Out of blog auto-reply

Marie is on holiday. She'll be back at the beginning of August. If anything interesting happens while she's gone, just pop it in the comments, there's a lamb*. Thanks.

*It's just an expression. There is no lamb.

Alternative

Don't read my blog today. Read Robert Hudson guest blogging on Me And My Big Mouth. It is an inspiring photo essay which will blow your mind, and teach you to make better coleslaw, which won't be hard: coleslaw is the finely-shredded food of the devil. I need to go and wash my tongue just from thinking about it.

Music Monday on a Tuesday

I wasn't here yesterday to do Music Monday on yer actual Monday as I was in transit from a (lovely, sunny) long weekend on Dorset's beaches. On the way home I was listening to my iTrip* (*not actually an iTrip but some ultracheap knockoff I bought off Amazon which just about transmits to my radio if they are within no more than two inches of one another, but hey, that'll do) and reflecting on how, when we used to drive to Dorset as a family, we would listen to only the following tapes ever, for as long as I can remember throughout my entire childhood:

- the Muppet tape - an distinctive olive green tape with songs and skits from the Muppet Show on it (good grief the comedian's a bear!)
- Ella Fitzgerald's Greatest Hits
- Louis Armstrong's greatest hits
- Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits
- the Bubbling Brown Sugar original cast recording

And that's it, for well over a decade. I think you could probably trace all of my musical preferences and half of my personality back to that very list. (I will no doubt be returning to one or more of the above for future Music Mondays.)

That's all very well, I hear you say, but it would be helpful for us to judge your taste, not to mention your sanity, if we knew what Bubbling Brown Sugar is.

I'm so glad you asked. Bubbling Brown Sugar is a musical set in a nightclub in Harlem from the 1920s to the 1940s and features songs from artists including Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, Count Basie, Cab Calloway and Fats Waller, which played in London in 1977, the year after I was born. I nver actually saw it, but I can probably do the entire album by heart - not necessarily in any way that another human being might enjoy, mind you - and when I was very small, my favourite song was called 'Strollin'. The singer said that in order to be cool you had to stroll, and in order to stroll you had to "walk with your left leg dipping a bit, resembling a limp". I thought this sounded like a great idea, so that's exactly what I did. All the time. Without telling anybody. I was three. My mother thought that I had orthopedic problems and nearly took me to see a specialist, except that I got bored of doing it just in time.

Here's a bit of Bubbling Brown Sugar performed on a Dutch TV gala a few years ago. No strolling, alas.

Bookswap Preview

Next Thursday is our regular Firestation Bookswap night and for once I have actually been sent the books far enough in advance to do a proper preview. Previous bookswap authors look away now... Gone? OK. The rest of you, usually I get the books so late I have to finish them on the train to Windsor. OK bookswap authors, you can look back now.

First up, we have Aliya Whiteley, author of Light Reading. Light Reading is a murder mystery - or is it? - in which two neglected air force wives stave off boredom and try to avoid thinking about their own problems by investigating a suspicious suicide in a sinister seaside resort. The cover, with its "A Lena and Pru Mystery!" sticker, makes it look like cheerful but conventional fun, but it's far darker and more unusual than that, and actually I can't figure out whether of the book's being missold or I'm missing the irony of the packaging. A question I'll be putting to Aliya.

Joining Aliya will be Bronia Kita, whose Wild West novel The Swansong of Wilbur McCrum reads like a cross between Forrest Gump and Little House on the Prairie. Wilbur McCrum, a cow-phobic, fit-ridden outlaw, narrates his peripatetic life story from the bottom of a well, where he is drowning after trying to escape a vengeful posse while disguised in women's clothes. No need to say more - that's a premise which sells itself.

STOP PRESS. At this point I wrote a whole lot of information which is now completely inaccurate. Like, as of five minutes after I posted. And which I will now delete. So I started off by saying that we're doing a bookswap at the London Review Bookshop on Thursday August 5th, which is still true, and then -

la la la la la la la -

He'll

[but who? The author who isn't coming, that's who. For entirely respectable reasons, I should add]

be joined by James Miller, whose book I don't yet have, but whose website promises the following:

Other than writing, my main passion is Jamaican and African-American music. I have a ridiculous collection of reggae, dub, dancehall, soul, blues and gospel music. My other obsessions include drinking coffee, wandering around London, going to Italy and taking pictures of buildings. I'm also interested in Civil Rights history, psycho-analysis, post-colonial theory, anti-capitalist protest, Middle East politics, Modern, pre-Raphaelite and Renaissance art, mega-cities and anything that might offer an insight into our present postmodern nightmare.

He doesn't mention cake. But clearly a man with plenty to talk about.

I think the LRB event is going to be fantastic, but please, please book ahead - I am fairly certain it will sell out. The event's not on their website quite yet (at time of writing anyway) but you could try calling them on 020 7269 9030. (Usual bookswap rules of free entry for those who bring home-baked cake will apply.)

Rafael Nadal's hungry bum

During the Wimbledon final on Sunday I'd estimate that my mother and I spent about three-quarters of the match discussing Rafael Nadal's bum. (My father maintained a dignified silence.) My mother's point was that surely a man with the wealth and profile of Rafael Nadal can afford to buy a pair of shorts or underpants that fits. I countered that Rafael Nadal has an unusually round, pert bottom that may be particularly, ah, hungry, as it were. My mother reiterated her original point. I said that perhaps Nadal, filled as he clearly is with nervous energy, plucks his bum as a kind of nervous tic, along with fiddling with his hairband and that cute little run he does to the baseline. He certainly does pluck his bum often enough - at least once before every point, just about, or say (with a guesstimate average of 6 points per game, 31 games in the match) about 186 times over the course of the match. Even more when he had to do a second serve.

I still love him. We've been over the Dogtanian thing, haven't we? My mother found time, in amongst the bum talk, to posit that he looks even more like Hong Kong Phooey:



Let's have a poll:

poll by twiigs.com

Music Monday on a Monday

A return for Music Monday, the much-loved feature that never gets a single comment, presumably because you are all in so much awe of it that you can find no words to say. And a very special Music Monday it is too, celebrating the reprieve of BBC6 Music from the champing jaws of BBC cuts. It is indeed a joyful day for thirtysomething Guardian-reading music snobs everywhere. Thirtysomething Guardian-reading music snobs like me. Hurrah!

I've noticed lately that everywhere I go and everything I do I am so in the middle of my demographic that I may as well sport a giant hat with the word AVERAGE on it, only that would actually make me not average. I doubt that anybody at any of the music events I attend doesn't read the Guardian or have an iPhone. I run into friends of mine wherever I go, from Jose Gonzales at the Festival Hall (he was pure genius, and I ran into my friend the literary agent there) to the Hay festival (everyone from primary school friend, the children's book author, to the co-godparent of my documentary-maker friend's baby - I put in the jobs here so you can see how smug and middle class boho it all is.) Even where I don't know people, everyone looks like they could be a friend of mine, if only I actually knew them. A while ago I went to see an avant-garde music event in a condemned warehouse in Kings Cross and took some pictures of the cellist on my iPhone. Last week I was doing a literary event with the writer Tim Coates, whom I'd never met before, and it turned out the cellist was his son. On Saturday night I went to Kenwood House to see Rufus Wainwright. King and Queen posh boho, Tim Burton and Helena Bonham-Carter were in attendance. I used to serve them when I worked at Daunt Books; H B-C went to my school. Afterwards, I told my parents how brilliant Rufus was, and they said they already knew - they'd been performed to by him at the American Embassy, at a private reception with 150 guests. I am so far from the cutting edge I have fallen off the handle.

Perhaps I should be depressed at being so very predictable, but I'm quite happy really. I've found the bit of life that I like, the bit which makes me feel like I'm hip without actually having to hang out with teenagers. Guess which festival I'm going to this summer. Go on, guess. That's right. Latitude. OK, so I'm either turning into Helena Bonham-Carter or into my mum - probably just depends on which haircut I get. Either way I'm quite contended. And now even my perfect radio station has been preserved for my listening pleasure. Could it be that I have found my niche, and that niche is marked "self-consciously cool but ultimately safe author in early middle age"? Who on earth thought there'd be so many of us?

Whatever. Here's some Rufus Wainwright.

In which I arrange a marriage

A stirrup, yesterday.

Today the firewall goes up on the Times, and I am celebrating the day on my STILL FREE blog by launching yet another of my doomed attempts to blog more often than once a week and about more than Doctor Who and Strictly Come Dancing. We shall see.

Anyway, it seems apt to begin this doomed attempt - what do you mean, "self-fulfilling prophecy?" - by commenting on something I read in yesterday's Times, which I bought specifically for the Eureka magazine inside, and which did not actually come with a Eureka magazine inside, and if I want to read the Eureka magazine online I now have to pay to do so. Anyway. No point linking to the piece as it is NO LONGER FREE, but it was their write-up of the case about whether troops still have human rights in war zones. (Apparently they do not.)

I'm sure that I am not the first to mention the glorious name of the outgoing Chief of the Defense Staff, Air Chief Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup. There are simply not enough people on this planet called things like Air Chief Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup and I fear those that are left will soon die out. Unless - UNLESS - Air Chief Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup were to marry the lawyer representing the complainant in this case, the admirably named Jocelyn Cockburn. Yes, people: *they were involved in the same case*. Their eyes will have met across a crowded courtroom, he on one side, she, literally and figuratively on the other, and yet joined by the force of nomenclature that no man can tear asunder...

Surely love must follow. And as we all know from our close study of the Bard, first comes love, then comes marriage, and then comes the baby in the baby carriage. Surely the world deserves nothing less than Air Chief Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup-Cockburn and Lady Jocelyn Stirrup-Cockburn and their children The Honourable Jack and Alfred "Hitchcock" Stirrup-Cockburn.

You know, I think my dad might have been one of the judges on this case. I'm going to MAKE IT HAPPEN.

Hang on. Would Cockburn-Stirrup be better?

Doctor Who: The Big Bang and full series review

So hurrah, it wasn't an RTD-style apocalyptic wig-out, nor was it All A Dream! In fact it was very good. In brief: the universe has ended and the Earth is the last to go (please switch off the lights). The doctor, freed from the Pandorica, hatches a plan to save space and time, but at the expense not only of his own life but the very fact of his having existed at all. Fortunately Amy can bring people back by the power of her mind, so as long as she can remember the Doctor everything will be OK. But can she? Well, what do you reckon? The man spent half of this episode in a fez. Who'd forget that?

This was not an episode to please those who like to think too deeply. Those, for example, who might think "if the Doctor has never existed, surely the Earth wouldn't have survived long enough for Amy to reach her wedding day and remember him back to life, because [insert any of the gazillion times the Doctor has saved the planet over the years before now] would never have happened". Or those who might get deeply irritated that, having set up the Pandorica as the greatest prison ever created, the Doctor manages to get out by a whimsical piece of timey wimey trickery involving being saved by sending his saved self back in time to hand over the screwdriver to Rory. And for anybody who prefers proper science to "er, Amy's only half dead and when she sees herself as a kid it'll be fine, and as for the universe, when the light from the thingy goes onto the whatsit, everything will be OK", well, fergeddaboutit.

Hmm. I seem to be talking myself out of liking this. But come on Marie, who cares? This isn't 'Horizon'. It was clever and neat and it had junior Amy Pond in it - I LOVE junior Amy Pond (Caitlin Blackwood) and desperately hope there will be more of her next season - and the Doctor in a fez! (OK so River and Amy destroy the fez, but as he says, he can buy another fez. Do it, Doctor.) There was lots of peril and a fossilised Dalek and antics in a museum, which is a good place for Doctory antics to take place, and River Song - with more River Song to come - god I love River Song, I want to be River Song when I grow up - and when the Doctor finally went back over his life as he made his way out of history, it was all rather understated and nicely done, and turns out whoever brought it up in the comments was right, that WASN'T a jacket-based continuity error in the Angels episode. Well spotted, that man. So yes, very good. Very good indeed.

Which means we end the series with high marks. The good episodes (my own faves? Vincent, and Amy's Choice) were great, and the bad episodes (Victory of the Daleks, and that tedious two-parter with the green scaly leotard monsters) weren't that bad. I have learned to love Matt Smith's Doctor - so what if I don't want to jump him, his absent-minded dotty professor schtick is hilarious - and Amy Pond has been an equally dotty and highly entertaining sidekick.

And yet and yet and yet... I just haven't cared about this series the way I used to care. Aside from that Vincent ending, which seems to have switched on the waterworks everywhere except for in my own eyes, it has all been, emotionally, a bit 'so what'. The Doctor never gets that fussed by anything: surely he should be at least slightly concerned by - say - the imminence of his own removal from the world? And Amy's much emphasised love for Rory would be more convincing if, for example, she didn't make jokes about wanting to snog the Doctor in front of Rory on their wedding day. As for Rory, I've never believed in him as a character - and I don't ever like the 'spunky girl and wet pathetic lovelorn admirer' dynamic, as it makes me worry that I'm going to end up with a wet pathetic lovelorn admirer of my own one of these days - so I wasn't at all bothered either time he got killed, and when he decided to sit outside Amy's box for two thousand years I know I was supposed to be moved but I just rolled my eyes. Purrlease. How boring is this man? Could he not at least request to have the box moved into a library to help him pass the time? And yes RTD's series were messy and soapy and hideously erratic, but they were wonderfully emotional too, and I cried my eyes out on numerous occasions. In this series, if I wasn't laughing or scared I was bored. Fortunately I was laughing or scared most of the time. (Well, you know, Doctor Who scared. By which I mean, would have been scared, if I was eight.) So if I had a request for next series, it would be this: yes to the cleverness, yes to the zaniness, but please try for a bit more emotional depth next time.

For the love of Brosnan

Lalala I haven't watched it I HAVEN'T WATCHED IT.

Well what the hell else have I been watching then?

Pierce Brosnan movies. Obviously. And I have been writing about my admiration / love / obsession / pathological disorder about Pierce Brosnan over on the Beat Website. Which has lots of other fantastic and slightly more serious articles for you to read. Once you have finished reading mine, naturally.

What's that you say? A sample, so that you can decide whether to click or not? Very well...

Pierce Brosnan is everything a movie star should be: handsome, debonair, with perfect teeth and a full head of hair, able to keep his head when all around him are losing theirs and blaming it on the script / director / co-star / catering, this is a man who even managed to retain his dignity, not to mention his sex appeal, while dressed as a lobster on The Muppet Show.

Ah, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on.

Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens

"There's only one way to settle this. FIGHT!"

Like the Spanish Inquisition, Steven Moffat's greatest weapon is the element of surprise. We all knew that Rory was bound to be brought back from the dead, but hands up who foresaw his reincarnation as a half-killer-robot Roman Legionnaire? So that would be no hands then. Verily my eyes nearly popped out of my head.

It was a terrific episode that sometimes teetered on the brink of lunacy but never quite toppled over. Looking back on it, it packed such a lot in that I'm not sure whether it was even the usual length. Firstly, a 'greatest hits' prologue where River Song (yay!) escapes incarceration again to bring the Doctor a Van Gogh painting of the Tardis exploding, with help from various characters from previous episodes of the series (the duffer episodes on the whole, sadly - Winston Churchill, I mean you) plus a blue-faced baldie in a Star Wars-style alien bar, and a message written into cliffs in a nod to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. This was followed by a lengthy interlude modelled on Indiana Jones - this ep was homages a-go-go - where the Doctor and co find the Pandorica - basically a big box - underneath Stonehenge in Roman Britain. Some particularly pleasing business with a headless, one armed Cyberman guard followed, plus the cyberman's arm and its head operating independently. If I'd be pre-pubescent I'd have lost my lunch, in one direction or t'other, when the cyberhead opened to reveal the rotten human skull within. Help me Doctor Jones! At some point in all this Roman Rory showed up. How? Because miracles happen and not everything can be explained and OH LOOK WHAT'S THAT OVER THERE? Amy didn't remember him. Then she did. Because it was like he'd never been born only it wasn't because some residue is always left like the ring and even though she'd forgotten him some memory still remains because love conquers all even the death of time, even the destruction of the universe, what's that you say, how, well, I'll tell you how, it's because OH LOOK WHAT'S THAT OVER THERE? Then every baddie in the new Who universe turned up to claim the contents of the box. This was crap. Mainly because it reminded me how crap all the evil aliens are. Oh look, the crap iDaleks. Oh look, the crap ones that look like baked potatoes. Oh look, the kitchen sink. And so on. And the Doctor stood on a bit of Stonehenge with a really powerful microphone which was sadly not calibrated to work terribly well with my TV speakers so I don't actually know exactly what he said but it was some variation on COME AND HAVE A GO IF YOU THINK YOU'RE HARD ENOUGH. Matt Smith: don't tell anyone, but it turns out that I do quite like you after all.

And THEN the Pandorica opened to reveal not, as I was almost correct to expect, the Doctor himself, but a CHAIR for the Doctor to be TRAPPED in, because IT IS ALL A TRAP and it turns out that this whole series is a strange projection of the mind of Amy using psychic dust and some books she read as a child but conveniently keeps sitting on a side table even now that she's an adult, with her model of the Doctor, so that River Song can discover them when exploring her creepy house, just before blowing up the Tardis, but not before dosing us all with a hefty amount of WHAT THE FUCK and also HANG ON A SEC and WHICH UNIVERSE ARE THEY IN ANYWAY and DON'T TELL ME IT WAS ALL A DREAM and while we're on the subject RORY, DEFINITELY SEXIER AS A ROMAN, THOUGH LESS SEXY WHEN KILLING AMY WITH HIS KILLER ROBOT GUN HANDS plus I SERIOUSLY CAN'T FIGURE THIS ONE OUT and really I DON'T KNOW HOW YOU'RE GOING TO GET OUT OF THIS ONE, STEVE but IF IT IS SOME TIMEY WIMEY VARIATION ON IT WAS ALL A DREAM I AM GOING TO FLIP MY LID but in the meantime IT IS GOING TO BE MORE CLEVER THAN THAT or at least I HOPE SO and if they are in a universe ALL OF AMY'S IMAGINING maybe NONE OF THIS MATTERS ANYWAY and I bloody hope that MOFFAT IS BETTER THAN RTD AT RESOLVING THESE THINGS but really THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO FIND OUT.

And thus, see you next week.