Unexpected Irritation In Tesco Area

I don't tend to shop in supermarkets - one of the advantages of working from home is that I have time to go round the local shops and buy there. (Incidentally, credit crunch followers, if you shop for fruit and veg in greengrocers it's miles cheaper than in the supermarket, and you get that warm glow of satisfaction of supporting your local businesses. But I digress.) However, from time to time, such as today, I do pop into Tesco when I have a list of things that can't easily be supplied locally. The queues at the checkout were massive so I went to the self-service check-out instead. Now, Tesco has these signs all over the place encouraging you to bring your own carrier bags, which I always do (am I insufferably smug yet?) This is all well and good - unless you happen to be shopping via the self-service check-out. For those of you unfamiliar with the method, you place your unscanned shopping to one side of the scanner, scan it across item by item, and then put it in bags in the bagging area. If you put something in the bagging area that hasn't been scanned, a voice says WARNING. UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA. PLEASE REMOVE IT BEFORE YOU PROCEED. And carries on repeating this and refusing to let you scan anything else until you remove your unexpected item. Your unexpected item, such as a bag, say. Your shopping bag that you brought with you. According to Tesco, this is a highly unexpected item to have in the bagging area. Now, if you keep the unexpected bag very still, sometimes the machine will forget that it's there, so you can carry on shopping. Unfortunately, the moment you move it, say, by placing an item into it, the machine will notice its unexpected presence again and start telling you to remove it again. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: why don't you just put your unexpected bag somewhere else, outside the bagging area? But Tesco have anticipated this. If you scan your item and don't put it in the bagging area, the same voice (annoying woman, like the annoying satnav woman and the annoying voicemail woman and all the rest of the annoying voice women - why are they *always* women?) will warn you PLEASE PLACE YOUR ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA BEFORE PROCEEDING. And then, when you do, of course: WARNING: UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA. Apparently, reasoning with the machine that there is no unexpected item in the bagging area, that all there is is a BAG, that you are BAGGING INTO, does not help, nor does shouting at it. Apparently reasoning / shouting at the machine doesn't help appease the gigantic queue that has formed behind you, planet-killers all, who have not brought their own bags. Apparently people in Tesco just won't like you very much at all. Unlike my nice local shopkeepers who like me loads and never act all UNEXPECTED when I produce my own bags. So I don't EXPECT I'm going to go back to Tesco in a hurry.

Can anyone explain to me why Athletics is interesting?

A whole bunch of people doing exactly the same thing except with infinitessimal differences barely visible to the untrained eye, or otherwise slightly slower or faster than each other to the tune of a millisecond. Amazing to take part in I'm sure, but to watch? Really?

(And should it be Athletics *are*?)

I got bored on the bus

so I started counting CCTV cameras.

Oh. My. GOD.

Before we'd even moved away from the traffic light I'd spotted seven without having to turn my head. Try it. It's terrifying. Every single thing that you do in the street is being watched by an audience of bored security guards. Apparently the UK has over half of all the CCTV cameras in the world, and I can well believe it. Of course, we also have no street crime as a result, so that's good. Shame George Orwell is dead, I think we need him.

Her Naked Skin

Off to the National Theatre last night to see Rebecca Lenkiewicz's 'Her Naked Skin'. Much has been made of the fact that Lenkiewicz's play is the first full-length original play by a woman to be staged on the Olivier stage (the largest at the National Theatre), which by any measure is disgraceful. Sadly what's also disgraceful is that they chose to debut women's writing on our most important stage with such a half-baked affair.

'Her Naked Skin' tells the story of two suffragettes who fall in love while incarcerated at Holloway Prison. Or at least, that's sort of what it's about, but it isn't really about anything much, or perhaps it's half about a number of different things. The first half of the play really only sets the scene and establishes the love story, and is pretty plodding and strighforward. Aside from the lesbian love scenes, there was nothing in this half that I didn't know from learning about Suffragettes in primary school. The second half is more adventurous but also more incoherant. There are surprises to be had, but mostly of the baffled, why-would-she-do-that variety. Little makes much sense, and where it does, it isn't developed far enough to become interesting. Our lead Suffragette, Lady Celia, dumps her lover, working-class Eve, for unfathomable reasons. Celia's husband gets drunk and launches into a stunningly articulate but utterly out of character speech about how she has always rejected him. I got the impression that there were ideas at work, about women having to hide their true natures, or about the difficulties for a man of the period to be married to a progressive woman, but nothing was taken further to the point where some true insight might be revealed.

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the play was the Suffragette setting itself. There was plenty of historical detail on show, both in terms of the conditions of Suffragettes' incarceration, and the parliamentary battles that surrounded them, but barely any exploration of why these women were Suffragettes or why they chose the tactics that they did. The play is framed around a heavily-trailed climactic scene in which a key character is force fed through a tube down her nose, a long and grotesque set-piece deliberately reminiscent of waterboarding. This scene was so extreme in its staging that I had to stop watching after the first minute, and one audience member was taken violently ill, but in the absence of any emotional or intellectual context, any sense of why someone would choose to go on hunger strike and endure this treatment not just once but repeatedly, all you're left with is shock, nausea, the knowledge that "this is wrong" which most people already knew, and a disinclination to eat foie gras in future. It's not enough. A play should make you feel more than sick.

What's so disappointing is that this was not a "bad" play. Lenciewicz is obviously a talented writer - her dialogue was often sharp and witty, and there were the germs of some interesting ideas. The set was beautifully designed, although to my taste a little over-complex. The acting was impeccable, the direction intelligent. It was all competently handled. It just wasn't ready. The play needed several more drafts, perhaps even a change of focus (I found the husband's story far more compelling than the main Suffragette's). There are producers who oversee these things, who should make sure that nothing is staged in the country's showcase theatre that isn't ready to go on. What could have been a four or even five star play given more time barely registered a two on my scale.

It's dispiriting that what should have been a key moment in the history of women's theatre should have ended up as a rushed, botched job, when it had the potential to be so much more.

I'm not imagining things am I?

It is Autumn, right? I was so cold earlier that I nearly put the heating on. And I had a nice warming bowl of soup for lunch.

2008: the year that put the tumn into August. (And kept the gust - of wind.)

Is Leonard Cohen the greatest songwriter of the 20th Century?

If your answer is "no", you'd better have some pretty good arguments to back that up, buddy.

In which I show off how much I've read.

A book meme! From Persephone, who points out that I didn't do the last one she tagged me for so I had better do this one. As Persphone is one of my best commenters it pays to keep her on side, so here we are...

The Big Read ("whatever that is" says Persephone - I believe it was a reading initiative launched without a hint of irony by reading's greatest friend, television, years ago, so this meme has been around the block a few times, which is the sign of a good meme, cf Dawkins 'The Selfish Gene') reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or for whatever reason loathe.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling - I have bolded a bit of this because I have read one of them and crossed it out because I have no intention of reading the rest. I've never wanted to go on record about not liking Harry Potter because then it's all UPSTART AUTHOR MARIE PHILLIPS IN FEUD AGAINST UK'S BEST LOVED WRITER but they are just books and I didn't like them. It happens.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - see above
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks Started this and couldn't finish it. Seriously, what is all the fuss about?
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - Funnily enough, was having a conversation about this last night at dinner. Apparently the only way to survive to the end is to skim-read War, but it is worth the effort.
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - I borrowed this off a friend years ago at university. I got as far as Crime and then she needed it back to revise for her finals. So am yet to experience Punishment. I have every intention of finishing it though, hence hybrid bold and italics. You can draw your own conclusions re Shakespeare.
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - I was halfway through this and at a particularly dull bit about peasant farming methods when my mother decided to tell me what happened at the end. In fact what actually happened is that she said "Everyone knows what happens at the end of Anna Karenina" and I said "I am halfway through reading Anna Karenina and i don't know what happens at the end" and she said "Come on, everybody knows that bla bla bla" only she didn't say "bla bla bla" she said the actual end. And so I never finished it. This was a long time ago though and I realise now there is a lot more to Anna Karenina than the end, so I will go back to it.
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens Scarred for life by a bad BBC adaptation, this is at the bottom of my list of Dickens to read.
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis Hate to point out to whoever wrote this list that The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe (36) is actually part of the Chronicles of Narnia (33). Either this list was compiled by idiots or, and I think more likely, somewhere along the meme path somebody altered it so that they could claim to have read more books. That's called adaptation, Dawkins would be proud.
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini I enjoyed this so little after so many recommendations that I thought it must be my fault and that I was losing the will to read. Then I read A Month In The Country by JL Carr straight after and realised that no, it was Khaled Hosseini's fault after all.
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres Another one I found unreadable. It's at times like these I start to wonder how I ended up so out of step with the whole of the rest of the world. I saw him giving a reading and Q&A recently, in fac we shared the bill at a Foyles event, and he was lovely, so I feel a bit guilty about this, but not guilty enough to read Captain Corelli's Mandolin again.
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown Oh god, you really shouldn't let an author do this because then I have to write all slaggy off things about Dan Brown and people will say "you think you're so much better than Dan Brown", and I will be like "no, but I don't have to stop every three seconds to tell you the precise dimensions of every building my characters go into and a brief history of how they were built".
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins The other problem with an author doing this is we are never going to openly admit that we probably won't get around to The Woman In White. Having said that, my mother is reading it at the moment (perhaps I will tell her the ending?) and she says it's good.
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - I'll see how I get on with Tess before making a decision about this. I do remember the excellent adaptation with Julie Christie and the sheep running off the cliff. (I don't think Julie Christie ran off the cliff. Just to clarify.)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert I have seen the (maybe worst) film (I have ever seen in my life), and that was enough for me.
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon On the bookshelf, ready to go.
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens Definitely before I go anywhere near David Copperfield.
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez Why does everyone love this book so much? I summarise: "I am in love with a married woman, so I am going to spend my entire life treating every other woman alive like dirt until I can get her". How romantic.
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - No thanks, looks a tad long...
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy Actually might try this one before Tess. Poor Far From The Madding Crowd, I don't know what it did to make me leave it to last.
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie My sister insists that I must.
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville Life surely is too short, and I don't like boats.
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - I fel like I've read it I've seen so many adaptations, so I doubt I'll get around to it.
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker Possibly unfair suspicion that it's not a great read.
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce I feel like I should at least try.
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola Not yet but one day. Prbably need to leave a nice big gap after I have finished Les Miserables (see below).
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - Keep trying, keep giving up, keep intending to try again, so torn between an italic and a strike.
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens Poor Dickens is getting short shrift from me, but I can't be bothered to read this one either, too familiar. My next Dickens is likely to be Our Mutual Friend which I know next to nothing about but hear is brilliant.
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom Dictionary definition of a book you don't need to read until after you die.
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Just not interested.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton Is this really considered a necessary book in life? I despair.
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad Though I didn't get on with The Secret Agent, but I'll give him another go this sounds so good.
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - I love Iain Banks but was traumatised by descriptions of this book when I was too young to handle them. Maybe I will read it anyway.
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - Hmm... maybe.
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare If watching it counts! (And of course I will be seeing it again, only this time with binoculars. And probably a police escort.) Also, part of the Complete Works, see above. Who made this list?
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - As coincidence would have it, this is actually the book I am reading at the moment, hence a half bold, half italics. It is BLOODY long. In fact it is so heavy in the hardback edition that I have that I can only read it sitting up in bed with the book resting on my knees, which means that I have to be reading another book at all times which fits into my handbag. It's slow going, but it is good, although I could do without Hugo constantly stopping the action to give you 500 pages on the Napoleonic wars. Reminiscent of Dan Brown in fact. And yet not.

So there you go. About 70 out of 100, if you include the ones I tried and gave up on. It's slightly depressing that the average adult has only read 6 of these, because if they are using me as one of the sample that means a hell of a lot of people haven't read any of them, not even Winnie The Pooh, and a childhood without Winnie The Pooh is too bleak to contemplate. You'll notice I haven't underlined any, that's because it's actually an excellent list and anything I haven't crossed out I thoroughly enjoyed. Do feel like giving a bit of a special shout to Little Women, Catch 22 and Pride and Prejudice, though. Oh, and A Prayer For Owen Meany. And Lolita. And - hang on, there was a *reason* I gave up on the underlining...

As for passing the meme along, I'll suggest Big Mouth because there's every chance he's read the lot, and also because no excuse is ever spared to get him slagging off Midnight's Children again.

Old People Have Sex Too

Or so my recent film watching would suggest. Who knew?

First up, Mamma Mia, which you might have thought was about a young girl who, about to get married, invites the three men who might be her dad to the wedding. No. In fact, it is about a woman whose daughter is going to get married, and whose daughter invites the three men who might be the dad to the wedding. Subtle but important difference. Especially when you consider the blithe liberties taken with casting. Sophie, the daughter in question, is incredibly young to be getting married, as everyone keeps saying: she is only twenty. Her mother, Donna, kept a pink, spangly, rather teenage-sounding diary at the time of her conception, and was, she says later in the film, turned out of home by her mother when she announced her pregnancy. So I'm thinking Donna must be about 40 years old, maximum. Donna is played by Meryl Streep: who is 59. Ageing her teen diary and furious mother to when she was 38.

So why not cast, say, Nicole Kidman (41)? Well, it wouldn't be as much fun, would it? Nicole's gorgeous 40-year-old friends would not look absurd in tight Abba costumes performing at her daughter's hen night, nor would they be as hilarious falling off boats a la Julie Walters (58) and they couldn't really make them sing "Does Your Mother Know That You're Out" to the sexy barman with any plausibility.

Not that I'm complaining, nor were the 98pc of the audience at Wareham's Rex Cinema who were women over sixty, and who clapped and cheered throughout the entire film. It's just interesting that's all: a decision made to appeal to a very specific demographic. On the other hand my neices (9 and 7) were mystified as to why almost the entire film consisted of women Grandma's age singing, dancing and snogging, and you got to see ole Pierce Brosnan's bare chest (55) a hell of a lot more than Dominic Cooper's (30).

Moving on to Something's Gotta Give, on TV the other night, in which Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, though both romanced by sexy things half their age (Amanda Peet and Keanu Reeves), fall instead for one another. This has to be filed under 'underrated films of all time'. Every review of it I've seen has been lukewarm, a solid 3 stars from all the TV guides, 6.8 from imdb, on a ratings system where if the picture is the right way up it rates an automatic 5. In fact Something's Gotta Give is brilliant: intelligent, thought-provoking, funny, and at times very moving - for example, when Diane Keaton, having had sex for the first time in years, bursts into tears and said that she thought she had closed up shop forever. I can't think why this film isn't more popular. Could it be that some people still find older people having sex - real older people, who have to worry about things like reading glasses and viagra, and don't dance to Abba - kind of revolting? I for one must disagree. I plan to be an older person myself one day and definitely of the sex-having variety. Refering back to Mamma Mia though, it is noteworthy that of the trio of older women in that, only the young-looking Meryl Streep is allowed a sexuality that isn't tinged with ridiculousness, unlike Christine Baranski (many references to her plastic surgery) and Julie Walters (spends most of time falling over and chasing a terrified Stellan Skarsgard.)

Anyway, if you caught and enjoyed either of those movies and can stomach more close encounters of the elderly kind, might I finally recommend the film Venus, in which ageing actor Peter O'Toole becomes infatuated with a decidedly ordinary young girl? It didn't do particularly well on release (see above for oldies-bonking-is-gross theory) but it's one of my favourite films of the last few years. Beautifully performed by all, and O'Toole was robbed of his Oscar (though by Forrest Whittaker as Idi Amin, so I can't really grumble too much...)

Things I Probably Should Have Mentioned Earlier...

I've been in Dorset all week. I thought I'd have internet access there but the significant cable I ordered from Ebay didn't arrive in time. Back to normal frequency from tomorrow (for a fortnight at least.)

Also: I missed my nephew before he went off for his summer holiday so he hasn't listened to his CD yet...

Ultimate Mix Tape: Final Version

Changes marked with stars. I would have done a swap of I'm Only Sleeping for Paperback Writer too but I've been out of town reading and now I've got a cold, so have had neither the time nor the energy to chase down a copy. And anyway, what kid doesn't empathise with a song about not wanting to be woken up in the morning?

1. Space Oddity - David Bowie
2. Tell Me Why I Don't Like Mondays - Boomtown Rats
3. Alright - Supergrass
4. Park Life - Blur
5. Brown Sugar - The Rolling Stones
6. Common People - Pulp*
7. Hanging on the Telephone - Blondie
8. Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
9. Psycho Killer - Talking Heads
10. The Lovecats - The Cure*
11. Take Me Out - Franz Ferdinand
12. I Fought The Law - The Clash
13. Baggy Trousers - Madness*
14. Signed, Sealed, Delivered - Stevie Wonder
15. Surfin' USA - The Beach Boys
16. Subterranean Homesick Blues - Bob Dylan*
17. The Boxer - Simon & Garfunkel
18. I'm Only Sleeping - The Beatles
19. Me and Bobby McGee - Janis Joplin
20. Teenage Kicks - The Undertones
21. Another Brick In The Wall - Pink Floyd

You'll note I cheated and squeezed in an extra song (Lovecats) by substituting the shorter 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' for 'Mr Tambourine Man'. No more time for more changes, I'm leaving for Dorset tomorrow with gift in tow. I'll try to get a report back from the nephew in question of what he thought.