Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

I am having a little problem with falling asleep at the moment.

The other night I went with He of the Big Mouth to see Kristin Hersh of the Throwing Muses doing a live event, combining readings from her memoirs, guitar accompaniment, solo songs, and the projection behind her of huge, dreamlike paintings. Dreamlike, or were they actual dreams? Hard to say, because I was only awake for about two thirds of it. It was a completely brilliant two thirds and I am sure that the additional one third was also excellent but I can't say for certain, because I was fully unconscious at the time. Big Mouth, with the benefit of having seen 100pc of the show, reviews at the bottom of this post.

Then this weekend I went to stay with aforementioned Big Mouth, and on Saturday night we watched Infamous. This is the other movie about Truman Capote, which came out at the same time as Capote and was completely ignored. Completely and unfairly ignored, because the film is fantastic, featuring excellent performances from Toby Jones - hilarious yet poignant - as Capote, Sandra Bullock - uncharacteristically restrained and showing off her dramatic abilities - as Harper Lee, Daniel Craig - muscular and volatile - as the murderer Perry, and a host of brilliant names such as Isabella Rosselini, Juliet Stevenson and Jeff Daniels all providing impeccable support. Of course, when I say that the film is fantastic, what I really mean is that the first half is fantastic, as I slept all the way through the second half. I can't even compare Infamous with any real honesty to Capote, as I fell asleep in that as well, and the only reason woke up is that I went to see it with my sister and she fell asleep as well, and her snoring woke us both up.

I have long had a problem with falling asleep in the theatre. Great shows that I have snoozed through include the award-winning Nicholas Nickleby (parts one and two); Shared Experience's adaptation of Wide Sargasso Sea; and Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. And I don't think I was awake for more than half of my MA in Anthropological documentary. Admittedly they did insist on showing us three-hour-long epics about crop rotation in Kenya. But I still remember the sensation of being dragged into sleep about twenty minutes into Shoah, the world-famous documentary about the Holocaust. I remember thinking, 'these people have survived the most horrific treatment imaginable to humanity, the least you can do is stay awake'. But it was not to be. It should be becoming obvious by now that it is not a question of getting bored. But seat me in the dark, dim the lights and show me ANYTHING AT ALL and I am liable to start nodding off.

The irony is that I am a terrible insomniac. I can't fall asleep lying down in bed with anywhere near the same ease. I am also a ridiculously light sleeper, so that any sound or light at all wakes me up - I have to travel everywhere with earplugs and a sleep mask. I can't sleep with anyone at all in the room, let alone in my bed with me. I literally can't remember the last time I managed to sleep through an entire night without waking up at least once.

Perhaps I should try sleeping sitting up with the television on and seven hundred people watching it with me at home?

Paul Gross

The Canadian David Tennant? Really?

Actually, I liked Due South a lot, but Paul Gross looks a bit too much like a cross between my brother and one of my cousins, and that is a major disincentive for developing a crush on him.

Any other suggestions?

Bloody Hell

Gods Behaving Badly is the number one bestselling fiction hardback in Canada.

They can't all be selling to Persephone.

I'm kind of in shock - good shock - I just can't believe that more people want to buy my book than any other book. It's number one. Top. It gets to have "Number One Bestseller" on the jacket. I think it means that I'm a little bit famous in Canada. I could probably speak to David Tennant, in Canada. (Who is the Canadian David Tennant?) Also, next time I do a book tour in Canada, I reckon I get to fly Premium Economy.

You know what? This might just be one of the most bloody amazing things ever to have happened to me in my life.

I have suddenly become completely obsessed with Franz Ferdinand

Which comes as a surprise to all of us.

The People vs GPS

What is the real purpose of GPS?

I ask because I only have a couple of friends who had GPS devices and they seem to have a complex relationship with them. I have always thought that if I had a GPS it would serve my purposes as follows: I am driving. The GPS gives me directions. The end.

It doesn't quite seem to work out this way. A friend of mine with GPS built into her car seems to be in constant dispute about the GPS's advice. So every time I go anywhere with her we end up in the following situation:

GPS: In four hundred metres, turn left.
My friend: Oh god, it wants me to go round the M25 again. No. I am not going around the M25. I'm going to take the North Circular.
GPS: Turn left.
Friend turns right.
GPS: Do a U-turn.
Friends: No! No, I am not doing a U-turn. I am taking the North Circular.
GPS: Do a U-turn.
Friend: No! Shut up!
GPS: Do a U turn.
Friend: Why does it always want me to take the M25?
GPS sullenly displays a big cross.
GPS (suddenly, unexpectedly): In eight hundred metres, take the second exit from the roundabout.
Friend: Finally! Finally it figures out what I want to do! At last!
GPS: In three hundred metres, turn left.
Friend: No! No, I don't want that exit! I'm going to ignore it.
GPS: Do a U-turn.

And so on. In other words, when my friend's husband is not in the car, the GPS exists not to give my friend directions, but to provide her with someone to argue about directions with.

On the way back from our booze cruise to France this weekend, another friend decided to switch his GPS off for half an hour to help preserve the batteries. After a while, though, we decided we weren't entirely sure where we were going so we switched the GPS back on.

GPS: At the next roundabout, take the fourth exit.
Friend: Oh, that's making us go back on ourselves. We must have missed our exit. Thank goodness we switched the GPS back on.
[Forty five minutes later....]
GPS: At the next roundabout, take the fourth exit.
Friend: Uh - hang on - that's making us go back on ourselves *again*.

Yes, out of revenge for us having switched it off, the GPS made us drive the same stretch of the M20 three times. In this case, the GPS appears to have taken the persona of a petty, vindictive boss.

Do all GPS's have their own unique personalities? Or is there a limited set that you can choose from when you turn them on? Do other people's GPS's sit on the dashboard muttering "OK, Mr Clever Clogs, you turn left if you want to" and then, one lost hour later, "I told you so"? Or maybe, when you have just turned right under its instruction, say "Oops, I meant *left*, silly me, I always get those two mixed up"? Can you get a GPS that spends the entire journey singing to itself and then, when you have accidentally ended up in Aberdeen, says "Oh I'm sorry, was I supposed to be looking where we were going"? (Or is that a radio?)

I think I'll go for a GPS personality that knows exactly where everything is, doesn't make dodgy direction decisions for me, doesn't talk to me in an irritating schoolmarmish voice, and never runs out of batteries at the exact critical moment that I am getting lost. Or to put it another way, a map.

Admission

I am in love with the men from Steve Hatt fishmongers in Islington. They are all dead sexy, even if they do smell of fish.

I think I know the lyrics to this song...

...but unfortunately I don't. What I do know is half of the spoken bit, the bit that goes: "I know when to go out. And I know when to stay in." Then I wait excitedly for the sung bit to start, because I think I know the words to the sung bit. I don't. I only know the first word, which is "I". And then I'm in trouble til "but I never wave bye-bye". I should really either stop trying to sing along to this song at parties, which won't happen, because it is one of my favourites, or I should learn the lyrics. What I don't need to keep doing is squawking "I" and then looking like a tit.

I don't know. Does this happen to anybody else?

In Which Reality Intrudes Again

Not being able to locate what I needed in Foyles, whose stationery department focuses staunchly on the gift market, I am directed to Ryman's down the street, which I am promised has the more functional stuff that I need. Gah! It was like some kind of hideous stationery death zone, full of ugly diaries with dull faux-leather covers, thin-papered notebooks bound in hard blackish plasticated cardboard, ringbinders in unpleasant colours that though aiming at dayglo somehow suck the light out from the room, workmanlike disposable biros, and not a single thing that might get a child (let alone an adult) inspired. I left with an ugly but useful wall calendar with a grid the exact size that I needed but which makes my heart sink every time I look at it, some run-of-the-mill post-its, a perversely repulsive pink ringbinder which I decided was preferable to tedious black, and some hole reinforcers. Utterly depressing in every way. Where is a girl to go for stationery that is functional, inexpensive, but retains some intrinsic beauty of design?

Buying Stationery

I am about to start a second draft of my new novel. This means absolutely nothing. It doesn't mean that I have finished the first draft - far from it. It doesn't mean I will ever finish the second draft. It doesn't mean that I won't start the second draft and in three days time decide that actually I liked the first draft better and go back to it. It doesn't even mean that I won't chuck the entire novel out and start writing an opera based on the Muppet Show sketch Pigs in Space. I am not a particularly predictable writer. (I am, however, slightly obsessed with Pigs in Space.)

What it does mean is that I am going to have to do more planning, and in order to do said planning I am going to have to buy stationery. Stationery! I love stationery. This is a love that goes back as far as I remember. When I was little, people were always buying me stationery, and when they weren't buying it for me I was saving up my pocket money to buy it for myself. There was a fantastic stationery shop at the corner near where I lived which had paper of all different colours, in that heavy texture that assured me that it was important, grown-up paper as written on by important grown-ups. You could buy it by the sheet. And I had boxes and boxes of writing paper, much of which I can still remember in vivid detail: the little blue and white hinged box with the blue paper in, tied with a ribbon; the large flat white box with the paper that had a spray of purple flowers along one edge; the scalloped Snoopy paper, lined and bordered in red. It wasn't just writing paper that fuelled my obsession; there was nothing in the world more exciting than the weeks leading up to the beginning of the Autumn term, or La Rentree as the equally-stationery-obsessed French call it, a week in which I could legitimately claim the need for a new satchel, a pencil case - pencil cases in my youth were judged on how many doors they had, and you could easily get a dozen doors on one squishy pink pencil case, if it opened on both sides and had a spinning pencil compartment and a rubber compartment (by which I mean eraser, US readers - I was only 8) and a place to put your sharpener - a maths set, a four-colour biro, a smelly rubber (see earlier note) and a stylish French agenda, one of those exercise books with lots of different sections for different days of the week, marked with different paper styles and different colours, with perforations to pull the tabs off once you'd done that day's homework. French paper was always better than English paper because the rulings were more complex. Just the lines on the page were achingly beautiful to my young eye.

Stationery stationery stationery stationery stationery! Just the thought of buying it today gives me that old thrill. It's the nudeness of it, the clean empty pages, just waiting to be filled. This must be how men feel when presented with a new virgin. Of course, I don't recall actually writing on any of it ever, and I think when we moved house when I was eleven, I threw it all away. That doesn't necessarily bode well for the second draft, does it?

In Which I Let You Down

I went to a party on Saturday night. David Tennant was there. I didn't speak to him.

I know, I KNOW. I've let you down, I've let myself down, I've let the blog down, as well as pissing on all the rules of narrative.

The thing is, there are other rules, rules of humanity. What a thing it must be to be David Tennant. David Tennant in the flesh is perhaps even more attractive than on TV, especially in the lovely silvery suit and open-necked shirt he was wearing on Saturday and his hair tousled just so. Think: The Doctor accepts an Academy Award. It wasn't a particularly big party, just a half-empty room in a private members' club in Soho, and he knew quite a few of the people there, judging by who he said goodbye to when he left, but what he actually did for the entire time he was there was fend off women. Women, women, women, and I'm sure this is a male fantasy, and I'm equally sure that David Tennant gets to have sex with whoever he likes, but I actually don't think it would be that fun to have total strangers monopolising your attention all night when you would rather be talking to your friends. There was one particularly persistent girl who was very, very excited and talking on and on, while our hero DT, despite being an actor, didn't seem to have much control of his body language, or at least if I am talking to a man who has got his legs crossed even though he is standing up, and keeps clutching the wall beside him as if trying to crawl away, and also keeps looking longingly at the dance floor where everybody else is having more fun than he is, I would maybe get the message and tactfully go off to get myself a drink. So I am surreptitiously watching this going on and thinking to myself a number of things:

- If I want to talk to that man, I am either going to have to interrupt or queue.
- I really don't want to be that super-excited girl who is making him crawl up the wall in discomfort.
- What the hell do you say as your opening remark to David Tennant anyway?
- Even if I want to talk to David Tennant, I am certain to my very core that he does not want to talk to me.

So I just danced instead, which I think was best for everybody.

Sorry. I know that it doesn't make for a great story.

Be Prepared: a postscript

I have just noticed that the slogan on my new box of matches is: "The Smokers Choice". Where can I get "The Doomsday Survivalist's Choice"?

Be Prepared

My street had a power cut last night. Stumbling around in the dark I managed to find two torches and a mountain of those nightlights it is impossible to leave Ikea without. Clever me. Although if I had also managed to find matches and batteries that weren't flat, that would probably have helped even more. I really need to work on my emergencies kit.

But how far do you go? Bottled water? Tinned food? Iron tablets? Wind-up radio? Weapons? Trivial Pursuit set, for something to do while you wait for the looters to come and kill you? It's depressing. I wouldn't last five minutes in a zombie apocalypse. But at least I have matches now.

Showgirls

Is there any other film as spectacularly bad as Showgirls? I accept that there might be worse films: worse made, more boring, though probably not as badly acted. But I mean ridiculously, gloriously, over-the-top spectacularly bad. Watching it for the second time last night, at least ten years since I first saw it, I lost count of the amount of times I said to myself "I can't believe I forgot about the bit where they do the lesbian biker chick sex slave dance / the chimpanzees escape and run riot through the dressing room / her virtuous best friend is gang-raped by a long-haired, hairy-chested singing star and his rent-a-goons, intercut with dancing from the floor below". This is a film where people can say lines like "It must be weird not having people come on you", "I'm erect, why aren't you erect?", "I like breasts" and (in mournful, sincere tones) "I have a problem with pussy" with a straight face. And then of course there is the infamous swimming pool sex scene, which actually is just a pale imitation of the earlier lap dancing scene, which takes place at Cheetah's, the strip club run by the man in the skinny leopard print shirt who shouts BLOW JOB a lot but turns out to be all heart. And then there is the dancing. It's supposed to be the most incredible dancing in the world and is actually like some kind of porn-star version of Xanadu, all glitter and wigs and girl-on-girl dry-humping. And if you feel in need of some full-frontal nudity, search no more. You have never since so many lady bits in your life. And one male bottom, courtesy of Kyle MacLachlan's none-too-convincing super-toned body double. All wrapped up with some breathtakingly phony message about female empowerment and the perils of being seduced into corruption.

It's not just worth watching as a bad movie though. I genuinely believe Showgirls to be a unique cultural artefact that people will one day hold up as the last gasp of pre-9/11 degeneracy, before we started making films about climate change and mysterious threats that mysteriously symbolise those mysterious Muslim terrorists.

It's also a perfect moment of hubris, as Joe Eszterhas and Paul Verhoeven's egos explode like fireworks on screen and then the sparks fizzle out into the darkness. If you have never read Eszterhas's autobiography 'Hollywood Animal' you have a sorry gap in your knowledge of self-deluded arrogant arseholes. Like Showgirls, which Eszterhas wrote, it is unbelievably entertaining for any number of unintentional reasons. Eszterhas firmly believes himself to be a genius, and the evidence of said genius is all the incredible movies that he was penned: movies like Flashdance and Basic Instinct. Showgirls, a deeply moral and Christian film in his opinion, only failed because he didn't get the cast he originally wanted: Madonna and Drew Barrymore (watch it with *that* in mind.) And I suppose that Showgirls actually doesn't seem that over the top to a man whose business mail has been known to be delivered on notes folded up and inserted into a prostitute's vagina.

One day, somebody will make a movie of Joe Eszterhas's life and it will be the most absurd, mesmerising, mind-boggling film ever made. But until they do, there is always Showgirls.

Le Ballon Rouge

I missed a day. I'm sorry. It won't happen again. By which I mean it will, but I will feel guilty about it.

I got an e-mail today from the Barbican, trailing a film that they are screening, Flight of the Red Balloon. Apparently it is a homage to Albert Lamorisse's classic 1956 short Le Ballon Rouge (The Red Balloon).

Up until the age of eight, I went to the Lycee Francais in South Kensington, and every year on one very exciting day they would herd us all into the French Institute cinema next door and show us Le Ballon Rouge. There was always an enormous kerfuffle about this. We were left in no doubt as to the fact that what was happening was a Very Big Deal. Le Ballon Rouge, as far as the French Lycee was concerned, was perhaps the most important artefact of French - nay, any - cinema ever made. As for the children, there would always be the hope that this year we would not be watching Le Ballon Rouge. The doomed hope, I should say. They are probably still showing it on a yearly basis even now.

I was only at the French Lycee for three years but I still feel as if I have seen Le Ballon Rouge about sixty times. Here's what I remember. The teacher taking us out of class and leading us across the playground. What seemed like several hours of standing around in the foyer of the French Institute cinema - it had an upstairs as well as a downstairs in the auditorium, which was properly exciting. Of course, I always wanted to go upstairs. Finally going in to take our seats. I am downstairs. The film starts. A little boy has a balloon and lets go of it and it floats away and bobs around a city. It is in black and white but the balloon is red. The film ends. We return to class.

Will I be going to see Flight of the Red Balloon? Probably not...

Event Reminder

I'm reading and giving a talk this evening at 6.30pm at the RADA bar, Malet St. Lovely day for it*.

*Joke only works if you happen to be in England today listening to the horizontal rain battering against your window like machine-gun fire. Yep, I'm expecting a huge turn-out tonight.

Shhhhhhh............

Don't tell anyone, but I've been unfaithful. I've been writing for another blog... It was only once - it meant nothing to me - it will never happen again... Well not until they ask me anyway.

The Boy

The short posts at the moment are because I'm working away from my computer, in the library, where I am currently reading Germaine Greer's The Boy. It's a scholarly art historical work about the representation of pubescent and post-pubescent males throughout history, with particular concern to how this reflects changing notions of gender and sexuality. In practise, what this actually means is that I am sitting in a public library looking at huge glossy reproductions of young men with their cocks out. I am getting some interesting looks.

Note to predictable DJs everywhere

ABBA wrote some songs other than Dancing Queen. Some of them are actually quite good.

Nicko & Joe's Bad Film Club: Glitter

I have just got back from the Barbican Centre's Bad Film Club, where every month comedians Nicko and Joe screen a lovingly-chosen execrable movie and then talk all the way over it. This month's movie was the Mariah Carey vanity project, Glitter, selected by special guest extra comedian Sarah Kendall.

It's impossible to convey the experience of watching a film as uniquely dreadful as Glitter in the company for three very funny people with microphones, but it made me laugh so much that first I cried, then I started hiccuping, then the hiccups got uncontrollable and I snotted all over my face. This in itself is remarkable, as usually the hiccups stage is followed by compulsive involuntary burping, and if I really can't stop laughing after that, I start to gag.*

I wouldn't advise anyone attempt watching Glitter except under controlled conditions, as it is a Mariah Carey movie, starring Mariah Carey and Mariah Carey's breasts and Mariah Carey's songs, and Mariah Carey is in almost every scene, and in these scenes Mariah Carey is almost exclusively filmed from the right, because Mariah Carey doesn't like the left side of her face. It also stars Max "bag a Spice Girl" Beesley as an allegedly hip, allegedly American DJ-producer called Dice, who gets Mariah Carey into bed by charming her with his xylophone playing. The most convincing actor in the entire movie is a cat. If you are still dithering, consider that the film is set in the eighties. There. I have done all I can.

It is a huge disappointment to me, if not to the event organisers, that I won't be able to come along to next month's screening of the Arnie classic Commando, because that night I am doing a reading at Hornsey Library. I know that you had all already planned to come to Hornsey Library to see me read, but given that there is limited space, I won't mind if some of you decide to go and see Commando instead. Just remember to bring a tissue.

*At times like this I feel I should remind you that I am an international bestselling author.

I Predict A Breakdown

Getting yoghurt out of the fridge for breakfast, I found myself with the song 'I Predict A Riot' going around my head. (Something to do with those boistrous bifidus digestivus bacteria?) What confused me was that it didn't seem to be the Kaiser Chiefs singing - the voice was quite different. And then I realised that I was hearing Alan Fletcher, aka Doctor Karl Kennedy from Neighbours, and the version he performed with his band Waiting Room on a documentary I saw about Neighbours a few weeks ago. Witness, if you dare:



Karl Kennedy has taken up residence inside my head and is singing to me. Disturbing.

Garfield Minus Garfield

My new favourite website.

Mad Men

Well. It was cracking, wasn't it? For those who didn't watch, this is a new series, a late 1950s / early 1960s-set drama about advertising men and women who work on Madison Avenue in NYC. To summarise: I am a man! I work in advertising! I am misogynist! I smoke a lot! But underneath it all I might just be unhappily married / gay / even more of a tosser than I appear on first glance / that guy who played the sexy mayoral candidate in Sex and the City! I am making it sound shit. It wasn't shit. It was great. Sure, it suffered from first episode-itis, where each of the themes clunk down as they are laid (THIS IS A SEXIST OFFICE, THAT IS WHY PEOPLE KEEP TELLING THE SECRETARY TO SHOW MORE OF HER LEGS) but I'm sure that will calm down in time. The acting was good, the script, when not clunking, was sharp, the design was beautiful, there were a couple of genuine surprises when things did not go exactly as predicted, a few of the characters appeared to demonstrate actual complexity, and it had Mel from Flight of the Conchords in it which is reason enough to tune into anything. I would particularly recommend this to women who will enjoy the toe-curling sexual attitudes on display - note for example the scene where the new secretary asks the in-house doctor to prescribe the pill, and he gives her a full vaginal examination (wearing repulsive brown latex gloves) whilst simultaneously warning her not to become a slut or he will withdraw the prescription, and at the same time boasting of his own conquest of one of the other secretaries. Neat. Nasty. 10pm, Sundays, BBC4.

Oh Dear

I just saw the headline "Prince Returns From Afghan Tour". And my first thought was: Prince did a tour of Afghanistan?

A Grumpy Question

My letterbox is made of metal and makes a loud clunking sound whenever anything is pushed through it. Why is it, then, that on Mondays to Fridays, my post is delivered at about 11.30, when I have been up and working for ages, but on Saturdays, when I'd like to sleep in, it comes at around 8.00 and wakes me up every single week?