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.