A work colleague gave me a printout of today’s Edinburgh Evening News crossword. Having failed to make much progress when I tried the same paper’s puzzle for the first time ealier in the week, I set to work on the cryptic clues (it’s a double crossword – two puzzles, one quick and one cryptic, with different answers for each but on the same grid).

I was very chuffed as I completed it in one sitting, and I only had to check one word in a dictionary: sisal.

“What am I doing here? I don’t belong here.” A thought that crossed my mind last night while at the cinema watching Creep.

It’s a pretty run-of-the-mill horror film, with the gimmick that it’s set in the London Underground (a setting previously used in the superior 1970s flick Death Line). The frights in Creep were standard turn-the-corner-and-there’s-a-scary-man style, with some unpleasant operating theatre action to top up the gore score. There was an attempt at back story (without spelling it out patronisingly) but this ended up slowing the film down without satisfactorily explaining big chunks of the plot.

Despite a few good turns (notably Ken Campbell and Vas Blackwood), the cast were pretty mediocre, but worse were the characters. The Scottish junkie was a walking stereotype and the lead, Kate, was incredibly stupid to the point that she became impossible to empathise with. Each time she had opportunities to finish off the monster-villain-creature, she let them pass and reverted to running through tunnels while panting. It’s made clear that Kate has no change and this means she can’t use the public telephone. (At least this is how I read it – if it was supposed to be out of order, it didn’t come across.) But in her desperate situation she doesn’t reverse charges, pay by credit card or dial 999. And at no point did she set off the fire alarm on the platform, surely the easiest way to attract attention.

I tried to forgive the film what I saw as its first requirement for me to suspend my disbelief: I wasn’t convinced by Kate’s falling asleep on the station platform. I put this to one side, since it was an essential conceit for the rest of the story to work, but there were too many other occasions subsequently that infuriated me. There are plot holes you could drive a tube train through, not least how a bloodthirsty creature who appears to have been in the tunnels for years has survived and why such a killing spree hasn’t (presumably) occurred before in all that time.

Creep, like to many horror films, has a weak story but passes the time – in this case, too much time.

One of yesterday’s Guardian crossword clues had me stumped (well, most of them did, but there is a point this…). The clue was, roughly, “Fifth-rate celebrities around (for instance) John Donne (7).” I resorted eventually to Googling “John Donne” since I had no idea who he was. The first result revealed him to be a poet. Another result contained one of his works which, given the title of this blog, I really should have known:

No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.

Thanks to this info about him, I did manage to work out the answer. “Fifth-rate celebrities” is “E-list” and “for instance” is “e.g.” which together give John Donne himself: elegist.

I’ve just been alerted to the happy news that I’m in today’s Guardian Backbencher. Last week, she asked for alternatives to the newly-announced EU referendum question (“Should the United Kingdom approve the treaty establishing a constitution for the European Union?”). I obliged…

WHEN TWO WRONGS DON’T MAKE A RIGHT

Thanks to the countless readers who sent in their alternative questions for the referendum on the EU constitution. “Europe – Yes or No?” wasn’t quite what the Backbencher had in mind, though it does have a certain terrifying simplicity. But the winner is Will Howells with this: “Should the United Kingdom reject the treaty establishing a constitution for the European Union?” “That’ll confuse the No campaign,” he explains.