Doing the Tony Benn historical perspective on politics thing.

In response to Andrew's comment on my post yesterday, I'm expanding a bit, as much to make sure that my thoughts hold water as from any need to convince anyone!

I have to confess to always having been a bit of a Brownite. I could see that Bambi was a Good Thing for the UK in 1997, but the gilt very soon wore off the gingerbread for me, being someone who likes a little substance with their style, and has the old fashioned belief that politicians should lead their country bravely to do the right thing rather than checking with the public whether it would be all right by them if the governement followed a certain course of action. Ironically the only time when Tony Blair did 'lead' us, when he didn't talk to a focus group, it was into that disastrous war. I don't think Gordon Brown would have done such a thing, because I don't think he is as concerned with his place in the history books, and I don't think he would ever have been blinded by the Bush dynasty.

In short, I think that had the little chat in the Ivy turned out the other way, the world would be a very different place today. But such conjecture, although interesting to me, is ultimately pointless.

But as to this government being dead in the water, well, that doesn't only depend on the leader of the party in power, or indeed the party at all, but very largely what you'd replace them with. I don't really think that David Campbell is the next Prime Minister. He's lost a lot of his own party who are bewildered by the direction he's taking the party in. He's very policy-lite. He swings from Hug a Hoodie to We're The Party Who Support Marriage in that populist way which TB made work so well, but the British populace are wise to that now, so he comes off as doing a pale imitation of Blair ten years too late.

I think there's a historical precedent for what's happening in British politics today. The post-1997 turmoil in the Conservative party looks very much like the post-1979 turmoil in Labour.

In 1979 Thatcher slaughters Callaghan and Labour panics. With Britain having elected a right wing government they lurch sharply to the Left and choose Michael Foot as their leader over arguably the best leader they never had in Dennis Healey.

In 1997 Blair slaughters Major and the Conservatives panic. With Britain having elected a soft left government, they lurch sharply to the right and elect William Hague over arguably the best leader they never had in Ken Clarke.

In 1983 Thatcher wins again. Michael Foot ditched. In comes another left winger in Neil Kinnock. He in turn is defeated in 1987.

In 1992, unbelievably and unexpectedly, Major, who’s knocked out Thatcher, wins over Kinnock, who stands down. The marvellous John Smith comes in, but death cheats him of his election opportunity and it’s young Tony Blair who wins the election.

Now the Tories implode. In 2001 Blair wins again, predictably. Hague is ditched in favour of Ian Duncan-Smith, another right winger. Then Michael Howard loses in 2005, and now our Dave will pitch at the next election. They haven’t got it right yet and they’re all over the place. I can’t see that they have yet earned the right to run the country. No one knows what they stand for. Not even they know what they stand for.

True, David Campbell looks, politically, a little like Tony Blair a decade ago, and not, I think, in a good way. His ‘modernisation’ of the party has a whiff of TB c.1996-7 about him, but really, it’s all a bit pallid and passé.

I reckon that GB will win another election; the Tories will change leader and win the next one. Maybe I’m wrong, but I might even be persuaded to place a small wager that I’m not.

Nice one, Gordon.

I think Gordon Brown has made a good start to his leadership. I like the fact that he's a little dourer and less televisually appealing than Bambi, (whom I liked until he decided to stop leading and start pandering). Where politics has turned into a beauty contest, the intellectual level of the debate is usually low, the wrong people get elected and stuff starts going hideously wrong. I like that Brown is as likely to spin events as my dog. He's a plain-speaking Scotsman and I respect him for it. I like that he's inclusive and wants a cabinet full of big brains and big talents. (Pity the new Home Secretary, clever, talented Jackie Smith; a big mipper if ever there was one, whose statement about the Glasgow airport and London bombs was subject to press scrutiny...because of the depth of her cleavage - what crass tossers the press are sometimes. Would they discuss a male member's package, if you'll pardon the pun? I think not.) I like that Gordon doesn't talk about his religion. Note to future participants in the British electoral process; we're not American - we don't do that. I like the fact that he's ditched the supercasinos - what a rubbish idea that was! I like that he's serious, intelligent and he won't be the story if he can help it at all.

The reason I've put up the two photos above is because of an interest I've had for many years. When I was studying for my French degree I wrote a paper about press political bias in the French newspapers. To illustrate my point about this I included a large section on the choice of photographs of particular plitical figures. Jacques Chirac, at the time mayor of Paris, was depicted as hard, untrustworthy and borderline misshapen in the left-wing papers, and shiny, smiling and handsome in those of the right.

One of these photos comes from the Daily Mail, the other from a Northern Labour website. Any guesses?

What's your theme?

Martin likes animals. He'll watch animal documentaries, reads animal books, supports animal charities. He'll cry about the plight of polar bears. He's not anthropomorhic about them either. He doesn't attribute human characteristics to our furry friends. He respects animals in all their bloody, fierce, primal, instinctive, essence.

Me, however, there's only so much wildlife I can watch. I like people. I watch documentaries about people, read about people and support people charities. And like Martin, I don't really expect people to be any different from the way they are. I accept people's petty vanities, prejudices, idolatries, their brutality and their potential to be sublime.

And for that reason I am fascinated by the twin issues of memory and identity. I only mention that because that's what my novel is about. And because I'm so fascinated by memory and identity I'm getting carried away on stuff which isn't strictly plot-driven. But as I'm not writing a screenplay this time it's okay!

How much of our identity is dependent on memory; from our earliest days to what we chose to eat at our last meal (in my case a prawn sandwich, even though I'd promised myself I'd take the time to make a salad - and then I beat myself up for being overweight...)? I would argue that all of our identity is based on memory; those we remember but also those which through choice or overburden, we have elected to forget.

Memory is interesting on so many levels. Not long ago I sat with a friend in a group and we shared memories of a holiday we took together some fifteen years ago. She was telling anecdotes which were hilarious, but which featured incidents that I didn't remember. When I told stories, I could see her wrinkling her forehead in an effort to recall. Sometimes people recount things that happened and I was there and I don't remember it at all like that! But who's to say my memory is right and theirs is wrong...?

And sometimes when I'm sharing a little story with my friends or family, I wonder even as I'm recounting it whether what I remember actually happened. I'm not beyond embroidering a story for effect, and I think that my memory has become entirely untrustworthy.

So when all these noteworthy (and supremely un-noteworthy) people pen their memoirs years after the event, how much of their memories are reliable? Clive James recognised this when he wrote his "Unreliable Memoirs", and a terrific read it was. How much of what happened to me exists in my memories, fragile, malleable things that they are, and how much in what actually happened, even if I can't, or don't want to, remember it?

Which leads me onto the subject of identity. Traditionally, and I can't quote the source, your identity is supposed to be made up of how you see yourself, how others see you and how you think others see you. Well, by that token I'm a different person every day of my life. Yesterday, for the very first time in my life, I was alarmed by a very fleeting, but quite intense, suicidal thought. Now that's a big thing, but I can't say that I'm a suicidal person. As soon as this thought flitted into my head I immediately rationalised it, and within a couple of paces had about five reasons sorted out why I shouldn't do what had popped into my head. Some days I think I'm the life and soul of the party; somedays something approaching a hermit. Some days people would describe me as friendly and approachable; some days a bitch on wheels.

I think memory and identity are so fluid as to be intangible. That thing about never stepping in the same river twice? Same thing with who I am or who you are. To try and pin people down is to diminish them and render them in their simplest possible likeness - a walking waxwork. Never trust one of them. And never trust those studies which try to categorise us... I am not just middle class, nor middle aged nor an AB1, nor an INFP, nor a auditory learner. I am me.

Black Dog

You will have noticed that I'm generally fairly up. But every now and then I fall into the clutches of the black dog of depression, and it floors me. It doesn't last that long, I'm pleased to say, so that I always know that I just have to get through it and I'll be cracking jokes as usual, but while I'm there it's not good.

While I've never, ever considered ending it all by topping myself, there have been a number of times when I've considered how easy it would be just to walk away from everything. I never would, naturally, as I'm far too responsible for that, but every now and then it's a tempting thought.

Now since I'm not a teenager burdened with too much make-up and an unnatural desire for negative attention, I'm not going to detail the ins and outs of my tussle with the dog. I am instead going to give you the opening of my current work in progress, the idea of which came to me in a previous, very similar, episode in my life.

Given all that followed, it is ironic that the most formative experience of my early life happened to someone else. After all, if the body lying partially hidden among the waste bins behind the Tudor Rose Hotel had been mine, as it should have been, as it was intended to be, then the existential crisis that led me to where I am today wouldn't really have cropped up.

They should have discovered me there, Claire, crushed and bloody. But instead it was Heidi, an exchange student from Hamburg earning a little extra money to indulge her passion for Miss Selfridge and glass paperweights, who was struck with a baseball bat on the back of the neck by a large, aggressive, but sentimental petty criminal. It was her family who were deprived of the chance to see her flower into womanhood and middle age, while I am heading stolidly in that direction.

I was coming out of a club in Bristol at the time of the murder, going through the lyrics of Joan Armatrading's "Walk under Ladders", and reflecting once again what an underrated artist she was, how absurd it was that she hadn't achieved the popular success of the likes of Culture Club. Entertaining as they were, they couldn't hold a candle to her for lyrical power. She had a profile, it’s true, but it was a low-key one. I comforted myself that their light would blaze and go out, but hers would be like the Olympic Flame. Later I traced the timing back to that one moment, that specific train of thought, and marvelled that I was unable to sense the life of a colleague, a friend even by some definitions, being snuffed out.

If Heidi had said 'no' when I asked her to swap shifts so that I could go and see Joan Armatrading at the Locarno; if Joan Armatrading had had a sore throat and had to cancel; if there hadn’t been a spare ticket for me in the first place, it wouldn’t have been Heidi pulling up her coat collar against the winter chill as she locked the kitchen door at midnight, relieved to be away from the smell of chip fat and looking forward to a beer and a cuddle with her rather thick English boyfriend in the comfort of her own flat. And I, Claire, would be dead.

Then it would have been my parents sitting, blotchy and stunned, in the pew-like seats of the court, listening to the evidence of how their daughter had been killed - the physical details, the scene of crime reports, the events leading up to it. Only it wouldn't have been so senseless, because it wouldn't have been a mistake. The events leading up to it wouldn't have been events that occurred in someone else's life. So they wouldn't have been able to turn their empty faces to another, similar, young woman, blaming her, all the while knowing that there was no reason to do so, but seeming guiltily almost to wish that if they looked hard enough at her the dreadful mistake might be rectified in retrospect.

If Heidi and I hadn't shared an enthusiasm for the same shade of a well-known hair colorant, if we hadn't been such slaves to fashion that we'd both rushed out to buy that black wool coat recommended in Cosmo, if Heidi had been a little thinner, or a little fatter, then perhaps he'd have realised I wasn't there, postponed the murder for a night, gone home and had a cup of tea and realised that it was an overreaction to want to crush the life out of me, to shatter my skull just because I warned Stephanie about him.

But then if Stephanie had never decided to overcome her natural disinclination to talk to unsuitable men in pubs, determined to quash her tendency to judge people by their looks, or if she'd picked instead the weedy, anoraked Mummy's boy whom she'd never normally have spoken to either, then perhaps Heidi would still be alive and so would I. Perhaps Mark Hunter would have met another girl, in his own time, in his own way; maybe she'd have shown him it didn't have to be like this. Maybe he'd have given up the gear, gone into rehab, got himself a job somewhere, settled down and had children, watched TV of an evening and warned his kids about the perils of drugs. Instead of doing life in Broadmoor.

And had I not decided that a seaside town was the ideal place to spend my summer holidays in 1985, surfing by day and washing dishes by night, then confronted fifteen years later with the opportunity to become someone else, maybe like most people I would have decided against it, wouldn't have taken Heidi's name and wouldn't now be living with one foot in fact and the other in fiction.

Mull and Manrique

Yes, we went to Mull. Yes, it has a micro climate. Yes, it rained. And rained and rained and rained. I believe that you should never ever go back to somewhere you've enjoyed because it is NEVER the same the second time around. Never.

I was adamant that I was going to do some writing and guess what. I didn't. I was BORED. I'm never bored. I believe fervently that only boring people get bored; interesting people can always find something interesting to do. My children know this mantra. They never complain of being bored. So there you are. It rained and I got bored.

I think I must be a bit of a jinx on holiday. Last month I went with a group of friends to Lanzarote for Denise's 40th birthday (Thanks, Ant!) and, while it didn't rain, the weather was dreadful. I learned two new Spanish phrases, which we heard every where we went: "Hace mal tiempo" - It's bad weather, and "Hace mucho viento" - it's very windy. Mucho viento? I should coco! We spent one afternoon on a beach and had a full body exfoliation from the sheets of sand which stripped us of comfort and skin. I think we managed to pretend we were enjoying ourselves for about an hour and a half before we gave in a headed for the bar for a refreshing beer.

But because it wasn't really hanging around the pool weather we went all around the island in search of culture and volcanoes. What an amazing place!

The twin influences on Lanzarote, each of which has left an indelible mark oin the place, are the volcano and an artist, a contemporary of Picasso and Miro, a man called Cesar Manrique.



The island is volcanic. In the eighteenth century the volcano erupted...for six years, wiping out everything, every man, woman, child, every tree, every blade of grass. We were told this in a matter of fact way as we were touring the volcanic craters in a tour bus. I looked out over this desolate lunar landscape and tried to imagine what that actually meant, what it actually looked like at the time. Can you imagine such an awful event - the volcano belching forth fire as you were working in the fields? Worrying about your children, not far away in the house which was in moments to be enveloped forever. Appalling.

The agriculture of Lanzarote has been coaxed out of the lava which coats everything like a thick mud pack. Farming here is hard, what with the unforgiving lava beneath and the harsh wind above ground. So vines and other plants are sheltered in small dips in ythe lava, surrounded by the shelter of dry stone walls in three quarter circles, the earth weighted with a sprinkling of lava stones. Even walking across this terain is exhausting; to farm it must be backbreaking.

Take a look at this:

Then there is Cesar Manrique. Artist and architect, it can be rarely that a man has left so vast a mark on his native land. Manrique worked with the landscape and the climate, harnessed it to make strange and wonderful things - buildings which use the difficulties of the locale and turned them to his advantage. His house was built out of a series of volcanic bubbles in the ground. By clever use of paint and mosaic and cutting just the right apertures in the stony walls he created beautiful rooms bathed in astonishing natural light. I could barely tear myself away.

He also built the Mirador, a point at the extreme end of Lanzarote looking over the bloest sea. He designed and built the Vistors' Centre in the volcanic park, and the curious, but compelling cactus park. Even if you hate cacti, which I really REALLY do, you find yourself giving in to this place. Stand one one of the raised levels and look over the planting and you have surrealist art. Extraordinary. Andon many of the millions of roundabouts all over Lanzarote are huge and colourful wind sculptures designed by... yes, Manrique. I'm not sure we saw any art by anyone else. To be honest, I'm not sure there's room for anyone else.

I loved being in Lanzarote, not least because of the company. Away from the family for a week, I did miss them, but in a good way, and they had time to miss me, and be pleased when I got back. But being with such a diverse group of fantastic women was a real joy. We drank far too much, we talked even more. We cooperated and had an amazing time.

All in all, fabulous. And to the beautiful and ridiculously youthful Denise, cheers!

Back to Mull

We're going back to Mull tomorrow to see if it's as gorgeous at Easter as it is in high summer. Given that today we've spent the day in the garden, all the French windows flung open, for all the world like an August day, I suspect it might be rather wonderful. Having said that, the Western Isles seem to have their own micro-climate, and not in a good way.

So for once my absence will be justified. I'll have lots to say when I get back.

The picture was taken by Martin while walking the dogs in July. Makes your heart soar, doesn't it? God's own country indeed.

Old rockers don't know when to stop

From the BBC news website this morning: "Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has claimed he snorted the ashes of his late father during a drugs binge.
"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow," he told NME."

Now I've always had the suspicion that behind the hard-living, high-rolling, head-banging facade of most of those 70s dinosaurs of rock lie some really mind-blowingly stupid people and now I think I have the proof.

What was he trying to prove with this? "I am more decadent than anybody else"? Perhaps "I don't adhere to the small-time taboos of the little people"? How about "Hey, look at me - what a raging twat." The NME readers will surely be bemused. Will there be many who aill applaud him "Yeah! Go Keith, you old rocker!"? Some, I'm sure. But probably not many.

Maybe he did it, maybe he didn't. His publicist, who's probably scanning the appointments pages or leafing through her contacts book as I write, insists that she can't believe anyone took the claim seriously. If he did it, he's as addled as the most addled addled thing in the history of being addled. And frankly, if he made it up, that really smacks of desperation. A pensioner, clinging to the remnants of his bad-boy reputation; a pensioner who falls out of a tree when drunk or stoned. Frankly it's very disappointing. I remember Keith Richard when I was a child, when he was gorgeous; etiolated and wan but wiry and devastatingly glamorous.

I went to see the Stones at Wembley years ago and they were already past their best. My brother made jokes then about Zimmer frames. And here we are, some fifteen years on, and they're still churning out music, going on tour and bragging about excesses. I have some sympathy with the Who's position. But I don't want them to die - I just want them to retire. The music's rubbish, the debauchery is embarrassing and they're not fooling anybody.

Hang up the leathers and the headband, Uncle Keith, and have a nice cup of tea.

To work or not to work

Read the Times 2 section yesterday and became totally incensed by an article by someone caled Leslie Bennett in which she advised women "don't give up the day job" and then went on at some length (she's actually written a book on the subject) about how women don't know the financial cost of giving up work and the difficulties of getting back to it years later and Him Indoors might drop dead or lose his job at any moment and then where would you be, girls?

Well to be honest, if you haven't discussed it with your partner beforehand and agreed what needs to be done in ensuring that he has enough insurance to cover you in the case of his death or his redundancy or his critical illness, then you're a bloody idiot. As is he if he doesn't ensure that your life is covered in the event that you kick the bucket and he has to carry on without you. REALLY! Don't people talk to each other any more?

As to the financial consequences of giving up work, well...duh. Of course you suffer financially. Of course you can't stroll back in ten years later as if nothing had happened - if you could, how entitled to yell would those loyal souls be who had continued to work all that time? It's a decision that you need to make as a couple, and it has its costs and its benefits much like any other maor decision you're going to make in the course of a lifetime. Frankly, to suggest that it will be taken by women without basic consideration of the ramifications is insulting to my gender. And his actually.

How can she spin this guff into a whole book? I'm almost, but not quite, curious enough to read it and see.

Luckily I can read this stuff and become irritated but never will anyone succeed in convincing me, or my partner, that we made the wrong choice. It's right for us. Doesn't mean it's right for everyone, but it's right for us.

I'm giving up alcohol today.

I've not mentioned all the things which I wanted to, but I'm going to make this statement right now, just to put on record the private decision that I've made.

I went to a wonderful party on Saturday night. Danced, played the fun-money casino tables, nibbled delicious canapes... and drank approximately my bodyweight in booze. The party finished at 1.30, and we came back home with the three people staying in our house, and I carried on drinking and made an absolute idiot of myself. I can't do moderation. I get excited about social occasions, and a few glasses takes the edge off and feels festive, but then I can't stop.

And do you know what? Enough is enough. I'm too old to be behaving like this. It's undignified and I don't like it. I spend too much money, I take on board too many calories, I feel remorseful every morning after and I don't want my children to think that it's the norm. I've been very careful not to over-indulge in front of them, but they're getting older and staying up later...

I've given up for a month at a time in the past, but I'm under no illusions that this will be harder. For a starter, none of my friends will understand, and even if they do, they will take it as some sort of reproof. They will think I'm not going to be so much fun. Even my partner isn't exactly chuffed at my decision. His immedate response is that I will be disapproving of him for not having made the same decision.

However I've been considering this for a long time and I really think that I've come to the point where this decision is inevitable.

I feel quite excited about it. Now I've got to find something non-alcoholic apart from water, that I enjoy drinking...

Phil Parker listened to my screenplay...and part of me wishes he hadn't.

You can always tell when my life is going crazy, because I lose track of my blog.

Diarists of old have recorded all the interesting events of history, and I wonder why it is that when really interesting things happen in my life, or around me, my inclination is to enjoy the experience rather than record them.

Makes me a pretty shoddy writer, I'd suggest. As a real writer, my first response to events SHOULD be to write them down. That is, after all, rather the point of starting this blog.

Well, for another hint that maybe I'm not as great as I thought I was, let's turn to Phil Parker.

I went to my regular meeting with Bristol Screenwriters www.bristolscreenwriters.org, a long arranged fixture where there was to be a reading of my screenplay. Now you have to understand that normally they read shorts and then there's some feedback from all of us and it's all very civilised. The month before they'd read a feature by the marvellous Virgina Bergin and were feeling kindly disposed to me. We were lucky enough to have Phil parker, screenwriting guru, in attendance. He gave a short talk and then my reading started.

Oh. My. God. It was ENDLESS.

The reading was HORRENDOUS. I mean really truly dreadful. God, that story takes AGES to get going. You could see people losing the will to live, going pale and twitchy before me...

At the end they all applauded wildly, more out of relief that it was finally over than from any sense of enjoyment. And then they all tore it to bits - slow, stereotypical characters, plot that didn't work, too much talk, too many characters.... you name it, really.

Then they asked Phil for his impressions. He was unbelievably impressive. he had such a bird's eye view of the thing, he remembered every scene just from one reading, and the name of every character, even the ones who didn't say anything.

He told me:

a) The THEME of the story is the creation of order out of chaos. he advised that once you have identified the theme of the story, you should make sure that every scene has in it that theme in some way.
b) Several of the people in my group had complained that this was a two-hander and therefore it was not clear whose story we were examining. Phil said this didn't matter as long as you knew what the ENGINE of the story was. In my case the engine of the story is the relationship between two grannies. What follows from this is that there must be no scene which doesn't feature one of the two grannies, and their relationship with each other and the others must be at the heart of every scene.
c) Some felt there were too many CHARACTERS in the piece. Phil didn't think so, although he did say that characters shouldn't be weighted too equally; some of them should recede into the background more, whereas some should assume more of a function in the piece.
d) In terms of the functions of the the various characters, as I've said the grannies are the ENGINE of the piece. One character is the CATALYST; by which I mean that it is his actions which effect the central problem. Another is the OBSTACLE to what the grannies are trying to achieve.
e) He liked the idea of my initial set-up but felt it needed to be dramatically cut from about 30 pages to 10. He thought the last thirty pages were great and should stay. WHich leaves me without a second act. But now I know what to do with that.
f) To objections about stereotypical characters he said he didn't think it mattered because it's comedy and there is a great tradition of streotypes in comedy. Thinking about the comments I think when people talk about 'stereotype' they mean 'cartoon', which I'll plead guilty to.

In addition there were certain pieces of advice about the actual process of writing which I think are worth mentioning.

a) Phil referred throughout not to scripts but to PROJECTS. I think this is important because that word 'project' has a sense of continuity about it, whereas to me a 'script' is something finished.
b) He also said that you should keep a copu of every draft of your project. And he would expect any 'finished' script to be the productr of about thirteen drafts, and that they would not be progressive, but that finished version would probably draw on elements from each draft. I've not done this - every 'draft' has been a rewrite, and my initial version has been changed each time, without retaining the original or earlier form. I can't therefore go back thinking, 'let's take that relationship out of version 4'. So he works in new drafts, rather than rewrites. He didn't use the word rewrite at all.
c) His advice was to start every new draft afresh, rather than cutting and pasting, in order to retain energy and freshness.

I@m deeply grateful, but I'm taking a couple of weeks to digest all this and regather my enthusiasm.

In the meantime I'm working on the novel I put on the shelf a few months back. I read it through and was enthused.

Maybe I have to accept that this is just the way I work. I've always known that I have a low boredom threshhold.

Overheating

Scary article in the Sunday Times yesterday. The cover of the magazine featured a photograph of the effect on the United Kigdom if the climate were to heat up by couple of degrees as it's widely predicted to do over the next hundred years. Bristol is underwater. Actually most places are underwater.

I have friends who have taken this seriously for years and I've always had a slightly sceptical view, but the weight of evidence seems to be swinging in the direction of the Doomsday scenario.

So what can I do? Well, holiday in this country, for starters. Or use the train to go into Europe. Anything not to take flights except for those long-anticipated experiences to far-flung places which will be, as they were decades ago, something you do once in a lifetime.

Now governments have got to ensure that they get the pricing right so that people will actually use those trains. At the moment I can fly to Nice for £14, but if I want to get to London at 8.30 in the morning it'll cost me about £90 to hang from a strap for an hour and a half. Ludicrous.

I LOVE trains. I 'eurorailed' when I was a teenager and a student and met the most fantastic people as I cruised through country after country, watching the landscape and the lifestyles roll by before my eyes. The British trains were always the crappiest and the dearest. Czech trains were my favourite; clean, old-fashioned and somehow rather regal. I'm really looking forward to taking the kids and meandering through Europe. I think we'd need to take the car on the train with us. In Britain, naturally, that's completely prohibitive, but I expect Europe is more clued-up.

Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam

I know I'm very, very old and very, very grumpy, but my current receipt of spam at about 150 emails a day is getting me down. No, actually, it's making me foam at the mouth.

So I'd just like to put on record the following:

a) I don't need a degree with no work. I've already got two degrees which I worked hard to achieve, and as a self-improver, I don't value anything which is got easily. I want to BE cleverer, not LOOK cleverer

b) I don't have any spare cash, so I will not be buying any shares. Even if I'm sent the same share tip 70 times in a day (oh, yes!) I WON'T BUY IT. Nor will any of the people whose email addresses are vaguely similar to mine but whose emails I am receiving.

c) I do not need or want Viagra. Mainly because I do not have a penis.

d) For the same reason, I do not need anything to make my non-existent penis larger, and my non-existent penis is unlikely to give any women, or men for that matter, more pleasure if it is enlarged.

There. I feel better already. Now I've just got to find the time to do something about it.

Talking of teenagers

I just crashed into one in my car, and she couldn't have been sweeter. This is especially remarkable given the facts that a) it was entirely my fault, and b) she was on the way home in the car she'd just picked up from the showroom about twenty minutes earlier, followed by her proud Dad, who was equally nice and unbelievably reasonable.

Sorry, Sharmaine. I'm really, truly sorry.

In praise of teenagers

I may have mentioned before that I love teenagers, and enjoy their company, which I find stimulating and entertaining. I think they get a very raw deal in the media, in society and even in the street, where they tend to be viewed with deep suspicion by a wary and fearful populace.

It was therefore very heartwarming to observe samples of the species behaving as responsible citizens not once but twice last week as I went about my business. On the first occasion, as I was driving to work, I saw an elderly lady prostrate on the ground, obviously shocked and injured, accompanied by two young teenagers. The first, a young girl, knelt by the lady and comforted her while a boy was gesticulating on a mobile phone, obviously giving directions to the emergency services. Mewanwhile we drones all drove past, wondering if we should stop, but in no doubt that they were coping admirably.

The following day I drove past a tiny blind old lady whom I know well hesitating at rhe side of the road, a teenager holding each arm and chatting animatedly to her, utterly unfazed and unselfconscious. She smiled with pleasure. I'm particularly pleased about this last incident. A couple of years ago this same old lady, still then with some residual sight, was mugged by a teenager not far from where we both live. She was terribly shaken, but was scooped up by another teenage boy who popped her in his car, got a description and drove around looking for the culprit before abandoning the search and taking her to the police station. He was outraged on her behalf. Nice that the balance of her experiences with the young should be, we hope, positive.

Then I had a long conversation with my eighteen year-old nephew, who was talking about his plans to go to an American university on a soccer scholarship. He is a thoroughly admirable, personable, sociable person, and if my kids turn out like him, I shall be well happy.

Added to all that I am lucky enough to spend a sizeable portion of each day in the classroom with teenagers, mainly boys, and it keeps me young. It's a cliche, but as we know there is some truth in most cliches.

I wouldn't want to be one though - all those hormones, all those challenges, all that angst. And who was the idiot who decreed that we should make young people sit important exams with a major impact in directing their future at a time when they are a puddle of hormones and just thinking about getting their ends away...?

Does prison work?

Well, it depends what you want it to do, doesn't it?

If you want to lock people up and forget about the problem, and if you are prepared to turn over more and more space and energy into building and maintaining prisons in order to accommodate larger and larger numbers of people, then yes, I suppose you might think that it does. If you have any other take on the problem then I would suggest that the answer must be a resounding NO.

If you've ever met me or read my views before, you might be unsurprised to know that I take a back to fundamental cause and effect view of this.

When I was doing my PGCE (post-graduate certificate of education) I did an extended study on the identification and treatment of the gifted child in schools. There are certain statistics which I learnt in the course of that which really stuck with me. First of these was the fact that the most important factor in how well you will do in your education is what your father does for a living. The achievements of children at the same school will vary along broadly demographically socio-economic lines. This is a stubborn statistic which government after government has tried to address with initiative after initiative. The second is that the prison population has a higher than average number of people with IQs significantly higher than the national average.

Personally I think these are linked. The one mantra which was drummed into me during my course was Children live up or down to their teachers' expectations. Children who may come into the classroom with less than impeccable manners and attitude may be viewed with suspicion by a teacher, who will make assumptions about their intellect based on their behaviour. They will be given undemanding work in the hope that they would be able to do it and would not give trouble. They may then become bored, and boredom breeds disaffection. So the behaviour may deteriorate and they may be removed to the lower sets so as not to get in the way of the 'good kids'. From then on the 'give a dog a bad name' syndrome kicks in.

Now I'm not saying this happens all the time by any means, but in large overcrowded schools where teachers are expected to teach what should be taught at home as well as their subject curriculum, it is understandable that they must set their own priorities. However, from a societal point of view we cannot allow the potential of great tranches of talent to seep out into bad behaviour and the remedial classes. Imagine how much talent sits confined in dismal cells in ghastly prisons around our realm.

It may be a knotty problem, but it's one of the most important issues to address and the fact that we haven't succeeded in unravelling it yet should only add urgency to the task.

(This is, incidentally, linked to my 'philosophy for all' campaign - teach logic, cause and effect, abstract thinking and maybe, just maybe, children will feel more in charge of their own lives as they go through school and come out the other end.)

Talking of knowing yourself...

I'm sitting here, full of joy, having sung along at the top of my lungs to the whole of Carole King's Tapestry while assembling my vegetarian lasagne for tomorrow's lunch. (I'm not a veggie, but we're lunching with veggies.)

I'm an old hippy, aren't I?

So much of what passes for life now upsets and confuses me. I just hate casual cruelty of the type meted out between kids, as entertainment on television, and reaching its nadir in drug-riddled hinterlands and middle-class suburbs alike as out-and-out war between generations living in the same miserable house, children abused by vicious, mindless parents or parents abused by slack-jawed teenagers. I hate that it has almost become the norm. I was only a little girl when Tapestry was made, my teens were in the late 70s when things were already much tougher, and my youth in the 80s when I was the only person I knew who had a long straight curtain of hair, and I still do now. Spiritually I'm a flower child.

In the nice, middle-class school where I teach, I was admonishing a class yesterday for calling out unpleasantnesses to one another, and I said "I don't like unpleasantness." One of the very nice, very gentle boys instantly retorted "Everyone's unpleasant, Miss." Now I know that's open to all sorts of philosophical interpretations, but as a knee-jerk reaction I find it troublesome. While I like an intellectual set-to as much as the next person, in the end I yearn for harmony. As I get older I find my skin getting thinner and thinner, to the point where I flinch at any injustice meted out to anyone anywhere. It's not quite as bad as it was when I was a new mother, but not far off. Everyone's child is my child. Everyone's environmental disaster is mine.

But in my own home, in my cocoon, I can play Simon and Garfunkel followed by Carole King and sing and dance, trying to ignore Daughter's disapproval, and kid myself that the world is full of love and knowledge and self-awareness and I can experience really the deepest joy.

As an aside, the same boy who piped up about everyone being unpleasant asked me as I was going around correcting French direct object pronouns last week "Do you like Leonard Cohen, Miss?" When I confirmed that I did, he said "Thought so." Do you think he thinks I'm an old hippy too?

I'm old, I'm a hippy and I'm proud.

Cakes at dawn

It's six thirty and son, eight, has just got his cakes into the oven. He's taken to baking in a big way. He does everything from turning on the oven measuring ingredients to getting them out at the end. And he's a very good baker. Daughter, 10, and friend are upstairs in bed, and won't get up until the very, very last minutes. He'll take them a warm cake later to try and winkle them out of their pits. But then this evening she'll have done her rugby, homework and story, and be busy practising for her gym competition and he'll be slumped in front of the telly, homework done as well as probably a bit of cartooning and some work on his scripts.

I'm very proud that they know who they are and that they don't feel constrained to live within any externally imposed paradigms. That's one of the great things about growing up now. I hope that as they approach their teens things will continue to be as rosy and they will continue to be as independent as they are.

My father, although he spent most of my childhood in the same job, never felt that he had finished looking for the next thing. He was a forester, a potter, a teacher, a diplomat, a dealer in ancient Chinese pottery, a calf farmer, a smallholder and then, in the decade before his death, a historian and biographer, publishing two books and becoming a renowned expert in two separate areas. My mother came in at the teacher stage, and totally supported him. She was for the most part a teacher, but in my childhood she was also, on our travels around the world, university lecturer, the editor of a literary review and a newsreader. Now retired she is a translator, sings in a choir, works for a charity providing funds for women who want to train themselves out of difficulties, is a school governor and more that I've forgotten. So when I announced I wanted to throw up a perfectly good career in IBM and retrain as a teacher, they totally supported and applauded me. And now Mum's too busy with her own life to follow my meanderings in and out of all my other endeavours. I hope to do the same for my chuldren. If they find their niche early in life, great, but if they never settle but always have the yen to try something new, well, it's in the genes.

Hallelujah! They're listening to me!

I mentioned when I first started this blog that one of my big bugbears is the failure of our educational system to teach children to think. I believe in philosophy lessons for children. And I do mean philosophy and not Philosophy. I mean that every child should be equipped with the ability to take raw data and question, organise and analyse it abstractly in order to arrive at conclusions. To anyone who says that it's an elitist idea, I say "You're an appalling snob." To suggest that only some children are capable of philosophical thinking is elitism.

If education is only about stuffing children's heads with unconnected and unrelated facts and figures, then give them a whacking great almanac at the age of five and test them on the contents at sixteen. The very word education comes from the Latin "e duco" - I bring out. Education is, or should be, about finding the gems in a child's brain, and developing them so that the child, and society itself, benefits from the raw talents which he or she possesses.

Don't think for a moment that I'm going down the "Every child is special" line, because by definition, if every chid is special then no one is. (As was so beautifully and succinctly put in "The Incredibles") What I am saying is that just because Jane is brilliant at Maths, and John, sitting next to her is rubbish at it, but John constructs the most amazing lego models while Jane can't stack two blocks on top of each other, don't think that Jane is, ergo, the more academic of the two. Teach Jane to work out what her maths tells her about the world, and teach John to derive the same lessons through his lego.

And hallelujah, this morning a shake-up of educational policy is announced. Philosophy, they say, should be taught to young primary age children. Hear, hear! say I. The first intelligent educational suggestion I've heard for a long time. And we're to go back to cookery lessons, as opposed to the appallingly sterile and disconnected "food technology"! Let's hear it for the government. And I don't often say that.

Now let's tell parents what THEY should be teaching. Don't let's be frightened to say yes, schools are responsible for a lot of what happens in a child's development, but so are families. If we need to use sticks and carrots to herd feckless parents into actually parenting their kids, let's do it.

And so, a month on, how do I feel?

Well, pretty bloody good actually.

As predicted, after the first awful week of caffeine deprivation, I felt great - full of energy and enthusiasm for life. I will never get over my addiction to caffeine, which I consider one of the most benign drugs available to me. I did give in a have a cup of coffee halfway through the month on a training course at held in a warm and airless room, when I had been travelling since 5.30 am. I reckon it was a necessity.

But otherwise I've managed the no wheat, no red meat, no dairy, no sugar, no caffeine, no nicotine, no alcohol thing without any ill effects. I've learned to love 100% rye bread in the mornings, drink hot water and lemon first thing in the morning, and cold water in the evenings. I've smoked my last cig and can't think of a reason why I should start again, and my God! Fish is so easy to cook! I even did a dinner party - three courses, all delicious and healthy.

I have lost 9lb, or 4kg, and people keep telling me how great my skin looks. Even I can see that my hair is good and my eyes are clear. So yes, I'm going to go back to my wine, and I'm going to have the occasional treat, but the fruit and veg and detox teas are here to stay. After all, there's a lost more weight to lose bfore I reach my goal.

I love January.

Caffeine is a powerful drug.

I have deprived my body of caffeine for the last six days and I acn barely walk upstairs, I am so lethargic.

This was not unexpected. Him and I do this every January - give up alcohol, caffeine, wheat, red meat, potatoes and sugar. And every year I think that the alcohol is going to be the toughest to kick, and every year about now I feel as if every ounce of energy has been siphoned out of me in my sleep.

Nevertheless I tried to do some writing this afternoon. What a silly idea! I was incapable of any cogent thought about anything, and so tired that I sat with my head in my hands and actually fell asleep. Nevertheless I persevered in between stints on Freecell and having a look at what was happening in the Celebrity Big Brother House on the net bulletin (why? I don't even watch it?). But I wouldn't allow myself to leave the desk, and so in the end I had a little spurt of inspiration and I now have an end to the story. Probably a rubbish one, but i'll go with it until something better occurs to me, as it inevitably will. I also, as a by-product, came up with an outline for a new comedy, which I have a feeling might get written before the magnum opus.

Anyway, the caffeine mist is showing no signs yet of lifting, and I have achieved very, very little since Monday. I remember once last year that about two thirds of the way through January I met a friend at a coffee shop and completely forgot to ask for decaf when I ordered. After one cup of coffee my heart was pounding, my mouth was dry and I was giddy as I sped up the hill to collect my children. Normally I drink so much (brewed, Lavazza, strong...) that I don't notice its effects. It wasn't until that moment that I realised what a very powerful drug caffeine is. Scary!

Tempus fugit

I've been appallingly lax about getting to my blog regularly, which I shall try to rectify.

At the Encounters Festival I went to a screening of Cinema Extreme; a series of shorts made by directors who are on the brink of features careers. It was an interesting evening. The films were 20 to 30 minutes long and very different in style and tone. Afterwards I spoke to the Blaine brothers and producer Paul Robinson, whose Hello Panda closed the show. The next day I went to a meeting with Billy Mackinnon, screenwriter of Small Faces and Hideous Kinky, organised by Bristol Screenwriters. It was really fascinating. The thing I learned from the weekend was not to do with writing, but to do with the business of being a writer, which is a very different thing. I realised that if I am to get anywhere in this business I have to treat it like a career and not sit around waiting for someone to recognise my genius.

No shit Sherlock, you may think, but this is a tough one for me. While I do the basics; writing scripts, peer review, sending scripts out, posting on script sales websites, I am only appealing to a very tiny sector of the market. If I really want to get anywhere I've got to get into the system and become part of the film-making fraternity that I glimpsed at the screening. And to do that I have to got to the system.

However, I made up my mind. I mulled it over on Sunday night and on monday morning I gave up a couple of my major commitments and emailed the Head of Creative Development at my local Film Council to talk about me and my career. And I made an appointment to see her in January. So I look forward to that. I have put in place a plan. And I have to stop frittering away time when I should be working and divide my non-teaching, non-mothering, non-housework time between writing and marketing, and stick to the plan.

After all, I'm not getting any younger. Tempus, as the man said, fugit.

Oh, and on the social side, after a festive season of cramming my body with unfeasible quantities of food and wine and polluting my system with smoke, I am now detoxing. I do this every January. At the moment I feel knackered because of the twin deprivations of caffeine and any refined sugar (includeing that converted to alcohol), and I can't walk upstairs, let alone concentrate. However I know from experience that by the 15th I shall be feeling saintly, will have dropped half a stone, have fantastic skin, and be noring for Britian on the benefits of a clean life. By February the 4th I shall be back to the normal bolshy, lary lush that I am for eleven months of the year. And everyone will secretly confess how terribly boring I was when I was off the sauce.

Back tomorrow, I hope.

Encounters

Well, what a great weekend! Met some fab people and found the spark of my writing mind re-ignited.

Now I've just got to get the career going. Piece of piss, surely.

No time to tell you more - I'll come back tomorrow.

Jeb Bush, you have a lot to answer for...

Damn those butterfly's wings!

Just imagine that way back when in Florida, the presidential candidate had NOT been the brother of the Floridan Senator. Do we suppose that things might have been fractionally different now?

If those few Republican voted had not made the difference in the presidential campaign, then would Britain now be facing a situation where a chunk of British Islamic youth is so radicalised that MI5 estimates that there are some 30 plots to commit major terrorist outrages on our shores? Would race relations have become so unutterably strained that a climate of fear exists where religious divides, almost unknown for decades, have once again become regular fodder on the evening news bulletins?

How would Al Gore have handled the fall-out of 9/11? Would he have brought the world to this terrifying impasse? If he had become engaged in Afghanistan, would he have carried on the pursuit of Osama bin Laden to the point of capture? Or would he have been distracted by the filial desire to avenge his father's defeat and invade Iraq, arguably at the time the most secular country in the Middle East, insisting that Saddam had links with the cabal of militant Islamic terrorist cells which is collectively known as Al Qaeda? Would relations between West and Middle East, between Christianity and Islam, between Sunni and Shia be as dangerously stretched as they now are.

I don't think so.

Jeb Bush, I think you have a lot to answer for.

In freedom is power

Apparently, our children are the worst behaved in Europe. Our teenagers drink more, get into more fights and have more casual sex. We didn't need research to tell us that. A couple of trips abroad makes it painfully clear. We also know that they can be abusive, thieve, knock down anyone who argues with them or stops them doing what they want and con old ladies.

Except that, for the most part, they don't. Most teenagers are delightful. And for the fact that some of them do behave as badly as they do we can blame the chattering classes and woolly liberals. Of whom I am a full, paid-up member.

Let me cite as evidence a small piece which is reported in the paper today. The Head of a secondary school (sorry - Community College) in Cornwall has advised his students not to hug each other.

Mr Kenning says ""Hugging has become very acceptable amongst students.

"This has led to some students believing that it is OK to go up to anyone and hug them, sometimes inappropriately.

"This is very serious, not only for the victim, but also for anyone accused of acting inappropriately. To avoid putting anyone at risk, please avoid hugging."

Risk? Victim? This is hugging we're talking about here, not anthrax. You can be a victim of torture, a victim of drought or famine, of rape or murder. You cannot be a victim of hugging. To use the word 'victim' is to disempower, to reflect the disempowerment of an appalling fate. The man whose family starves because his crops has failed can do nothing about it and is a victim. The woman who is raped by a man more powerful than she in an alley can do nothing about it and is a victim. The child strung up and tortured can do nothing about it and is a victim. The more we extend the use of the word victim, the more we disempower.

Similarly, when we place more stress on rights than on responsibility, we disempower. There are certain basic human rights and those must be preserved at all costs. Common sense dictates what those are. If we say beyond those 'you have a right to happiness" which is, in effect what people now believe, you then by implication, tell people that they have no responsibility for their own lives, and therefore they are powerless. It is up to others to ensure that they become happy, by making sure that it is NOT ALLOWED that others should do things to upset them, thereby making them victims. I would support that everyone has a human right to shelter, enough food to eat, clean water to drink, protection from crime and persecution, education, free speech, freedom to worship, and other basics. I don't think that anyone has a right to a breast enhancement on the NHS, the right to be protected from harm while burgling someone else's property, the right to expect one's child to be educated in school in areas beyond the academic curriculum, the right to have a baby at whatever cost, the right to a tertiary education, the right to a bedroom per child on state benefits or the right to a tv and video, among others. If you want something, you should be allowed the sense of achievement which goes with getting it by your own efforts. That's the way you bring up a child. We're leaving too many adults in child-like state. And those badly-behaved teenagers are just living upto the hedonistic model which is set for them in the media and in common currency. Expect to have. Don't expect to work to get.

I'm a socialist. I believe in the mantra of "to each according to his work". I also believe in the idea of the emancipation through work, so beautifully expressed by George Gissing in his 19th century novel "The Odd Women".

Not so much as a shopping list

Writing that is. I haven't written so much as a shopping list since I last signed in.

Creative hiatus, I call it. Don't even pretend to do anything remotely artistic and suddenly the muse will come. That's the theory, anyway.

So I took myself and the children off with my friend and her children to their house in the Charente region of France. It's like stepping back in time to a rural 50s countryside where children can roam free on their bikes and visit friends or play endless make-believe games in the large, rambling back garden, utterly free of adult interference. The only time they were summoned back was when the neighbouring farmer warned us that there were hunters out in the fields. The hunters target small birds, but are renowned, due to the amount of the local liquor they imbibe from about seven in the morning, for hitting larger, more domestic prey such as cows, or small children. The kids put on a circus in the barn. The two eight year-old boys performed with their flower sticks and diablos, the two ten year-old girls showed of their trampolining and trapeze skills and the three year old performed some magnetic magic. The audience of two mums was suitably impressed. During the day we pootled around doing not much at all except making sure that food was on the table at the appropriate times and chatting over lots of tea and coffee. In the evenings, trying not to indulge in nicotine, we did Very Difficult Jigsaws, mainly composed of blocks of one colour, read, talked, and drank loads, so much that my liver hurt by the end of the holidays. We also, for some reason, found it incredibly difficult to go to bed, and were still up at one am, even when we'd decided to get an early night. As we were up with children at seven, I came back from the holidays knackered.

I know that when we came back from Wales I said that I really wanted a holiday home in Wales. Well, now I really want a holiday home in France. Either way I'll have to set about earning it. That, if nothing else, is a good spur to my creative endeavour.

It was also quite nice to miss my husband. We get so used to the daily grind of domestic life that we never really have time to think about each other. We've made that classic error of ignoring our own relationship in favour of our roles as parents and family.

INFP off on holiday

I've done the Myers Briggs Personality Thingy before, but I suspect I am a changed person since then. I am now, I discover, an INFP (that's Introvert (a trait that every single person I have ever met in my whole entire life would challenge, but there you go...) iNtuition Feeling Perception type.)

Looking up the attributes of this type, it's not that far off, although the nomenclature 'dreamer' isn't accurate. I'm not a dreamer - I don't just dream of things; I work bloody hard to achieve them. And I always have done. In fact I think that's what marks me out from most of my age group. I have never stopped believeing that I can start NOW and build something completely new, learn something completely new, DO something completely new. I question, however, the benefit of knowing that I'm very nearly a textbook INFP. And I doubt that I'm going to look at a class of kids and be able to tell the ENFJs from the ISTPs. There's a whole industry built on thie idea that you can sort people into categories, and I find it all absolutely fascinating, but I don't think it's terribly helpful.

Half term this week and I'm away to France with the children tomorrow for a week in the country with my mate Den and her children. Eating, drinking, doing jigsaws, reading and generally kicking back with the children. Maybe some horseriding. Oh, and speaking a bit of French.

Au revoir, mes lecteurs. Je vous souhaite des bonnes vacances.

History Matters - 1 Day in history

Today stuffstillhappens takes part in the mass observation exercise organised by History Matters.

This might make for a pretty tedious read now, but the idea is to get as many people as possible to record the minutiae of their day, in order for future generations to be able to know about and wonder at the way we lived today, October 17th 2006.

So, here goes:

Martin got up at 5am to take the dogs for a walk. The cab came to take him to the train station to go to meetings in London and Reading. I got up at six, put a load of washing in the washing machine, checked my email, looked on the screenwriting website to see if anyone'd looked at my work, looked at the local news and then settled down with a mug of red bush tea for my daily dose of Sudoku. I especially like the 'Killer' version, where there are no numbers to guide you, but instead combinations of squares are enclosed with a total numeric value, so that you have to use maths as well as logic. I like to think it keeps my reasoning faculties healthy! I beat the guide time, which is always my objective.

At 7am I unloaded the dishwasher, made the children's lunches (sandwiches, fruit, little cheeses, boxes of raisins, pouch yoghurts and squash) and laid the table for breakfast. I had just enough time to print out the scripts from the Blue Peter website for the competition to win a speaking part in Doctor Who, and went up to wake my kids at 7.30. They are massive fans of Doctor Who, and they are very excited about this competition. They read the scripts while they got dressed and I had a shower. We have to make one minute audition DVDs of them performing one of the monologues. Breakfast, as always, was at 8am. Martin is usually with us. It's our time to talk as a family, as we can't always do supper together. I had a poached egg on malted wholemeal toast and far too much very strong coffee, while the children had Weetabix followed by toast and butter and a boiled egg, all washed down with juice. Jake had a 'fish pill', his Omega 3 supplement, which helps him to stay focussed at school. (We try not to give him sugar in his diet as he has a tendency to be slightly hyperactive.)

At 8.30 we walked up to school together. They go to a Catholic primary school, although we're not Catholics. It's a lovely place - really nurturing and caring. At the moment the school is welcoming a lot of children from Eastern Europe, especially from Poland, which is newly part of the EC. Bristol has a very well-established Polish community and has had since WWII, and it has grown very considerably since May. There's a great debate about the very existence of faith schools and the effect, positive or negative, that they have on British life in these days of tension between religions.

On the way back I popped in to the corner shop and picked up a couple of things, and was reminded that the paper bill is VERY LARGE! So I paid it on the way into school. Our corner shop is run by two brothers who work unbelievably hard to provide an invaluable service for the local community. Unfortunately our neighbourhood has recently become the focus of the supermarkets, mainly because until recently we only had one. Which was absolutely fine. We have everything we need in the main road - an organic butcher, greengrocers, toyshop, bookshop, pet shop, card shop, coffee shops, jewellers, shoe shops, clothes shops, and not a well-known name among them - they're all independents. In the last year or so two more supermarkets have been opened and another two, one extremely large, are planned. So in two years if we don't succeed in stopping them, we will go from one supermarket within one mile's radius of us to six, or even seven. The existence of our thriving independent retail community is threatened. There is a campaign to stop it - BOGOFS.com - Bishopston Opposes Glut OF Supermarkets. They put up trestle tables on the main road on Saturdays and have petitions that you can download from the internet. Unfortunately another recent conservation campaign in the area made barely a dent in the planning applications when a local Victorian pub/hotel was bulldozed so that a developer could put up a block of modern flats. And we lost the beautiful Edwardian swimming baths, even though we fought tooth and nail, involving English Heritage and local and national media. It now awaits someone to come in and turn it into yet another restaurant... Although there is a campaign to revive it as a private concern.

I've put out a cheque for the dogwalkers - they only come once a week, on a Tuesday when I work pretty much all day. Today's going to be quite easy because Year 11 (15-16 years old) are out on work experience. I'll spend their double lesson marking coursework. I teach in an independent school. In our city the standard of education is pretty low in the state sector. This is partly to do with the fact that over the years when results are published and parents see that the state schools are doing badly, they avoid them and, because there are quite a few reasonably priced independent schools locally, they can do what is necessary to get the school fees together. So now education is quite segregated. As a result too much time is devoted in education to fudging the figures rather than actually improving education. I don't feel great about working in the independent sector, socialist that I am, but I'm pragmatic enough to know that I don't want my kids' education to be a social experiment. I don't want their futures in the hands of the useless dunces on our local council. And in order to make the school fees as affordable as possible, I hope I'll get a discount for at least one of the children.

I had a good morning's teaching, then a sandwich in the school cafe for lunch and a bit of marking and I came back here and did more marking. Then a bit of writing, rewriting a script which has elicited some interest, and I fetched the children. Both kids, my eight year-old boy and my ten year-old girl, play tag rugby, which is a non-contact introduction to the sport of rugby, after school on a Tuesday. My daughter scored a try last week in a match against another school. She was very proud! They also go to drama and football provided after lessons at the school. When they got home the children had a buttered hot cross bun as a snack, and then settled down to do their daily Kumon. Im does Maths and Jake does English - it's a Japanese programme, where the children's level is assessed and they are given a bit of the subject to do every single day of their lives. It tends to be repetitive and it's timed, so that skills become automatic, meaning that they can concentrate on more complex ideas in school. Although they complain bitterly about it, they like the effects it's having on their achievements at school. It's only about fifteen minutes a day. They also do their homework, which is typically about another fifteen minutes. Im does all hers on a Monday, so that the whole lot is out of the way for the rest of the week.

We'll all do some music practice at some point: she learns violin, he learns guitar and I'm keeping them company by learning piano. We plan to form a family band! He wants to be a rock star, she wants to play in an orchestra and I want to be able to accompany myself singing.

It's raining today so they don't want to kick a ball around outside. So it might be plasticine, if they're in creative mood. They both love the work of Aardman Animations, creators of Wallace and Gromit, plasticine inventors. They have made their own models, and even added some of their own creations; there's Mr Pork; an innocent besuited animal by day, at times of crisis he turns into the caped and leotarded SuperPig! Or they might make Lego models, tiny, intricate designs which can keep them happy for hours.

Martin will come home at some point and we'll all have our supper; lamb cutlets with redcurrant jelly, peas and mash. I've got some rhubarb from the garden which I'll poach in orange juice for pudding. I'll iron tonight while watching TV. Martin's going away tomorrow for a few days in France with his friends, so I'll iron some shirts. (Don't think I do this all the time - I don't. I would do practically anything rather than iron.) And then I've got to finish my book club book for tomorrow night - This Motel Life, by Willy Vlautin. I won't manage it tonight, because I'll fall asleep, but I'll be up extra early tomorrow to make sure I get through it.

Wouldn't it have been nice if I could report that something amazing had happened today? A director had rung clamouring for me to take my script off the market. One of the agents I'd approached had called to say they'd represent me. I'd done a gig with the jazz band. But no. I'm afraid not.

That's my quota of the quotidian.

Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

Brown Dog Films

Right, this is it. I've been talking about setting up a website and hawking my wares, and today's the day.

Brown Dog Films will hit the web today. (Well, it will if I can find my way through the set-up instructions, which is by no means a foregone conclusion.) I've got to contact the photographer who recently did some studio shots for us to see if he'll let me use one of the images of our gorgeous Viszla, Nina, to be my logo. Either tht or I'll have to chase her around to try and get a good shot of her. She's very, very timid and shy, and clearly believes that a camera is an offensive weapon. It would also be nice to have a pic of me, but that's trickier... I've edited out practically every photo taken of me over the last decade. The one illustrating my blog is, I think, the only one that survived the cut.

Not sure what should go up on the site once it's live. CV, obviously. Short bio. Loglines for my work or whole scripts? Just scripts or other work too? Short stories? Sample chapters of novels? Anyone with any expertise who wishes to give me the benefit of such, don't hold back now!

I'll get back you later and let you know how I'm getting on.

The veil and the cross.

A classroom assistant has been suspended from Headfield Church of England Junior School because she refused to remove her veil in class and it was impairing the children's understanding of her during English lessons. They have said that she may wear it in the staffroom and corridors, but must remove it when teaching in class. She claims that this infringes her civil rights.

On the same day, it is reported that a British Airways has asked a Christian member of staff to conceal her cross necklace because it contravenes the company's uniform policy. They do not wish members of staff to wear religious items visibly. Sikh and female Muslim members of staff are exempt from this as it is unrealistic to expect that the hijab or turban may be worn under other clothing.

Religion is becoming politicised in a country where, on the mainland, traditionally, politics and religion has been separated. Those of us 'over here' regard the Northern Ireland problem, massive as it has been, as political rather than religious. And, on the whole, we actively dissociate ourselves from it. While we do not have the French attitude of the rigid detachment of religion from the state, we have been more gently secular. In a country where the division between Catholicism and Protestantism made for a sticky couple of centuries and caused the death of many, we are sensitive about religious choice, and it is a widely held tenet that a person's religion is their own affair. (Thanks, Henry VIII, for the whole new religion thing. Never has a man's desire to rid himself of a wife caused so much death and destruction...)

But the secular Britain where I went to school in the 70s is becoming a distant memory. Religion was gentle in my day. It was the quiet, unassuming children who took to religion. On the BBC message board relating to the veil incident there are many British Muslims commenting on the fact that in their day it waas almost unheard of that a girl would wear a hijab, let alone a burqa or a veil, but now when they pass schools it is a common sight. In the 70s such a girl would have been regarded as retrogressive and oppressed; now she's radical in claiming her civil right to wear these items. This has all happened since 9/11. As Islam becomes the subject of ever more attack, the young, threatened Muslim community turns inward and battens down the hatches. You don't have to be an expert in sociology to work out cause and effect. Then, as Muslims demand, and are granted, more religious right, the Christian community, the most well-rooted religion in this country, itself feels threatened, and percieves its own oppression. Watch this space for some fanatical Christian acts. As an unscientific alert, I had never met a Creationist until about 5 years ago, and now they seem to be cropping up all over the place. There's that old film about the teacher being tried for teaching that evolution was the truth - I looked at that as a period piece, historical whimsy, something we could all look at and congratulate ourselves in how far we'd come. But no. It appears that the debate is still alive. More so in the US than here, but it's growing in these isles. Interestingly, in the name of religion, the archaic is being embraced as revolutionary. As a human trajectory it makes for a depressing commentary.

I don't really have any answers, because in a country where religious tolerance has been one of the hallmarks of our civilisation, it would be difficult to put the brakes on and adopt the French model. However, now that Muslim girls are having their hijabs and veils ripped off in the street to the accompaniment of verbal or even physical abuse from idiotic bigots, something really has to be done. No one can be more concerned about this than our country's religious leaders, and I hope (and would pray if I were that way inclined) that they are working together to avert the gathering storm.

The darkest hour...

Things are better today. Two people reviewed and really liked my latest offering. Which is just as well, because I really feel I've polished this pretty thoroughly. There's always more that can be done. There's one scene that's funny, but probably doesn't serve much purpose. One person's already picked up on that. I pitched it this morning on Shooting People and that has already generated some interest.

I'm putting in a story for consideration for a public reading to take place in a crypt on Halloween. This was a bit of an issue, as I don't really do creepy, so I've had that washing around my brain for a while, but I came up with an idea while walking the dogs in the rain today. Astonishingly the idea has nothing to do with either rain or dogs. I came home and put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and wrote a few hundred words. It's a start and now I'm cooking.

Fun teaching today too. I generally have a laugh with most of the kids I teach - they're a really nice bunch, but today was lovely. I felt they really enjoyed their lessons. My year 10 had to make up excuses in French for not giving in their homework. I read them out and we voted for the best. It read "On m'a mis sur un bateau et envoye en Afrique" or, loosely, "I was put on a boat and sent to Africa". My personal favourite though, was "Ma mere les a mange" or "My mum ate them". Good fun.

North Korea, eh? What's the world coming to? Sorry - that's your lot. I'm not up to a rant. I'm feeling too mellow. How quickly things change!

Reader, he said No.

I'm up and down like the proverbial whore's drawers these days...

After a good few weeks of solid Pollyanna-dom (or Anne-of-Green-Gables-dom, whichever it was that was always 'glad'), here I am with, as a friend of mine used to say, 'a face like a slapped arse'. I've been pootling around under my own little raincloud. (Mixed metaphors? What do you mean - mixed metaphors?)

What fragile creatures we writers are. If I may be so bold as to describe myself thus, which today is touch and go. The Director said No. This has made me unreasonably depressed. I'm not too worried because I'll almost certainly snap out of it before Friday. Anyway, I haven't let him get completely away, but have already suggested that he read something else of mine. We'll see. If you don't ask, you don't get.

I'll try and work up some enthusiasm to rant about something tomorrow. It's been ages since I had a good rant. Maybe that's the problem. I'm spending too much time writing and not enough venting my existential angst with the world and its status quo.

On page 30 of the first draft of At the Front though, which is good.

Glutton for punishment

That's me. Having put up a script on the script review site I frequent daily, I now feel that I don't know how to write any more. Ironically this was the first script picked up by a producer, about three years ago. She claimed to love it and we worked together for a while. Unhappily it all fell through in the end, mainly, I think, because we didn't actually get on very well with each other. After that I didn't do much with it until a few months ago I dusted it down, rewrote it a bit, and posted it on the site to test the response. And it was savaged by a number of people. Rather tragically I've already sent this script to a producer who, having read one other script of mine, is interested in my work. He's calling me back before Sunday. I'm not optimistic, but if he does pass on it I am going to suggest that he read a third oeuvre of mine. I hope he goes for it. He's exceptionally nice and we've had some good chats on the phone. He has been directing drama at the BBC and has done some very good work which I've really enjoyed. I really, REALLY want him onboard.

However, I have just put up another script for review, one which is probably my favourite. I'm holding my breath on this because I feel that it's now well and truly ready. In that marvellous universe which exists in the third dimension, the main roles will be played by Judi Dench and either Marianne Faithfull or Meryl Streep. In this universe I am planning to write to Judi Dench, who once dandled me on her knee when I was six years old and she was the most promising young Shakespearean actress of her generation and touring West Africa with the RSC. I plan to remind her of this in the almost certainly vain hope that it will prick her curiosity enough to start reading my script. After that, and I might be ridiculously misguided here, I'm hoping that the words will take over and she might enjoy it. I'll give it a few weeks to see if the agents who asked to see my work offer to represent me. To have representation might make things easier.

I'm being very self-indulgent now, talking about writing, but the lack of movement in that rather large segment of my life is preoccupying me. I feel rather in limbo at the moment. While many projects are poised for action, nothing is actually happening, and that's very, very frustrating indeed.

Watch this space.

Taxing

To cut taxes or not to cut taxes, that is the question being asked at the Conservative Party conference. Traditionally the Tories have been the party of tax cuts. It's usually the big surprise they come out with in the Leader's speech, although everyone's seen it bulging under the three-piece suit.

This morning it was reported on the news that some right-wing MPs went to the bother of hiring a steamroller to illustrate their opinion that taxes should be, wait for it, 'steamrollered'. You gotta love 'em.

But unfortunately this year, to muttering and despondency, David Cameron has decided against announcing tax cuts for the simple reason that he doesn't know if they';d be able to meet those promises if they came into power. There's a novel idea - linking the concept of tax to the concept of public spending. Politicians go on as if tax is A Very Bad Thing. People should make their own choices, they say. Robbing the taxpayer, they say. Stealth taxes, they say. Not a peep about the public services which these taxes are going to fund.

We've sold off the family silver in the shape of the formerly nationalised industries and our manufacturing industries. Now the boring infrastructure of the country is in private hands - coal, water, electricity, airways, railways, communications - and we've learned the hard lesson that private enterprises can be just as inefficient, wasteful and shoddily run as their public predecessors. The major difference being that the nationalised ones actually had a responsibility to keep working for the sake of the country, rather than bleating that certain necessary undertaking, such as making sure the trains run when they're supposed to, or that half the water supply doesn't drain away through leaks in unmaintained pipes, don't make economic sense for the shareholders. The manufacturing industry sector in this country, such as it is, is almost exclusively owned by other nations, Japan, America or Germany among them. So yes, there are jobs, but the profits of these industries wing their way out of the country. Bless you, Margaret Thatcher.

So the opportunities for raising funds to actually run the country start to look a little thin. Taxation has to be a key method, so to witter on blithely about how the Evil Labour Government is robbing its people through taxation is just daft. What are you going to do instead? Or is your big idea to stop performing any public services at all, but simply to frame legislation and supervide the closing down sale of GB Inc.? At least David Cameron, for all his polished plastic suavete, isn't quite down to the lowest common denominator of the Tory party whose big idea is to emulate their last 'successful' leader and carry on the legacy of St Margaret. He's won a titchy bit of respect from me for that. I'm not sure I could ever bring myself to vote Conservative, but as Tory leaders go, he's not the worst.

Hungover and restless

H and JP couldn't make it to the party last week so they came round for supper and we sank a lot of wine. H is one of my oldest and dearest friends. We were BFs for years and at one point lived together. In fact at one point we lived together with our two French boyfriends. No, don't ask. Yes, it was a total soap opera.

Anyway, now we hardly see each other as our lives run on different tracks. But she is one of the most life-enhancing people on this planet. JP's a star too.

So this morning I'm hungover and inexplicably restless and frustrated. Nothing to do with last night. (Well, the restlessness anyway. The hungover bit's DEFINITELY to do with last night.) But this writing thing just takes too long. The writing itself takes time, but the marketing it, the marketing ME, the convincing everyone that I'm worth it is draining. I'm so bored of being nearly there. Every morning I wake up and I'm thrown into a state of waiting. I'm always waiting for that big break. Hell, I'm waiting for that little break. And I'm too old to be waiting.

I can't see a day when things are going to be otherwise. I don't think I'll ever be the kind of person who's satisfied. I'll always be striving and waiting. Most of the time I think that's positive. On days like today it depresses the hell out of me.