Bite it, crunch it, chew it.

‘New Cadbury’s biscuit Boost’ – who could forget that shrill little jingle? It sticks in the mind not simply because of its non-tune, but also as being just about the last time a genuinely new chocolate bar was launched. Those crazy pioneer days are long gone. The fat (I’m assuming) controllers of the chocolate conglomerates don’t gamble on new brands now, but prefer instead to stretch existing brands into new and ever more mutated shapes. This is a sad thing for me, partly because we've lost the variety, but more importantly we’ve lost the strange little fictional backdrops unique to each chocolate bar that somehow imbued eating them with some exotic edge. To eat a ‘Country Style’ was to cross the wide open prairies on a covered wagon, to sample a 'Mint Cracknel’ was a more authentic encounter with the piste than any mere skiing holiday.

Now we just have endless remixes of the Dairy Milk brand with its thrilling connotations of a glass and a half of milk. Not only have the small, gaily adorned foot soldiers of confectionery been erased, but for the big names, the relationship between name and product has been ruptured for ever. Who could begin to say what a Kit Kat is these days? Once it was a 2/4 finger choco-wafer treat, now, engorged and distorted as a Bernard Matthews Franken-turkey, it looks around baffled and a little ashamed with no idea of its place in the world.

I was wondering if there were any analogies with other risk averse industries like the music business. I guess the most naked attempt to create an ever-mutating brand was when S Club 7 spawned S Club Juniors, though sadly this didn’t seem to go any further. We never did get to see S Club New Wave– though of course that franchise does exist under various other names. I suppose the situation in the music industry rather than being the same as the confectionery business is actually the opposite. The chocolate industry innovates content all the time, but hides it behind the same names and packaging. The music business churns out the same bilge endlessly, but gives it new names. A glass and a half of Richard Ashcroft; a glass and a half of James Blunt; a glass and a half of Simon Webbe....

Send more bees

Seen a few films recently. ‘Good Night and Good Luck’ is pretty much exactly as you’d expect – a decent enough dramatisation of the McCarthy/Murrow tussle. David Strathairn has a great face for the job – hewn from granite – so that imperciptible twitches of the eyebrow convey volumes. I think though they might have overdone the everyone-in-the-1950’s-smoked-a-lot angle. I found myself imagining a Morecambe and Wise style spoof of the film with hardbitten newshounds puffing away on 3 cigarettes at a time, with another one in each ear.

‘Walk the Line’ was again much as expected – but that’s not good when your expectations are low. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon are great, but biopics – particularly of artists - are just so corn-laden. (Are there exceptions to this?) There’s something toe-curling about the obligatory scene where they create their masterpiece – in this case Johnny coming up with the follow up line to ‘I killed a man in Reno...’ or June driving home, sobbing ‘It burns, burns, burns’ etc. It’s a shame they went for such a formulaic approach when Cash’s own autobiography doesn’t follow that linear, cliché-drenched model. If you haven’t read it, it’s worth it, not least for what you learn about cotton-picking terminology and the dangers of ostriches. It also reveals that a recording of Edward R. Murrow was one of Johnny’s desert island choices – so that’s nice.

On the other hand, ‘Hidden’ (Caché) is brilliant. It stays with you long after it’s finished – and not just because the ending is open. There is a whole raft of pretty dimwitted speculation about ‘what really happened’ on the internet should you be the kind of person who hates to draw your own conclusions.

Another hot off the press recommendation – only 33 years late – is ‘Spirit of the Beehive’. It’s a powerful, still movie but this describes it far better than I can.

Millions now living

In a cold room in a castle, in files entitled ‘Ancestors’, are hundreds of sepia photo portraits of anonymous people from the past. Most have lost their moorings on the page and have slipped down into a slush of moustaches and frowns. In another room in a damp bookshop is a tabletop piled high with magazines and journals on everything from motorcycle maintenance to the Kennedy dynasty. In the corner - towers of detailed instructional paperbacks on obsolete technologies. All these forgotten people and words - what can you think about except death? Or in fact worse than death, the utter futility of everything in the face of death?

Hurray – welcome to Hay on Wye.

I don’t know, in the past it’s always been a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, browsing around the various bookshops – but this time it was just a slow slide into despair. I couldn’t work out why this was so – then I realised it was the disorder. If the magazines had been sorted by genre and date and piled neatly.....if the ancestors had been stuck down properly and all the moustached men put in one file, the milky eyed women in another...then it would have felt like a triumph over oblivion. That was when I realised that the first weapon in the ‘War on Death’ is tidiness. Our parents obviously knew this – this is why they went so crazy when they saw the state of our bedrooms – it wasn’t crayons and Beano annuals they saw on the floor – it was the abyss.