coronation St on a black and white telly was very clever, and daring, since this film sough to make a soap opera out of grisly reality (with one or two Corrie and Brookside faces among the cast). Sean Harris didn't have much to work with, and came across as a pantomime villain at times, but Peake was well-judged, bringing depth to a woman seemingly locked forever in that photograph. Looking at the Manchester Evening News message boards, it seems that people in the area are generally happy with the result, even some who had a connection with Brady and Hindley, so it's a job well done, even if we are no closer to knowing why they did it.

Take me to the Moors . . .

Paddy . . .



. . . meet Pepper

Well, it's been emotional, and far from decisive, but Pepper has now officially met the new arrival. We've read all the books, and, despite plenty of clashing advice, they do seem to agree that it's a delicate process, introducing a new kitten to a reigning adult cat. (The reason we got a boy was because adult females are supposed to feel less threatened by them.) Paddy's been in the house for over a week now, largely in his room, but over the last few days we've allowed and encouraged him to explore, while Pepper has been sleeping in her bedroom and thus unaware, or when she's out in the garden. His smell is certainly all over the house now, which must be helpful. She's seen him through the patio doors and looked put out. She also saw him through the glass-panelled kitchen door and gave an unholy growl. This, all the books insist, is normal.

Now Paddy's had the run of the house, it seems unfair to keep locking him back in one room, so we are keen to let him roam, but at the same time, we don't want them meeting unsupervised, and we don't want Pepper bashing him on the head. Yesterday, he wandered into her bedroom while she was under the bed. They came face to face at last. Pepper hissed. (Normal.) She let out a deep, guttural growl. (Normal.) But Paddy's reaction was superb - he approached her gingerly (not bad for a tabby), and respectfully. He didn't cross the line. She kept on growling, but didn't move. He held back, looking about as pert and friendly and unthreatening as a small potential pal could. Eventually, he sat down and spread out, totally submissive and calm. They regarded each other for quite a while. The growl rumbled on.

They met again this morning, in the same place. Again, he was cute and fearless but held back. It's clear he's not scared of her (he was raised well and in a good, noisy house, for his first seven and a half weeks). She is still very unhappy about his presence. She hissed again, every time he approached. He eventually scuttled back his his room.

To his credit, these encounters have not dented his confidence. He still roams the house with head and tail held high. They crossed paths again in the kitchen this afternoon: more hissing and guttural sounds, more devil-may-care olive branch reaction. It's early days yet. We're making sure Pepper knows she is the queen of the house, and reassurring her at every stage. Paddy is bombproof. We don't need to worry about him.

I don't know if anybody else has any stories or experience about socialising cats . . . I'd be interested to hear them. It's quite stressful at the moment, and time-consuming, but it has to be worth it.