Marie, why aren't you blogging that much these days?

Because my second novel is bleeding my creativity dry. In a nice way. Like a friendly vampire.

But also because I've been moonlighting. You can find me guest posting over at Facegoop, the internet's newest and best makeup and products website in which we can eavesdrop as two fabulous women, one of whom is aka the splendide Belgian Waffling, talk to each other about smearing Chilean snail slime on their faces (actual example). My post was about Nuxe lip balm and I will soon be updating as I try the brand new Rouge Charismatic colour and discover that it has literally doubled my charisma with one application.

You should be reading Facegoop every day even if you don't wear make-up. You really should.

Music Monday

Woke up this morning feeling as if I had barely slept, after a particularly egregious "I have to do my A levels again" dream, which I am now having a couple of times a week. Every time it is exhausting as I explain that I've already done my A levels and have been to university twice, so surely I don't actually have to do them again, and this is just like that dream where I have to do my A levels again. A brief stand back from my life reveals that it is in fact an awful lot like having to do my A levels over and over (second novel syndrome anyone?) so I suppose it isn't that surprising. More surprising was the friend who recently revealed that she too has the dream about having to do her A levels again, only she never actually did A levels.

On the theme of revisiting childhood, this week's Music Monday is Shirley Ellis performing The Clapping Song with some fabulous 1960s Breton top-wearing backing dancers. Shirley's dancing is slightly less enthusiastic...

Music Monday

Did you think I had forgotten? I had not forgotten. I did, however, spend this morning looking after my four-year-old nephew, who, while behaving angelically, is nevertheless a four year old nephew, therefore finding time to breathe started to look like a stretch. But I am here now.

I have spent the last few days pruning my iTunes and have noticed a few things. Things like:

- thanks to (the fabulous) Songlines Magazine I have a gigantic World Music collection that I mostly uploaded onto my iTunes without listening to first. I have now listened to it all. I adore most of it. I really, really don't adore some of it. Some of it sounds like people tuning their instruments, doing the washing up, and wailing from toothache all at the same time. But I love most of the African, the South American, the Caribbean, the folk and the klezmer (I seem to have more klezmer music than someone who's only slightly Jewish, and the wrong kind of Jewish at that, could ever require.) I do not like the sitar music and anything with that loud reedy wind thing in it (Turkish?) Much World Music rap makes my ears bleed. The extra free CD of South African music from a year or two ago is brilliant. The extra free CD of Danish music is not. Sorry, Denmark.

- I don't 80s funk any more.

- Ditto Acid Jazz.

- I still feel bad about buying the substandard Kristen Hirsch solo CD I've been trying to like for fifteen years. And the rubbish Beck album which managed to be the only one I own - and all the others are good. And that Jimi Tenor one I got because my boyfriend liked it. I didn't. £10 that I spent in the year 2000 and still it haunts me.

Not all Jimi Tenor is bad though. Here's 'Sugardaddy'. No video. Just listen to it through your headphones. It is as good as an autobiographical song about being a Finnish male prostitute can be.

The Little Dog Laughed - but did I?

Remember when those lovely people at Arthur Leone PR gave me tickets for Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story On Stage, and all I had to do in return was pen my thoughts on it for this here blog? And remember how I did pen my thoughts on it for this here blog? Well, they've done it again. Last night I and a distinguished older gentleman who may or may not have been my father (I mean, I know whether or not he was my father, as does he, but I'm keeping him anonymous for the purposes of this review) were the guests of Arthur Leone PR at 'The Little Dog Laughed'. I can only assume one of the following:

- The people at Arthur Leone PR have very short memories;
- The people at Arthur Leone PR never actually read my review of Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story On Stage;
- The people at Arthur Leone PR are very confident about the quality of The Little Dog Laughed;
or
- The people at Arthur Leone PR are of the belief that all publicity is good publicity.

Let's find out, shall we?

Weeeeeeeeell... Oh I can't be bothered to draw out the suspense. It was brilliant.

The Little Dog Laughed is the story of a Hollywood Agent, Diane (Tamsin Grieg) who wants to score a lead role for her client, Mitchell (Rupert Friend) in the film adaptation of a hot new Broadway play. The only catch is that the role is of a gay man... and Mitchell is gay. Doesn't sound like a problem? In Hollywood it is. "If a perceived straight actor portrays a gay role in a feature film, it’s noble. It’s a stretch. It’s the pretty lady putting on the fake nose and winning an Oscar. If an actor with a ’friend’ plays a gay role it’s not acting, it’s bragging." So says Diane, a lesbian herself, who is determined to keep Mitchell firmly in the closet. But things get complicated when Mitchell falls in love with rent boy Alex (Harry Lloyd, channeling a young John Barrowman in this performance). Alex isn't gay - he's got a girlfriend to prove it (Gemma Arterton.) But then Alex finds himself enjoying Mitchell's company more than he expected...

The jewel in the crown of this production is Tamsin Grieg, who despite taking the role of cold, Machiavellian Diane, hams it up with gleeful hilarity, pulling the audience in with her from the very first words. It's almost a pantomime villain role and Grieg is fantastically over the top with it, ensuring that for all the dark twists the story takes, we never lose sight of the fun. Friend, Lloyd and Arterton are less experienced stage performers and suffer a little in comparison - Friend a little hyperactive, Arterton a little difficult to believe in - but they're still solid enough, and all stunning eye candy to look at. We get to look at them an awful lot, and it would be dishonest of me not to mention quite how much I enjoyed the fact that Friend and Lloyd spend much of the play showing off their perfect bodies in very small, tight underpants, and once without even those. I am so glad I went with a distinguished older gentleman who may or may not be my father. (Distinguished gentlemen and lesbians of all ages can enjoy eyeing the beautiful Arterton, and Grieg for that matter, though neither are quite as scantily-clad, so it's equal-opportunities ogling.)

Great performances aside, it's a sharp, funny script by Douglas Carter Beane with plenty of quotable lines ("Give a writer final cut? I'd sooner give firearms to small children"), snappily directed by Jamie Lloyd, and though some reviews have dismissed it as inconsequential, I'd say that the issue of gay actors not being able to come out in Hollywood is important - as with football and the American military, it's wrong when any profession forces people to live a lie. The programme quotes Rupert Everett, one of Hollywood's few openly gay stars, rarely cast in straight roles and lately reduced to a drag part in St Trinians, saying "I would not advise any actor necessarily, if he was really thinking of his career, to come out... the fact of the matter is, and I don't care who disagrees, it doesn't work if you're gay." Or as the play puts it, "Are you British? Do you have a knighthood? Then shut up."

The Little Dog Laughs is not on for long - it closes on April 10th - so if you fancy a joyfully entertaining night out I would advise that you book straight away.

Music Monday

It's a new feature. Completely different from Big Mouth's Song for Sunday. Because it's Monday, innit.

You know this one already, but it's what I had going round my head walking into work this morning. Unusual choice for a Monday morning maybe, but it's a beautiful day and I love my new office and the book is going well, so here it is. I think Tamara Connolly has done a lovely job making a video for it too.

Nina Simone, Feeling Good:

Weeks later...

...and I'm still obsessed with this:



I'm so up to date. In about two months I'll blog about how cool it was that The Hurt Locker swept the board at the Oscars.

Most disingenuous advert ever:

The 8-second demo for Internet 8 where the man says that if you are shopping for an anniversary present for your wife, you can switch to keeping your browser history secret, so she'll never find out.

Yes. That's the web browsing men want to keep secret from their wives. The fact that they're shopping for jewellery for them.

In which it doesn't rain and everything goes back to normal.

I have a guilty secret - well, I have a few guilty secrets, let's not go into them all. The one I am going to reveal today is that pretty much every Sunday night I watch Lark Rise to Candleford.

Lark Rise, for those unacquainted with it, is an Edwardian-era costume drama of such surpassing gentleness that the experience of watching it is like lying in a bath of cotton wool being fed candyfloss by your grandmother. It makes Cranford look like The Wire. If that doesn't sound like a good thing, that's because I am not quite sure it is a good thing. And yet I watch it, every week.

Lark Rise is a show in which nothing happens, set in a sepia-tinted corner of the West Country* in which it never rains. In fact, were it to rain in Lark Rise, that would be an episode's-worth of drama all in itself, as the yokels of Candleford come out of their picturesque hovels to stare in awe at the water coming down, and a mysterious umbrella-seller comes to town and flirts with Dorcas the postmistress to the envy of Miss Pratt, and at the end of the episode it stops raining and the umbrella-seller leaves and everything goes back to normal because everything always goes back to normal at the end of Lark Rise to Candleford.

Think I'm exaggerating? Here is a list of everything that happened - and I use the word "happened" loosely - in last night's episode of Lark Rise.

1. Daniel and Thomas (two adult men) got competitive over a game of conkers.
2. Thomas bought his wife some new wool underwear, but it was itchy.
3. A new seamstress came to town and scandalised the locals by wearing trousers. She then left town again and moved to America.
4. A goose came to town. Sydney (a child) got emotionally attached to the goose. The goose then left town again, possibly to move to America (not specified).
5. Laura and Minnie (two adult women) used numerology to try to figure out how suited they were to their menfolk.
6. Dorcas got a new stove. It didn't work.
7. It didn't rain.
8. Everything went back to normal.

I once heard that looking at penguins is as effective as taking Prozac for warding off depression. In which case looking at Lark Rise to Candleford is like taking Valium. I suspect that I will be watching again next week. Laura's mother is getting a job as a teacher. It won't rain.

*I stand corrected. North Oxfordshire, apparently - thank you, Baroness Black - but if you are guessing from the accents you might think otherwise. Or for that matter "otherwoise".

Because I Am A Girl

Updating my website mariephillips.co.uk - which is pretty awful, by the way, mostly because I designed and maintain it myself, and I'm not exactly an expert at that kind of thing, and I sort of can't be bothered, ahem... The plan is to redo it when my next book comes out ("when", not "if", ever the optimist). Well, anyway: updating it, I realised I had completely forgotten to mention that I have a new publication out and an event to support it. (That's an event in addition to the flourishing Bookswap, every third Thursday of the month at the Windsor Firestation. It's £5 to get in and I believe we are the only literary event to let you in for free if you bring a home-baked cake. But moving on.)

The piece in question is called 'Change' and you can find it in the Plan International / Vintage anthology Because I am a Girl.

(I notice Amazon are selling it at a discount. Hmm. All the profits go to Plan, so...)

'Change' is an account of my visit to Uganda to witness Plan International's work there. Without wishing to spoil the story, I was so appalled, and say as much, that Plan had to publish an official retraction straight after my piece in the book. There's a cracking review of it over here - thank you, Independent on Sunday.

What's that? You want an extract, you say? Oh god, I'm probably not allowed. But here you go, as long as you promise to buy the book. It's my first day in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, and I have been taken to visit a project which works with prostitutes there:

The streets of Kampala are not a safe place to sell sex. The women complained of rape from clients, rape from the police who periodically round them up to clean up the streets. Then there are the other risks, notably from HIV and AIDS. Condom use is not popular amongst johns in Uganda, and even if the prostitutes insist on it, it’s easy to get around the issue by insisting on sex in a dark corner and then lying about the condom. And anyway, as one pointed out: “You can get a man to use a condom but you are still a sex worker.” These are not happy hookers. The only time anybody laughed was when my Plan chaperone mentioned the Dutch model of legalised and regulated brothels, which reduced the entire group to hysterics.

The Moonlight Stars project aims to provide sex workers with healthcare - AIDS tests, condoms and so on - as well as training and financial support to help them set up their own businesses outside the sex industry, such as baking or hairdressing. But the funding has run out. So while Moonlight Stars aims to provide healthcare, financial support and training, what it actually provides is “outreach”. I asked the women what outreach is. They told me that it’s going out and telling other prostitutes about what Moonlight Stars aims to provide. It’s not my last encounter with “outreach” in Uganda. This is probably the right place to mention: outreach is cheap.

Before we left, the women asked us to give them money for the project. We explained that it doesn’t work that way, that we have to report back to Plan in London who make the funding decisions. They were not impressed. In my notes I have written: “I felt as if they were thinking: who the fuck are you and what are you here for if you’re not going to give us any money?”

Cheerful stuff, as you can see. The talk's on Thursday March 4th at Central United Reformed Church, Grove St, Bath, 6.15pm, £7 / £6 concessions, and my fellow speakers will be Deborah Moggach and Xiaolu Guo. You can get more info and buy tickets here. It should be an interesting, challenging, controversial evening. Hope to see some of you there.

It's a niece!

Followers of my sister's blog Blogzambique will be pleased to hear that baby Eva arrived this morning, a week early, healthy and happy with lots of dark hair. I haven't met her yet so I don't have any pictures, but in the meantime, I'm stealing this cute shot from Rebecca's blog of the baby clothes waiting for their new owner: