Archived News 2007
July 2007
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I went to the Port Eliot Literary Festival in Cornwall. You camp in the grounds of a stately home while various literary, arty and aristocratic types entertain you with music, poetry, stories, films and stalls.Favourites included Daphne the Fairy-spotter, the One Minute Disco at the Boathouse and the Poetry Juke Box.It’s quirky and fun. I did a brief write-up on my blog here and for The Book Magazine (left). |
June 2007
I went to the Screenwriters Festival in Cheltenham, a sort of four-day conference set up with the aim of establishing a community of screenwriters here in the UK.
A number of big-name screenwriters spoke during the four days, including Diana Ossana, Bill Nicholson, David Hare, Anthony Horowicz and Michael Goldenberg.
The consensus seemed to be that if you wanted to break into writing for film, you needed to start in TV or in the theatre, but that you should think twice about film-making as a career because it’s a long, difficult path getting a film made, and you’re likely to get fucked over along the way.
I was struck by how few original big budget screenplays get made – most are adaptations of literary books and short stories.
I was there to cover it for the Writers’ Guild – you can read various posts about it on the Writer’s Guild blog here and on my blog here.
May 2007
| I’ve been growing marrows, strawberries and sunflowers in my garden. The slugs and snails have eaten the marrows, which I don’t care about because who eats marrows anyway?The squirrels dug up the sunflower seeds before they had even sprouted but there was one large, green strawberry that I was especially proud of and I would go and admire it every morning.
It seems the squirrels had been admiring it, too. They pounced on it overnight and carried it away somewhere, stripping the rest of the strawberries from the plant and scattering them around in an act of vandalism that seemed to suggest that my gardening was not up to their standard. |
Three Haiku Spring chill; marrows grow Summer, a bird sings; Strawberry battlefield;
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April 2007
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I have spent rather too much time blogging this month.
Other than that, a trip to Lisbon was cancelled because one of the friends I was travelling with was taken in to hospital on the morning we were due to leave. I’d been busy writing (real writing – not just blogging) and hadn’t spent any time planning the trip – I left it all to my friends to sort out. Usually I do a trial pack at least two weeks before I go anywhere and stock up with maps, guide books and recommendations but this time, nothing. There is a tiny, irrational part of me that insists that the trip to Lisbon didn’t go ahead because of a failure of imagination on my part. While I have no doubt that willpower can affect the performance of sportsmen and women, I’m not convinced that it has any effect on international travel. Besides, my friend is still in the hospital with pneumonia. She’ll be OK. You see, we spent a lot of time playing on a Nintendo Wii just after Christmas and she whupped everyone at everything, including the boxing. While there may be no connection between my lack of imagination and the cancellation of our trip to Lisbon, a strong performance on the Nintendo Wii is surely a very good indicator that a person will make a swift recovery following hospitalisation. |
March 2007
Because I read for pleasure and I write for a living, if I’m not careful I can spend too much time inside my own head. Every month I resolve to get out more, to seek out new experiences, to live life to the full. Sounds impressive, this relentless questing after novelty and thrills? In practice, it’s all rather tame and disappointing. Whether this is on account of my advancing age or my lack of ambition, I cannot say. The latter, I suspect. For example this month, for the first time ever, I roasted a duck. It was a successful enterprise but not a particularly noteworthy one.
When I was younger, I used to go out dancing two or three times a week, every week. On Saturdays I would dance, as if it were my right, from midnight till eight o’clock in the morning. Whether sewing fancy dress costumes for drag balls or dancing on the podium in gay clubs (what must they have thought?) or dancing in my sunglasses in dodgy after hours clubs, I thought that I was engaging with the world; living life to the full. Gyrating in a semi-sexual way to the music in a nightclub is emphatically not a team sport and it was an activity I found I was particularly suited to.
I remember worrying about what would happen when I got too old to go to nightclubs but nature is kind and I simply don’t want to go any more. The queues for the toilets, the taxi ride home – who needs any of that? So what is left to me to do these days? Well, I go to the theatre, an activity that generally disappoints. I go to art galleries, I walk the dog, I go swimming. Gah…
When I leave the house, I want to be entertained, moved, thrilled, entranced and to feel part of something. You used to be able to get that on the top deck at the front of the no. 59 bus travelling north from Brixton over Waterloo Bridge until they went and fitted TV screens inside the bus that broadcast adverts on a loop.
I want that feeling you get with the first five minutes of watching a firework display or the first drink of the evening or that moment when you go diving and you sink below the surface of the water and enter a new world. Yes, I have been to see Cirque de Soleil – it left me unmoved. I’ve come to suspect that to get the most out of any experience you have to participate rather than be a spectator. However I am shy, unsporty, uncompetitive, uncoordinated, grumpy and lazy. I cannot play tennis, football, the piano, the guitar or any acting role on the stage. In short, participation-wise, I am a bit stuffed.
This month, buoyed up by the novelty of cooking the duck, I went all-out for a new experience and attended a Shamanic Dreaming workshop. A charismatic man drummed and told wise stories and then you closed your eyes and went into a dream, a kind of guided vision where you could meet your animal spirit guide (mine was a huge tiger) and have adventures. I sat in a cave and wrote a novel in mine, while a glorious purple light streamed down from the top of a volcano and filled my head. It was the most fun I’ve had in ages.
Technically, you could say the Shamanic Dreaming was just another way of living in my head. But I sat in a church hall and held hands with real people while I went down into that cave with a tiger for a companion. And when we got back above ground, the tiger told me it would turn into a small attractive bird and remain close by. And I’ve seen the bird several times since, in the apple tree in my garden.
February 2007
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Don’t get a dog. Just don’t. It isn’t because of the hair on the sofa or the dog shit or the walks in the rain. It’s because you will fall in love with them and then they will go and die on you.
No, wait. Don’t get the wrong idea. Jessie has NOT died. Not yet. She turned 14 on Valentine’s Day (convenient – always got a date, even if it’s a date whose breath smells like prawns). 14 is 98 in dog years. Not that dogs years actually exist. You think dogs really calculate anything other than how many gravy bones are left in the box and how to get you to hand them over? The concept of dog years is a human conceit. But Jessie is old, time is marching on, I spend too much time worrying about her mortality, which in turn makes me think about my own inevitable decline. Yes, it is possible to love too much. Especially if you love a dog. And love can lead you to do crazy things. While it can be amusing -even liberating, at first - to use a special language, songs, hybrid words and all the rest of it when you are with your dog, sooner or later it will catch you out. Singing to your dog in a nonsense language is an activity that is sure to be misunderstood by the outside world. So we have instigated a special kind of ‘buddy check’ routine before any of us leaves the house. This sort of system will be familiar to scuba divers and followers of extreme sports and is vital to ensure the safety of participants. In our case it’s Got your keys? Yes. Got your money? Yes. Got your Oyster Card? Yes. Stopped talking in the special stupid dog language? Yes. But it’s when people come to visit; when you’re off your guard – that’s when it can get tricky. Before you know it, you find yourself turning to your much loved animal friend and humming the first few bars of a familiar tune… |
January 2007
January has got off to a good start. I’m working on a play. It will open this summer, so I’m in the fortunate position of writing something and knowing that I will be able to go and see it performed.
Does a writer need to have a play produced or a novel published? Yes, I think so. You can write a book and just put it in a drawer if you want to, but in that case it’s writing as therapy, which is valid in its own way but doesn’t make you an author.
I’ve recently written a couple of TV scripts and I had a lovely time doing it. But until a script is produced, it’s just a script; a little lifeless thing. You want that script to go out into the world and make something of itself, so you can be proud. You don’t want it lying around the house, doing nothing. Even if it doesn’t get produced, you can still send it out to people so they can read it and judge whether they like your work. But you need to see it on screen for it to really mean anything.
So anyway, I’m thrilled because I know this play is going to be produced. I’m also thrilled because it gives me an excuse to go and see lots of theatre.
Here’s what I’ve seen in January:
The Waves by Katie Mitchell & Company – National Theatre
Kindness & Exuberance by Josie Long – BAC
Blasted by Sarah Kane, Graeae Theatre Company, Soho Theatre
Cymbelline by Kneehigh Theatre Lyric, Hammersmith
Low Life by Blind Summit – BAC
