I'm off on holiday...

Guess where?



See you on May 14th when I get home.

Doctor Who: The Sontaran Strategem

I was going to say 'nothing happened', but things did happen, they just happened SLOWLY. The reason why became abundantly clear at the end of the episode where it turned out that this was a two-parter, when at a guess there is only enough material to cover one and a half episodes, if that. Hence for example the interminable scene where the two guards (Dumb and Dumber) went into the Sontaran lair and stood around discussing the fluorescent green clone pool for an inordinately long time. (Although I did love the line "My legs! I can't move my legs!", last heard in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, another creature-in-vat-of-slime movie, and therefore surely a deliberate kitsch homage.) Also, a lot of the stuff that did happen was fatally bland. I mean scary satnav, really? And all that poison gas being spewed out of car exhaust pipes without actually poisoning anybody. Not for one second did I believe that the planet or any of our favourite characters were at risk. Even poor Grandad in the car - um, break a window?

Still, there were redeeming features. Donna is one hell of a smart cookie and I like her growing habit of taking the initiative and figuring stuff out by herself. She had the bulk of the decent lines, she didn't get captured, and she got to drive the Tardis! Get in! And the Sontarans are blissfully idiotic villains who look stupid, act stupid, and can be defeated with a shuttlecock. I liked them a lot, though I do hope they weren't supposed to be frightening.

Hard to say without seeing next week's, but my guess is that this could have been a somewhat rushed but entertaining one-parter or a wrist-slitting crawler of a two-parter. I know which one I would have preferred, and it's the one I didn't get.

When Computerised Recommendations Go Wrong

Witness.

Elfin Agent of Genius

Looky look! I have been longlisted for the Desmond Elliot prize! Very exciting, it is my first one. I am not at all sure how I ended up on a list with books like The Outcast and Random Acts of Heroic Love, it is making me feel a bit vertiginous. According to the site -

Reflecting the overall high quality of writing on the list, Nikita Lalwani’s novel, Gifted, has already been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Glen Dimplex Fiction Award 2007; The Outcast by Sadie Jones has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction; Random Acts of Heroic Love by Danny Scheinmann has been selected for the Richard & Judy 2008 Book Club; and Adam Foulds, author of The Truth About These Strange Times has recently won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2008.

Put it this way: only three books get on the shortlist and I am not picking out my dress for the ceremony just yet. But never mind! If I was going to get nominated for any prize, I'm glad that it was this one. The award is named after the Desmond Elliot who is described on the website as the "elfin agent of genius". From the site biog:

Desmond Elliott was ageless and, when he died, in August 2003, it seemed impossible that he could be 73. “A dapper little elf”, he was five-foot-nothing, always stylishly dressed in Brooks Brothers’ boyswear and with a mischievous twinkle in his faded denim-blue eyes. Waspish, witty, an uncanny mimic and a sometimes outrageous raconteur, he told endless stories against himself but wasn’t above bitching about some of his peers. And he always enjoyed a good feud: “I believe it is really important to have one or two really influential enemies. They tend to talk about one to all the right people.” [...]

As his authors grew rich, so, too, did Desmond, who quickly learned to enjoy his success. He drank only champagne and bought his groceries at Fortnum & Mason, “the local corner shop”, where he had a charge account and treated its St James’s Restaurant like the office canteen. [...] The Connaught and the Ritz were also favoured venues, but “travelling west of Marble Arch gives me a nose bleed”. When he flew to New York, it was always on Concorde and, once there, he exchanged his Mayfair bachelor pad (complete with kitchen trapeze) for a Park Avenue apartment."

It is a point of great pride to be associated with someone who owned a bachelor pad with a kitchen trapeze. I don't care that a kitchen trapeze is probably some kind of sling for hanging your saucepans off, I am imagining a team of performance dwarves doing acrobatics above my head as I burn the toast.

The only disappointment is that as a nominee I don't get to meet the marvelous-sounding but sadly deceased Desmond Elliot - the man who discovered Jilly Cooper, no less - but I am honoured to be listed for his prize. I will of course keep you posted on the shortlist and the eventual winner.

In case you're wondering why I'm not blogging much...

...I'm in the library. The books don't write themselves, unfortunately. Not without really expensive software.

Surely I can't actually be 32.

Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood

Another good one! And then I remember: this is how they all used to be, before that very dodgy Season Three.

Pitch dark this time, very very disturbing. I was quite upset after watching it. Not sure what young children would have thought of the whole slavery theme and the massive body count but I was quite moved. I'm enjoying Donna's continued character development as a deeply compassionate and intelligent woman (I feel like they are giving her a lot of what would normally be the Doctor's lines - eg about the Ood carrying their brains in their hands) and also David Tennant's hair's continued character development as modernist sculpture. Plus it's a welcome respite from all the 'aren't humans great' nonsense that has dogged Tennant's incarnation. I liked the revisiting of the Ood story, as they were pretty let down by the Doctor's last appearance. I experienced much retrospective guilt.

A somewhat frustrating episode though, as it would have been brilliant if some clangers hadn't let it down: man being killed by being absorbed into giant Ood brain? Company director gets turned into an Ood by drinking lots of Ood juice (shades of Human Dalek here, if we didn't all know that Human Dalek was a collective hallucination that *never happened*)? And such a wasted opportunity with the Doctor being chased by a giant claw which would have been a lot scarier if what we'd seen hadn't mostly been gurning man wiggling old skool joystick, as opposed to, say, CLAW. Also, I am already bored of the disappearing bees.

Still, it was properly nasty, and actually rather thought provoking. Three out of three!

The Joys of Compilation

I love making compilation CDs [would love making compilation CDs if it were legal]. It is one of my favourite things to do [or would be, if it were legal], particularly when I [would] make one [if it were legal] for a friend who I have made [in my head] many for before and whose taste I am starting to nail. Like my best friend whose birthday was yesterday and who I am spending the evening with tonight, watching the Kids from Fame. That's all the clues you're getting as to her taste, but even so, what do you think of the following CD [that I would have made her, if it were legal, but it isn't. What do you take me for?]

1. Yesterday Once More / Carpenters
2. Theme from Valley of the Dolls / kd lang
3. Fairest of the Seasons / Nico
4. Quelqu'un M'a Dit / Carla Bruni [yes, that Carla Bruni]
5. Does He Love You / Rilo Kiley
6. Fuck You / Haley Wojcik
7. 9 to 5 / Dolly Parton
8. My Name Is Tallulah / from Bugsy Malone
9. Guilty In Here / Miranda Lambert
10. My Boy Lollipop / Barbie Gaye
11. Girls On The Beach / The Beach Boys
12. And Your Bird Can Sing / The Beatles
13. I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter / Madeleine Peyroux
14. The Circus Is Leaving Town / Isabel Cambell & Mark Lanagan
15. I'll Kill Her / Soko
16. Art Bitch / Cansei de Ser Sexy
17. The Dark of the Matinee / Franz Ferdinand
18. Raspberry Beret / Prince
19. Diana Ross / The Concretes
20. Tears Dry On Their own / Amy Winehouse
21. Yes / McAlmont and Butler

Is there anyone on earth aside from me who actually likes all of those songs? By the way, four of them are taken from compilations that friends who are also blog readers [would] have made me [were it legal], can you guess which? No cheating if you are the blog readers in question.

Further

A friend of mine called me today to tell me that he'd been shat on by a bird too. Epidemic?

I forgot to blog yesterday

and now it's tomorrow.

All I had to tell you was that a bird pooed on the back of my head at the train station, and I had to get a total stranger to wipe it off with a tissue. That could wait, right?

Chemystery

Interesting shelving in the proto-chemist section of my local supermarket. Top shelf, pregnancy tests, the only thing on the entire aisle to be security-protected. Next to them, lube. Two varieties. Next to that - and I know you think you're ahead of me, but no, not condoms actually. In fact what was next to that was a little machine to clear the wax out of your ears. Just beneath, insect repellant, and just under that, hay fever remedies.

I will leave it to your own imaginations what I went in there for.

Doctor Who: The Fires Of Pompeii

Another stonking episode. Nasty villains! Proper peril! Big moral questions! Decent surprises (notably when all the soothsayers turned out to be bang on)! Plenty of running! A bit that was definitely filmed inside a quarry - old school Who in the house! Fire-breathing monsters! Peter Capaldi! A bit with a water pistol! David Tennant saying intense things against a fiery backdrop! Donna being thoroughly brilliant! If she lives beyond the end of this series I will be completely astonished - she has noble (ahem) self-sacrifice written all over her.

I was slightly distracted by the fact that the lead Romans were named after the family from The Cambridge Latin Course, my Pompeii-set Latin textbook from GCSE sixteen years ago, so I spent large amounts of the episode missing dialogue because I was too busy thinking "Caecilius est in horto", "Metella est in atrio" and wondering what happened to poor old Canis (aka dog, star of the textbook, found preserved perfectly in ash - and you'll note no dog made it onto the Tardis at the end. Dog killers!) It didn't really matter, because actually the dialogue was the weakest link in this episode - if I'm going to be picky (and I always am) I'd have to admit that none of the funny bits were particularly funny, but I don't care because I was properly scared plus the Doctor and Donna got to escape inside a giant stone egg.

Keep up the good work, Russ. Very excited about next week.

Placeholder

It's my Bro's 40th this weekend - happy birthday Bro! - so I won't be watching Who until after I get back from his birthday celebrations. No review til after that, obviously. But fear not, it will come...

Doctor Who?

Guess who was having a knees up at the book launch I went to last night...


And I thought David Tennant was an exciting person to see at a party.

Did I speak to him? Are you crazy? It would have been like initiating chit-chat with God.

My first choice to play Zeus, GBB fans. Though now that I think of it Ian McKellen would be a world-class Doctor...

About Last Night

I was inexplicably nervous before my reading at Hornsey Library last night - maybe some sixth sense as to what was to come. A warning from the gods? Though actually, aside from a bit of an anxious preamble, the reading (Chapter 6, excluding the Neil and Alice bit) went fine. And most of the Q&A went fine too. Most. But then a man stood up at the back and started to lecture the room on the Truth of the virgin birth and the resurrection. With a thick greek accent as it happens (Eros?? - in-joke for those who have read the book.) It turned out not to be a question, so I didn't answer it. The event finished and refreshments were served, which is always an opportunity for people to chat to me and get their books signed. But the normal, nice people in the audience barely got the chance, because I was cornered by Truth man and his side-kick, I Am The Way man, who had obviously decided that having written a book with God in the title, I was ripe for conversion. (Note to readers: never write a book that even brushes against religion if you don't want this to happen to you.)

At around the point at which Truth man was jabbing his finger in my face and ranting about only one man ever having been made without sperm, my trusty friends from Chance UK stepped in to rescue me. (Chance UK is a local charity that runs mentoring programmes for vulnerable primary school age children, and if you appreciate their kind act in saving me from aggressive religious nutjobs, do feel free to make a donation at their Justgiving site or on my fundraising page for them over here. Now back to the plot.) Sadly it was out of the frying pan into the fire, as I was next cornered by a man who kept asking me why I didn't write about real life but only about personal relationships, and how if I were to write a book about extraordinary rendition I would make half a million pounds, and did I know that all the judges in this country accept bribes, and by the way, could he have my phone number? (Um....... nice offer but no.)

In the taxi home, the driver asked me what I had been doing that evening. "I'm an author, and I was doing a reading in the library," I said. "So the night has died," said the driver. Odd reply, and yet - quite.

Having said all of the above, many thanks to Hornsey Library - actually an extremely nice library - for having invited me, and thanks to all the nice, non-aggressive, non-bonkers people who came who I barely got a chance to talk to.

Here's a photo of me with lovely Wendy who organised the event and did her best to shelter me from the agents of Jesus:

I have fallen in love.

With a book! This doesn't happen all that often these days.

When I was a child, I used to fall in love with books all the time. I'd start reading and lose myself in them completely. I knew - and liked - the characters more than I did my friends.

I still love reading, but in general I don't love the individual books in the same way. I enjoy them, I appreciate them, I am gripped and moved by them but I don't passionately inhabit them like I used to - not usually, anyhow.

Yesterday I started reading Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim. It wasn't even the book I wanted to read - I was leaving the house in a hurry to catch a train, and the book I had earmarked for my next read was nowhere to be seen, so I picked this one up off the nearest of the little piles of books that clutter up my house and put it in my bag.

Within the first few pages I was completely in love. Published at the turn of the 19th century, the book is the diary of a young English woman who is married to a German man, has three children, and likes to spend all of her time gardening. That doesn't sounds like the most riveting start, but it is just so beautifully written. The narrator is witty and honest, and a fantastically sharp observer of the society around her, which she spends most of her time trying to avoid. She loathes the expectations and constraints of her sex and her role, and is at her happiest alone, in the garden, reading books. It's a hymn to the joys of solitude and is particularly recommended reading to anyone who has a tendency towards self-pity or loneliness. And you don't need to know anything about gardening to enjoy it.

And now, a word from our sponsor.

I'm doing a reading tomorrow evening at Hornsey Library, Haringey Park, N8, 9JA. 7.15pm. Free. Bargain or what? I've been reliably informed that the audience will be "intimate" so either only six people are turning up or it's going to be an orgy. Either way, you're not going to want to miss it.

Ten New Commandments

This evening, on the bus home, two men came and sat down next to me who were so loud and obnoxious that I was forced not only to crank the volume of my iPod right up to drown them out, but to change music styles as well, because they were penetrating through the delicate sound of Jolie Holland even at the top of the scale. I had to listen to party tunes all the way home instead.

Earlier in the evening I had been in the pub and my friend was telling me that the Catholic Church had published ten new commandments for the modern age. She could only remember one of them: Thou Shalt Not Have Excessive Wealth, which is a bit rich - so to speak - coming from the Vatican. But they do say "excessive". I suppose that as long as you are no wealthier than the Catholic Church you are still OK.

Sitting on the bus this evening I decided that as we have nine slots left, we could easily spare one for: Thou shalt not sit on the top deck of the bus shouting the words VAGINAL VIGIL over and over again. Sure, it's specific, but God would definitely agree that it was *unbelievably* annoying. And that there is absolutely no circumstance in which such behaviour could be considered acceptable.

That leaves eight. Any more suggestions?

In case you're having trouble, a little inspiration. It's not quite Jolie Holland either, but that moment is gone.

Doctor Who: Partners in Crime

Oh, oh, oh. I liked it. I liked it a lot. I LOVE Donna. I love the Donna dynamic. I love that Donna is excited by the prospects that the Doctor's Time Lordiness has and yet is not overawed by the Doctor himself. I love that Donna is no ingenue. I love that Donna is funny. I love that having a funny, mature companion gives the writers twice as many people to write smart, sassy dialogue for, which makes each episode twice as smart and sassy. Also, I loved the cute little creatures made of fat, though I reckon I will be in a minority regarding this. They are adorable! I want one as a pet! Plus I think I would enjoy having one better than I enjoy having my muffin top at the moment. And at the very least they gave Donna a classic line: "I'm waving to fat". And I love that any prospect of a Donna-Doctor love dynamic has been quashed from the very start. ("I want a mate." "YOU WANT TO MATE????") That was definitely the weakest part of the previous season and if we're going with writing-at-fault it certainly did Martha the least amount of favours.

Nice touches: all the in-jokes. "You're a journalist? Make it up, then." RTD speaking from the heart. And responding to all the blogger complaints re Donna's screechiness in The Runaway Bride by having her first encounter with the Doctor be conducted entirely in mime. And Rose's reappearance at the end, in manner of Chris Tarrant of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire: holding out the cheque that has just been won (Donna) but then snatching it back: "But we don't want to give you that!" And then dangling the larger cheque that is just out of reach (Rose.) For the record, I'm in two minds about the return of Rose. I like it, because I like Rose, and I like the fact that the return of Rose creates a nice long story arc from the very start (one of my major Who complaints is that the story arcs aren't long enough. A few mentions of disappearing bees aren't quite enough.) On the other hand I thought the departing Rose storyline was perfect, and this reappearance could have a whiff of Bobby Ewing coming out of the shower. I will wait and see.

Ultimately, lots of enthusiasm from here regarding the forthcoming series, and since I've read previews that categorise this as the lousy episode and next week's as the good one, my general feeling is: happy days!

Doctor!! Hurry!!!! QUICKLY!!!!!!!!!

50 minutes to go and I am having serious trouble waiting patiently.

I have just been to the garden centre and bought lots of plants.

We will now have a sweepstake on how long they will take to die.

Most Depressing Conversation Ever

Me: It's my brother's 40th birthday next week.
My yoga teacher: Is that your younger brother?

I know I'm stiff, but come on! I am thirty-one years old! (Thirty-two in three weeks, but even so...)

When did jogging become running?

I merely ask.