Guilty Pleasure Saturday

Is there anything that you do that you know is either pointless or bad for you but you still love it? Here's mine

Crime Dramas: I've gotten really addicted lately to awful crime dramas. We haven't had a tv for a year but since we got really fast internet I can watch them online. So I got totally hooked on Wire in the Blood, a drastically terrible ITV cop crime mini-series that was shot about 10 years ago. When we had tv they used to show it a 3am on RTE and I loved it, but I only ever saw about 3 of them. It's based around a female detective and a male crime psychologist played by Robson Green. It's really terrible but the faux gritty realism and comforting predictability and scooby-doo structure is brilliantly addictive. I only have 1 episode left to watch, and I'm traumatised that it's over!

Farmville: Yes I'm one of those crazy people that's addicted to that stupid facebook game!! For those of you blissfully unaware of what it is, farmville is a basic game connected to facebook that is quite like The Sims except it's on a farm, so you grow crops, raise animals, buy cottages etc. It's no way near as complicated as Sims but it's feeding upon the same addictive logic. I totally blame my friend Laura for my addiction, she came to stay one weekend and she got me totally hooked. I actually stopped playing it for months, and then recently when I had a really nasty cold and couldn't work or think I started playing it again!!

4 in 1: This will take some explaining. Back when I was growing up in Celbridge we had a Chinese takeaway that served something called a 3 in 1, which was fried rice, chips, and curry sauce all in the same container, also called 'a long tray'. It was a rare treat when we got to have it; total junk food but it takes fantastic. I didn't realise how in love with it I was until I moved to Limerick 10 years ago and I discovered that you couldn't buy a 3 in 1!!! Well you could, but it would cost you loads extra to buy all the bits separetly, and it never tasted quite as good. There were other things like good white pudding, and Brennans batch loaf that seemed impossible to buy down here too, much to my annoyance. Anyway about a year ago a local Chinese started serving a 4 in 1, wow, low and behold they managed to top my childhood love by adding some chicken into that mix too. It's perfect, all the lovely bits of a curry for a fiver, and not too big cos it all fits into one of their small containers. Obviously I don't eat it all the time, but it's good to know after 10 years of it's absence in Limerick, that if I ever get a craving that it's only down the road.

Fantasy: Reading fantasy books as a woman in her late 20s isn't as unusual as it once was, in the last few years the world has fallen in love with Harry Potter, Twilight and Lord of the Rings. But there is still a part of me that feels I should be reading something slightly more intellectual, especially when I whip out my book in a coffee shop and it's got one of those nasty illustrations on the front. I feel like I should have a badge that says 'No really I am smart, I do know this is trash, but I still love them'. I weirdly got into fantasy when I was 18 and my friend gave me lots of David Gemmell books, I then tried some Ursula Le Guin, Tad Williams, and J.R.R.Tolkien. A few years ago I started the epic Wheel of Time series, 12 books and still going. A few of the things I hate within fantasy are that they are mostly written by men for teenage boys, and have awful female characterization, there's a disproportionate mentioning of heaving bussoms and firey tempers. But I love the scope and detail of the stories, and the freedom within the narrative of making up your own rules, magic and myth are part of the everyday. At the moment I'm at a loose end book wise, so if anyone can recommend a good series let me know, I just read the last installment of the Wheel of Time, so it will have a lot to live up to.

Note: To any Wheel of Time fans I recently stumbled upon these new series of covers for ebooks. Still quite traditional fantasy work, but a huge improvement on the originals, with a couple of real stunners aswell. Click this link, scroll about half way down, and each of the links is an article of the illustration with background sketches etc. facinating stuff for any fellow nerds!