Please take the time to watch it, it’s more than entertaining enough to fill three minutes of your life and it offers a concrete and very real way you can take a small action that could change the world.

Books, in direct contrast to their compact size, can tell sprawling stories of emotional depth and complexity. Films require a certain economy of narrative but handle the grand sweep of action and spectacle with natural aplomb. Arguably, books unlock the reader’s imagination, challenging them to fill in the details of a fictional world, while cinema is more prescriptive, locking down those infinite possibilities to a consistent, artistic vision. Neither is the ultimate expression, each merely offers a different aperture to view the story.

And so we turn to John Hillcoat’s The Road, a grim, intimate and mostly successful attempt to bring Cormac McCarthy’s novel to the screen, or as script writer Joe Penhall puts it, ‘transmute the state from ice to water, or water to gas’ while leaving the audience in no doubt it’s the same base element. Penhall asserts that the novel is ‘delivered directly to the blood stream’ and the film attempts the same trick. It can’t rely on McCarthy’s stripped down, bleakly evocative prose but it can offer breathtaking vistas of rotting cityscapes and a dying world, broken and bowed by an unspecified apocalypse.

Viggo Mortesson’s perfectly calibrated performance draws us into this world, wielding sparse, fractured dialogue to devastating effect. Life on the road is sketched out in visceral detail in a series of scenes that unfold as slowly and deliberately as a storm front. By playing to the medium’s strengths in this way, concentrating on visual storytelling and well paced narrative beats, the celluloid Road captures the essence of its literary cousin and delivers a wounding yet strangely uplifting cinematic experience.

For ourselves we mourn the death of Hereward Cooke, one of our number who died standing up for what he believed in. He passed away peacefully in his sleep after a full day’s lobbying and campaigning, his journey completed.

He was a great man. He wore hiking boots to cycle in. He was an inspiration.

But we must also mourn for us all as the Copenhagen talks produced nothing that even approached a solution to the global threat posed by climate change. It’s because of people like Hereward that we have to keep on fighting.

For now I present a transcript of my Twitter activity during the four days preceeding our arrival in Copenhagen. It’s very silly and idiosyncratic but I hope it gives a flavour of the adventure we all shared together.

It’s not something I’ll ever forget.

The Tweets

Day One: Wednesday 9th December 2009

Day Two: Thursday 10th December 2009

Day Three: Friday 11th December 2009

Day Four: Saturday 12th December 2009

Addendum

You can also check out the video of our journey that appeared on the Guardian website (including Jim introing the RDM) – Guardian Video

and finally …

“RT @juliandobson “The shame and failure of Copenhagen is not the end of the story. If our leaders can’t lead, the rest of us must.” #COP15″

I’ll be tweeting all through the trip. Follow me on http://www.twitter.com/spiritofthestairwell or on the sidebar to the right.

See you on the 17th.