Moving to Mars follows a year in the lives of two families who move from a refugee camp in Thailand to Sheffield, UK. The camp where they start out is a haven for people fleeing Burma. “Haven” being a relative term though: in the camp they are safe from Burmese government attack, but they are effectively imprisoned in the camp, without proper citizenship or civil rights, etc. Like all refugee camps, it is a limbo, made somewhat comfortable by the sheer adaptability of the human residents.

The two families have had emigration to the UK fully organised by the UN, and they don’t need to go through some of the traumatic processes that most other refugees are subject to. But nonetheless they are very nervous, yet still excited about the imminent move.

When the day finally comes, we see them transported to Bangkok in a bus, where they stare wide-eyed at the people and traffic. Most of them have never been to a city before. They take on a zebra crossing with great trepidation… which is quite sensible, actually, given that it’s Bangkok.

In Sheffield, UK, all the family members are happy to have arrived - but things are strange. It’s cold, and dark. The heating doesn’t work, or even when it does work, the house still feels cold to them. They set up their eating utensils and dine together on the floor of their new house, as they did in the bamboo hut back in the refugee camp. Sheffield society is strange for all of them: language is perhaps the biggest barrier, but also customs, work, trying to find friends, and deal with being a total foreigner. Through a translator, youngest girl tells the camera that a boy hits her every day at school. But she can’t do anything, because she doesn’t know enough English to explain things to the teacher. Her parents don’t know English either.

But the children soon adapt (again, that human trait). It’s the adults who have made the big sacrifice. By the end of the film, I’m not sure if the adults will ever be happy in this strange new place. It is cold and they don’t like the food, but at least they are free to move around - and they marvel at how policemen help you in the street, rather than just beating you or arresting you.

There’s good and bad. Great hope and happiness for the young, but also a huge sense of loss. All this is effortlessly portrayed in the film, which I consider to be an outstanding documentary. I hope it gets wide distribution.

Well I was wrong - A Single Man is singularly awful. The whole texture of the film is sterile, stilted, dry and contrived. Every scene feels like a magazine spread, and here’s the problem: the script-writer, producer and director are all Tom Ford, the famous fashion designer. And this is the worst kind of self-indulgent pet-project.

I noticed that the camera is almost always still in this film. It is a sequence of meticulously constructed tableaux (once again: magazine spread is the inevitable association), in which actors move or barely move, carefully trying not to rumple the clothes or mess up the coiffure that some poor assistant has undoubtedly just put the finishing touches on. I found the constant attention to hair and clothes irritating and distracting, but not distracting enough to hide the vacuousness of the script.

It’s painterly film-making gone too far, or perhaps taken from the wrong end of things. The carefully composed images in this film are generally not used to tell the story, or give depth to the characters: they’re just pretty images. There are about 10 times in the film where the shot cuts to a close-up of the cigarette that someone is smoking. But this isn’t used as a symbol or metaphor: it’s just a glamorous cultural image, thrown in because it seems cool and arty. The film’s main attempt to use imagery meaningfully is through a fiddle with the colour balance: it is usually very cold and blue, but when the protagonist feels some warmth of emotion, the colour balance suddenly turns up to a warm orange glow. I found this affect clumsy and laboured; for me it just drew attention to the absence of any more subtle means of visual story-telling.

Both Colin Firth and Julianne Moore put in brave performances, for which they’ve been much applauded. But they were struggling against some leaden material. In fact I think that Firth’s performance works because he stoically puts up with so many crap scenes of light gay erotica, and this stoic expression happens to suit the character and story quite well.

Ultimately, I was somewhat fascinated by the particular way in which A Single Man disappointed me. It lacked the mobility, nuance and unpredictability of human life; it was a Vogue magazine instead of a novel. Perhaps it showed me something about the difference between art and design.

For a more articulate and less grumpy review, see the Village Voice.

About 10pm we stopped. We’d been driving for a couple of hours, but we were still in Mumbai, or at least, some dark and cluttered version of Mumbai on the northern outskirts. The streets here seemed dedicated to wholesalers, warehouses and depots… except that such things in Australia would be enormous metallic barns, whereas here they were crammed into much smaller buildings by the side of a narrow street. Electric lights festooned a row of stalls out in the street: noodles, fried snacks, DVDs and other tat.

I got off the minibus, only because everyone else had got off. Larger coaches were lurking in a sidestreet nearby - I found out which one went to Bijapur, but it wasn’t clear how long before it departed. So I just got on and sat in the darkness, waiting. I had bought spicy noodles and veg at one of the stalls, and I ate them out of a plastic bag. They tasted good.

The bus to Bijapur took ages. During the night it stopped at mysterious places, where things cost more than usual. At a roadside place some time after midnight there were more stalls, this time selling plastic cooking implements. I met some other foreigners here: Italian Christians, who were going to Bijapur to work in a centre for people with HIV.

I slept for a while, then woke to find us moving through the pale blue of early morning. We were in an almost desert-like area now: a beautiful dawn with different colours in the sky, crisp air rushing in from the bus window. We moved past small villages, where people had let their houses be painted to advertise softdrinks and mobile phone companies. A lot of the villagers were up already, carrying water, or washing themselves at the water-pumps by the side of the highway. There were a lot of goats, seemingly untethered. Did anybody own them?

It was late morning by the time we got to Bijapur. It was a small town, but it was busy, dusty, and there were more goats. It was difficult for the bus to get into the yard of the bus-station, because swarms of people, cows, goats and rickshaws caused a general gridlock.

As usual I needed a hotel first, and although this involved some trudging through the growing midday heat, I was above all glad to be out of Mumbai. The first hotel I went into was the Karnataka State run place, and though it was a bit noisy, and not cheap by Indian standards, I was tired enough to go for it. Four or five staff were scattered around the building, lazy and probably contented with their state salaries. I think I was the only guest.

I had a big tiled room, and I tried to take a nap. But it was hot and the traffic noise was quite intense. I lay there and thought about what I was going to do. I wasn’t sure yet if my India trip had been a good idea.

I had agreed to meet my friend Annabelle in Mysore, but Mysore was a long way south, and I had to make it back to Mumbai in 9 days to catch a flight onwards to Australia. So I had some calculations to make: what route should I take, how many days could I tarry in various places?

While I was considering all this, I was mindlessly playing with a small bottle of cinnamon oil that I’d bought in Mumbai. I got it at a street-stall, and the vendor had tried to tell me that I didn’t really want it, and that it was “spice oil”; but I basically ignored him, because everyone in Mumbai was telling me to do or not do things all the time. Now as I sat in the hotel room trying to make a plan, I dabbed a bit of cinnamon oil on my tired shoulders and back.

The smell was heady, heavy and exotic. As I closed the bottle, I felt a warm tingle on my skin, much like the effect created by “tiger balm”. That seemed nice. But in the following seconds, the warm glow heated up, and I quickly began to feel an intense burning on my skin. I jumped up and bolted into across the room, into the bathroom, where I turned on the tap and stood under it, trying to rinse the oil off my skin. By this point my skin was stinging unbearably, and I was writhing under the cold water of the tap, shouting. This went on for about half a minute, before the heat gradually began to subside.

Eventually I left the bathroom, still with a potent heat in my skin. I put clothes on, and decided that I might just stay one night in Bijapur. It was time to go out and see the town.

I visited first the most famous monument, “Gol Gumbaz”, a massive tomb built by some sultan to house his mortal remains. There were many Indian tourists there, but no other white people. From the moment I entered, I had a stream of Indians greeting me and questioning me. It was like being famous. One of the people who started talking to me was a young guy - maybe 20 or so - called Bal, who spoke a bit of English. He began walking along with me around the monument, asking more and more questions in the Indian style. It soon became apparent that he had attached himself to me - not in some malignant way, I was fairly sure that this wasn’t some trick or scam. It was more a case that in India, intimacy is assumed, where in the West, distance is assumed. In the West, you can’t just start hanging around with someone, without first reaching some kind of understanding. In India it seems both acceptable and normal.

So I left Gol Gumbaz, and walked around Bijapur with this guy Bal. We walked into the backstreets, which were dusty and poor. People looked out at us from run-down houses: we were a curiosity: an out-of-town Indian walking along with a white man. We smoked beedies, and talked in our broken English. I did wonder a little if he might have some ulterior motive: a business opportunity, a money opportunity. But neither scenario seemed right: Bal was not trying to sway me towards any particular destination, any particular path. Instead, I led the way to where I knew from my map that there were some old mosques, and together we strolled around the quiet courtyard of the “Jamia Masjid”. It was very peaceful there: the courtyard was quiet and graceful, with a rectangular formal pool in the middle. On one side was the mosque itself: simple but beautiful design of repeated white arches on narrow columns, within forming a grid over the floor tiled in blue and white. The only other feature was on the front wall, where ornate shrines elaborated out of golden Arabic calligraphy. Within this cool, peaceful canopy, there was a bookshelp holding many copies of the Quran, and a single observant knelt praying between the columns.

After the Jamia Masjid we kept walking through more dusty streets. We were in a very poor Muslim neighbourhood, and here some people looked at us quite suspiciously. Others smiled and said hello. We passed a group of young men out the front of a shop, and one of them made hissing noises at us. This made me angry, but there was nothing worth doing but to return him a dirty look.

It was a hot late afternoon now, and my throat was dry from the beedies. I bought mango juice for both of us. Then Bal led me to a Hindu temple, where there were lots of people, and lots going on, none of which could I understand. There was perhaps some kind of lesson being held inside the temple, or maybe it was just standard prayer, and music, candles, people everywhere sitting on the ground. Everything was very colourful, and as usual, everyone was looking at us. But for some reason Bal didn’t find what he was looking for, so we left the temple, and then he went off to return to his hometown.

Evening started to fall, and I kept walking around the dusty town. I ate dinner, which was again incredibly good, and again locals talked to me freely. I marvelled at people’s social skills, their lack of hang-ups. I felt happy now, happy and far from home. I bought a bottle of beer and went back to my hotel room, where I had beer and beedis. With beer lightening my thoughts, smoking a beedi on my own, in the small garden at the back of the hotel, I began to get over my India-shock. At last I began to get the feeling of having arrived somewhere.

I worry about Flickr, by the way. It’s a great photo site, but I think that traffic might be declining - at least, it is for my photos. I’m pretty sure this is because of the rise of Facebook. Fbook is drinking Flickr’s milkshake.

That’s the first serious outage on totalcardboard.com since I first put the site up, back in… ah… 2003 or something. I’m not quite sure why I’ve kept it going all this time.

As the scudding day passed overhead the dingy windows glowed and faded in ghostly retrograde. A car passed along the road outside, labouring in the sand, died away. Dilsey sat bolt upright, her hand on Ben’s knee. Two tears slid down her fallen cheeks, in and out of the myriad coruscations of immolation and abnegation and time.

“Brethren,” the minister said in a harsh whisper, without moving.

‘”Yes, Jesus!” The woman’s voice said, hushed yet.

“Breddren en sistuhn!” His voice rang again, with the horns. He removed his arm and stood erect and raised his hands. “I got de ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb!”

The taxi driver didn’t know where my hotel was, or even the road, so I got him to leave me at the central railway station, then I walked. It took me a few minutes to orient myself to the crude map in my travelguide. I wandered one way then another, walking around the sleeping people, a snarling dog. I watched a cat toy with an injured mouse underneath a streetlight, while two crows looked on greedily. The only people awake were taxi drivers, chatting in a group near the station.

With some difficulty I found the doorway to Hotel Oasis; it was blocked by another sleeping person, a sort of doorman who slept with his body angled across the doorway, so that anyone coming or going would have to wake him. He let me in, and there in reception three more men were sleeping on the floor. They all woke up and stood to attention; I apologised for arriving so late, and was shown to the small, semi-clean cell that I had booked.

The room was hot and stuffy. It had air-conditioning, but the unit hung right over the bed and had green lights and a loud noise, so it was best left off. I felt wired and couldn’t sleep, so I read for a while, then lay for a long time staring up through the window, between buildings, at the heavy sky above. I willed this purple-black fog to get lighter, but it refused, and time seemed to have been switched off altogether. I stared, and willed, and by the time I had reached a sleepless hypnotic state, the first shade of pale blue began to move up the window. The first few beeps and voices sounded below.

Daylight Mumbai grew slowly into a state of mania. For the first couple of hours it was okay: vendors laying out wares, men pensively drinking small cups of tea, cows wandering the streets. But as the day ripened, the humans multiplied unstoppably. The first few beeps of the dawn climbed an exponential curve, and by mid-morning the din was terrible. Eyes-wide and sleep-deprived, I walked through random downtown streets, wanting to stop at every shop, shrine, restaurant, doorway, and find out what was going on. Almost everything was incomprehensible. A woman with a shrine balanced on top of her head came up to me asking for money: I looked at the mad, red-faced god sitting on top of her, at my eye-level, and felt I needed to pay her something because I may never again see a person with a shrine on their head. I saw a pigeon restaurant - a special section of the pavement reserved for pigeons: you can buy seeds and thrown them into the dining area, and they have water-bowls too.

By midday, my own manic energy was waning, while Mumbai’s was still on the rise. Forlorn signs in the middle of the road proposed “Say No to Honking”, and “Silent City, Peaceful City.” But all the vehicles in Mumbai beep continuously, orchestrally. There are no lanes for the traffic, and no obvious road-rules either, so beeping is used as a system of communication between vehicles. Asking them drive without beeping is like asking an Italian to talk with his hands tied together.

I was walking now in the main market area of downtown Mumbai. By this point, I was too detached from my body to know if I was hungry or not; but I really needed to get away from the cars and scooters, just for a few minutes, so I dived into a humble street-corner eatery, dark and aromatic inside. A man pointed me at a table in the corner, then stood in front of me and said something I didn’t understand. The restaurant was quite full: khaki-clad policemen with their paunches and moustaches; other men in white tunics, their heads wrapped also in white cloth. No women, of course. They all seemed to be looking at me, and then finally I understood the man to be saying “veg dhansak”, so I assented to that, and chapati.

The food was amazingly good: a spicy rich vegetable curry, and a subtler, warm aromatic dhal, which I must have ordered without realising. Serendipitous. Near me, in the corner, was a kid wiping down the tin plates as customers finished with them. Something about the way the main waiter kept yelling at him made me think this kid was his son. And the kid kept staring at me, openly, unashamedly, leaving off from wiping his plates, and instead just standing about a metre in front of where I was eating, and watching me. The he’d get yelled at again, and go back to his plates for a while, before forgetting about the plates and going back to staring at me. I tried to smile at him, raise my eyebrows enquiringly, etc, but he didn’t react, just stared.

I didn’t mind the kid staring. I was glad to have provided some fascinating change to his dull round of dish-wiping.

After lunch, more wandering through the crowds and noise. I smoked beedis (small Indian cigarettes) to stay awake, but there wasn’t much keeping me upright. I now regretted having checked out of the Hotel Oasis: there were still five or six hours to survive before I could get on a night-bus and get out of Mumbai. So I kept trudging across town, dogmatic and half-dead. Whenever I interacted with anybody, they seemed to tell me I had to do something, or buy something, or just give them money, or go with them somewhere.

I found a cinema, and tried going to see a movie, but I couldn’t understand how anything worked, and some people shouted at me, so I left. I headed west hoping to hit the beach.

When eventually I found my new oasis, it turned out to be a dirty strip of sand with about 3 bits of shade. Each of them was already full of Indians. But still, this strip of sand enabled me to get about 20 metres away from the traffic noise, and that was my essential goal.

I sat down cross-legged on the sand, and arranged a t-shirt on my head for shade. I looked out at the unappealing bay, and was relieved to be somewhat still, and quiet. But then the children started.

First just a couple of them, cheeky little middle-class Mumbai kids, came over to me and said hello, asked a few questions, wanted to talk about cricket. They were rude and excitable, but I didn’t see any problem here. But soon the two of them became four, then ten, and they all got more and more excited, and louder and then at some point there were twenty of them, shouting at me and laughing. I tried to just ignore them all, respond to nothing, and stare straight ahead; but there was no getting rid of them, they found this too entertaining, and they multiplied still, maybe thirty of them now, and they were shouting more all the time and even beginning to jostle me.

I briefly considered a strategic act of violence, then realised there was nothing for it but to leave. I got up, and shook off the ones who were grabbing on to me; I started walking, and they followed along like a comet tail, laughing and shouting… So I had to leave the beach altogether, and as I walked off the sand and back on to the pavements, the comet tail trailed off, till there were just four, then two, then none, then I was back on my own, back in the streets of Mumbai.

And so I just kept walking, in a bad mood now. There were still people sleeping everywhere, and from the look of their skin and clothes, many of them seemed in a pretty bad way. I wondered how many of them were actually dead. I climbed up a footbridge over a filthy brown railway line, and a man there was sleeping down the steps: his head on one step, and his feet four steps below.

Nothing interested me now - I just wanted the day to end. When I saw some public benches, I lingered hopefully nearby, opportunistic, but they seemed permanently occupied.

There are probably much better things I could have done to pass a long day in Mumbai, but I was too tired to think straight, and instead I reverted to some destructive dogmatic mode. So I stomped exhaustedly around more streets, until finally I got my luggage from the Hotel Oasis, and thankfully by then it was time to catch my bus.

The bus was a much smaller vehicle then I had expected, and it didn’t really seem to be going anywhere. It just sat, driverless, by the side of a narrow street out the back of the stinky poultry market. Me and one other guy were slumped in the darkness of the cabin. But I didn’t care: it was dark, and quiet, and in the dark cabin of a stationary mini-bus, surely no-one could hassle me.

I try to imagine my ancestors, how they felt about life here in the rough and rude colony. But I can’t really imagine.