I'm loving Heat's current tagline:

"Easier to carry than the internet".

Why I hate Ryanair, in detail.

Last time I flew on Ryanair I swore I would never do it again. It was a bank holiday, and they only had one check-in person on the desk. We had to queue for over an hour just to drop out bags off - we'd "checked in" online, whatever that means when you don't get a seat allocation and you have to queue to leave your bags anyway - and then we had to run to the departure desk, to queue again, to be allowed onto the hideously decorated, cramped and uncomfortable plane, with no seat allocations, which meant lots of begging other passengers to swap with us so we could sit with my nephews ago 4 and 2, because Ryanair don't let parents traveling with kids board first. I think you can buy priority boarding but it was too late for us to do that because it took us so long to "not" check in. Then of course there are all the extra charges for food and drink and so on. While we were on the plane my sister told me that you have to pay to use the loo, and I believed her. But it was just a joke. Or at least, it was just a joke until now.

If you follow this link you can see the head of Ryanair talking to the BBC about his plans to charge passengers £1 to use the toilet on the plane. I'd embed the clip, but BBC clips start automatically and the last thing I want is Michael O'Leary's demonic voice every time someone comes to this blog. You'll note that he couches this £1 charge as a saving, because all O'Leary wants to do is to keep the cost of air travel down, by increasing "discretionary charges". Going to the loo is discretionary, don't you know. It's something you can choose not to do. Like checking in, or having luggage, or taking your child's carseat with you, or all the other things that Ryanair charges you extra for.

OK, it is a budget airline, and I might consider cutting it some slack if it wasn't for this. This is the recent incident where a blogger posted about an error on the Ryanair website which meant that flights came up as costing 0.00, eliciting the following charming reply from a Ryanair employee:

jason! you're an idiot and a liar!! fact is!

you've opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it! you dont get a free flight, there is no dynamic data to render which is prob why you got 0.00. what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway AND puts they're mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!

Following Jason's remarkably reasonable response, the employee returned to add:

Hehe - I found a bug that lets me show anything I want on your site.

All I have to do is put something along the lines of javascript:void(document.write('hehe')) into the address bar, and I can do whatever I want with your site ( or indeed any other site ).

I'm not sure what you think you've achieved here - that wouldn't have gotten you through to the back end. You wouldn't even have been able to enter passenger information.

You must never have seen a decent exploit, if you think this is something worth bragging about. There is another exploit you could try - wait until we're running a promotion when we give away a million odd seats for free anyway.

[Aside: free flights with Ryanair are (a) never actually free and (b) still too expensive in my book]

Pressed for comment, Ryanair released the following official statement which goes to prove that charm runs all the way through this company from the bottom to the top:

Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again.

Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.

This idiot lunatic is happy to keep the blog sphere, and to leave the skies to Ryanair. They will never, ever get any of my money ever, ever again. Not even 0.00 of it. I would rather never fly again. I HATE THEM. It is hard for me to think of a company more openly contemptuous of their customers, although if you can, feel free to use the comments to let me know.

[goes off to buy Easyjet flight for her summer holiday to France.]

Just had to share...

...this sensational (and long) article by Linda Grant on shopping.

Lipgloss Doooooooom

OK, I know that these posts are not interesting for most people. But I DON'T CARE. It's MY blog, and I am the one in LIPGLOSS DOOM. I think there is going to be more SHOUTING on this post. YES. Because I am in DESPAIR.

I've never been much of a person for make-up, but lately I have given in, because it was undeniable that wearing a bit of the stuff made me look better, and I am vain like that. So I wear Touche Eclat under my eyes, a bit of mascara and eyebrow pencil, Benetint on my cheeks, and until now I wore Clinique lipgloss most days. In fact I've been wearing the same shade of Clinique lipgloss for several years, because this particular one suits me and goes with all my clothes. Today, I popped into Selfridges to buy a new tube of it, and discovered that CLINIQUE HAVE STOPPED MAKING IT. This is a DISASTER. So I thought, sensible person that I am, well OK, I will choose the nearest shade that they have and try that. Except NOT ONLY have Clinique stopped making my favourite shade, they have also changed the CONSTITUTION of their ligloss, so that what was a nice, comfortable, easy to wear gloss is now something more akin to a coloured tube of GLUE. In the three seconds between me putting it on and me wiping it off in DISGUST, leaving my mouth looking as if I had been eating CHERRY JAM, half of my HAIR had already STUCK ITSELF to my MOUTH, AND I WAS WEARING IT BACK. My hair. Not my mouth.

So I left the shop with no lipgloss and only a week's worth left of my much-beloved one in the bottom of the tube. DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOMITY DOOM. DOOOOOOOOOOOOM. DOOM.

Ladies, and cross-dressing males. Can you help me? I need a nice, comfortable, non-sticky, non-gluey, coloured gloss, ideally in a plum shade. I am less concerned with durability than with it not welding my hair to my lips every time I go out on a breezy day. Please. Even Obi Wan Kinobe can't help me now.

New Favourite Edition of Gods Behaving Badly:

Hebrew. Same image as UK hardback. Front cover on the "back". Lettering so baffling I can't tell which is my name and which is the title.

Yearly Starchy Fun

Just back from a late night eating pancakes on account of it being Pancake Day, or at least it was when we started eating the pancakes earlier on. To my astonishment two of the guests at the feast were American and revealed that not only do they not celebrate Pancake Day in the US, but they had never even heard of it. Then the New Zealander flatmate of the host turned up halfway through the evening and said that she hadn't heard of it before either.

And there was me thinking that Pancake Day was a universal feast, like Christmas! It's not like Thanksgiving or Guy Fawkes or Australia Day or that thing where the Spanish get chased through the streets by bulls. It's the global day of pancake love before Lent! Or if not global, at the very least pan-Christian, no pun intended.

But apparently the rest of the world is being deprived their yearly starchy fun. Help me out here, non-British readers. Do you celebrate Pancake Day? And if not, would you like to start, from next Shrove Tuesday? It's really very simple:

1. Wait until Shrove Tuesday.
2. Eat pancakes. (And by pancakes, I mean crepes, oh ye of the US.)

What on earth have you been holding back for all this time? You don't even need to be chased through the streets by bulls!

This Play Is Not Grim

As promised, my interview with playwright Stephen Brown, author of Future Me.

'I was on the edge of my seat!' - Time Out

'Unexpected, peppery humour' - London Metro

'Packed with ironies and funny lines' - San Francisco Weekly

'Informative, creepy, humane, thought provoking and riveting' - San Franscisco Chronicle

And that's just the play! Imagine how good the interview's going to be.

MP: Tell me about Future Me.

SB: Future Me is about a successful young barrister who gets sent to prison for sex offences. It follows him over five years, into prison and back out again. It shows you all the people around him – his girlfriend and his brother and the people he meets in prison – and the effects of what he did and how he changes on them as well. And it’s about a number of different things; it’s about sex and compulsion and desire, and it’s about change, and just what does it mean to say ‘I can’t change’ or ‘I have changed’, and how would you prove it – how would it be possible to prove it. It’s about how we as a society think about our monsters, and about the collision between our desire to forgive people or to let people have a second chance and our visceral reaction to certain kinds of crime – to horrific crimes that turn our stomach.

MP: Most people would expect to identify with the other characters in the play, with the victim or the family, but in Future Me, you’re also encouraged to identify with the protagonist, which is more unusual.

SB: The most complex and exciting and testing relationship within the whole play is the relationship between the audience and the characters on stage. Half the characters of the play are sex offenders and you’re actually, in different ways, sympathetic to all of them, even though you’re simultaneously invited to judge them and to question what they’ve done and whether they’re able to change. And so the play works by giving people a very complex experience of identification.

MP: What was that like for you as a writer?

SB: One of the things that I’ve learned from writing it is that you can write about anything if you want to. You can take your imagination into places that are extremely dark. Writing the play took me on a difficult personal journey into a world that was quite disturbing. But then that’s the point of the play. It’s easy to pontificate about justice or mercy or what it would be like to have committed a crime or to want to commit a crime, but the nature of a play is to take the audience on an experience where they’re at ground level with those questions and living them with the characters. The play puts you right in those people’s world. And it shows you them struggling with who they are and what they are and what they’ve done.

MP: It’s a play about sex offenders but it’s also a play about temptation and self-control and about the dark side of anyone, and I think most people will find it an uncomfortable watch, because we all know what it’s like to want to do something that you know you shouldn’t do.

SB: There are two ways of looking at deviant or criminal behaviour. One of them is to separate those people off and view them as abnormal and try to put them in a different box, as another type of human being, and the other way, which is my way, is to view everyone as being on a continuum. For me, the really interesting thing writing the play was to say simultaneously that these are human beings like us, who have their attractive aspects so we sort of like them, and at the same time, not to tell lies about the reality of what they’ve done. It’s very easy to make somebody who’s done something awful attractive by minimising what they’ve actually done, but the play is very, very clear that certain kinds of behaviour are really damaging to the victims and are wrong.

MP: People think you either condemn or you understand, and that understanding is condoning, but I think you can condemn and understand at the same time.

SB: That divide, or that contradiction, is just where justice lives. Justice means that, over and over again, you need to make a judgement which in some sense is impossible.

MP: Why did you call the play Future Me?

SB: Future Me is a phrase taken from a therapy programme that is given to sex offenders in British prisons, in which the prisoners are invited to list the characteristics of their Old Me, while they were still offending, and then list the characteristics of their Future Me. The whole play, in a sense, is about whether the central character has a Future Me. People who’ve committed sex offenses end up in a position where, like alcoholics, you’re never not an alcoholic. It’s always there within you. And so you can never really enter into the future. You’re always facing the future but always on the brink of your past as well.

MP: The play is quite funny, which people might not expect from everything else that you’ve said.

SB: The humour just developed naturally. I wanted to do something where it wasn’t po-faced because I don’t think life is po-faced, and I think life is particularly not po-faced when it is dealing with serious things. If you go into prisons and talk to the people you meet there, you find this massive streak of black humour, and that was certainly true in the prisons I went into, amongst the prison officers and probation officers and psychologists and so on who were dealing day to day with people who had done, in some cases, really appalling things. Equally, if you make a child abuser into this incredibly shadowy, terrifying figure who’s the bogeyman, it dehumanises them, and somehow at the same time reinforces their power over the people they abuse, whereas the reality of these people is that they do terrible things and they’re also slightly absurd and laughable. A lot of these guys are fundamentally emotionally immature, and there’s a lot of comedy in that, but it’s dark, edgy comedy.

MP: The play doesn’t take the tone you’d expect. It’s not hysterical, it’s not a heavy, miserable experience. A lot of people will think ‘why would I want to go and see a play about sex offenders?’

SB: It is funny, and it’s also exciting. It’s a bit like a thriller, there’s a lot of jeopardy. One of the characters is basically trying to save the other character, and it’s a tense and exciting story. Guy Retallack, who’s directing it for this tour, said, ‘One of the things I say to the actors is that this play is about anything that’s unspeakable.’ It’s about secrets, about people dealing with things that they find at the edges of what they can talk about, and how difficult that is. The play observes how people deal with these extreme pressures. That’s making it sound terribly, terribly grim.

MP: It’s all right, I won’t make it sound grim.

SB: Edit that out. Just put in loads of jokes.


***Ticket Giveaway***
Stephen Brown and Scott Davison Productions are offering three pairs of tickets free, to any performance. The only condition is that you review Future Me on your blog or website, ideally before the run ends... If you want to take part, e-mail me on strugglingauthor at tiscali dot co dot uk.

Future Me is touring the UK:

New Greenham Arts, Newbury
Tuesday 24 February
01635 522733 / www.cornexchangenew.com

Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry
Wednesday 25 – Thursday 26 February
024 7652 4524 / www.warwickartscentre.co.uk

The Lowry, Salford
Monday 2 – Tuesday 3 March
0870 787 5780 / www.thelowry.com

Theatre Royal, York
Thursday 12 – Saturday 14 March
01904 623568 / www.yorktheatreroyal.co.uk

Burton Taylor Studio at Oxford Playhouse
Thursday 26 – Saturday 28 March
01865 305 305 / www.oxfordplayhouse.com/BurtonTaylor

Only Connect, London
1-26 April 2009
0845 370 7990 / www.onlyconnectuk.org

Further details available from www.scottdavisonproductions.com

Please note that the play is suitable for ages 15+ only.

What A Feeling

For everyone who missed this last night, including those in foreign parts who may not know who Robert Webb is or what the hell he might have been doing on Let's Dance For Comic Relief, or indeed what Comic Relief is...



I laughed so much I cried. And then I couldn't get to sleep til 3.30am because I couldn't get the theme from Flashdance out of my head.

Make a donation to Comic Relief here.

PS If anyone finds the one with the intro as well, please let me know and I will swap them.

Future Blog

On Monday, I am going to be posting an interview I did with Stephen Brown, the hot (in every sense, ladies) young (well, youngish - sorry Stephen) playwright whose brilliant play Future Me is about to embark on a UK tour. You should totally read that interview, not least because it took me forever to transcribe and edit down - seriously - about six hours, because I had to cut out exchanges like this one:

MP: I think, from the perspective of, obviously I’ve seen it, and I’ve read bits of it since it was on.
SB: In preparation.
MP: In my in-depth research.
SB: You can edit this.
MP: That’s just what I was thinking. Because I’ve done a lot of these for radio, so I forgot, OK, this isn’t going out on the radio. I just have to listen to it over and over, hideously. I’m very self-conscious, as if someone -
SB: You’re not going to use very much are you?
MP: Well, I’ll edit it down. I haven’t quite decided how to do it. I haven’t decided whether to do it QA QA or to write a piece with some answers in it.
SB: Will it be like: he was wearing a teal jumper…
MP: The fascinating but enigmatic Stephen Brown…
SB: Overweight.
MP: [laughs]

I mean, I could have left them in, which might have made for a very entertaining interview, except it would have been over 4,000 words long. Plus the play is about sex offenders. So it was important to, shall we say, calibrate the tone.

Anyway, the interview is still pretty long so I thought I'd give you a bit more info about the play today, in advance, a trailer if you will, and also so Monday's post doesn't collapse under its own weight.

Here's the official blurb:

Peter often works late. A promising young barrister, he's about to move in with his girlfriend. Then one day his computer sends out an email to everyone he knows, with an attachment that no one can bear to look at.

From the strange alliances of a prison segregation unit, to the trials of life on the outside, Future Me tells an epic story of ordinary monsters.

It's OK blurb. I don't think it's enough to get me to go see the play. So I am going to add, what this play is really about is: what would it be like if one of your perfectly normal-seeming mates - or your brother, or your boyfriend - turned out to be a paedophile? More to the point, what if you were the one who was trying to be perfectly normal when deep down you knew that you were a paedophile?

You totally want to see this play now, right? And you should. It's shocking and exciting and clever and thought-provoking and a lot funnier than you might expect. But why listen to me when you could listen to The Guardian or The Stage or Metro, or Time Out, who gave it four stars and made it Critic's Choice, only I can't find the review online.

Anyway, on Monday I will be posting my interview with Stephen Brown and giving details of when the play is on, how you can buy tickets or, if you are really lucky, win some.

The Woman Who Talked Too Much Book Club

Claire in Sydney has seconded a Woman Who Talked Too Much Book Club and so a Woman Who Talked Too Much Book Club we will have. We don't care if it's just the two of us, because we can have plenty of intellectual discussion by ourselves. But obviously, we would totally love it if more people joined in.

It's going to be a bit experimental because I have no idea how to run a book club on a blog, but for now I'm going to say let's meet back here on the third Thursday of every month ('cause it's the third Thursday today, no other reason) and chat in the comments about the book we have been reading. This month we are reading Ali and Nino by Kurban Said...


...and we will be discussing it on Thursday March 19th. People in other time zones will have to wait until I get up. You will be allowed to carry on commenting after Thursday 19th. It won't be a very strict book club. I think I will probably be quite strict about book choices though, because the one thing I hate about book clubs is being made to read books that I don't want to read. So chances are that in the WWTTMBC the book of the month will be whatever I happen to be reading anyway. Hey, it's my club. And so it will be a very small book choice dictatorship. But that's OK. It's a benign dictatorship. No secret police (well, I would say that...) And I will take reading suggestions from the floor. Plus one of the things that isn't strict about the book club is you don't have to finish the book, or even read the book, or even say anything, if you don't want to. You can still eavesdrop on the conversation. It's just for fun. In the way that all dictatorships are fun one way or another (eg outfits) (the WWTTMBC will not have a special outfit) (not yet anyway).

Are you in?