Underrated Food, Overrated Band: Part 2

The unexpectedly swift return of the fun new feature in which I eat an underrated foodstuff whilst listening to overrated music on the radio!

This week: spaghetti bolognese accompanied by 'God is a DJ' by Faithless.

Spaghetti Bolognese may not be considered the cutting edge of Italian cooking but it's perfect comfort food on a cold day after a long session with the physiotherapist (back very much on the mend, hurrah!) Bloody hell, this music is so boring and soulless and wibbly. I don't know the track but it just HAS to be Faithless. Oh look. Yes it is.

Blouch

Have put my back out. Physio has banned me from sitting at my desk. So no blog for the rest of the week. See you back here on Monday.

Being Human

Werewolf George (Russell Tovey), vampire Mitchell (Aidan Turner) and ghost Annie (Lenora Crichlow) are sharing a house Bristol. None of them are particularly happy about their predicament. Annie may be the ghost, but is herself haunted by the memory of the fiance she has lost. Mitchell wants to go straight but is tempted by the throbbing pulse of every sexy neck he passes by. And George, the mild-mannered janitor (or hospital orderly), is agonised - literally and figuratively - by his monthly transformation into an uncontrollably vicious creature.

All the way through Being Human I was thinking: *this* is what Torchwood was supposed to be like. Clever and dark and funny and sexy and nasty, atmosphere-heavy and special effects-light, with proper characters, played by proper actors, trying to figure out the answer to proper dilemmas, which, while slightly different to what we might actually face - unless any of "we" happen to be a werewolf, a ghost or a vampire - serves as proper metaphors for the frightening inside of us. Tovey's character and performance were particularly nuanced; while the central metaphors of Mitchell and Annie's existences are the controlling but familiar force that sex, love, or more chemical addictions have over our lives, George represents a more terrifying thought: that inside each one of us lives a beast, unknown, alien and yet part of us, something that cannot be controlled, that will escape us, and will cause unspeakable destruction. Unspeakable destruction which, as Mitchell points out whilst cleaning up after one of George's rampages, will mean a trip to Ikea - "You know how I feel about that".

BBC3, Sundays, 9pm.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

My dear friend Karen at Cinnamon Brainstorm did this fantastic bit of photomontage for me, so that now I am totally channeling Aretha. I have to say, when times are troubled, when the world looks bleak, the only way forward is to fix yourself up with a really fantastic hat. And if times aren't at all troubled and the world looks pretty good, just think (think!) how *even more* brilliant you'd feel in a hat like this!

Announcement

Yesterday, halfway through the lunchtime edition of Home and Away, I officially quit my Australian Soap habit. I have been watching Neighbours and Home and Away ever since they first reached British screens over 20 years ago, and every lunchtime since I became a full time writer, and it was only at 2.30 yesterday afternoon that I noticed that they are a tedious, repetitive, mind-rotting waste of my time. I switched off at the exact moment that Tony's nephew Xavier showed up at a beach party in Summer Bay with a handful of unspecified drugs in his pocket and I realised that I could not care less what happened next. Xavier is not entirely to blame, I am also not at all interested in the fact that Dan doesn't really want to move in with Libby, whether Donna and Ringo's first sexual encounter will be as special as Ringo hopes, whether Jack will find out that Roman is still in love with Martha, or whether Melody will make it to the Senior Formal and what havoc she will wreak if she does. This may be a sign of age and maturity, or just a sign that there is nobody I fancy on Neighbours or Home and Away any more.

From now on I will spend my lunch hour reading and / or listening to the radio. But in farewell I post this picture of Kip Gamblin, my favourite ever Home and Away crush, whom very long term blog readers might remember from the early Struggling Author days...


Adieu. I know you are on Casualty these days, but there are limits.

Reality Check

The boiler broke down yesterday. I didn't notice until my fingers began to turn blue. So I called out the emergency plumber, who came very quickly to tell me exactly how much less fun I was going to be able to afford this month than I had expected.

When he got here, he asked for a parking permit and I gave him one, mentioning as I did that the local traffic warden is actually quite a nice guy. "That's not possible, is it?" he said. "It's like the only good German is a dead German."

And so the Obama wave of goodwill officially dies.

(Does it belittle me to reveal that, as a writer, I found the line so utterly shocking and brilliant that I felt it was worth the £50 call-out fee alone?)

Yes He Did

Yesterday I put aside my natural kneejerk cynicism for long enough to watch Barack Obama's inauguration and allow myself to be filled with the kind of hope which is - yes - audacious. It's beyond one man, even a man as powerful as the President of the United States, to be able to heal all the complex problems of global politics and economics, but equally such problems will never begin to be addressed without great leadership and it seems that great leadership might be what we are finally getting. At the very least he has managed the first part: making people want him to lead them. Not grudgingly allow him to lead them, but actively, desperately, hopefully want.

After the ceremony - the speech (appropriately sober and inspiring though not as gloriously moving as his acceptance speech), the godawful poet who came after him, and the brilliant civil rights activist who spoke after that - the lunch (I blame freezing cold and then overcharged central heating for the senatorial bodycount) and the incredibly dull parade, we watched Aretha and her hat sing again on YouTube:



Then at a friend's suggestion, the equally incredible Nina Simone singing a very appropriate choice of song some years before:



And then a brilliant excerpt of a speech by James Baldwin some time before that:



Which kept us all in contemplative mood.

Contemplative and uncynical as I was, I still couldn't help a few stray thoughts from crossing my mind. Like relief that Michelle Obama had chosen a decent outfit this time, and a mental note that Barack Obama's coat was rather gorgeous, and also the briefest hint of suspicion that he might be wearing a thermal vest or two. His shirt did look a bit padded. Also, that the chap who did the prayer at the start of the inaugural lunch sounded a lot like Darth Vader.

Afterwards, we all had dinner and the Obamas headed off to TEN balls. They had to pose for pictures and do a first dance for each one, like getting married over and over again, and indeed Michelle had changed into something not unlike a wedding dress by then. I hope she was wearing comfortable shoes. Barack can almost dance, although he moves his hands in a funny way when getting down, which is a relief. The President should not be *too* groovy. But they look so sweet together that I am in danger of developing a serious couple crush on them. So happy! So in love! I bet she is not averse to telling him off when necessary either. She should get her own nuclear codes (which is not what I always say when I have a couple crush.)

You can see extracts from the ten balls over here. You'll notice that Etta James's At Last is played more than once, and it is indeed a very good choice of song for the occasion. But I'm sure you people can choose better. What's the best possible song to dance to for your first shimmy as First Couple? And the worst?

Unexpected Uses For Excellent Books

Another new gimmick! I mean, carefully considered new feature.

A Month In The Country by JL Carr is one of my all-time favourite books. It's a deceptively simple tale of a young man, damaged by his experiences in WWI, who spends a month in a village repairing a church fresco and, in so doing, himself. The problem with that description is that it sounds (a) worthy and (b) dull, which it (a) isn't and (b) isn't. It's charming and intelligent and surprisingly funny, it moves quietly but packs unexpected emotional punch, and it's altogether rather lovely. I am yet to recommend it to someone who hasn't loved it; my best success was with my aunt, who enjoyed it so much she immediately bought three more copies for friends. It was nominated for the Booker prize in 1980 (and lost to a William Golding novel about boats - yawn - she says unfairly, not having read it - but seriously, boats) and was made into a film in 1987 with a young Colin Firth and a young Kenneth Branagh which, you will not be surprised to hear me say, is good, but not as good as the book. (Do you notice a theme in recent posts?) It is also pleasingly short.

So pleasingly short, in fact, that the Penguin Modern Classics edition is the perfect width for propping up the wobbly leg of my ironing board. You can't do that with a Kindle. Well, you can, but it probably invalidates the warantee.

Underrated Food, Overrated Band

A new, possibly very occasional, feature in which I eat an underrated food whilst the radio plays an overrated band.

Part one: soft boiled eggs with granary toast soldiers, accompanied by the Manic Street Preachers.

Mmmm... perfectly cooked eggs, the creaminess of the white and soft drip of the yolk deliciously offset by the salty tang of the hot buttered toast. God, would it KILL them to match the lyrics to the music just for ONCE?

I Want To Get Younger Every Day, Please. Can You Help Me?

No comments for the books, eh? You lot are an unpredictable bunch.

OK, and not just to get comments, because I am not a comments whore, comments whore I am not, but a question for the ladies: after a war of attrition between myself and my hairdresser lasting several years, I have recently surrendered to using a proper expensive salon shampoo, and I am irritated to reveal that it IS much better and you DO only have to use about a third of the amount so it DOESN'T work out as that much more expensive than the cheap stuff. Thus I am now wondering if I should break out of my habit of using incredibly cheap moisturiser on the basis that even if the expensive ones have whale placentas in them, in the end all you really need is goo + sunscreen. Am I right? Am I wrong? Would you recommend your moisturiser to me? My requirements: I insist on factor 15 in my daycream. I don't tend to bother with any makeup on my actual skin*, so if it could leave my face looking nicer than before I put it on, so much the better. And if it could make me look slightly less like I am getting older every day, and slightly more like I am getting younger, that would make me a very happy bunny. Surely not too much to ask from a small pot of unguent?

*as opposed to mascara, lippy etc.

What I Read Before My Christmas Holidays

Seeing as the Revolutionary Road post provoked some enthusiastic commenting, I thought I'd do some more book ones. A Christmas Holiday book round-up is to follow. This is "What I Read Before My Christmas Holidays, Going Back As Far As October, If This Post Is To Be Believed."

1. Michael Ondaatje 'In The Skin Of A Lion'. Read this one in Uganda and left it with Gandalady who is currently enjoying it, I think. The precursor to The English Patient, it is a beautiful, emotional read and somewhat easier to understand than that book (which I consider to be a masterpiece miserably traduced by the film, even though it is a good film, but honestly, The English Patient is such an extraordinary novel: you don't even know which of the characters the narrator is until about halfway through. Start with Lion, then read EP. Golly, what a long bracket.) It's about a young Canadian man who falls in with, and in love with, various transients, immigrants and a former nun. Rather magical.

2. Margaret Atwood 'Moral Disorder'. Weirdly marketed as short stories when in fact it's a novel made up of individual episodes, telling a woman's life story. I wouldn't query the 'short story' designation except that far more people read novels than short stories, so you do wonder why they'd choose to call it stories when they could avoid that particular sales-killer. Anyway it's the usual deal from Atwood, subtle and sly and funny in surprising places, not her best perhaps, but mid-level Atwood is better than most other things. Much better than 'The Penelopiad', which will forever inhabit that sad dark place in my mind reserved for bad books by good authors.

3. EM Forster 'Where Angels Fear To Tread'. God, Forster is good. I hadn't bothered reading him much before because it all looked a bit worthy and minor Edwardian yawn yawn, but he's intelligent and funny and knows a lot about human nature, and his style is wonderfully economical. 'Where Angels Fear To Tread' is the story of a woman who goes on holiday to Italy and falls in love with a younger Italian man, scandalising her family. It's very good, but pales in comparison to the glory of the similarly-themed 'Room With A View', which is a marvelous, "what, you haven't read Room With A View, then what the hell HAVE you been reading" type book. I am determined to read all of Forster's novels, which sounds more impressive than it is. He only wrote seven.

4. Penelope Fitzgerald 'The Blue Flower'. Started. Panicked. Stopped. Complained to the person who recommended it to me. Got told off. Tried again. And bloody hell, it only turned out to be brilliant. It's a novel based on a true story about an 18th century writer who fell in love with a twelve-year-old girl. Believe me it is so much less yucky than that makes it sound. In fact it's a stunning evocation of life for a certain class of German family in the 18th century, blissfully free of cloying period detail and yet somehow magically evocative of the time and the place. The characterisation is magnificent, there isn't a drop of sentimentality anywhere in the book, and the whole thing is underpinned by a cunning, sharp sense of humour, even where the material would seem not to be humorous at all. And good luck getting to the end of the book without falling in love with the twelve-year-old yourself.

And if you are only going to read one of these books, make it... The Blue Flower.

Pride and its relation to Fall

I am writing a long post about books, and I don't have time to finish it now, because I'm off to the theatre ('August: Osage County'). Just in case you were wondering why I hadn't blogged since Monday.

Meanwhile: yesterday I was on the phone to my mother and she mentioned that she had burnt the soup. Burnt the *soup*? Is that even possible? Apparently so. She had put it on the hob, and then forgotten all about it while she pottered around outside doing some gardening. Poor woolly-minded woman, it's tragic what age does to a once-intelligent brain. Hung up the phone, went out, met a trio of handsome men in the library, indulged in semi-flirtatious highly intelligent chit chat because I am both gorgeous and smart. From there to Portuguese class with my mother, that poor, mentally-enfeebled lady. Crap class. Unbelievably crap class. Teacher breathtakingly appalling, we both agree that we are never going back despite having booked for ten weeks. Poor appalling teacher, I am so much cleverer than she. I walk out early, feeling superior. Get home, open front door. Entire house filled with acrid smoke. I have burnt the stock. Left it on the hob for EIGHT HOURS. Fossilised remains of a chicken is welded to the bottom of the pan. Smoke alarm has beeped itself to death. Not much time left before entire house would have burnt down.

Moral, anyone?

Revolutionary Road

Fans of excellent gushy awards acceptance speeches - which I am, in a kind of I hate it I love it I can't watch yes I can oh god please stop, PLEASE STOP, please don't stop sort of way - can't do much better than watching this sterling effort from Kate Winslet last night:



(Did anybody see her when she got the Supporting Actress gong? More contained?)

Fans of excellent books - which I certainly am, in every way - can't do much better than reading Revolutionary Road. I'm on a bit of a mission about this because I'm in a sudden panic that not enough people will have read Revolutionary Road before they see the movie. If you have sat next to me at dinner or indeed anywhere this week, this is what I have been talking about. Advance apologies to future dinner neighbours.

The film, as you'll know if you watch that speech, reunites Ms Winslet and Leo DiCaprio from Titanic and then throws in her husband too for the ultimate in love-ins. Actually I'm sure the film will be good if a tad smug, and I'm looking forward to seeing it. But it will not be, can not be, as good as Revolutionary Road, the novel.

Revolutionary Road, the novel is SO GOOD. I can't do the dispassionate reviewer thing here because I am too anxious that you might not read it. It has to be one of the best novels of the 20th century, or indeed of any time. The book is about a married couple in 1950s suburban America who live on a knife edge between happiness and unhappiness. The smallest shifts in their lives and relationships keep tipping them from one side to the other. Or perhaps it is about a married couple in 1950s suburban America who are hanging over an abyss of unhappiness and all they have to cling onto is that knife edge, only it's cutting more and more deeply into their hands. Yes: I think that might be it.

They key thing is, vis a vis book v movie, is that the magic of the novel isn't so much in what happens, but in the exquisite, wise, meticulous observation of the shifts in the characters' internal lives, and how that shapes and is shaped by the decisions that they make. I'm certain that Leo and Kate will act it beautifully, but there really is no substitute from the level of detail that you can have in a novel - in this novel. So if you see the film you will enjoy it and you will think you have understood the characters, but it will be nothing in comparison to the depth of understanding you can get from the book.

Please read it before you see the film. Please, please. Run, don't walk, to your nearest independent bookshop. Or order it right now. Look, you can get it from play.com and help balance out Amazon's market share of online retailing, ensuring a more competitive marketplace. Whatever. Just get it and read it before you see the film. You will not regret it.

Best Shop Of The Holiday

Chicken King, Nampula. A shop divided into thirds. One third was a restaurant serving chicken. One third sold frozen chickens to be cooked and consumed at home. And one third sold chicks, chicken feed and vaccines.

Best Dream Of The Holiday

The one in which Martin Amis apologised to me in person for having written London Fields.

What to Read in Paradise

I spent my New Year's Eve (and a few days surrounding it) at Nkwichi Lodge on the shores of Lake Niassa in Mozambique. If you click the Accommodation tag you can see my room. Nice, eh? It was a stunning place, completely peaceful and isolated on the perfect, private, deserted ivory-sand beach you see above, with clean, clear fresh water to swim and snorkel in every day (though not between dusk and dawn because that's when the crocodiles come out...)

I say "isolated". From our start point in Pemba - a coastal city in Northern Mozambique - we had to drive six hours, fly one hour, drive a further four hours largely over unpaved roads, and then take a boat for an hour to get there. On our first night we were pretty tired and I was the first to get to sundowner drinks on the beach. The only other people there were the hotel's owner, his parents, and the hotel manager, a young Kenyan. I introduced myself and we chatted for a while about what I do in the UK before moving on to other topics (such as how the mirror-like lake water can turn to a North Atlantic storm with 3-metre-high waves in a heartbeat: visitors be warned, you can't get there any way other than by boat...)

The next morning, the hotel manager came over and said that he'd finished the book that he'd been reading (Alexander McCall Smith's Tears of the Giraffe) and had started a new one. Oh yes, I said. He opened his bag and pulled out... Gods Behaving Badly. His sister in Kenya had sent him a copy for Christmas.

It's official, GBB is like cockroaches, it gets EVERYWHERE.

Upon Mature Reflection

Having finally watched the dances online from the second half of the final, I now know that Tom and Camilla's showdance was a work of utter genius and blew Rachel and Vincent right out of the water.



LOVE it. What I like best about it is that it's a proper *dance*, not just the lift-a-thon that we've got used to from every other year. It has showmanship, energy, character, fun and charm - everything Tom's been all about from the start. A worthy winner. Rachel who?

UPDATE: Oh god. I just saw Lisa's - hadn't realised she did one. Icky. Kind of... necrophiliac. Not a good choice of style.

Initial thoughts upon watching the Doctor Who Christmas Special

What? Who are the - hang on - and the furry things? With the faces? Why are they - hang on, I don't get the - how is he blowing up their heads? With a sort of video canister? But why? Isn't she a bit cold in that top? Wait a sec, who are those guys? What are they doing? Why does that Cyberman have a weird brain thing? What are the kids for? What are they doing? Why aren't they - wait a second, what about - but I thought Cybermen were - hang on, I'm not getting this bit. That's a nice dress. OK, I think I've just about - no, no, I've lost it again. Oh, he's put his glasses on, excellent. What are they doing with the - and why are the - but, but - wait a sec. Ooh! Is that made out of Meccano? What's it doing? What's it for? Transformers! Robots In Disguise! Sorry. OK, I think I finally get the - no, wait a second, is she - oh no, what's he doing now? But I don't understand what that means about the - wait, now he's doing what, exactly? But why? Why? Why?

I probably shouldn't have watched it with jetlag. I liked all the David Morrissey bits though.

Also: in future episodes let's all watch out for Emily Price, for whom many guineas are offered in reward.

Initial thoughts upon returning to the UK

1. Matt WHO?
2. When is the sun going to come up?
4. Oh.
3. Seriously, Matt who?
4. 200 e-mails are about 190 too many.
5. OOOOH. The sexy one from Ruby in the Smoke. OOOOOOOOOOH.
6. Why doesn't my PVR know that the Strictly Come Dancing Results Show is an intrinsic part of the Strictly Come Dancing Final?
7. TOM? Are you kidding me?
8. Can I fit another jumper over the four I'm already wearing?
9. I really, really fancied Matt Smith in Ruby in the Smoke. Get. In. GET. IN.
10. Happy new year, many happy returns of the Who.