Tonight We Shall Feast With The Appetite of Many Men

The February mid-term break just passed. We made the executive decision to not go anywhere. Everybody else with kids in Warsaw went skiing. Everybody. All week, while stuck in the bleak city, nothing to do but the usual rounds of swimming and movies for kids in Polish, I kept receiving texts from friends in the Alps or the Dolomites, saying how wonderful it was. Blue skies, beautiful snow, best week's holiday anyone had ever had, why are you lot stuck in the city, you poor bunch of sad sacks?

All the shopping malls of Warsaw, not just the one closest to the school, are havens for the ex-pat and diplomatic communities. Hard to go five minutes in one without coming across someone you know, or don't like. Last week the malls were deserted. They were the shopping malls of a zombie movie. Occasionally we would be passed by a white-faced miserable old soul, a wizened old woman in her black beret, who would scowl at me and say, 'Dlaczego te dzieci nie są na nartach?'

Instead, we went to Middle Earth. Foreign Office travel advice; beware pickpockets, cave trolls, giant spiders, wizards, the Dead Marshes, Mount Doom, Dark Lords and orcs who will remove your head and impale it on a spike. On the plus side, the mountains are nice.

We watched a disc of Lord of The Rings every night for six nights. The kids hadn't watched it all the way through before. It seemed like a good idea for the holiday - and it was - and cheaper than a week's ski pass in Switzerland. Roaring fire, bowls of ice cream all round and we'd all snuggle down on the sofa to watch Gandalf. At nine and seven they're at the right age. Old enough to watch orcs without getting freaked, young enough to still consider it a treat to sit down with their parents to watch a long movie. Give it a few years, and we'll have the same idea again. 'Hey kids,' one of us will enthusiastically say, 'let's all sit down and watch Lord of the Rings (or some other lengthy movies series, Harry Potter or Nightmare On Elm Street...) and they'll look at us like we're some lower life form, turn the volume up on their iPod and mooch off to the bedroom, locked door and black walls.

Lord of The Rings, like every other art form on planet earth, Middle or otherwise, is there to be loved or loathed. I think it's ok myself, although I feel it takes about six hours to get going, and could do with finishing just after Aragorn gets crowned; and I hate the fact that he snogs Liv Tyler in public - come on, man, you're the king, start acting like one - and I hate the protracted fifteen minute homo-erotic fellowship reunion sequence on Frodo's bed. Oh, and I hate the fact that Sam bursts into tears every ten minutes in the last movie. Apart from that, Return of The King is all right.

But here's the thing I hate most about the entire LOTR movie saga. It relates to the jokey bonhomie between the dwarf and Orlando Bloom during the Battle of Helm's Deep. All that, 'I've killed six!' 'Ah,well fuck you, because I've killed ten!' stuff that goes on. As Legolas kills orcs, one, two or even three at a time, he happily reels off his head count. He gets to fifteen or so in the blink of an eye.

The battle lasts all night. All night. So, let's call it eight hours, as it starts after the hours of darkness. An eight hour battle. When we see Legolas killing orcs, he does it at a rate of about ten to twelve a minute. Let's call it ten for ease of calculation. In eight hours that would mean he killed four thousand, eight hundred orcs. Now, that's obviously excessive, he couldn't keep that rate up for the entire time. So, let's give him a more realistic kill rate of four a minute, plus two half hour coffee breaks in the middle of the night, and we'll throw in a one hour sleep as he must have been getting tired. That still makes one thousand four hundred and forty orcs he should have killed.

So how many orcs does Legolas actually claim to have killed the following morning? He and the dwarf get together, amidst a pile of dead orc flesh, to happily recount their deeds in battle and boast of their killings. Legolas' final head count?

Forty-two.

Forty-two? Forty-flippin' two! Holy crap! What was he doing all night? Did he only kill orcs when the cameras were running? Is he some prima donna elf dude who works for five minutes at a time and then has to have three hours sleep? Did Orlando swan off to his trailer every time the cameras turned away?

Forty-two, for crying out loud.

That's it, I don't hate anything else about LOTR. Apart from all the rest of the elves who are so miserable, so unrelentingly bleak in their outlook, so gloomy and filled with dejection and despair that they could all be old Polish women in berets. Never a minute of the film passes without an elf popping up to say something along the lines of, 'The time of men has come, and men are shite, so the world is going to end,' or 'We're all going to die and there's nothing anyone can do about it,' or, 'It's not our fault, we're elves and we're cool, it's all you, you lot, you're all rubbish, we rock, you suck. That's why the world is going to end and we're all going to die,' or 'Did I mention that we're all going to die? Well, that's not the half of it...'

And then there's also the line in the first movie when Aragorn says to Liv, 'When I first saw you I thought I'd walked into a dream...'

Oh, please... I said to One of Two, any man ever says anything like that to you, run a flippin' mile.

We all await The Hobbit in 2010 - law suits permitting - with great excitement.