I was in the kitchen yesterday when Amelie walked past with this label sticking out of her mouth...


I have absolutely no idea where she got it, but the fact that the makers feel the need to warn you against its removal in five different languages, two of them in capital letters, tends to indicate that she's done a bad thing. I expect it's like the pin on a hand grenade, and we're all about to go up in smoke.

But while I'm waiting for the big bang to occur, I've spent a lot of the weekend cleaning the flat. In fact I've done such a good job that I've successfully managed to remove all traces of Lisa and Amelie. They've fled to Lisa's Mum's for the day so that they don't get sprayed in the face with Mr Muscle.

As a reward for all my hard work, I treated myself to the DVD of District 9 whilst doing the weekly shop at Asda on Friday evening. Which showed amazing foresight as I hadn't actually done any hard work whatsoever at that point. Asda are currently selling it for only £7, which I see as a thinly veiled attempt to convince me that DVDs are history and I should buy a Blu-Ray player.

I wanted to go and see District 9 at the cinema last September, but Lisa insisted that anything featuring aliens is, by definition, rubbish, and despite my protestations that her unfounded extra-terrestrial prejudices are the whole point of the film, and that's precisely why we should go and see it, she persuaded me that our time would be much better spent watching 'Away We Go'. And we all remember what a roaring success that was.

Six months later, District 9 is up for four Oscars tonight, including Best Picture, which shows what Lisa knows about cinema. 'Away We Go' is strangely lacking in nominations, but I'm sure that's due to some kind of administrative error. So having cleaned the kitchen and walked into town yesterday afternoon to buy a Mother's Day gift, I tried to persuade Lisa to sit down with me last night and watch District 9. She refused, claiming that not only does the sight of aliens make her feel ill, but she doesn't like the sound they make either. Not that she's prejudiced. Some of her best friends are on another planet.

So while I sat on the sofa and spent the evening watching what turned out to be a very good film, Lisa took up residence on the computer and started slagging it off on Facebook. As she put it at 8:35pm, "There's only so much alien snorting you can take before a film becomes really tedious". Which is pretty much what I said about 'Away We Go'. The thing she particularly disliked was the guttural vocalisations of the prawns, which is interesting because the DVD extras include an interview with the sound effects guy, in which he says that he created that noise by running his fingernail down a butternut squash. And Lisa's never liked the sound of those either.