1. It is a ‘sentimental mishmash . . . muddily photographed in flat television style.’ Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction 2. It ‘invites you to have some wonderful dumb, callow fun.’ Pauline Kael 3. It was made for €12 million – even at the time a relatively small budget – and released on 4 June 1982, when I was not quite a year old. 4. I don’t remember the first time I saw it, though I can guess that it was probably around 1991, when I was ten. I must have watched it at least half a dozen times a year since then. I am now forty, which means that I have seen it some 180 times. If we factor in the period in the middle of my adolescence when I watched this film once a week – every Wednesday afternoon, when school finished early – we can...

Imagine walking through the car park of a supermarket and seeing a baby sleeping on the back seat of an empty car on a very hot day. The baby looks like it’s barely been born; it has mottled skin; the squashed features babies have for the first few days. It looks to be sleeping, but it’s not moving properly. Something seems off. Is it breathing? Is it drugged? And why isn’t it in a car seat? It’s lying on a sheepskin. It should be in a car seat. Jesus Christ, what monster would leave a baby alone in a car? You need to sprint over to the security guard right now, ask them if they can break the window. You need to run screaming into the supermarket to page whoever owns the car! But . . . Oh, oh, oh. It’s not a real baby. It’s a doll. An expensive,...

I am, in this memory, five years old. I do tap-and-jazz class with my little girlfriends: Lindsey, Fiona, Karen (latterly, in Australia; a yoga teacher; last seen stealing boyfriends at the debs). We return from the hired lodge by the Protestant school – where we dance to ‘The Ugly Duckling’, ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop’; where the air is grainy with dust motes and fragrant of sweet, decaying orchard fruit – via the drained mill pond and contained land-water cataract known to the small town as the canal. We do this every week and the route remains in my memory with strange vividness. On this day I skip ahead of the group and the mother-chaperone to cross a concrete bridge which, if you run through it, produces a tinny echo not unlike the tup-tup-tup of tap and jazz. Spinning out at the end I veer left into a green space,...

We were young and given over to certain clichés of youth. We had recently discovered drugs and drug music and drug culture, and now, with no college and nothing else to make us feel special, we leaned hard into the stoner vibes. Our heroes were the usual suspects, Jim Morrison, Hunter S Thompson, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, William Blake, Charles Bukowski, et cetera. These were our guys. They were all guys. It was 2004 and we felt absolutely no compunction to cultivate any interest in female artists. We were eighteen-year-old boys; feminism was a joke to us. But to be fair, we did love Janis Joplin, and all she had to do to get our attention was drink herself to death.