Slap of the Day

So last year!

2010-10-26T00:03:00.004+01:00

In the episode of Ugly Betty that was broadcast on Sunday, on ITV, Mark said to Betty, after learning she was starting a blog, ‘Oh, welcome to six years ago... [PAUSE] That was uncalled for: welcome to two years ago.’ It got me thinking.

I haven’t posted for several months, but I always planned to resume writing at some point. However, blogging does seem rather passé, especially blogging about one’s misfortune. Although I have always tried to sound ‘angry’ rather than ‘crushed’ when relating unpleasant events, some of my posts must have sounded like annoying moans. I don’t want to read that kind of thing any longer – I find it tiresome and self-indulgent – and I’m pretty sure a lot of people don’t either. The only blogs that have lasted and are worth spending time on are those that provide useful information – or are amazingly beautiful to look at.

The number of visitors to Frag Name of the Day is increasing steadily and I will carry on posting there. As for Les Planches d’Outre-Manche, I don’t know yet...

Anyway, I would like to thank everyone who came here in the past few years. Hope you found Slap of the Day entertaining. Au revoir !

Tally-ho!

2010-02-17T14:27:00.006Z

Yesterday, for the third time in a couple of weeks, I saw a woman wearing fur at my local supermarket. Her coat looked vintage (don’t you just love the way ‘second-hand’ became ‘vintage’ when the middle-class decided it was OK to use stuff that has already been used by someone else), but the other two had been wearing coats that were obviously new. And I don’t think those women weren’t Italian or Eastern European either. The fact that this was in Hammersmith, not in Mayfair, is indicative that it is about to become more acceptable.

I have to confess that I myself have worn fur in the past. My parents, who worked in the rag trade, had friends who were furriers, and two or three times (before the late ’80s, when fur became a no-no, at least in the UK, and you risked having eggs thrown at you if you wore it in the street) I was taken to their workshops and told to select a coat or a jacket. We’re not talking mink here; just something cuddly – and affordable. There is nothing like real fur for warmth and softness; synthetic fur can be very nice (items from La Maison de la Fausse Fourrure and Jan Kuperus, for instance, are wonderful), but it doesn’t age well – actually it doesn’t age at all, whereas real fur (as long as moths are kept away from it) is indestructible and always looks beautiful.

Before she died, knowing I would never want to wear it, my mother gave away her fur (a black astrakhan coat) to one of her neighbours, who didn’t have such scruples, but, later, when sorting out her belongings, I found a woollen coat with a silver fox fur collar in her wardrobe. I took the coat to a charity shop, but kept the collar. I have it still; it is lovely; it sits along the top of my armchair and I stroke it from time to time. It is old, the poor fox is long dead and nothing can bring it back to life so I have no intention of getting rid of it. At least I didn’t hunt the animal myself, like a neighbour of mine – a member of the landed gentry – who has several such trophies hanging on his wall.

If it were possible to obtain skins without hurting the animals in any way, I would wear fur again, but since that can never be I deplore the return of the fashion for fur. It may be another sign that we are going back to uncaring times. Apparently, as a journalist wrote in The Independent a while ago, there is a fashion in ethics too.

Slap!

Update 24/02/2010: Twiggy agrees with me. She has publicly condemned the use of real fur at London Fashion Week. She said designers should be ashamed of themselves.

Frag Name of the Day – FIY

2010-02-15T23:41:00.002Z

If you wish to know what the latest sound file is, look under MY OTHER BLOGS (at right). If you wish to listen to it, please log on to Frag Name of the Day (you might want to subscribe to be advised automatically).

Money down the drain

2010-01-30T16:28:00.004Z

It would never occur to a printer (not the human kind – the noisy, breakable one) to poof off BEFORE a new – extortionately priced – ink cartridge has been put in (and cannot be removed because the carriage is stuck in an inaccessible corner). OBVIOUSLY!

Of all the peripherals, printers are THE most annoying. And expensive.

Slapping (and kicking) stupid printer!

Quelle surprise!

2010-01-26T18:08:00.007Z

Now that our hard-earned cash isn’t going to subsidise Mr Ross’s extravagant lifestyle* any longer – who on earth needs, or deserves, a salary of £6m a year – I was hoping he might be replaced by a woman. Preferably a mature woman. There are quite a few who would do just as good a job, or even a better one. I wanted to nominate Francine Stock for Film 2010 (her programme on Radio 4 is always interesting).

After a lout (Jonathan Ross) and a dinosaur (Barry Norman), it would have made a refreshing change.

Unfortunately, rumour has it that it will be an ageing rocker with a quiff**.
Sigh. And slap!

*Actually, I have no idea whether his lifestyle is extravagant – I’m not interested enough to find out, but with that amount of dough at his disposal it certainly should be.

** Mark Kermode, who I always thought was related to the great literary critic Frank Kermode. He isn’t. Yet another disappointment.

Frag Name of the Day – Serge Lutens

2010-01-04T23:02:00.005Z

Earlier today, on a message board that I still read occasionally, people were arguing about the correct pronunciation of a French perfume house, and finally agreeing on an incorrect one, so I intend to record (and post here) a new name every day – starting with that of my favourite perfumer, Serge Lutens.

I hope all perfumistas out there will find this useful.

Log in tomorrow for the next name on my list. What is it? Ah, that would be telling...
Update (5/01/2010): I have just found a blog host where you can download any sound file posted by the blogger. Go here if you want to save the file for further reference.

I welcome requests, please don't hesitate to ask by using the comments form.

Happy New Year!

2009-12-31T20:02:00.009Z

Update (1/01/10): I hope you all had a good time last night. But not too good. To check the state of your gall-bladder, visualize a piece of toast dribbling with melted butter. If you instantly feel nauseous and clutch your right side, you have overindulged: you need to cut out all fat and alcohol from your diet for a while.

This is an actual test that was used by French doctors in the olden days. It should be revived: it does work. Try it!

Scrogneugneu!

2009-12-28T18:14:00.003Z

I’m sitting here writing a post for Les Planches d’Outre-Manche with the TV on (with the sound off and out of my line of vision – the ideal setup) and I’ve just glanced at it and seen David Tennant taking part in some game show… GO AWAY, we’re all utterly sick and tired of seeing your silly face all over the place this Christmas!

Slapping silly face!

Season of Goodwill

2009-12-24T16:49:00.005Z

A lot of parcels get lost in the post in the UK. Millions of them every year, and probably a high percentage of those around now since so many are foolishly entrusted to Royal Mail before Christmas. (Actually, I believe this is the safest period mail-wise because every parcel is assumed to be a present that has to reach its recipient. Royal Mail employees called off the strike that had been going on for several weeks in October and November because, otherwise, they would have been lynched by their nearest and dearest, let alone the general public. Nothing, but nothing is allowed to get between a Brit and his/her Christmas cards/pressies.)

Anyway, if you agree with the above statement, could you, please, go and tell those neighbours of mine (a young couple from Thailand) who have accused me twice in the past few days of stealing a parcel meant for them. Notice I didn’t say ‘addressed’ to them because, apparently, the sender made a mistake and wrote down my flat number instead of theirs on the label. It goes without saying (but it’s even better said) that I haven’t set eyes on their blasted parcel: all parcels are left with the porter on duty at the time (I know, it sounds ever so grand, but I assure you it isn’t), who enters the name of the recipient – exactly as it appears on the parcel – and the flat number in a book (which you sign when you collect your parcel).

The young girl came to see me first. Her English is practically nonexistent, but I eventually understood she had ordered goods from a company somewhere and the parcel bore my address. I told her that if I got notification of a parcel waiting for me in reception and the parcel didn’t bear my name I would, of course, not collect it and let the porter know which flat it was intended for.

She seemed OK with my response, but the following day, the young man turned up and said – in slightly better English – that he knew I’d recently had a parcel: he’d seen my flat number in the book. The implication being that it had been theirs. Er, no, it is Christmas and lots of people get parcels and, however surprising it may seem, so did I. The parcel, as the name entered in the book indicated, had been intended for me. I also showed the guy the box the stuff had come in – with my name on it.

No doubt their parcel is lost, like all the other unfortunate pieces of mail that never reach their intended recipients, and I expect the company is refusing to send them a duplicate of whatever it was they ordered from them and will carry on telling them, ‘Sorry we made a mistake, but you need to sort it out with the person who lives in that flat.’ I feel sorry for them, but there is nothing I can do. Please tell them that for me – again. And tell them not to turn up on my doorstep any more with an accusatory look in their eyes. They also accused the porter – five times – of the same offence. Enough already! This is England: things will go wrong.

Slap!

Happy Hanukkah!

2009-12-11T21:47:00.004Z

Plus ça change

2009-11-17T03:05:00.002Z

The story goes that the great art critic John Ruskin refused to consummate his marriage to his young bride because he was horrified at finding she had pubic hair. He was used to seeing paintings and statues. That was in 1848 and you’d think young men these days would have a pretty good idea of what women look like down there.

Well, you would be wrong: apparently, some men still find women au naturel repulsive. A few weeks ago, a 38-year-old Times reader, who had just started seeing a 27-year-old man asked the resident sex adviser, ‘Do I need a Brazilian waxing?’ because her new lover had remarked on her ‘lack of grooming’.

That is shocking in itself, but even more outrageous – and sad – was the answer.

There is something hugely irritating about being forced to conform to an aesthetic ideal instigated and perpetuated by the porn industry, but, like keeping one’s armpits and legs smooth, it is now expected. If your boyfriend has been conditioned to expect a tidy Brazilian, he may genuinely find anything else very off-putting.

Though the feminist ethos of your ‘take me as I am’ argument is perfectly valid, your boyfriend’s reaction is instinctive — and in the face of something that is honestly perceived as a turn-off by one partner, rational arguments simply do not work. The good news is that, as “issues” go, this is a pretty small one and, hey, if the relationship doesn’t work out you can return to your old ways.

So, there you have it, ladies, if you want to please your man, you have to take your cue from porn stars. Nice!

Talking about being groomed, I wonder whether the man in question uses an antiperspirant or whether he prefers to stink like his Neanderthal forebears. There is a certain male sales assistant in my local Primark whom one cannot approach for fear of being suffocated. What do you bet he too is very particular about his woman’s toilette?

Slap!

Disclaimer

2009-10-20T19:52:00.004+01:00

As the New York Times reported on 5 October, ‘[from 1 Dec 2009] The Federal Trade Commission will try to regulate blogging for the first time, requiring writers on the Web to clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products.’ At last people who blog about ‘stuff’ are beginning to come clean and reveal what samples they’ve received.

So…

1) lots of people are not as wealthy as they appear to be
2) some companies do not care how badly reviews are written as long as their products are being mentioned
3) I should have been cleverer and realised straight away that blogging about nothing in particular was never going to be lucrative (writing well or badly about books might have got me a Sony Reader – drat!)

Anyway, I would like to assure my readers that no company has ever given me free bad service so I could comment on it. I’ve always had to pay for it one way or another.

You don't have to be a translator...

2009-09-05T22:58:00.004+01:00

...to enjoy this

Second-guessing the medics – updated

2009-08-15T20:03:00.007+01:00

1990 - I’m having an ultrasound on my right eye at Moorfields. I am anxious, but not overly so because the symptoms I’ve been experiencing are the same as those I had seven years ago and I’m expecting ultimately to be told the problem will go away and to get used to the weird green patch in my field of vision because they can’t do anything for me. The ultrasound operator is very talkative and we chat happily for a few minutes while she strokes my eyelid this way and that with the probe. And then she goes silent. I subliminally register the change, but shrug it off. I know she’s seen something because, in the course of the angiogram I had a couple of weeks earlier, the doctor called out to a colleague to ‘come and see this lesion!’ It turns out I have a retinal melanoma.

1999 - I’m having a mammogram arranged by the consultant I saw the previous evening. I’ve never had a mammogram before and it’s agony because I have small breasts and they don’t fit between the plates. The technician struggles with my body, gets her hand squashed, one of my breasts even pops out of the machine halfway through a picture being taken. It is a thoroughly humiliating – and excruciating – experience. Then it’s over and I’m asked to sit on a chair and wait. I sit there, breathless, holding my injured chest, angry that I have to be put through this torture when the consultant more or less said it was some benign problem. The technician comes out of the other room and says she should be having her lunch break now and has to go and fetch her colleague. She comes back with someone else who, when she’s seen the pictures, says that some of them are not clear because the other technician is fairly new and didn’t operate the machine correctly. I get a bit distressed, and even angrier, but do not think there is anything sinister. The experts at the Marsden deliver their verdict the next day: cancer in both breasts – except they were wrong.

2009 – A few weeks ago, I’m lying perfectly still in an MRI room (there is something incongruous in having such a sophisticated test in the basement of an 18th-century house in Harley Street, but I can’t see the humour of it at this point); my head is squashed between two chunks of foam and the machine is making a deafening sound. Still, I’m OK: I’m not in a tube and not feeling claustrophobic – much. The technician told me before the scan started that it would take approximately 15 minutes, but I’ve already heard her say, ‘the next one is eight minutes’, then, ‘the next one is four minutes’ several times and I know it’s taking a lot longer than it should. And then it dawns on me that they are not looking for damage to my cervical vertebrae, but for a tumour on my spinal cord. When it’s over – 45 minutes later – and I query the time it took, she says, ‘We took some extra shots because you’ve had a melanoma,’ and I know I guessed right. Results: no tumour or nerve compression.

The moral of the story? You can’t rely on your instinct when it comes to such tests – just as well sometimes.

Where we at, then? (You can tell I’ve been watching The Wire, can’t you?) Well, no one knows why I’m having the symptoms that have been bothering me, but they’ve discovered I have osteoporosis in my spine (the MRI didn’t show that, by the way), which may or may not be responsible. Some big frightening words have been mentioned, but they don’t bear thinking – or talking – about right now so it’s a question of waiting and seeing if some calcium will do the trick.

Update (18/10/09): So, after waiting over two hours at the hospital and being weighed in public (ugh!), I was told (thanks to a clever computer program that any GP could probably master and thus save everyone a lot of time) that I wasn’t suffering from osteoporosis after all. That is, I do have osteoporosis, but no more than any other woman of my age and I don't require any specific treatment. Just need to be careful not to fall over too often.

That was the good news; the bad news is that osteoporosis is obviously not the cause of my symptoms… I wish it were.

Another Great British Summer…

2009-07-09T20:04:00.004+01:00

…another blight on my life.

For over 20 years, I could never enjoy the sunshine* because summer was my busiest period (all the other French translators being away for ‘les grandes vacances’), then, when that work dried out and I was free again, the gods decided I should be preoccupied with health scares instead.

So here I find myself once again ‘under the doctor’, in front of X-ray machines and soon inside an MRI thingamabob, for symptoms that are making my life a misery. I used to be a hypochondriac, but not any longer. That’s what chronic ill health does for you.

Slapping the gods!

* of course, since I live in London and recently bought a new pair of sunglasses, the sunshine is most often replaced by torrential downpours, which, at least, are in tune with my mood. Trust me on this: going for tests and receiving bad news is worse when the sky is blue and the sun is shining.

It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky. (Muriel Spark)

Shameless

2009-06-27T18:21:00.005+01:00

I’ve already mentioned my erstwhile friend Diana, who sublet her Notting Hill Gate flat to me when I moved to London in 1979 (Small pleasures from small favours). For the first six months, the flat was still in her name and so were all the utility bills: I gave her the money and she paid them – or so I thought until, one day, I found I couldn’t use the phone because the line had been cut off. Art-loving Diana had bought some pieces in a Stratford gallery. I was livid: that money didn’t belong to her; it didn’t even belong to me; it belonged to British Telecom.

I was reminded of her behaviour earlier today when I read a comment on a blog in which the commenter boasted she was thousands of dollars in debt, but still managed to save for luxuries – to make herself feel better, she said. You cannot save money that doesn’t belong to you. You have no business buying luxuries when you owe money to others. You’re not ‘worth it’! You don’t ‘deserve it’! You are being irresponsible and it’s partly because of people like you that people like me, who always strive to live within their means, are in trouble. I am losing money daily because interest rates are now practically nil in this country, lower than inflation anyway. Forget luxuries, I need that money to live on. For the sake of my health, I’m trying not to get het up about things I can’t do anything about, but that made my blood boil.

Slapping selfish, irresponsible people! There are so many of them.

My Brilliant Career

2009-06-14T23:54:00.003+01:00

I’ve been digitizing old cassette tapes and feel I cannot deprive my readers of this treat one moment longer.

I was big in Mali and Niger in the early 90s. Easy to see why, innit?

Time and the Conways at the National

2009-05-09T03:33:00.004+01:00

Why, oh why?

Slap!

That famous British humour

2009-04-22T21:39:00.005+01:00

Just back from my yearly ‘book bath’ at Earl’s Court. Exhausted, but happy: the future of books is not in danger and the quality seems higher than usual – certainly higher than last year. Fewer rubbishy ‘comic’ stocking fillers; fewer patronising ‘lifestyle’ books; more serious fiction.

Anyway, this was next to my seat on the bus back:

Pity it wasn’t rush hour yet.

The column to end all columns

2009-04-11T00:01:00.005+01:00

I used to read quite a few blogs; I don’t any longer. Over the past year or so, I have gradually stopped reading blogs about topics I don’t really care about; blogs that don’t make sense however hard you try to fathom what they’re striving to say; blogs whose authors use the pronoun ‘we’ to refer to themselves; blogs written in painfully bad English; blogs written by admirers of Marie-Antoinette and/or the Romanovs; blogs written by hypocrites; blogs written by sycophants, and blogs whose authors are hypocritical sycophants.

Instead of blogs I’ve been reading newspaper columns online. What is the difference between a blogger and a columnist? The former does it for free; the latter gets paid? Nope: the newspaper columnist has an editor (no one would let me ramble on the way I do in print and that’s as it should be). I am getting fonder of edited stuff by the minute.

The majority of the columns I read are interesting and occasionally perceptive, but none has been more strikingly so as this one, by the delightfully grumpy Giles Coren. It was published in the Times, on 22 November 2008. It refers to events that happened a few months ago, but the main message is even more relevant now, as the recession deepens. I haven’t agreed so much with anything anyone has written for a long time, but then, to me, ‘middlebrow’ is a dirty word.

We need high culture when the index is low

Forget Siberian flosspots. When we’re living on boiled squirrel we should turn to Tolstoy, not trash.

I don't want to give you the wrong impression - and make you think that I give a gibbon's blue goolies whether or not John Sergeant and some horse-thighed Croatian belly-dancer were robbed of a chance to win that game show – but there was one vein of comment in the quagmire of cack spouted about it over the past week that did, briefly, engage me.

And that came when the pro-Sergeant “lobby” appeared to marshal itself around the rallying cry that “the judges should lighten up, it's just a bit of fun, we need distracting from the grimness of the recession”. And I just absolutely do not agree. I cannot see the link. I do not grasp why global economic meltdown should necessarily create an appetite for dumb vanity and shallowness.

Dancing is a moronic activity at the best of times, and when turned into yet another opportunity for celebrity exhibitionism and flawed voting schemes that give democracy a bad name (among a viewing public too lazy to turn out in any significant numbers for elections that really might make a difference to their lives) it appears more imbecilic still. Fiddling while Rome burns.

If a man has lost his job, if his children have holes in their shoes and he is living off soup made from the ninth boiling of a squirrel, then how dare we imagine that his lot will be eased by the sight of a retired journalist waddling round a dance floor with some thunder-bummed Siberian flosspot? (or Slovenian or Russian or whatever she is – I've not seen the show but I've seen the photos in the paper, and nobody colours their hair and body like that except to compensate for a childhood lived under communism).

The media, perhaps understandably, have turned very monochromatic of late. It has only two notes: mad, screaming pessimism about money on the one hand, and brutish, wailing enthusiasm for the lowest of low culture on the other. As if a lack of perspective at both ends in some way created balance.

This week, for example, the papers, when briefly turning their attention away from Strictly Come Dancing, have been thoroughly boob-struck, wrapping stories about the “moral failure” of banks around photographs of Nigella with her shmams out, and running front-page headlines about families losing their homes alongside I'm a Celebrity... video-grabs of big, wet, plastic norks in the jungle.

I do not want to appear hypocritical here, for I am as easily distracted by a big artificial rack on a dim-witted WAG as the next man, but it's not a “new Jordan” that this country should be looking for just at this precise moment, it's a new outlook on life. A far more serious and grown-up one.

And don't look up from your copy of the No1 bestseller Look Who It Is! - My Story by Alan Carr and give me “escapism”. Escapism is an illusion. Escapism is what has got us into this mess. Buying on credit, from the tiddliest MasterCard lunch you couldn't really afford to billion-dollar leveraged buyouts, is, when you boil it down, just escapism - avoiding any sort of engagement with objective reality and doing something just because it feels good at the time. Like a child might do. Or a monkey.

This is not the time to waste a week of your life with Alan Carr's autobiography (or Dawn French's or Paul O'Grady's or Richard Madeley's) and think it counts as reading a book. Because it doesn't. You have borrowed unwisely. You have taken a week off your life that you will not get back at the end, and when you shut whichever compendium of venal drivel you chose, you will still owe thousands on your worthless home and be in no less danger of losing your job.

If you had at least read a bit of Tolstoy, you might have expanded your mind a little. If, instead of watching all those reality shows, you had learnt Japanese, you would be in a better position to remain in work. And if, rather than calling radio phone-ins to say that Len Goodman is a spoilsport, you had learnt the French horn, you would, if nothing else, be able to play your children a bit of Mozart while they sit shivering round the last candle in the house.

I cannot tell you how furious I am with these people who seem to think they should be given back the money they spent on voting for John Sergeant. Anyone to whom a single pound represents a significant, useful quantity of money, and who spent it on a celebrity game show vote, should have his or her assets frozen immediately – under the counter-terrorism laws if need be. Their children should be taken into care. And they should have their credit cards melted and moulded into a stick with which they should be flogged until they bleed.

How in the world can people be angry about a game show? How can a country in 2008 (with the National Intelligence Council in America predicting 20 impending years of environmental tragedy and nuclear war) truly divide into two camps on the question of whether or not the dancing, per se, is the lifeblood of Strictly Come Dancing? It's not funny. It's not even wholesome. It is rancid. If the people who have got so angry about the “injustice” of John's departure had any balls, they would be out lynching bankers.

The point is that all these distractions and escape channels were created not by recession but, quite the opposite, by economic boom.

It was the fat years that made us lazy, dumbed us down, replaced great television with a series of reality shows and killed literature to make room for celebrity whingeing and kiddy books repackaged for adults. It is no coincidence that the publication cycle of Harry Potter, from the first book to the seventh, marked almost exactly the years of economic growth. It is a fat, lazy race that turns its brain off as a prelude to cultural engagement.

Fat, like the seven fat kine in Pharaoh's dream, and the seven lean kine who came after and ate them up. We laid nothing by in the fat years except shlock and dross, and now we turn to it and find that it offers us nothing. Shopping as leisure activity, for heaven's sake. Bluewater, Lakeside, Westfield. The descent into Gomorrah is all-encompassing and headlong. We have not just lost our money, we have lost everything.

Sensible investment designed to repay over the long term would not have screwed everything up the way wild speculation for short-term profit has done.

And the same is true in the culture. Things are going to be pretty crappy now for quite some time, and the short-term fixes of reality television and celebrity biography are not going to help. It would be a great thing if bad times meant we found room for proper books again, and slightly less poisonous popular culture. In the long run, we will end up feeling better if we moderate the gloom of a life with less money by focusing on higher things, not lower ones.

Off to read a ‘proper’ book!

Jamais deux sans trois

2009-03-17T03:43:00.003Z

You wouldn’t expect the Swedes to trick people, would you? They are so straightforward, so no-nonsense, so blond, so healthy, so attractive… but I digress… I usually visit IKEA once a year: it’s tiring and these days there isn’t much I need to buy for my little flat so going there more often would be tedious and unnecessary.

My last ‘expotition’ to the nearest store yielded a very nice shopping trolley at a reduced price of £11, and a white mug-like container with a handle that looked so strange I could not not buy it. I will ask one of my two Swedish friends to tell me what it’s used for. I fully expect her to laugh and say, ‘We don’t use that kind of contraption for anything; it must be Finnish.’ Anyway, on my return home, I checked the receipt and realized to my dismay that I had been charged the full price for the trolley instead of the discounted one. So, two days later, back I went to that huge warehouse, but before going to the customer service desk and complaining about the mistake I thought I should take a photograph of the label showing the price of the trolley in case they didn’t believe me. All the trolleys had been sold, but the label referring to them was still there. That’s when I noticed that I had been charged the correct price: £11 was the Family price. What Family price? Never heard of a Family price.

Easy to miss on the label, non?

I dislike being tricked in this way. I really do. In an attempt to relieve the frustration and resentment I felt, I bought a small table specially designed for laptop users. I occasionally have mine on my lap, but it gets very hot very quickly. Just like the trolley, the table had to be put together, but unlike the trolley, which had been very easy, it couldn’t be built because a main part was missing. So, the next day, I traipsed to IKEA for the third time and returned the stupid, incomplete table. The guy at the desk didn’t even want to hear the reason why I was returning it. As I was leaving, I noticed a large counter in the waiting area, where buyers are encouraged to ‘check’ that the boxes containing the items they have bought are not missing an essential ‘bit’. The very existence of that table means that masses of ‘bits’ are absent from masses of boxes; that it’s a common occurrence.

What about making sure everything is there in the first place, eh? Slap!

PS. At least I won’t have to go back to IKEA for another two years now.

A failed cure

2009-02-04T02:59:00.005Z

Last year I wrote about the reader’s block that had afflicted me for a long time and how I had managed to conquer it (see The book freeze). It worked very well for a while and then I had a relapse: all I could read was stuff on the Net instead of all those wonderful books that were piling up on my bedside table. I got quite distressed about it again.

And then, one afternoon, in Poundland – one of my favourite shops in the whole wide world, where you can satisfy an urge to spend money so easily and so cheaply, I found several interesting audio books (24 hours of entertainment for £4 – an incredible bargain):

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, read by Kerry Shale
Brick Lane by Monica Ali, read by Ayesha Dharker
Toast by Nigel Slater, read by the author
Orson Welles by Simon Callow, read by the author

My treatment started well: the Jonathan Safran Foer was pure bliss. The novel is marvellous and I cannot tell you how wonderfully Kerry Shale reads it. Brick Lane was also a delight. At last I could understand what all the fuss was about: it’s a sensitive, beautifully written novel, read with feeling.

I was elated: in a very short space of time I had managed to ‘read’ two great novels. I stuck the first tape of Toast in my player and prepared to be enthralled. But as soon as I heard the first sentence read out in a weedy, reedy, thin, wet voice by Nigel Slater I knew I wouldn’t enjoy that particular ride. It was torture, but I suffer from ‘Completion Syndrome’ when it comes to audio books too so I had to listen to all six hours of it. I love Nigel Slater’s recipes, but the food he talks about in Toast (the story of his childhood and youth through the foodstuffs he ate) is stodgy and unpalatable and so is the book. Still, OK, I thought, the reason must be partly because it wasn’t read by an actor. Surely the Orson Welles biography would be fascinating: Simon Callow is a talented writer and he was bound to read his own book with all the passion he put into his acting. Alas! I am halfway through it and not enjoying it much. This time I am bothered by Callow’s American accent. It is the most atrocious I have ever heard. Think Anthony LaPaglia’s English accent in Frasier. It makes me want to scream, which is not good since I mostly listen to the tapes at night. I don’t know how I’m going to bear it for another four hours.

After that, it will be back to printed books, I think, because at least I won’t have to put up with silly voices.

Slapping the self-indulgent authors who think they can read their own works and the editors/publishers who can’t say no to them!

A neat trick

2008-12-28T23:19:00.006Z

The media don’t report the rocket attacks the Israelis are subjected to on a daily basis so everyone can express outrage when, at the end of their tether, the real victims decide to respond in kind.

For the past few days, I’ve listened to the news with trepidation and heard the now- familiar biased wringing of hands, as it were, but I was pleasantly surprised by a journalist’s blog. The post itself was the usual hypocritical waffle about ‘disproportionate response’, but a lot of the comments were taking the author to task about it, and that was unexpected and rather heartening.

Update (1/01/09): Watch this.

Happy Hanukkah!

2008-12-22T13:46:00.003Z

No, but, really!

2008-11-29T20:25:00.001Z

I just think that a PC from a reputable maker, in the hands of someone who’s been using a computer for nearly 20 years and who knows what she’s doing, should last longer than 16 months and not poof off without warning.

I’ve been a nasty shade of livid for the past few days.

Slap!

Update (1/12/08): if you want to retain your sanity, do not buy a Hewlett-Packard computer, and do not buy it from John Lewis.

The stress of it all!

Some Health Hero!

2008-11-18T14:37:00.003Z

I was reading the Boots magazine the other day and came upon this – about their pharmacists:

High Street Health Heroes
[They can] advise on vitamins and supplements:
we can assess your age and lifestyle and advise on what nutrients you might be missing from your diet.

Ha! They can advise me on what vitamins to take, can they? So why is it that when I asked a Boots pharmacist about a good, easily digestible brand of vitamin C (because I have IBS and can’t have things like citric acid, an ingredient of effervescent tablets, which are supposed to be the easiest to assimilate), he looked like he hadn’t understood the question, hesitated and then mumbled, ‘But citric acid is vitamin C!’ I answered, ‘With respect, vitamin C is ascorbic acid, not citric acid.’

Actually, I didn’t say ‘with respect’ because I had instantly lost all respect for him. I told him to look it up, and walked away. His two assistants had witnessed the encounter and I expect they didn’t have much respect for him either after that.

Slap!

Mixed messages

2008-11-15T21:01:00.011Z

A couple of weeks ago, the largest shopping centre in Europe opened within spitting distance of where I live. If my flat was higher up I could probably even see it from my desk.

It's called Westfield. Gorgeous, innit?

Except... I’m not fond of shopping malls: I find them claustrophobic, even when they’re very spacious. I need to breathe a bit of fresh air from time to time. If I can’t, I lose the will to live after a while. They’re not kidding when they say Westfield is the largest shopping centre in Europe. It’s absolutely ginormous: I’ve been there three times since Day 1 (when I took the pics above) and still can’t quite find my way around.

It should be ‘a good thing’, though. We’re all hoping it will signal the start of the long-promised regeneration of Shepherds Bush. Not before time, we thought, when we first heard about it. The ‘gentrification’ was going to happen, years ago, when it was announced that Kate Moss would be buying a flat in the area; she never did. Then, Nigella, who’d been living around here for years, dissed the place after John Diamond died and soon moved to a much posher address with her millionaire husband. So let’s hope it won’t be a case of jamais deux sans trois. But it might, and Shepherds Bush may never become a new Notting Hill Gate since hardly any residents will have the money to avail themselves of what Westfield has to offer. The only customers will be those foreign multi-billionaires to whom we owe the fact that London is the most expensive city in Europe, if not the world. At the moment, business in Westfield is booming, apparently, but what about after the holidays, when all the fairy lights have been switched off and everyone has received their credit card bills? What then? Some of the stores will survive, but others are bound to close down (I think I can already tell which ones). Will this bright and shiny temple of consumption turn into another desolate warehouse, full of mobile-phone stores and charity shops?

Curiously, Westfield has revived my fondness towards Hammersmith, which has been my playground until now. It has a wealth of fun, cheap stores, like Primark and Tiger and the newly opened Poundland and, of course, TK Maxx, where I can get items of clothing I couldn’t afford otherwise. I can have fun in Hammersmith: I can spend the odd pound without feeling guilty. Westfield is for ‘serious’ shopping. Although it will be very nice not to have to traipse to the West End if I want to visit Debenhams or House of Fraser or a large branch of M&S, I predict I will mostly come back empty-handed and rather frustrated from my trips to Westfield.

I will just have to resist going there and instead stay at home and make preserves and mend my tights using my hair, as India K probably advocates in her latest book on thrift. I am so sick and tired... of clichés... no, of wealthy people giving me advice on how to live frugally. I could hardly be more frugal than I am already. I gather there are adults out there who’ve only lived in a time of boom and who would welcome some tips, but someone who wrote a bestseller entirely devoted to shopping – and who will be raking in the royalties for this book too – is in no position to tell them anything about not spending money. Or doesn’t credibility matter any longer?

Oh, and one more thing: what is missing in Westfield – and that will sadden some of my readers – is a posh perfume shop. There isn’t a single ‘niche’ fragrance to be had – nothing but so-called department-store stuff. There is a branch of Beauty Base (the Queensway perfumery), but it doesn’t even sell the Serge Lutens scents it used to stock a few years ago. Actually, talking of Beauty Base, the boss should have a word with some of his employees and tell them not to antagonise customers by using words like ‘You’re not allowed to...’, etc. Considering Beauty Base sells miniatures clearly marked NOT FOR SALE, I don’t think it has a leg to stand on when it comes to things not being allowed, do you?

Slap!

I’ve been tagged again!

2008-11-02T13:17:00.004Z

And this is a fun and easy assignment from Trina at My Life My Words My Mind : ‘Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 56. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your journal/blog along with these instructions. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST. Tag five other people to do the same.’

Now, let’s see: the book that is always closest to me is my trusty Collins Robert Comprehensive English > French Dictionary. It’s very big and a great source of comfort: I know that should my memory fail (as it does more and more often these days) I can always rely on it to get me out of a tight spot.

Page 56 bang / bar
* to bang one’s fist on the table taper du poing sur la table
* to bang one’s head against or on something se cogner la tête contre ou à qch
* (fig) you’re banging your head against a brick wall when you argue with him autant cracher en l’air que d’essayer de discuter avec lui
* to bang the door (faire) claquer la porte
* he banged the window shut il a claqué la fenêtre

Fascinating, isn’t it? If you want to know what comes next, you’ll have to buy your own copy of the book: there’s another 1284 pages like that.

I’d like to tag:
GSE at Really Quite Useful
Brian at Brian Sibley: the blog
Bowleserised at Bowleserised

The Monday tip

2008-10-27T13:03:00.002Z

You already know how much I hate hanging participles, but there is something I abhor even more: the absence of a comma before or after a vocative. The ‘before’ comma is essential. If you don’t put a comma in, you get something like this:

Fanny: ‘Hey, I heard Madonna was in the area today.’
Marius: ‘Oh, did you see her Fanny?’

Oedipus interruptus

2008-10-16T18:00:00.004+01:00

So, the house lights go down, Ralph Fiennes, as Oedipus, enters, comes downstage and says, ‘Citizens of Thebes, I...’ and the mobile of the woman sitting two seats down from me goes off. She reaches into her bag and shuts it up, then tries to turn it off completely, thereby making it ring again!

To his credit, Mr Fiennes did not walk off in disgust. I might have.

The companion of the woman in question arrived fifteen minutes after the start of the play and plonked herself in the empty seat next to me: she obviously was the person who had been calling at such an inopportune moment. I saw them both later at the Press Night party: they were with one of the actors in the Chorus. People who are somehow involved in the theatre can be the worst audience.

Slap!

Across the Pond

2008-10-11T14:46:00.003+01:00

The more I get to know Americans, the less they fit the image I used to have of them. Surprising as it may seem, they are not all like characters in Woody Allen films. Some attitudes I have encountered recently on the (mostly) American message board I visit have puzzled me quite a lot.

Question: if you see two strangers arguing in the street, do you go up to them and interfere in their argument? If one of them insults the other and then, realizing they overreacted, apologizes, do you – before the insultee has time to respond – tell the insulter there is no need to apologize? Or do you tell them they are forgiven for what they said? I don’t think so. Yet that kind of thing happens all the time in the virtual world.

What on earth makes a person think they can exonerate or forgive someone on behalf of someone else? As Primo Levi said, in a much more serious context of course, only the victim can forgive the person who did them harm. And, in the case of murder, the culprit cannot be absolved by anyone, not ever.

Anyway, if I’m having an argument with someone (yes, it does happen), I do not want anyone to come to my rescue – I am old enough and articulate enough to defend myself – and, if I’ve been abused, I do not want some meddler turning up and telling my ‘adversary’ that all is well. It’s up to me to say so, not them.

And then there’s the idea that you can be proud of someone even though you aren’t their spouse or a member of their family or directly involved in their achievement – like their teacher or trainer, for instance. (On that forum, the ‘achievement’ in question is very often spending an enormous amount of money on a luxury product, not discovering a cure for cancer, and I will never understand how that warrants congratulations, anyway, especially these days.) I thought it might just be me, so I asked around and no one can understand why one should say ‘I’m proud of you’ to a stranger either, so it must be a US thang, like dressing up one’s pet or newborn baby for Halloween, using buttermilk and canned soup in everything, allowing a creationist anywhere near the White House, and owning a gun.

I have a new blog

2008-10-10T03:43:00.001+01:00

It’s called Les Planches d’Outre-Manche and it’s here. It’s about the theatre (which is my abiding passion – apart from collecting McDonald’s ‘The Dog’ – er – dogs).

I will be posting fairly erratically (as opposed to like clockwork on this one, LOL!), but I hope you will find it interesting.

Laughing matter?

2008-09-30T04:35:00.005+01:00

Do you like double acts? I do. French and Saunders, Fry and Laurie, Les Frères Ennemis (in France), Laurel and Hardy, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, Morecambe and Wise – they all make me laugh like a drain. Being French and therefore exposed to them from a young age, I even used to like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (yes, I know!).

I am less fond of those married actors who perform with each other all the time or are never seen without each other. Could any couple have been more annoying than Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson (that was before Brangelina, of course)? In the end, they became figures of fun and had to split up. I even despised Judi Dench, whom I normally adore, when she acted with her late husband Michael Williams in inferior shows. Then there are the directors who always employ their wives. Claude Chabrol, for instance, who somehow couldn’t make a film without the detestable Stéphane Audran. She couldn’t act to save her life and, as far as I am concerned, spoiled every single film she was in. The less talented partner usually brings the other one down.

There are no problems when people achieve recognition simultaneously, but what happens when someone who is already well known in his or her field teams up with a novice? The former loses some of their credibility if they let the person who shares their life share the limelight as well – their own reputation is dented, and the latter faces accusations of riding on their partner’s coat tails. If the more experienced of the two is not competitive or insecure there are no sparks, but what happens if he or she is an egomaniac in need of constant admiration? Suppose they end up becoming a foil to their more flamboyant, newbie spouse, what then?

But as much as I dislike couples who work together in the world of entertainment, what I detest most of all are real-life double acts (sometimes they belong to the previous category as well): they are not just ridiculous, they are slightly repellent too. There is something so smug about them. Excluded from the cosy relationship, one feels like a voyeur. Is there anything more unfunny than two people who constantly laugh at each other’s jokes in the presence of a third person, or finish each other’s sentences? They both deserve to be slapped.

Slap!

Bored?

2008-09-12T01:23:00.007+01:00

Why don’t you play with my new widget... over there... on the right... scroll down a bit... that’s it! Yes, click on Decide!

Who knows where it’ll lead you...

Update (8/10/08): OK, that was fun, but enough playing.

Please bear with me

2008-09-04T22:11:00.005+01:00

while I try to restore my blog to its old self.

I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.

Update (8/09/08): That'll do, Pig!*
*Know where that comes from, yes?

The Peter Pan syndrome

2008-09-04T02:55:00.001+01:00

A recent article in a UK newspaper reported that Japanese society was getting more and more infantilised, as evidenced by the increasingly trivial calls received by the emergency service hotlines – dumb things like, ‘Help! Police! Quick, I can’t stop my ice-cream melting.’ Or – more surrealistically, ‘I think there may be something on my head.’

The UK emergency services get silly calls like that too, although perhaps not in such huge numbers, yet there is another sign here that we are getting just as infantilised as the Japanese: it’s the way everyone has started referring to their parents as ‘mum’ and ‘dad’, in formal situations – regardless of how old they are. It’s bad enough when it comes up in conversation, but when a reporter says it on the radio or the television it sounds inane. I’ve even heard a journalist talk about some murdered child’s ‘nan’! Is it supposed to make us feel closer to the family? Are we not capable of feeling compassion towards people we don’t know unless they are called by those familiar, childish names?

Everyone gets the treatment – a serious actress is described thus in the current issue of the Radio Times: ‘Mum-of-three Geraldine Somerville....’ Ugh!

Very soon, we too will be calling 999 and saying, like those Japanese, ‘I need you to give me a morning wake-up call tomorrow!’

Slap!

Boast of the Day

2008-08-30T14:40:00.000+01:00

I don’t have a pussycat asleep on my bed these days (soon, maybe), but today I have the next best thing: a pile of books with my name on the cover (under the title).

The book I spent so many months translating last year is coming out in France, on 11 September – as part of the Rentrée littéraire.

Guess how I’m feeling today!

RTBD!*

2008-08-27T17:11:00.005+01:00

Busy today so just time to slap people who think BUYER TO COLLECT means SELLER TO DELIVER.

*Read The Bl**dy Description!

Update: Actually, as I was writing the above, the guy I was slapping turned up, and turned out to be a really charming person. Just needed to be told ‘no’. Very unusual man, that one.

Phew !

2008-08-13T02:43:00.000+01:00

Some people practise extreme sports to add thrills to their boring lives. Me, I don’t have to: I have cancer scares.

At the end of June, I discovered a brownish spot on my back that I didn’t remember ever seeing before. I went to my GP straight away (years ago, I would have worried for weeks before consulting a doctor, but not these days) and got the usual mixed message: ‘It’s a mole; it’s nothing, but you could have it removed. Shall I arrange it for you?’ Which begged the question: if it’s nothing, why the rush? Still, I came out of the surgery half reassured that I could leave it alone if I wanted to.

I soon realized I didn’t want to, though, so I tried to arrange to have the nasty-looking thing cut out at the Cromwell Hospital (home from home, as it were). It wasn’t easy: because of the holidays and because most of the dermatologists there are women with kiddies, the earliest appointment I could get – with someone I had already seen for something else last year – was for last Wednesday, i.e. over six weeks later. As it happens, I had to visit my GP again in the meantime and, although she said that of course it could wait until then, she intimated that removing the mole was not an option but a necessity. That’s when I got really scared and considered rushing to the Hammersmith Hospital’s walk-in skin clinic, but someone I know had a mole removed there and she said they made her feel ‘like a piece of meat’. I decided to wait and use the time to accustom myself to the idea of hearing the dreaded words – ‘You have cancer’ – for the third time.

Anyway, I have a small – healing – wound in my back, but earlier today I was told that what I had wasn’t even a mole, it was a benign lesion (seborrheic keratosis). Those things never turn cancerous, but are apparently very difficult to distinguish from melanomas. No kidding!

Now, once more, I have to learn to live again and do all the things I promised myself I would do if I was all right.

Slapping stupid skin!

Drat, I could have made a killing!

2008-08-08T15:00:00.005+01:00

A few months ago, I bought two pairs of tickets for Leonard Cohen at the O2 on 17 July (see why here). A couple of weeks before the show, I managed to sell the extra pair on eBay for a few pounds (no, really, only a few pounds) more than its face value. Before the man announced he was coming back on 13 November, and now also the following night (if that concert is sold out too, he will have filled 60,000 seats in London – not bad for an old guy of 74, is it?), my tickets were something very precious and some people did buy seats for hundreds of pounds on eBay. But I’m not a ticket tout, I wasn’t trying to make a profit, I just wanted to get my money back. The few extra pounds certainly didn’t cover the hassle and time spent trying to get those precious tickets. Still, someone bought them and I was very happy.

Forget Leonard, though, it’s tickets for the new RSC Hamlet with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart I should have bought seats for! I’m on the priority mailing list, I could have got tickets (for the Stratford and London runs) very early on for £40 and sold them on eBay for around £300 (that's their current price).

Problem is, I don’t watch Dr Who or Star Trek and I had no idea a whole lot of mad fans would suddenly want to sit in the theatre and watch the longest play in the Shakespearean canon. I think some of them are in for a shock and a disappointment: when it comes to supernatural beings, there is a ghost in Hamlet, but that’s about it – and there are no intergalactic creatures at all.

The RSC has ‘asked people to desist from bidding for the tickets. As part of our terms and conditions, they are not to be sold for commercial gain. The tickets are for their own use.’ However, unless eBay closes the auctions down, I can’t see how the RSC can stop people from buying and using those tickets.

People’s names are printed on the tickets, but in order for them not to be used the ushers would have to check IDs at the door; or the RSC would have to scour the auctions, draw lists of performance dates and seat numbers, and the ushers would have to check tickets against those lists every evening. I don’t see it somehow.

Forgot to say: it’s not just that I’m not a fan of those TV programmes, it’s that I don’t really like David Tennant and Patrick Stewart. The former was a terrible Antipholus of Syracuse in a dreadful production of Comedy of Errors a few years ago. He was good in a wonderfully frightening play entitled The Pillowman at the National, but, basically, I think he lacks charm – and he makes faces. As for the latter, I’ve known him – as an actor – for nearly 40 years. I’ve seen him in dozens of RSC productions: he is what you might call a ‘solid performer’, i.e. someone who’s never very bad, but rarely very good. He was pretty good as Antony in the latest RSC Antony and Cleo, and I remember him as Launce with a hilarious, gloomy dog in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in 1970, but I can’t think of any production where one came out saying, ‘Wow, wasn’t Patrick Stewart amazing!’ Oh, and he nearly killed me once, but that’s another story...

Also, I feel a little bit Shakespeared out: I have seen all of the guy’s 37 plays ten, nay, twenty times over. Even the obscure ones (Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus...) I’ve seen at least three times. I need a Shakespeare moratorium. The thought of seeing another production of Hamlet gave me a migraine, so I didn’t book. My loss, obviously.

Slapping the silly – and ignorant – fans who wouldn’t touch Hamlet with a barge pole if it didn’t have TV stars in it!

And the RSC for pretending to be surprised by what’s happening. Yeah, right!

Addendum (31/08/08):
The day I was nearly killed by Patrick Stewart:

I was watching a poorly attended matinee of a very bad production of Titus Andronicus, with PT in the title role, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. I was sitting in the front row; there were several empty seats on either side of me. In the course of a furious fight, at some point in the first half of the play, PT let go of his heavy sword (the RST craftsmen pride themselves in creating ‘authentic’ weapons), which did several somersaults in the air – watched in disbelief by me and a few hundred people – before landing vertically at the foot of the nearest seat on my left, i.e. a few centimetres from me. There was an audible gasp from the audience, as the sword remained there, swaying gently. The look of horror in the eyes of all the actors on the stage was something to behold, but they never missed a beat. I don’t think I heard much of the play after that. In the interval, PT and several of the actors rushed towards me to ask whether I was all right. They were pretty shaken up too. The sword was unstuck from the floor and everything went back to normal. The second half proceeded without any other drama – either in the auditorium, or on stage (unfortunately).

The pornogrification* of mainstream culture

2008-07-31T04:13:00.009+01:00

Apparently, I have no sense of humour. I love the Marx Brothers and Bill Bryson and laugh at all sorts of jokes, but, no, according to some, I have no sense of humour. Why?

Mostly because:
– I don’t think pole dancing is an ‘empowering’ activity for young women, let alone little girls.

– I don’t think calling a perfume Putain des Palaces is either witty or charming; it’s a cynical marketing ploy on the part of Etat Libre d’Orange (a French perfume company), aimed at épater le bourgeois, that’s all.

– I don’t think choosing the word ‘brothel’ (albeit in its Latin/French version) as one’s message-board username is cute.

I’m told I get my knickers in a twist for nothing; that I take myself too seriously; that I should ‘relax’. It seems I’m not ‘a good sport’.

But then neither is that old feminist Rosie Boycott, who, a couple of years ago, reported that, in a lads magazine she had been reading, ‘every woman who had achieved something in her own right – other than possessing a great pair of boobs – was routinely dismissed as a boot-faced minger or dyke. Dame Ellen MacArthur, who had just achieved another nautical first, came in for a particular drubbing: “a miserable, sobbing, whining bitch in a boat... basically a frigid dyke-looking, yachting c***”.’

Ariel Levy, who wrote Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, is not amused either. She asks, ‘How is resurrecting every stereotype of female sexuality that feminism endeavoured to banish good for women? Why is labouring to look like Pamela Anderson empowering? And how is imitating a stripper or a porn star going to render us sexually liberated?’

As the journalist Fenella Souter says, ‘Sexiness has become the new political correctness.’ Woe betide the woman who finds it objectionable!

Well, I would rather be in the company of those humourless ‘harridans’ than that of any ‘team player’, who, brainwashed by men, objectifies herself.

Slap!

* Does anyone know where the term comes from? I read it first in an article by Ginny Dougary in the Times, but I don’t think she coined it.

Update (2/08/08): If you don’t agree with me, and – obviously – know nothing about the Suffragettes, who fought for women’s equality, back in the last century, go and see Her Naked Skin at the National. You will learn a few things that will make your hair stand on end and possibly make you feel a bit guilty for betraying their ideals (they certainly didn’t fight for women to behave as badly as men). If, on the other hand, you do know what you owe these brave women, don’t bother: apart from a history lesson, it is one of the shallowest pieces of drama I’ve seen for a long time. There is a play to be written about the subject, but Her Naked Skin ain’t it.

Hallelujah!

2008-07-18T04:09:00.005+01:00

I made it!

A minuscule taste of what it was like at the O2 Arena earlier tonight.

More about it later...

Update (25/07/08): One of my commenters asks, ‘I hope it wasn't entirely spoiled by being with 19,998 other people?’ The answer to that is, ‘No, not entirely.’ The O2 Arena is absolutely HUGE, but it feels quite intimate from the stalls (I got cold shivers down my back when I looked up and pictured myself on Level 4, in what would had been my original seat: I could hardly see it, it was so high up). My partner and I were still a long way from the stage but the two large screens on each side of it enabled us to see the faces of the performers (and the people operating the camera knew exactly what to shoot so we didn’t feel we were missing anything). And the seats were surprisingly comfortable. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the constant stream of people going to the bars because they couldn’t listen to music without having a glass in their hands, the evening would have been utter perfection. I was hoping I wouldn’t have cause to slap anyone on that occasion, but those people were so disrespectful to the artistes on stage and to the rest of the audience that I must. Slap!

Yes, yes, yes, but what was Leonard like? What can I say that hasn’t been said before? He was wonderful: funny, charming, boyish, ironic, warm, courteous, wise – just lovely, skipping on and off the stage between the four encores, obviously delighted with the rapturous reception he was getting: the sound of 20,000 people on their feet cheering and clapping was exhilarating even for the audience. The energy that man has!

Oh, and the voice! Deep, low, soft, rasping, caressing... He sang some of my favourite songs, and others I didn’t know so well but now love as much as the others. Sharon Robinson, who was the ‘star’ of the backing singers, was fantastic: intense and focused. I adored her intro to Boogie Street. I’ve always loved Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla, his previous backing singers, but, although they don’t quite have the same ‘rapport’ with Lenny yet, the Webb Sisters were superb: they have beautiful, pure voices and their rendition of If It Be Your Will was very moving. All the members of the band – you know, those musicians one usually doesn’t care much about – were virtuosi in their own right, on some very strange instruments. And we got to know their names very well too. LOL! (There are some extraordinary videos on YouTube now: you can practically watch the whole concert.)

What amazed us was the wide range of ages in the audience: lots of grey-haired people, like me; lots of younger adults; lots of older teenagers; I even saw a couple of children. LC’s music really appeals to everyone. Who would have thunk it back in the ’60s, eh?

Only a few hours before the concert, it was announced that Leonard was coming back to the O2 on 13th November. I am tempted, but I would rather hear him again in a smaller venue, where buying drinks during the performance is not an option and the audience listens to the music instead of trying to get sloshed. I don’t need to be drunk to appreciate a great artiste, do you?

A few people I won’t be slapping

2008-07-09T02:37:00.006+01:00

Brian of BRIAN SIBLEY: the blog tagged me the other day. Sorry for the delay in responding to the challenge.

The brief was: List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now. I can’t really do the ‘enjoying now’ thing because I don’t listen to music all the time: I can’t work with it, although I can perfectly well with the radio or television on. Furthermore, I’m not that au fait with what’s currently ‘in’ (I hear songs that are in the charts in shops or cafés, nowhere else), so I can only talk about singers and songs I’ve always loved.

Thanks to all those nice people who upload videos on YouTube, I am able not only to tell you about my favourite singers, but to let you hear them too. I am a YouTube fan, just like Norman Lebrecht, who enthused about it recently in the Evening Standard. Funnily enough, he singled out the singer whom I listened to most when I was a teenager (at the same time, I was learning English with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack). Her name was Barbara. All her life, she was a huge star in France. She died in 1997. I remember seeing her for the first time on television in 1959. I was 11 years old and she frightened me a little bit: she was dressed all in black and looked like a bird of prey. She was an auteur-compositeur in the tradition of Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel. I saw her on stage several times in Paris in the ’60s; she had an amazing, if slightly affected, presence.

Serge Reggiani is mostly known abroad as an actor (he played opposite Simone Signoret in the wonderful Casque d’Or), but in the late ’60s he started singing. His parents were Italian so he had a head start. He was fantastic.

I am a fan of so-called World Music, or, as my partner’s mother says, ‘songs in languages no one understands’. That’s true. It comes from not really listening to the lyrics and not being able to remember them at all. I could never quote a verse from a Beatles song, for instance, to illustrate a point. Still, as you can see, not all my favourite songs are in foreign languages (obviously, French isn’t a foreign language to me, LOL!).

I couldn’t find any of the tracks from my favourite album of Joan Baez on YouTube, but here’s a lovely old ballad in a recent interpretation. Her voice is as limpid as ever (and she looks as gorgeous as ever too).

I love folk music. So there. My favourite English folk singer is John Tams. I heard him for the first time in the National Theatre’s production of The Mysteries , back in the ’80s. He was extraordinary. I was very chuffed last year when I had to translate the script of a BBC programme entitled The Song of Steel, whose music and songs had been written by John Tams. You can't hear that fascinating programme any longer, unfortunately, but some of the songs are still here: The Song of Steel

But if you don’t know what John Tams looks like, here he is (he is the walrus on the right). Oh, one more thing: he always makes me cry (just like Anthony Hopkins).

The singers that follow express themselves in languages I don’t understand (and you may not either), but they never cease to charm me.

Lhasa de Sela (she’s Mexican): I heard her for the first time on France-Inter, some years ago. The song was ‘Los Peces’. I missed her name when they broadcast it and spent the following week ensconced in the Nice FNAC, listening to masses of CDs and trying to describe to the sales assistants what the song sounded like. Finally, on the eve of my departure, a clever young man persuaded me to listen to just one more CD and there it was – no.6 on the album entitled ‘La Llorona’. Here Lhasa sings another track from that album (there is no YouTube video of her singing ‘Los Peces’, unfortunately).

I will never forgive myself for missing her concert at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire – only a few hundred yards from where I live.

Paolo Conte: a long time ago, one of my partner’s colleagues, who is Italian, made us a CD of one of his albums. We subsequently heard him live at the Barbican. He was wonderful, of course.

Esther Ofarim: there is no purer voice. Here she sings – with her then husband Abi – a song written by my ‘famous uncle’ (as opposed to the ones who were not celebrated writers). The song is so well known that most Jewish people think it’s ‘traditional’.

Another Israeli singer, but one who, unlike Esther Ofarim, never got a worldwide audience, even though he deserved it (perhaps he wasn’t cute enough) – Arik Einstein. I first heard him in Israel, in 1977. He was a big star there at the time. He probably still is. (The sound on this clip is quite faint: you’ll have to turn up the volume.)

I know I’ve already gone beyond my brief and mentioned eight singers, instead of seven, but I want to talk about one more: Petru Guelfucci. I discovered him somewhat like Lhasa, during a short stay in Nice, about ten years ago. The night before I left to return to London, I saw a documentary about the marvellous ballerina Marie-Claude Pietragalla. They showed an excerpt from her ballet ‘Corsica’ and I became haunted by the music and the voice (I especially love the polyphonic choral bit). It took me several months to find out what it was. This is the song I couldn’t get out of my head. Pity Petru Guelfucci can’t actually be seen singing on this clip.

The one singer that is missing from the list is, of course, Leonard Cohen, but I have mentioned him often on this blog so you all know I adore him. I don’t like to wish my life away, but right now I can’t wait for next Thursday to come.

I am supposed to tag seven more people, but, just like Brian, I’m finding it difficult because I don’t read that many blogs these days, so if you’d like to tag yourself, please feel free to do so – on your blog or here.
Addendum: I have to add two more singers (because they belong together and with the others). Milva. I saw her in Paris in the mid-’70s in a show entitled Io, Bertolt Brecht devised by the great Italian theatre director Giorgio Strehler. She was unbelievable. But I only like her when she sings Brecht and Kurt Weill. And while I’m talking about those two, I can’t possibly omit Lotte Lenya (Weill’s wife), who obviously knew better than anyone how to perform their songs. Here are Milva and Lotte Lenya singing the same repertoire – the former in Italian (the clip is from the above-mentioned show), the latter in German. I can’t choose between the two.

A bit slapped out

2008-06-28T14:54:00.005+01:00

That’s how I’m feeling right now. I’ve railed against the Post Office, the Pension Service, incompetent employees, arrogant and stupid sales assistants, unruly children, etc. etc. and I find myself without anyone to slap. Not that there aren’t things that are irritating me at the moment, but they’re a bit too personal to blog about.

So...I am opening these pages to you, dear readers. For a few days.

Be my guests – slap away!

Play nice, though. I can’t edit comments: if yours is too rude, inflammatory or libellous, I won’t be able to publish it at all.

Breathing more freely

2008-06-18T03:13:00.006+01:00

I am pleased to report that I am indeed alive. It was confirmed by a nice woman at the French Consulate yesterday. I met my latest deadline on Sunday night, and first thing on Monday morning – since it’s only open until noon – I set off for the French Consulate. The process took all of five minutes and I was told that, although the Attestation d’existence says it should be filled in and signed by an official in the country of residence of the French national applying for a pension, in fact the form has to be processed by the French Consulate and no one else, and it would have been returned to me even if the Hammersmith town hall had agreed to do it. It’s a little game they’re playing: let’s see whether that person manages to guess where they should be going, hee hee!

Having to go to South Kensington in the morning nearly killed me, which would have been rather ironic, wouldn’t it, if I’d died trying to prove I was alive.

While I was in the area, I went to see the newly reopened Jewellery Gallery at the V&A. It’s out of this world – I was drooling. Once they’ve removed a beautiful silver Star of David, found in Spain in the 15th century and labelled simply and erroneously ‘Star Ornament’ (!), from the display entitled ‘The Islamic World’ – or given it its proper Jewish name – it will be perfect.

One more bugbear: if the V&A specify that large bags may not be taken into the gallery, they need to provide something for visitors to put their valuables in. Do they really expect people to leave behind their money, their keys, their precious Attestations d’existence? No way! I shouldn’t have had to beg the cloakroom attendant for one of those transparent bags they supply to people who use the library, nor should I have had to lie and say I’d travelled specially to see the exhibition that morning. Slap!

...therefore I am?

2008-06-08T04:03:00.009+01:00

So, because I’m no spring chicken and because I worked in France for a few years before moving to the UK, I'm entitled to a couple of peanuts from the French government. So far so nice.

Hmm... Yesterday, I received a form from the French pension service headed Attestation d’existence, which reads,

‘We the undersigned hereby certify that So-and-So [basically, me] is alive, having appeared before us today.’

I need to have it filled in by some petty official (officials are always petty), preferably in a big, imposing official building (it doesn’t actually say which one would be suitable). The British pension service believed the person who spoke to them on the phone a dozen times and who sent them a whole bumf was me. But, the French, you know, are much more suspicious, much less gullible. So I have to prove to them that I exist.

I think I do, but will the person behind the counter agree?

How easy will it be to prove my existence, I wonder. Harder than proving that of God, I fear.

Update (9/06/2008): As expected, I have been passed from pillar to post at the Hammersmith & Fulham town hall and the officials have been very petty. ‘We don’t do this kind of thing in this country!’ Er, could you go and tell the French, please? It would save a lot of aggro.

In the meantime, I have to traipse to the French Consulate: they said they would probably be able to find someone to fill in that form for me.

To be continued...

Who are these people?!

2008-05-27T17:12:00.004+01:00

Quiz on the RNIB’s website.

If you see a blind person in the street, you should:

1) Leave them alone
2) Pet their guide dog
3) Ask if they want help
4) Shout to get their attention

Apparently, 26.8% of people (the second highest number) who answered the quiz think they should shout to get the blind person’s attention in the street. What on earth for? To show them their new shoes?

Slap!

The correct answer is, of course, to leave the person alone unless they look lost or in need of help. I know it’s hard, but resist petting their guide dog first.

How to go too far

2008-05-21T13:59:00.013+01:00

If you have a bad cold and want to annoy hundreds, nay thousands of people who know what influenza is truly like, announce you have the flu on a message board, i.e. sitting at your computer, in front of a bright screen, while complaining of a splitting headache, etc. Don’t forget to malign anyone who suggests you might be overplaying the sympathy card.

If you want to make someone very angry indeed, let people write vicious and unwarranted comments about them on your blog, and leave those comments there so your friends can put links to them on their own moronic blogs. Then, years later, even though that person chose to forget about the earlier incident, write something just as vicious and just as unwarranted about them. Don’t forget to deny having any friendly communication with them in the meantime, in case your friends think you are a hypocrite.

If you have already given birth to one healthy baby and want to insult hundreds, nay thousands of women who cannot have children, call yourself barren.

Congratulations! Now you can also call yourself a

Addendum: You need to do all of the above to qualify. Only one of those things is not enough. Sorry. WinterWheat

Men, give up now!

2008-05-16T14:13:00.005+01:00

Rehearsal photo, taken by his daughter Lorca
I’m working again. Yes, I know, I’m supposed to be retired. Yeah, right! Anyway, I’m well-disposed towards everyone at the moment. Well, almost everyone. There is one person out there who deserves to be slapped repeatedly, but ‘elle ne perd rien pour attendre’. The slap, when it comes – and it will come, trust me – will be all the more satisfying for being delayed.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to Leonard Cohen’s concert in July. Just quietly looking forward to it: I hate wishing my life away. I’ve been reading a few accounts (not all - don't want to spoil the surprise) of the concerts that have already taken place in Canada and visiting the lovely forum devoted to the guy. One of the fans, Steve Wilcox, posted this earlier today:

At the third show, during the intermission, I overheard two women agreeing that it wouldn't be fair to expect all men to be like Leonard Cohen. One of them was my wife. I don’t hold it against her.

Happy Birthday, Israel!

2008-05-08T17:25:00.000+01:00

Many happy returns of the day!

Life: A User’s Manual*

2008-05-06T03:47:00.005+01:00

I have already slapped women who play at being ‘helpless’ (Me, my goat and women), but it’s not just they who expect others to be ‘capable’ and in possession of the user’s manual, is it? Just a certain kind of person, who thinks that those of us who are not fazed by life have some sort of innate knowledge of how things work, of how to find information, etc.

We don’t.

We don’t believe we’re entitled to ‘exploit’ other people, that’s all. We believe we have to spend our own time (not someone else’s) looking for this phone number or that website. We believe we need to speak to helplines or official organisations on our own behalf and ask relevant questions ourselves so we can solve whatever problem we're having. There is no mystery, no special skill. We just get on with it.

Slapping the spongers.

* with apologies to Georges Perec

Too much publicity

2008-05-05T17:51:00.001+01:00

Ken Livingstone, the ex-Mayor of London (hooray, he’s gone!) apparently employed 55 PR people. Fifty-five minions to make him appear less of a repulsive individual than he is.

It didn’t work quite, did it? You can fool some of the people...

Boris is busy getting rid of those parasites.

Such a busy little bee

2008-05-01T01:45:00.005+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I went to the London Book Fair and I can tell you they’re not joking when they’re talking about a ‘credit crunch’: there were hardly any complimentary goodies to be got this year. It was really pathetic: sweets (what adults eat sweets?), a few crisps, a couple of cheap-looking pens. You can tell how buoyant an industry is by the freebies it gives away at trade fairs.

Still, as usual, I came home with lots of brochures, full of attractive blurbs praising thousands of books, most of which shouldn’t have been published in the first place.

Much* too many books everywhere.

Anyway, about those brochures... I have two in front of me as I type: one is for Gallic Books and the other for Bloomsbury (yes, the publisher of the Harry Potter series; apparently, they haven’t been doing too well since the publication of the last HP, but that's neither here nor there). They both have books in translation on their lists; in fact, Gallic, whose motto is ‘The best of French in English’, only publishes books translated from the French. Yet, one looks in vain for the names of the translators. Not a single one is mentioned in their catalogues.

So, just like most of the texts I’ve worked on in the past 20 years, those books were translated by the Holy Spirit.

I’m slapping him for not raising his hand and shouting, ‘Hey, that’s not my work; so-and-so did it.’ He doesn’t, and translators in this country remain uncredited and unknown.

*Note to the Grammar Police**: I know it should be ‘Far too many books everywhere,’ but it doesn’t sound so funny.

** I’m told I am the Grammar Police.

Update (2.05.08): As it happens, Scott Pack (of the Friday Project), whose blog is so entertaining, recommended one of Gallic Books’ – er – books yesterday, here, without mentioning the translator’s name – obviously, since it’s probably nowhere to be seen. So I repeated my little rant there and, because he is a nice man (I think) and he cares about the written word, he took it seriously here. Thanks, SP!

From now on...

2008-04-25T14:48:00.004+01:00

...I am entitled to free travel on London’s public transport.

I would rather pay.

I am not a happy bunny at all today.

Addendum: After I acquired my Freedom Pass today, it occurred to me that since I didn’t have to pay for my bus/tube rides any longer it might not be right for me to complain about the sorry state of London’s public transport. However, I believe it is my duty to grumble about things that affect us all, so I will carry on slapping on behalf of younger travellers who still have to pay outrageous fares and endure unconscionable delays every day.

Scandal in a slightly bigger pond

2008-04-17T18:37:00.008+01:00

In his forthcoming book, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics and Professional Hedonism, Thomas Kohnstamm, a Lonely Planet author, reveals he didn’t actually travel to some of the countries he wrote guidebooks to. As CNN reported, ‘He plagiarized or made up portions of the popular travel guidebooks and dealt drugs to supplement poor pay.’ He used information supplied by friends who lived in those countries and some he found on the Net. He also accepted free travel, which is against Lonely Planet’s policy.

I have firsthand knowledge of how little travel writers and updaters are paid. I can confirm he wasn’t being greedy.*

His employers panicked and urgently double-checked all his books and didn’t find any inaccuracies.

Lonely Planet isn’t the only travel-guide publisher that panicked after Thomas Kohnstamm’s revelation. They all did. They all reviewed the way their writers and updaters operate, in the hope of being able to say that they worked in a totally truthful way. However, since none of them pays well enough, none of them could issue such a statement. They all cut corners.

When told by an editor (not a million miles away from where I’m sitting) , ‘And you think we double-check the facts of the update at editorial stage? We would only check if a fact looks contradictory or suspicious,’ one boss queried, ‘Why do we proofread, then? And what do copy-editors do?’

This is the editor’s answer.

‘What copy-editors do:
- edit the text while looking constantly at the map to ensure that the text is structured correctly using four or five levels of heading, and that the map matches the text exactly.

- check that any changes made by the updater in one chapter are transferred to other places where they might be relevant such as the architecture chapter, colour section or maps.

- check that the updater has done their job properly, followed the brief and not missed anything out.

- compare the text with competition guides to see what elements are missing, focused on by others or covered unsatisfactorily in the guide.

- edit the text, especially new text, for grammatical and spelling errors and then edit it also to make it read well and flow. Then edit again to length if the book is over or under.

- edit the history, art and architecture sections to make academic information clear to a lay reader. Check that all artistic movements, architects and artists mentioned in the rest of the book are covered generally in an explicatory way here so that the chapter serves as an introduction. Check then that unfamiliar terms in this chapter and the rest of the book are explained in the Glossary of Terms at the back of the book.

- edit the Food and Drink chapter so that all typical types of food and drink mentioned in the guide are explained.

- look out for anomalous facts such as phone numbers that look as if they have a digit missing or websites where the name of a hotel is spelt differently from the name in the text, and check such facts again.

- apply house style to all the practical information such as addresses and opening hours, which must be the same throughout the book and the series otherwise the guide will be unusable.

- study practical sections intelligently to see if they apply to the text they belong to. Rework such sections or request more information e.g. if a getting there section leaves out how to get to a major place or a bus is not mentioned but happens to be mentioned in the running text.

- ensure that listings sections are at the end of text they actually belong to, and that all villages and towns mentioned in the listings boxes are in the same order that they appear in the descriptive text. Ensure that listings sections follow the same order of information throughout the book.

- in [name of imprint] guides, sort out the top five highlights for each chapter and mark them on maps and in the text.

- edit the travel chapter and compare with the travel chapters of other guides to ensure consistency of material and that everything is covered; recheck any discrepancies.

- in [name of imprint]’s case, decide which kind of box to apply to stories and background information.

- brief the author on writing their colour sections and the kinds of themes that would work with the images available or that suit the book.

- edit the colour section and do picture research if necessary, or brief the photographer if not.

- check that foreign languages are set correctly especially those needing special fonts such as Greek, Russian, Turkish, Swedish, Icelandic, Latvian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech. Keep an eye out for adjectives that don't look as if they agree with their nouns and plural verbs with singular nouns in the basic European languages Italian, French and Spanish. Check with a native speaker if in doubt.

- ensure that all scale bars on maps look correct.

- dealing with prices and putting them into ranges.

- questioning whether there is enough information to be genuinely helpful at every point.

- making sure the hotel listings don't read all the same or use the word 'pleasant' or other meaningless adjectives.

- looking out for consistency in foreign proper names that may have English equivalents (Seville/Sevilla, or famous people, or the chosen spelling of Velázquez).

- having to know your Renaissance from your Reconquista, your apse from your apsidum, your quattrocento from your medieval – not in depth, but just enough to spot errors.

- cross-referencing the maps with the text, e.g. in church plans or Roman site plans with keys or for listings in the few books where hotels and restaurants have numbers with blobs on the map and then the updater changes three and every single number has to change in three places but remain correct or it's worse than useless.

- having to do all the cross-references for the text, of which there are around 100 per book, plus all those in the colour section.

- editing the index to see whether it makes logical sense and has the right things in it.

As one does *one* copy-edit (at around 70 pages – 35,000 words – per day) one has to do all this in one go alongside the spelling and grammar, which is why the latter has to come absolutely naturally.

What copy-editors don't do:
Recheck all the facts provided by the author and updater, doubling up on work the company has already paid someone else to do.

What proofreaders do:
Proofread. While doing all the above, the copy-editor will have made typos and errors, not lined up practical information correctly, missed essential bold and italics and will have missed spelling and punctuation errors because they have been trying to do all the above in a matter of a few weeks.’

Slapping bosses who haven’t got a clue what their employees actually do day to day. Especially those who drive around in expensive cars. They don’t live on the same planet as us – lonely or not.

* I know of an editor who went on a two-week trip to Holland once to help an author finish their book quickly: she planned it all out and worked out she had to visit five towns a day. She parked her car, got out, went to the tourist office, picked up leaflets, possibly went to one museum or anything that was brand new, looked around and made a few notes on atmosphere, and then an hour and half later got in her car and went to the next place. She wrote it all up in her hotel room each night. She stopped for ten minutes in small villages. She was paid £1,000 for that trip, and she spent £890 on travel and accommodation and food. That means she earned £7.86 per day.

Battle in a small pond

2008-04-17T17:05:00.000+01:00

In the red corner, we have the Emperor of Scent and, in the blue one, the Professeur de Parfums.

Two big fish. Both with big, fat books.

Who’s gonna win?

The Emperor with the smiling consort or the lonely Professeur?

Who are you?

2008-04-14T03:15:00.003+01:00

I have kept a diary for over 30 years. However, I don’t examine my life (sorry, Socrates), I just record it. I don’t want to cringe when I read what I wrote later.

Which is what I have just done – read it, not cringed. Well, only a couple of years (1974-75), but several thousand words nevertheless.

Gwendolyn Fairfax was right*, but what bothers me is that there are several people mentioned in those pages that I have completely and utterly forgotten. I have no idea who they were. Only their first names are mentioned (at the time it was obvious to me who they were) and now I cannot conjure up the faces that go with those names. I seem to have been quite friendly with them, but now they are nothing but shadows

We meet many people in the course of our lives; we part with them and, in some cases, we don’t give them another thought, but when their existence has been recorded we should remember them.

Slapping myself for my bad memory.

* ‘I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.’ The Importance of Being Earnest

Addendum: of course, there are also those people who should be mentioned in my diary and who aren’t – for some reason. That’s even worse. Probably. Sigmund, where are you? (He’s never there when you need him.)

‘Nuff said – the sequel

2008-04-06T16:56:00.004+01:00

Last week, I wrote: If you think God moves in a mysterious way, you haven’t dealt with Ticketmaster.

I owe you an explanation for that cryptic pronouncement:

You know I love Leonard Cohen (Yes, you do! You’ve been reading my blog for a while so you are aware of that fact). Well, he’s embarking on a world tour in a minute (please keep your fingers crossed he doesn’t give up the ghost because of it; the poor man is 73 this year; I am, er, xx years younger and I know how I feel when I go out just for a couple of hours; I can’t imagine singing my heart out every night and travelling from city to city for an entire year)... where’s the beginning of my sentence... ah, yes, and he is coming to London.

Hooray!

Yeah, right! He’s going to perform at the O2 Arena (aka the stupid Dome). I ask you! In Nice, he’s going to stand (or sit down maybe, poor darling) in the middle of a beautiful Roman amphitheatre, surrounded by scented trees, on a soft, warm, quiet summer night (the crickets will presumably have shut up by then). In London, he will be surrounded by 20,000 people, a good number of whom will be hanging on for dear life on tiers as high and sheer as any cliffs.

The tour was announced in January, I think, but I wasn’t aware of it. On Friday 14 March, I noticed a small, mysterious ad in the Evening Standard that seemed to indicate that something was in the offing – a new album, OMG, a tour maybe? So I logged on to a wonderful forum full of lovely Leonard fans (his music attracts nice people) and discovered that tickets for the London concert (on 17 July) could now be booked on the O2 website (they had, in fact, gone on sale that very morning).

So, like thousands of others, I logged on, went through all the Ticketmaster hoops to secure two seats (the best available at that point), and sighed with relief when I got the email confirmation.

Only later did I notice the blah blah saying:

PLEASE NOTE Seats located on Level 4 (Upper Tier, Upper Bowl) are not recommended for those who have a fear of heights.

I have problems standing on a stool to replace a light bulb. I started getting nightmares about it. What if I couldn’t actually climb up to my seat on the night; what if, once seated, I couldn’t bear to look down at the stage (a million miles away); what if I couldn’t leave my seat at all at the end (I have been known to freeze at the top of a ladder, when retrieving a book in a library)? I started panicking. And then I read on the forum that Ticketmaster deliberately kept seats aside and released them bit by bit later.

Indeed, three days on, better seats came up for sale, and I immediately grabbed two. So now I won’t be hanging from the ceiling, but I will need powerful binoculars to even catch a glimpse of that lovely, lived-in face, because it’s going to feel like he’s in Greenwich and I’m still in Shepherds Bush, the seats are so far away from the stage.

And then, a few days later, Ticketmaster released even better seats, for the same price. This time, I abstained because I can’t really fork out that much money all in one go, without knowing whether I can get rid of my extra tickets first*. And, at the moment, I only have virtual tickets because Ticketmaster are holding everyone’s tickets hostage. They ask people not to contact them if they haven’t received them. They warn they might not send them until five days before the event. Like I’m going to wait until then to raise a stink.

Slap slap slap!

*I will let you know when I actually get my tickets so you can fight over them here. Won’t that be fun? I will charge what those tickets cost me (i.e. quite a nice sum plus some ridiculous booking fee – why? – plus even more ridiculous postage), plus a year’s worth of psychotherapy sessions for the stress I suffered in the course of booking those tickets and waiting for them to arrive, please god.

Laugh of the Day

2008-04-04T13:55:00.004+01:00

Advertisement for Ocado (the home delivery service - selling mostly Waitrose goods):

This Pesach we'll beat Elijah to your door.

Update: All you puzzled, non-Jewish readers, I will now put you out of your misery.

Pesach is the Hebrew name for Passover, which is, as Wikipedia says, ‘the Jewish festival commemorating the Exodus from Egypt and the liberation of the Israelites from slavery’. A meal kicks off the festivities, during which the story of the Flight from Egypt is recounted. Wine is drunk at some point and a glass is poured for the prophet Elijah, who is supposed to herald the Messiah at this time. The door is opened for him too, for a little while.

Don’t you find that Ocado ad funny and clever now?

Done!

2008-03-31T16:32:00.003+01:00

My deadline was today, and I returned my translation (all 100,000 words of it) a couple of hours ago.

Free, free at last! If only...

I now have to do all the chores I’ve put aside over the last few weeks.

I’m feeling a bit dazed.

See you later. An awful lot of things have annoyed me recently and not being able to vent has been rather frustrating. Grrr!

‘Nuff said

2008-03-25T21:50:00.003Z

If you think God moves in a mysterious way, you haven’t dealt with Ticketmaster.

Slap!

Normal service...

2008-03-24T13:17:00.003Z

...will be resumed soon. But not just yet.

While I’m here: I have read all emails sent to me. They will be answered as soon as I have a moment.

See you later.

Still around

2008-03-13T16:29:00.010Z

I am in ‘Positively Last Read Mode’ at the moment. My deadline is almost upon me. My faithful readers (I may have one or two) will remember I’ve been translating a novel for the past several years – that’s what it feels like, anyway. ‘Positively Last Read Mode’ is when you want to slap yourself for being so stupid earlier and writing weird sentences that no human being – not even a French one – would ever say. ‘Positively Last Read Mode’ is when common sense comes back to you at last (no common sense – no translator). ‘Positively Last Read Mode’ is also when the Translation Fairy finally appears. You’ve called her to the rescue several times before, but she always waits until the last minute to turn up. She sits on your shoulder and whispers in your ear, ‘Change this sentence like so. You’ll see: it’ll be much better’. I always follow her advice: she’s never let me down.

Anyway, all the above to explain why I’ve been a bit elusive recently. It doesn’t mean I don’t get mad at things; it just means I don’t have enough energy to share my anger with you lot.

In case you all go away and never come back (we wouldn’t want that, would we?), here’s a medley of blood-pressure-raising stuff.

Today, dear readers, I’m slapping:

* Our Chancellor of the Exchequer: yesterday was Budget Day and, as usual, I’m gonna be worse off.

* The builders who’ve been renovating the bathroom in the flat next door: they should have finished last week and, guess what, they haven’t yet. I don’t mind the noise they make in the course of their work (can’t be helped), but if they carry on slamming the front door, which is, like, two inches from mine, every time they go in and out (and there’s a lot of comings and goings all day), I will come out with a big kitchen knife and stab them in their newly installed shower. Ee ee ee ee ee!

* Hospital food. I haven’t been in hospital recently (thank god) and I hope I don’t in the near future, but I saw a TV programme about it last night and it is a disgrace. No, you have no idea how bad it is. There are no guidelines regarding hospital meals: it’s up to each NHS trust to set their own standards. And they only have something like £2.10 to spend on each patient per day. Do not get ill in this country: you will be well cared for but you will starve to death: no one will help you eat your meals if you’re incapacitated; they won’t give you a spoon to eat the disgusting soup they’ve plonked in front of you and then they’ll take the tray away and write ‘Meal refused’ on your chart. Things like that. A disgrace, I tell you.

Stay healthy!

See you later: the Translation Fairy is calling...

Addendum: The Translation Fairy has another name: Adrenaline. What she can’t stop you from doing, the mischievous little minx, is opening a previous version of your translation, working away on it for a while and suddenly thinking, ‘I could have sworn I spent two hours yesterday formatting the b***** thing. What’s happened to it?’

Stay healthy, and don’t forget to label your files unambiguously!

Only one choice, really

2008-03-08T15:07:00.006Z

What does the word ‘ethnic’ mean? Choose the sentence that conveys its meaning accurately:

1) I bought this lovely Kenyan bracelet in an ethnic shop in Camden Town.

2) This delicious French jam comes from an ethnic grocer’s in South Kensington.

OED definition of ‘ethnic’:
a. Pertaining to race; peculiar to a race or nation; ethnological. Also, pertaining to or having common racial, cultural, religious, or linguistic characteristics, esp. designating a racial or other group within a larger system; hence (U.S. colloq.), foreign, exotic.

b. ethnic minority (group), a group of people differentiated from the rest of the community by racial origins or cultural background, and usu. claiming or enjoying official recognition of their group identity.

To my US readers: although the OED mentions ‘foreign’ as a possible meaning for ‘ethnic’, you have to use your common sense here and understand it is ‘foreign’ as in ‘exotic’. European products/goods are not ‘exotic’ – at least to people of other Western countries, who share the same ‘culture’. The word does not apply to them. If you do use it in that way, you end up with preposterous sentences like 2).

What does the word ‘antisemitic’ mean?

1) Mr Abdul Hussein claimed he had been the victim of an antisemitic attack.

2) Three youths subjected Mr Solomon Isaacs to a torrent of antisemitic abuse.

OED definition of ‘antisemitic’:
Hostility to or prejudice against Jews.

Forget the etymology, which includes all Semitic groups: ‘antisemitic’ is used exclusively to mean hostility towards Jews. I believe anyone who insists that the word should be used in its larger meaning (as I’ve read on a blog recently) is, in fact, harbouring antisemitic views.

Slap!

Oh, hold on, Happy International Women’s Day!

The evidence of one’s own eyes

2008-03-07T03:09:00.004Z

Are the Palestinians going to deny rejoicing in the streets over the murder of eight Israeli students in Jerusalem tonight, just as they denied jumping for joy when the Twin Towers collapsed?

Is the BBC going to boycott those disgusting images tomorrow, just as they stopped showing those same images in September 2001?

I saw them – both times.

Sensitive flowers

2008-02-29T23:20:00.002Z

Apparently, some American teachers have been instructed not to grade papers in aggressive red ink for fear of hurting students’ feelings, denting their self-esteem. Another generation of ‘approval junkies’ is being nurtured. Slap!

In the meantime, I am correcting the 78th draft of my own translation (the deadline is soon, very soon) in red ink, but not any red ink: it smells of roses.

I just hope I don’t scar myself for life.

My lucky day

2008-02-13T18:01:00.007Z

I don’t go out a lot these days – I don’t mean I don’t go out in the evenings; I mean I don’t set foot out of my building much. I’m not agoraphobic, just very busy. And, it’s cold out there. And, if you’ve tried to use London public transport recently you will know that it’s a hassle at the best of times. And, it certainly doesn’t help that our nearest Central Line tube station has now closed for eight months (this deserve a slap of its own – some other time).

Anyway, from time to time, I get the urge to leave my postcode, and yesterday was one of those times. The abiding reason was this: I wanted to buy a French beauty product that is not widely available in the UK. I couldn’t find it on the Net (or rather I could, but the postage and packing costs would have been exorbitant) so I got in touch with the company, who gave me the name of their UK distributor, who in turn told me where I could get it in London. (I’m very good at this kind of sleuthing.)

It so happened the said product was apparently on sale at the ‘pharmacy’ (chemist’s shops are called ‘pharmacies’ in posh areas) I used to go to when I lived in Notting Hill Gate (obviously, at the time, it was just a small local chemist’s, whose owner was very good at not noticing things: ‘I can’t see anything,’ he said once, when I pointed to a huge gap in one of my eyebrows – caused by stress, in case you’re wondering). So I called the pharmacy (hey, Pooh Bear wouldn’t set off on an ‘expotition’ into town without checking everything in advance, and neither do I) and this very nice, but practically unintelligible man, assured me they stocked the product I was looking for. I still couldn’t be certain, but decided to take a chance. I hopped on a bus and walked along the streets I used to know so well. Notting Hill Gate is only minutes away from where I live, but I feel as if I’m entering alien territory now. One thing I noticed on the way was that all the still-familiar stores (Tylers, Boots, WH Smith, etc.) now had automatic doors. Posh people don’t ‘push’ or ‘pull’ like you or me: they glide in or out, unobstructed, whether or not they’re carrying armfuls of posh bags.

The guy from the pharmacy welcomed me like a long-lost friend when I put the product in question on the counter. We were both very pleased with ourselves and each other. Had he not told me he carried it? Was I not as good as my word when I had said I would pop in? Encouraged by my good humour, he asked me to fill in an NHS questionnaire while he was torturing with my credit card. It was about how satisfactory my ‘experience’ had been in his establishment. It had been fine, thank you very much. To make sure I expressed the ‘correct’ opinion, he pointed to all the ‘Very good’ boxes and prompted me to tick them, which I cheerfully did – well, it had been very good.

What I didn’t know yet was that the experience was soon going to be even better.

As I always do when I buy cosmetics (especially rather expensive ones), I asked if I could have a sample of ‘something’ – after all I had filled in a questionnaire in a way that made his pharmacy one of the best in the country. He nodded and motioned me to the displays; there he opened a drawer and took out a basket full of Caudalie samples. I exclaimed with delight (I’m so girly sometimes) and prepared to select one suitable for my skin type, but before I could do so he said, ‘Open your bag!’ I obeyed and he tipped the entire contents of the basket into it; then he turned to another display, opened a drawer full of Avène samples this time and filled my bag with them. It was preposterous and delightful and made up for all those years of being refused ‘a little tube of something’ by snooty sales assistants – all in one go. (Of course, there was the time when I was left alone with a basket of Alexander McQueen perfume samples in a large Oxford Street department store... but that is another story.)

I could slap the above-mentioned snooty sales assistants, who lie through their teeth when they tell you they don’t have any samples of ‘anything’, but today I’d rather pay tribute to that lovely, generous pharmacist who made me laugh so much yesterday.

Where shall I go?

2008-02-07T17:41:00.000Z

Already, living in Hammersmith feels like being in Eastern Europe sometimes (my parents would have felt at home and been appalled at the same time), now it looks like we might become an Arab country. The Archbishop of Canterbury said earlier today in an interview on BBC Radio 4 that the introduction of Sharia law seemed ‘unavoidable’ in the UK. Over my dead body, I say, and, judging by the thousands of people who left comments on the BBC message board and elsewhere, so does the majority of the country, thank goodness.

Still, things can change in the blink of an eye. So, please suggest where my fiddle and I could go if we suddenly found ourselves in danger of being stoned, etc.

Slapping old religious men who shoot their mouths off!

Talking about unread books...

2008-02-01T18:37:00.000Z

Woolworths have had to remove a range of bedroom furniture for six-year-old girls. A member of staff had had the bright idea of calling it ‘Lolita’. No one at Woolworths knew what the name referred to or meant. Parents did, though, and complained.

The fact that Books etc., the only bookshop not a million miles away from where I live, is due to close in three weeks’ time won’t help with the pervading ignorance. Although, I can’t really be too outraged because I haven’t patronized it as much as I should have (I buy my books on the Net, like a lot of people these days). But the café attached to it was cheerful and the store itself – on two floors – brought much-needed brightness to an otherwise fairly dreary shopping mall (you should have seen it a few years ago, before it was renovated: it used to make me feel suicidal... and it might again if all the fun stores abandon it).

Slap!

The book freeze

2008-01-14T18:58:00.000Z

A small book written by a French academic is currently causing a stir in the UK. It’s entitled How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read – and I haven’t read it, but I can talk about it, thanks to all the reviews and blog posts I’ve found about it on the Net. It’s a guilt-free approach to literature, and we’ve all put it into practice at one time or another. We all talk about books we haven’t read; plays/films/exhibitions we haven’t seen. Does it matter?

Well, as far as not reading books is concerned, if, like me, you suffer from ‘Completion Syndrome’, you have to ignore certain books: it’s a question of survival; you might go mad otherwise. I am totally incapable of leaving anything unfinished – especially books. Once I start reading I am in danger of getting an attack of ‘reader’s block’, and that is very painful.

The first time it happened, I was trying to read The Scarlet Letter. I wasn’t enjoying it and when I came across a particularly stodgy page I froze. And that was it. I couldn’t drop it, but neither could I put it aside and give up on it. So I didn’t read another book for a good long while, until I forced myself to skip that page and a couple more, and finally managed to resume reading. I was triumphant when I got to the end. And I can now say I’ve read The Scarlet Letter, although, as Pierre Bayard points out in his book, we forget most of what we read and I have indeed forgotten the intricacies of Hawthorne’s novel. Was it worth the trauma? Probably not.

My most recent attack of reader’s block was even more distressing.

My father's eldest brother was a famous Jewish writer in the first half of the 20th century. (He lived in the USA and I was 11 when he died in 1959 so I don’t remember much about him – except he was very imposing and a bit scary, and yet cuddly, and very generous.) His novels and poems are part of the school curriculum in Israeli schools; there is a street named after him in Tel-Aviv. He was highly regarded by his peers around the world. There was even talk of a Nobel Prize in the 1930s, but it couldn’t happen in the political climate of the period. Anyway, only a tiny number of his books have been translated into the two languages I read, so, unfortunately, I haven’t been able to acquaint myself with his entire oeuvre, only with the novel that won him most of the acclaim, a few short stories and a couple of poems. I was delighted when another one of his books (a semi-fictional depiction of life in a small Russian community in Belarus before the First World War) was published in France a while ago. I acquired a copy and prepared for a good read. However, to my dismay, I struggled and finally stalled. It was The-Scarlet-Letter-big-freeze all over again, and this time the author was a member of my family. Had he usurped his fame? Sadly, I put the book down and didn’t pick another one up.

And then my cousin (the writer’s daughter) wrote to me and in the course of her letter mentioned that book and its execrable French translation, which harmed her father's reputation). Of course! I couldn’t read it because the translation is an absolute disgrace. I took the book out of the big pile by my bed, sat down and started reading where I’d left off. I was able to edit the French – in my head – and work out what it should have sounded like, and the book is wonderful. The colourful characters (one of whom, a small child, is my father) are so endearing, and the whole atmosphere is funny and melancholy at the same time. I love it.

As a literary translator, I usually defend translators because they always get the blame when readers can’t get on with foreign books (and, until I started reading blogs about literature, I had never realized how quick people were to condemn the translators), but this particular one should be slapped – or even shot.

Hooray, I don’t have reader’s block any longer and I’m ready to tackle that big pile again. The next book is not a translation so if I freeze again I will know straight away whose responsibility it is. Alain de Botton, you have been warned.

Update (24/01/2008): I changed my mind about what to read next because cute Alain never disappoints me and I know I won’t be ‘frozen’ with him, so there's no rush. Instead, I turned to a Nick Hornby book I bought as a hardback (and I don’t like hardbacks: I don’t have the space for them in my tiny flat) as soon as I flicked through it in Books etc. – so long ago that it’s now in paperback.

Anyway, it’s entitled The Complete Polysyllabic Spree (I know!) and it’s about reading and books and life, etc. I cannot tell you how much I am enjoying it! And, on page 5, I found this, ‘I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. But please, if you’re reading a book that’s killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren’t enjoying a TV programme.’ I will from now on, Nick. I promise. Unless I have absolute proof that it’s a bad translation, of course.

Not a happy bunny

2008-01-05T18:35:00.000Z

I was all right this morning – I woke up in a fairly good mood – and then I opened the one envelope that was lying by my front door. And that was it!

‘It’s time to think about claiming your state pension,’ it said. Three and a half months before I even want to begin to think how old I am. I keep telling those people I am 27, but they refuse to listen.

Anyway, do not speak to me today! I will not answer you.

Slapping my parents for having me 33 years too early.

Best of 2007

2008-01-03T17:30:00.000Z

It’s that time of the year again when I wonder whether I truly belong with the perfumistas and make-up junkies listed below. I bought even fewer cosmetics and skincare products in 2007 than in 2006. I didn't fall in love with any fragrance: I am still in thrall to Tubéreuse Criminelle and see no reason whatsoever to be unfaithful to it.

Still, here are the few items that ‘made it’ to my bathroom shelves in 2007.
The main discovery of the year was undoubtedly Boots No.7 Protect & Perfect Beauty Serum. I am not usually swayed by hype, but I saw the TV programme that started the stampede and the evidence that P&P was effective against skin ageing seemed compelling so I decided to give it a try, thereby betraying my resolve to only use products devoid of parabens, etc. By the time I went to my local Boots the shelves were empty and there was a notice warning of a shortage and to expect a long delay. The situation was apparently the same all over London. I waited for a while and checked the display in Boots regularly: it was quite funny, actually, you’d see these women approaching the counter and glancing around furtively and then walking away; no one wanted to be seen openly looking for that product. I got rather impatient – you know, I was getting more wrinkles in the meantime, but one of my Internet pals – a very generous woman – took pity on me and sent me a large sample of the serum. I used it up and finally managed to buy a whole bottle. After a few weeks, someone commented, unprompted, that my skin looked smoother and plumper. Hooray, it worked!
However, things are not that simple (are they ever?) because at exactly the same time as I started using Protect &Perfect I also began to use Avon Ultimate Day and Avon Ultimate Night creams. You see, P&P is not a moisturiser; it has to be used under one. The question is then whether my skin has benefited from P&P or from the two Avon creams. I intend to test this further: when I have used up the tube of P&P (it’s now in a tube not in a beautifully luxurious but infuriating bottle – at least two days’ worth of precious serum was lost in the first bottle I bought), I will stop using it for a while and stick to the Avon creams. If my skin shows signs of regressing to its former state, I will know P&P is not the miracle-worker it’s been hailed to be, which would be a shame.
As I said above, I slipped, and slapped high-tech creams on my face again, but, I’m happy to say, not on my lips (well, except for the lip gloss below, of course). I have added to my small collection of natural lip salves: Badger Chai Rose, which tastes deliciously of cardamom and rose, and which, I have this minute discovered, is supposed to be for the body too – difficult when you only have a small tube of it, though. And Fresh & Wild Vanilla Honey, which tastes wonderfully of – yes, you guessed it – vanilla and honey. They are both 100% natural and 100% yummy.
I also have on my desk a small tube of Clarins Baume Couleur Lèvres in Coquelicot (Poppy - 11). I don’t like gloss: at my age, when the outline of your lips become rather ‘vague’ and you don’t want to look tarty by drawing it with a pencil, you need to wear ‘proper’ lipstick. Not too shiny is best, otherwise your lips look younger than the rest of your face and that’s not a good thing (the same goes with bright white teeth and long hair). I got that sample of lip gloss with a French magazine. How could I resist: it’s the cutest thing you’ve ever seen. It’s a gorgeous shade of red (the pic is of another one) and it smells of cherry; it glides on easily and it’s not sticky. I recommend it to anyone not ancient as I am, who can still wear lip gloss without looking silly. I just use it while I work – for me.
My only other purchase in 2007 was a small bottle of Palmer’s Olive Butter body lotion. I’ve never been able to use the original one: the smell of cocoa butter makes me nauseous (or nauseated, if you live over there, to the left of us) so I was delighted when I found the same great product with a smell that I could tolerate, nay that I could ‘love’. It doesn’t smell of olive oil, though, as one might expect, it smells of flowers, possibly hyacinth or lily of the valley. I can’t quite tell. What? Am I supposed to be a perfumista or something? Anyway, it’s gorgeous and soft and emollient. It’s not greasy and goes in very easily. A great, cheap product.

And that’s it for the new stuff. Told you I’d been very frugal in 2007. But don’t go away just yet: I must tell you about my favourite eye pencil. It was discontinued several years ago, obviously – anything that works and is attractive gets taken off the shelves; it’s a fact of life, but I got wind of it and stocked up. I am currently using the last of my little stash of five L’Oréal Eye Artist crayons in Muscat. It’s a purply brown with a hint of shine that suits me better than any eyeliner I’ve ever used (certainly better than the peel-off liquid eyeliner Dior launched in the early 1970s. It was so silly: it would come off in the middle of the day and you’d end up with a kind of thin, curling caterpillar on your upper lid, LOL!). One day, in a couple of years’ time, I will have to go in search of a replacement. I’m not looking forward to it.

This time, I’m done. Check out what the ladies below (Word 2007 is telling me I’m not supposed to use the word ‘ladies’; how sweet, I have a feminist copy of the program) are recommending. I will be joining you there...

15 Minute Beauty Fanatic

Beauty Blogging Junkie

Beauty Talk

Beautiful Makeup Search

For The Love of Beauty

Give Me Your Eyes I Need Sunshine

Getting Amped

Grayburn

HauteMommaStuff

Koneko’s Beauty Diary

Makeup Bag

The Makeup Girl

Miss Whoever You Are

My Life,My Words,My Mind

The Life Of A Ladybug

My thanks to Annie of Blogdorf Goodman for organizing this fun event and to Melanie for the beautiful logo.

Best wishes for 2008

2007-12-31T03:27:00.000Z

What will you be doing tonight? Drinking champagne and nibbling on blinis and gravadlax with sour cream and dill, while watching whatever is on the telly, that’s what my partner and I will be doing. Warm and cosy, we will be. Aaah!

What we won’t be doing is standing in the freezing cold, in the middle of the pavement outside John Lewis, on Oxford Street, armed with an instant camera. We won’t be stopping people on their way to the river to watch the fireworks and trying to take their photograph for a £1 so they can cherish a record of the night forever. No, we won’t. On the other hand, we won’t be collecting over £20 to send to a cancer charity, either.

Been there, done that. Yep, on 31 December 1999. I bet those twenty odd people (well, they weren’t odd, we were) are very glad to have a photograph of themselves on Millennium night. Wouldn’t you? Hmm... perhaps it wasn’t one of my better ideas.

Anyway, whatever you’re doing tonight, I hope it’s fun and memorable.

Where will it stop?

2007-12-27T01:11:00.000Z

It’s just past one o’clock in the morning; I’m working while listening to the television (don’t worry about the neighbours: I’m using earphones so as not to disturb them). I’ve just heard an ad for a chain of women’s clothing: it said something like, ‘Sale starts tomorrow – five a.m.’

If I hadn’t watched the news earlier today I might have thought there was some mistake, but, no, apparently people were queuing outside department stores this morning at four. And then they fought over ‘stuff’ like animals. I saw women grabbing armfuls of handbags in Selfridges, for instance. I felt nauseated. Nothing repels me more these days than people who spend spend spend. Those who feel they have to ‘own’ everything they see, whether they can afford it or not. Those who boast of being shopaholics and are not ashamed of their addiction. Those for whom possessions replace achievements, or non-materialistic aspirations.

Slap!

Have fun!

2007-12-22T23:04:00.000Z

Language matters

2007-12-14T04:29:00.000Z

Do you know why British kids are not required to learn foreign languages past the age of 14? No, it’s not because there aren’t enough teachers. Nor is it because there isn’t time for foreign languages in the curriculum. Nope, as an official revealed the other day on BBC Radio 4, it’s because students – er – I mean, pupils can’t express themselves in English so there is no point in trying to make them speak another language, is there?

Good, eh? If you remove foreign languages from the curriculum, teachers don’t waste their time and kids don’t fail, and everyone’s happy.

Does it mean that pupils will acquire a better command of English when they’re not being bothered by pesky irregular French verbs? What do you think? What will replace foreign languages? More English lessons? Probably not. Will the kids spend their newly-found free time reading? I don’t think so. If would-be writers need to be told to read, as I discovered recently, why should teenagers, who would rather be playing computer games, bury their noses in old-fashioned books? But if they don’t read they will never be able to use all the wonderful possibilities offered by their mother-tongue. Like interesting figures of speech, for instance: puns or rhetorical questions or irony*, say.**

Slapping short-sighted educators and literal-minded people while I’m at it.

*Some folks are better at irony (using it and getting it) than others: I’m told it’s a cultural thang.

**Homework for the above-mentioned lmp: find one instance of each in this post.

Happy Hanukkah!

2007-12-04T17:23:00.001Z

Hope you all have a great time.

I also hope that, when it’s over, you won't have any trouble removing the melted wax from your menorah. And since I’m a very practical person I will tell you how to do it (read it somewhere; wish I’d known the secret long ago): you use a hairdryer to soften the wax and then it comes off easily. That’s it!

Update (5/12/07): I didn’t think Hanukkah would provide me with a slap, but I've just read this item in thelondonpaper:

‘Celebrate the festival of light
To mark Hanukkah, the V&A are putting on a special celebration which includes gospel singing workshops, sitar recitals and Buddhist meditation.’

And while I’m at it I think I should slap the contestants of last Monday’s Brain of Britain Radio 4. None of them managed to name the Jewish festival that usually falls in December and commemorates... etc. etc.

Remind me again what Christian festival is celebrated around the end of December...

Slap!

Can't have one without the other

2007-12-03T04:35:00.000Z

Whenever I watch Law & Order I wait for the Fed Ex van to drive past in the background, while whatshisname and whatshisname (I’m very bad with character names; hey, I’ve only been watching it for ten years; Briscoe and... nope...) are out wisecracking in the streets of New York City. There is one in every episode (sometimes two).

That’s product placement, that is. (Whereas my previous post wasn’t. I said that already, I know. That is called ‘padding’.)

It annoys me. A lot.

Like, earlier tonight, BBC2 showed a fillum (the guy on Channel 4 says that, always; he’s cute) entitled Chopper by whatshisname – oh, OK, I’ll go check – by Andrew Dominik. Why? Because his new film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (don’t tell me he never saw The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade – is it just titles with the word ‘assassination’ in them that are a mile long?), what was I saying, because his new film opened here a few days ago. What other reason could there be?

When Elizabeth – The Golden Age came out recently we were treated with another showing of the first film. It’s regular as clockwork. However, sometimes, they can’t get their act together, quite, and funny things happen, like with the Ice Age series. ITV showed Ice Age one afternoon and then, to everyone’s amazement, they showed it again less than two weeks later. What had happened ? Yes, you got it: Ice Age: The Meltdown had been released in the meantime. Someone had f***** up big time.

So, whenever a big film is released, we get shown a film by the same director or with the same film star. Why? Why is television linked thus to the cinema? I don’t mind so much when it’s the commercial channels that do it, but when it’s the BBC it’s our money they’re using to promote those films, instead of using it to make original programmes. We’re not getting the royalties, are we? I was particularly upset a little while ago, when it seemed that Stephen Poliakoff’s entire oeuvre was going to be shown again before the unveiling of his latest pretentious, portentous, puffed up offering.

And now it’s not just TV that’s hand in hand with the cinema; it’s radio too. Military animals were mentioned for the first time in The Archers a few weeks ago. It was around 11 November, but still. My first thought was that they were promoting War Horse, which is currently on at the National Theatre (I’m seeing it at the end of January; I’ve already started to collect tissues to take on the night). And, the other day, Mariella Frostrup (don't like her, but like programmes about books) mentioned a new book about Sweeney Todd. Why? Yes, of course! Tim Burton, Johnny Depp... very soon... at a cinema near you.

Slap!

While you wait...

2007-11-25T02:11:00.000Z

Feast your eyes on this beautiful beast:

Modest, moi? Which question did I answer wrongly, I wonder.

I haven't read the book and won't see the film until it's shown on TV in a few years' time. This is no product placement. I just love the look of the website. (Thanks, Dove Grey Reader, for posting about it.)

Tête à claques XV

2007-11-11T04:08:00.000Z

When I moved to London, in 1979, I took over a friend’s flat in Lonsdale Road (one of those cute little streets in the heart of Notting Hill Gate that look like tranches napolitaines, with each house painted a different pastel shade). She was starting a new job with the RSC, in Stratford-upon-Avon, and my coming over suited everyone: she was glad to have someone to look after her cat and her belongings until she could move them to Stratford permanently; her landlord was glad to have a ready-made tenant; and I was glad not to have to live in a depressing bedsit, like on my first attempt at settling in London a few years earlier. The flat was minuscule, but very sunny and convenient (I worked in a publishing house just off Oxford Street, a short bus ride away). I was happy there for a while.

Flash forward to early spring 1983: I had just had a dreadful year battling with noisy upstairs neighbours: a loud Belgian girl and her Middle-Eastern boyfriend who used to play the drums on the floor on their flat, i.e. directly on my head. It had started one Friday evening and had never stopped. The guy had refused all entreaties to be quiet. Finally, because I was a good, reliable tenant, the landlord had agreed to terminate their tenancy and my torturers had moved out.

I had a few weeks of blissful peace, then, one Saturday morning, I was woken up by deafening choral music accompanied by something thunderous that I didn’t recognize. I jumped out of bed and went upstairs. The door was wide open: the carpet had been removed and a young man was sanding the floorboards. When I called out to attract his attention, he looked up and I realized it wasn’t a young man but a young woman. I explained about loud noise, about people like me working full-time in offices and needing their rest on Saturday mornings, about the flats being tiny and very ‘sonorous’, etc. etc. She looked at me with cold unblinking eyes and went back to her sanding machine.

It went on like that for several weeks: she would turn up in the evenings and at weekends to sand and hammer and drill and play music as loud as in a cathedral. At first I couldn’t understand how it was that she could be redoing the entire flat. I wasn't allowed to so much as stick pins in the walls to put posters up. However, when I wrote to the landlord, an old military man who lived in Dorset and had several properties in the area, he told me she was the daughter of friends of his and all became clear.

Her name was Sophie Hicks. At the time she was a fashion editor at Vogue: when she came back from shoots, she used to clutter the narrow lobby of the house with enormous black suitcases bearing labels from all over the world; she drove around in a Jeep, which looked incongruous in that tiny street; she had short back and sides and wore men’s brogues; she stomped around like a spoilt brat.

The previous year I had been toying with the idea of buying a flat, but had shelved it when the loutish couple had gone; after I understood from my landlord that I would never get rid of her, and after he refused to have my water heater repaired (it leaked gas and I could have died because of it), I knew I would have to leave. Which I did, the following year.

Much later I learned she had tried to replace the old bath in her flat with a new, larger one, and the floor had collapsed under the weight. Did I laugh? What do you think?

In the meantime, she left Vogue, trained as an architect and now designs for the super-rich. She’s had three children, but she still looks like an arrogant man who could make someone’s life a misery. I came across an article about her yesterday on the Net and since there is no statute of limitations for slapping I thought I would do it today – 24 years later.

Slap!

I need a good laugh

2007-11-02T14:41:00.001Z

I thought I’d wake up to an entertaining list of hanging participles, but none yet. No lovely sentences where the person speaking is hidden in their own breast pocket or men are wearing high heels (see post below) so I had to go elsewhere for a restorative chuckle.

I found it in the Jewish Chronicle online, in an article by the late Alan Coren. Here is an excerpt from it (if you want to read the rest go to Licensed to amuse)

FOLLOWING reports that the threatened dismemberment of the Church of England over the issue of homosexual prelates is apparently persuading hordes of disaffected Anglicans to up sticks and defect to Roman Catholicism, thousands of you have, not surprisingly, written to ask me for my expert guidance in this perplexing matter. [...]

Judaism, for example, has considerable appeal. The soup is good, and you can keep your hat on indoors, thereby making a considerable saving on fuel costs. Also, since you will not be allowed to drive on Saturdays, your car will last about 14 per cent longer than gentile ones. Furthermore, books are read back to front, which means that you do not have to plough through the whole of the new Jeffrey Archer to find out what happens.

Islam, however, may suit you even better, in that if you don’t want to read the new Jeffrey Archer, you can not only publicly burn it, you can apply to have him shot. The main drawback with Islam is that you will have to take your shoes off upon entering the mosque. If it is a big mosque, it may take you all day to find them again.

Buddhism is terrific if you are bald. Nobody will ever know. You can also spend all day walking up and down Oxford Street without ever having to buy anything, and with no socks to wash when you get home. Moreover, the principle of reincarnation is immensely attractive: you could come back as Bill Gates or George Clooney. Then again, you could come back as Jeffrey Archer. [...]

Enjoy!

Hanging participles

2007-11-02T04:30:00.000Z

Hate hate hate them. They are foul... and sometimes hilarious.

Any good ones you’d like to share?

Slap! (No, not you, hanging participles.)

Update (4.11.07): For those of you who aren't quite sure what a hanging participle is, here's a nice one:

Even in her high heels, he was taller than she was.

Déjà vu

2007-11-01T17:55:00.001Z

I’ve been writing for so long now and my life is so bo-, er, predictable, that I could just recycle old posts all the time. Since I’m still very busy and somewhat lacking in energy this week (mostly because the life force has been sucked out of me by another large organisation and Leonard Cohen wasn't there any longer to revive me) that’s mostly what I’ll do today.

If you haven’t read it already, look at this post Puzzle of the Day and make the following amendments to it:

1) Replace ‘two hours’ by three
2) Add four phone calls (to sort out the mess the Box Office made of my booking)

Oh, OK, if you insist, I’ll elaborate a bit.

This time the performance schedule was less than 1% of the surface of a huge, double-sided sheet full of blah blah about how wonderful the plays will be (yeah, right, that’s if anyone is actually able to book for them).

Next spring, the RSC are doing Shakespeare’s Histories so the plays are called Richard II, Henry IV Part 1 and 2, Henry V, and Henry VI Part 1, 2 and 3, Richard III. In that tiny strip of a schedule, the titles of the plays are printed in a very narrow (well, there’s no space, is there?), very thick, very black typeface and, to make matters worse, everything is in Roman numerals – Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II, Henry VI Part I, Henry VI Part II... you get the message. You need a magnifying glass to distinguish them from one another. I was told earlier today that Roman numerals were used because they look ‘posher’ (yes, that person works there; no, I won’t tell you who it is; you can torture me if you like: I have to protect my sources).

There were other things that were confusing in that booking form, but I will spare you. I wouldn't want you to be as stressed by it as I was.

Now I have to send back the wrong tickets. I was given a Freepost address to send them to, ‘... so you won’t have to pay for postage.’ Wow, thanks! Did the person (I can give you the name of that one if you like) think I should be grateful for that, after all that wasted time?

Cliffhanger: will I ever get the correct tickets? Stay tuned.

Slapping the RSC! Again!

Update (13/11/07): Tickets for the correct date did turn up eventually. I will be going to the theatre every week for two months next year: I used to go three times a week all year round when I was younger, but I might not be up to it these days. We'll see.

Les jours se suivent...

2007-10-22T04:55:00.000+01:00

...et ne se ressemblent pas.

What would make one forget one’s troubles with the Tax Office?

An evening with the serene Leonard Cohen.

He was at the Barbican on Saturday evening, in conversation with Philip Glass.

I was there.

It was even better than seeing Moses in the audience, that time, in the Barbican Pit.

He didn’t sing. He spoke. His voice has now become so low it’s practically inaudible. He recited a wonderful poem. He joked. He avoided answering the odd question.

The whole auditorium was filled with such love.

Later, we listened to Philip Glass’s musical settings of Leonard’s latest poems, Book of Longing, while the latter’s sketches and paintings were projected onto the back of the stage. The music was inspired (and inspiring) too and sometimes, even though it really bore no resemblance to the ex-monk’s own, it sounded like it could have been written by him.

I took a few pictures during the talk. Here is the only one that came out. I don’t need any other. I don’t need any at all. I’m not likely to ever forget that evening.
(The guy on the left is John L Walters of the Guardian.)

Fit for nothing

2007-10-19T15:00:00.001+01:00

I am in despair. I learned this morning that the second tax return I sent by Special Delivery at the beginning of September had not been logged in.

You may remember the first one I sent by Recorded Delivery managed to get lost somehow (if you don’t, see That famous British logic). The Royal Mail assures me the second tax return I filled in was delivered two days after being posted, but the people on the end of the phone (as I said before, you cannot speak to anyone who is actually in the office and has access to your files) tell me they have no trace of it.

What do I do now? Fill in a third one? How can I guarantee the Tax Office will acknowledge they received it?

The nonsense about the location of my Tax Office is even worse than I thought: it’s the Cornwall and Plymouth Area office, tax returns have to be sent to an address in Newcastle, where they are collected, logged in (well, some of them are) and then, guess what, they are redistributed to local offices all over the country. Which means that my files are in Cornwall, not in Newcastle. Are you following this at all? Good for you, because I’m not.

Now, of course, I missed the deadline.

And why am I getting such stress? Because I want to send these people some of my hard-earned money. What would it be like if I wanted money from them?

Don’t ask me to do anything today: it has drained me of all the little energy I had when I got up this morning. I might go back to bed.

Update (13/11/07): I'm off to the post office later going to send my third tax return (not by any special mail, but I still want a certificate of posting). I'm sending it to a real person this time. Will it be 'third time lucky' or 'jamais deux sans trois'?

Grumpy old writers

2007-10-12T14:57:00.000+01:00

TV Reporter to Doris Lessing getting out of black cab with some difficulty (she’s 88, after all): ‘Have you heard the news?’
Doris, looking and sounding gruff, ‘No!’
TV Reporter: ‘You’ve won the Nobel Prize for Literature!’
Doris, looking p*ssed off: ‘Christ! It’s been going on for 30 years....’

...and she walked away.

Interviewed on BBC Radio 4, she said the Nobel Prize panel didn’t like her 40 years ago and told her so, and she couldn’t see why they would like her better now. She more or less said, ‘High b***** time they gave it to me!’

Later, she did say she was very pleased and reminded everyone she’d won all the other literary prizes available in Europe.

She has a right to be cantankerous; she’s earned it with brilliant books. Not all older female writers should be allowed to be rude to strangers, though. There is one out there (who shall remain nameless) who is just as grouchy as Doris, with one big difference: she doesn’t run the risk of ever winning the Nobel Prize.

I’m slapping her.

No shepherd and no bush

2007-10-02T04:06:00.001+01:00

So, it took me two weeks to put the BBC texts I had to translate through Babelfish, sentence by sentence, sometimes word by word. It was horrendously slow but it was very rewarding and, thanks to this new – and much more accurate – way of translating, I managed to meet my very short deadline – again (see More of the same below). Now, after taking a few days off, I’ve resumed my daily struggle with the big book I have to do for next year. I can’t Babelfish it, though: it’s much too long. Shame.

Anyway, I walked down to Hammersmith, the other day: I thought I might celebrate my new-found semi-freedom by buying some tat in TK Maxx, as is my wont. On the way, I encountered a big fridge, plonked in the middle of the pavement. It looked familiar – probably the same one I’d seen on that very same spot several days earlier. A couple of B&Bs along Shepherd’s Bush Road are being refurbished and their front gardens look like enormous skips. On the way back, I pinched a nice piece of new carpeting to use as a doormat sometime in the future. With the amount of stuff they’d chucked out I could in fact have re-carpeted my entire flat. I’m a bit of a scavenger, me. The fridge wasn’t in working order, unfortunately, otherwise I might have taken it too – it was still there.

Apart from that fridge and the lengths of carpet and underlay, I also saw one of those pathetic LOST notices that desperate pet owners pin on trees. That one was particularly heartbreaking: a cute five-month-old puppy had been taken from his owner under threat, in Notting Hill Gate. The fact that the guy was now looking for him in my neighbourhood showed that he obviously thought the villains who’d committed such a horrid deed couldn’t possibly live in upmarket NHG. Yeah, right! Like it’s not full of drug addicts and rogues of all kinds – and I’m just talking about the denizens of NHG who gather at the posh Electric Brasserie...

Still, he’s not the one who deserves to be slapped, obviously, poor man. Losing a pet is bad enough, but having to give it away yourself to criminals must be unbearable. Who would put someone through this kind of ordeal? And for what? Money?

Slap!

What not to say

2007-09-14T00:36:00.000+01:00

It’s obvious the McCanns do not watch CSI (any of them, although, what they would learn from CSI : Miami, I have no idea – standing sideways maybe).

If they did, they would know you must never ever ever say, ‘Prove it!’ to the police. Only the guilty say that and they’re usually actors. Yes, I know that everyone in CSI is an actor, but the culprits are the only ones, apart from the main protagonists, who are actors. If someone appears on the screen and you recognize them from some other TV series or, even better, from films, you can bet anything they’re the murderer.

I now believe the McCanns are guilty. They gave themselves away, didn’t they?

Addendum (14.09.07):
What not to do
If you are a famous Polish author (if you’re currently a British author you can spend some time in Poland – they’ve got masses of space there since everyone has now moved to this country – and become a Polish author), so, if you are a famous Polish author (I have no advice on how to become famous: you’re on your own there, sorry ) and you commit a crime, it is not a good idea to write a thriller describing your crime in great detail because someone will tip off the police five years later and suggest they read your book and you will eventually be jailed for the crime. Do not follow Krystian Bala’s example: think of another plot for your novel.

Are there any limits to people's stupidity and greed and arrogance?

More of the same

2007-09-12T02:45:00.000+01:00

What would I do without the BBC? What would I write about? No, really. It’s a constant source of astonishment, aggravation, amusement, alliteration. Such a gift for a grumpy old woman.

Like, for example, why did they show Bend It Like Beckham the other day? As if I didn’t know. Could it be, by any chance, because that Keira Knightley (my mother would have said, ‘On dirait un hareng.’) is in a new film? Could it?

I don’t care when this kind of thing is done by commercial TV channels, although I don’t see why TV and newly released films should be coupled thus, but this is my licence fee they’re using to hype Atonement. Drat, I’ve said it!

Don’t go away, there’s more: the BBC has surpassed itself this week. They have reached a new low in moronicity. Wanna hear the latest? I’m once again about to translate stuff for them, as I do every year around this time. Yesterday morning I received a summary in abominable French for one of the scripts I have to translate. I asked the PA who sent it to me why it was in French and where it came from, dismayed at the idea that such gobbledygook might have been used to promote the programme in a French-speaking country. She got back to me saying, ‘... the translation I sent was created from a translation website that I found – I was trying to help.’ Does she think that’s what I’m going to do too: feed the scripts through Babelfish and just correct the odd infelicitous phrase here and there? Obviously she does.

Idiots are all around us. How do you respond when a project manager says to you, as one did recently to my partner, who’s an editor, when told a particular book would take x weeks to edit, ‘But surely you don't have to read it all, do you?’

Makes you want to curl up and die, doesn’t it? Or slap them very hard, anyway.

Something to look forward to

2007-09-03T03:47:00.000+01:00

The problem with having a blog dedicated to bad things and bad people is that readers might get the impression that my life is one long miserable series of tribulations. Not so. I choose to write about what annoys me, as a way of getting it out of my system, eliciting sympathy from my readers (no, not really), showing that we all have the same problems, and, finally, making people feel better about their own lives (‘Well, at least, nothing like that has ever happened to me’ kind of thing).

Sometimes I want to share the nice things too, but since I can’t start writing another blog called Blessing of the Day (not only would I make myself throw up but frankly, on balance, I wouldn’t have enough to write about) I have to use this platform and wonder who or what I can slap at the end. Let’s see how it goes...

A little while ago, I told the story of a failed getting-together-again-after-so-many-years with someone I met when I was having fun with – er – teaching French civilisation to kids in Tewkesbury. The young, bohemian guy I knew then had become a dirty old man and I didn’t feel like having anything to do with him now. I more or less swore not to try to track down any more people I had lost touch with years ago: we were bound to not have anything in common any longer and meeting again might destroy the good memories we had of each other.

However, one of my recent commenters turned out to be someone who studied English at the same university and at the same time as me: I didn’t know him personally and he didn’t know me but we’ve been able to remind each other of people and things we encountered then. He’s a charming man and I hope we can carry on reminiscing together.

Encouraged, I decided to see who else was out there. I googled some names and hit the jackpot.

I used to smile when my mother visited her ‘school friends’: women, who, like her, had managed to escape being murdered by the Nazis; little old ladies she knew when she was a child in Poland, with whom she walked to school, her pockets full of hot sunflower seeds in winter. To me as a young person it seemed slightly ridiculous but yesterday I talked on the phone with someone I knew when I was 11 years old and hadn’t spoken to for 45 years. We were best friends at school, and the last time we met we were 14 and we were both in tears: I was leaving Paris with my parents. She still lives in Paris and has two grown-up daughters, and we giggled like schoolgirls on the phone. I’m so looking forward to seeing her again soon.

So, you see, it’s not all aggro.

Who shall I slap, then? What about myself for not looking for her sooner?

Yet another b***** wet BH

2007-08-25T17:42:00.000+01:00

What is it with leaks? They lie in wait hidden away for several days until they suddenly jump on you at 2.38pm, at the very beginning of a long weekend, when your trusty plumber is in Wales and won’t be back until Wednesday.

Please keep your fingers crossed that the drip drip from under my kitchen sink doesn’t get worse and that a large saucepan is enough to keep things dry until next week. Emergency plumbers are nasty nasty individuals who exploit people’s misery.

Just as well I don’t do holidays, eh?

Slap!

Update (30.08.07): I’m sure you’re all waiting with bated breath to hear what happened yesterday when the plumber came. Well, what do you know, he didn’t. I got up especially for him too. Anyway, he came earlier today. Verdict: I need a new tap, but I can use silicone bath sealant in the meantime. Great, I’ve never bought a tap in my life. I really need new experiences just now. As if I didn't have enough on my plate, what with that stupid Tax Return getting properly lost and my having to redo it all, etc. etc.

By the way, I wasn't kidding about leaks revealing themselves at Bank Holidays: this is the third time it's happened to me.

On a happier note: the packet of Scottish salmon fillets I’ve just opened says, ‘Allergy advice: contains fish’. I should hope so.

That famous British logic

2007-08-23T18:02:00.000+01:00

I’ve written before about the palaver of telling the taxman how many peanuts I’ve earned in the past year. It’s the same thing every year: I earn four peanuts and I give him one. How difficult should it be?

Last year, I wasn’t busy in the summer (I’d just lost one of my main ‘clients’); I was busy wondering where the fourth peanut would be coming from. So preoccupied was I that I left it almost too late to fill in my tax return. The sky doesn’t fall in if you don’t do it by 30 September, but you have to calculate the amount of tax due yourself and send the taxman the correct moonay in January – on pain of death, of course. My situation is so simple that I wasn’t unduly worried about missing the deadline. Still, I'd rather let someone else make a mistake, so I sent it back in time by Signed For Recorded Delivery and breathed a sigh of relief. Well, what do you know, no one bothered to sign for it and it sat for ages in Newcastle, in a huge pile of tax returns.

Why Newcastle; don’t you live in Central London, I hear you wonder. Yes, I do, but the tax office that deals with my ‘financial affairs’ is in Newcastle, and it’s called, wait for it, ‘Cornwall and Plymouth Area’. But of course! My tax office used to be in Cornwall (it was ridiculous but at least the name corresponded with the location), but they moved it up north, last year, without telling any of us, so I had a terrible time trying to find out what had happened to my tax return. I attempted to track it with that nifty thing on the Royal Mail website, but it didn’t come up as having arrived anywhere. So, where was it? Was it in Cornwall, where I’d sent it, or was it in its new home in Newcastle? Those two places aren’t exactly next door to each other. After about a million phone calls, it was spotted safely ensconced in Newcastle: they’d been so snowed under with mail that they hadn’t had time to acknowledge receipt.

OK, then, so, this year, I decided to spare myself all that hassle and filled in my tax return well in advance of the deadline. I sent it back on 13 July, again by Signed For Recorded Delivery. Again I didn’t get an acknowledgment and again it didn’t appear on the Royal Mail website. In the end, last week, I thought I would find out, etc. etc. One person told me that it was possible it had arrived and that no one had signed for it or acknowledged it because it was sent back so early. Aaaaargh! You can’t win, can you?

Another thing you cannot do is speak to a person who is actually in the tax office where your file is. I have no fewer than six different telephone numbers for that one office, all of which take me to a call centre.

Why don’t I believe my tax return got lost in the post? Because, as I said, the same thing happened last year, and because I sent two other envelopes by Signed For Recorded Delivery on the same day – one to another address in the UK and one to France – and they both arrived at their destination within a few days. And because I just don’t believe these people. The only envelope I sent on 13 July that didn’t get there was the one addressed to the tax office? Yeah, right!

Since I don’t relish the thought of having to redo it all, I sent a letter to Newcastle a few days ago, by snail mail, asking them to please have a good look and let me know if my tax return was anywhere to be seen.

Have I had an answer to my letter? Did it even get to Newcastle? Is there anyone out there?

Slap!

Oh, yes?

2007-08-16T17:18:00.000+01:00

A-level results are in. And, guess what, they’re the best ever.

I’m sure that, like me, you have noticed how much more clever and articulate and knowledgeable young people have become in the past year.

You haven’t? Really?

Let’s see what the results are like next year – when they reduce the amount of coursework and test kids on what they know here and now.

Slap!

Update: I apologize to my non-British readers; I should have explained. This is what Wikipedia says about A-levels: ‘The A-level, short for Advanced Level, is a General Certificate of Education qualification in the United Kingdom, usually taken by students during the optional final two years of secondary school (Years 12 & 13, commonly called the Sixth Form), or at a separate sixth form college or further education college, after they have completed IGCSE or GCSE exams.’

Where was I? *

2007-08-09T15:48:00.000+01:00

Not on holiday, that’s for sure. I don't do holidays.

No, I was still struggling with the new PC, and all that entails. Those things are supposed to make our lives easier and save us time. Yeah, right!

And that’s when the user is not a novice and knows her software from her underwear.

Even when everything is as it should be, i.e. when the computer purrs nicely and accepts new programs without spitting them out, you’re still at the mercy of those frauds, those people who get jobs with Virgin, or Symantec (don’t start me on those crooks), and call themselves helplines. If I had made a note of the name of that woman at Virgin who told me beforehand that, no, they didn’t have a specific broadband installation download for Vista and I could use the Windows XP one, I could have made a voodoo doll, named it and stuck pins into it. OK, the connection is working, but only because I had installed broadband on two other computers already and knew what I was doing. Since they charge something like £1.50 per minute and usually spend the first 20 minutes asking for your life story, you can imagine how much the poor people who don’t have a clue have to fork out.

And then there are the peripherals that are in perfectly good working order but that won’t work with newer computers because Microsoft or Apple have decided to produce a new OS (are you following all this jargon?) and the manufacturers of those peripherals haven’t bothered to make patches for them (still with me?), so said peripherals can’t work with above-mentioned computers (phew!). My lovely flatbed scanner – so flat, so bed – should be working with this beautiful PC (coochycooch). I need it for the OCR function (there she goes again with the jargon!) because it’s easier to translate stuff when it’s on the screen in front of you than to have it propped up on the side of the monitor. Much. Anyway, I cannot throw away a machine that is not broken. I just can’t. And is it possible to buy a cheap flatbed scanner these days? ’course not. At some point you could get one for, like, £20, now everyone’s buying those 3-in-1s and they’re no good if you need to scan a book. Luckily, my partner still has an older Mac and we’ve managed to make the scanner work on it. Hooray! That’s one in the eye for Bill Gates, Vista et al.

Now if only I could make my old speakers work on the HP (Hewlett-Packard to you). Why do some new computers come without speakers? They keep telling you about what sounds you can have to alert you when you fall asleep at the keyboard or when you need a pee, and there are NO speakers!

So, as you can see, the saga isn’t over: more potentially stubborn programs and devices to install...

While I’m on the subject of waste: we’re all doing our bit to save the planet. We sort out our rubbish; we don’t leave our machines on standby (well, not all of them); we reuse plastic bags, and then we buy cook-chill stuff (I don’t, but some people not a million miles away from me do) in Tesco or M&S, and we’re asked to cook a minute portion of dog food for 25 minutes in a hot oven. Twenty-five minutes for a few mouthfuls. You can cook a meal from scratch in 25 minutes!

Slap!

* I know I’ve already used that heading for another post. So what?

There’s a new computer in the house…

2007-07-22T13:24:00.000+01:00

…so, as you can imagine, I have no time for anything except trying to make this new lodger talk to me and, more to the point, obey my orders. So far so tractable… but I haven’t asked it to link up to any other computer yet, over there in cyberspace. I hope it will agree to do that without dragging its feet too much because my patience is wearing thin.

In the meantime, two of my most favourite places in the world (I haven’t been anywhere much so they might not be on anyone else’s list of ‘100 sites to visit before you die’) – Stratford-upon-Avon and Tewkesbury – are under water. I’ve seen pictures. Awful!

Here, in my second-floor flat in Central London, I am not completely unaffected by the torrential rains: we haven’t had any hot water for the past two days because of it. Don’t ask me why; it’s too preposterous, as usual with anything to do with this building.

Slap!

Boom booming

2007-07-17T23:57:00.000+01:00

Yesterday morning (well, OK, lunchtime), I was sitting at my desk trying to convince myself that, yes, if I could translate four pages of a novel satisfactorily I could translate another 279 just as well, and, yes, I would stop having nightmares about it soon, when suddenly the building shook: a loud thud was reverberating through the floor and the walls of my flat.

Another mini earthquake followed, then another and another, and so it went on, practically without interruption, until 5pm. At some point, I went out on a recce and discovered piles were being driven into the soil next to our block of flats.

We knew it was going to happen: we had circulars warning that the owner of a small block adjacent to ours had asked planning permission for an extension. Everyone here was against it. We wrote letters to the council; we tried to have it stopped. Since the guy is French, I volunteered to go and swear at him in my mother tongue, but, for some unfathomable reason, my offer was turned down. As was his first proposal. But, of course, he modified the specifications again and again, and eventually he was allowed to build.

Apart from the initial shock, the first BOOM scared me, and I’ve been trying to understand why. I think it comes from an atavistic fear: although the piles are being driven vertically, it feels like the building is under attack and being rammed into. I have the impression that my home – my refuge, my sanctuary – is at risk.

I may be right too: a structural engineer has given the OK to the work next door, but who knows what this constant shaking will do to our building. We are already aware that some of us will be deprived of daylight; what else is in the offing?

I learned tonight that the shaking of my walls (my windows rattled too today) might go on for months. Why did the council ever say ‘yes’ to that greedy landlord? Why don’t reasonable petitions ever work? Slap!

Full circle

2007-07-09T14:03:00.001+01:00

Life’s a funny old thing.

I was still at college when I got my first full-time job. While my fellow students still faced the prospect of having to look for work at the end of their last year, I was earning a good salary as a translator and archivist (employed by the CNRS; yes, like Luca Turin at some point in his career) at the Neurophysiology lab of the Faculty of Science in Nice, which was (still is) situated in a wonderful park full of gorgeous plants and flowers. Everyone was nice; I drove a cute little car; I felt happily settled, but eventually I realised I was too young to be such a bourgeoise and, at the end of my two-year contract, I left. I lost touch with my bosses (a charming couple of researchers) for 35 years – until I traced them again (it wasn’t difficult: they hadn’t moved around like me), and these days we are very close friends. They are incredibly supportive and keep me in Provençal goodies.

Back to the mid-’70s: after a short English hiatus, I found myself in the right place at the right time again, and became a literary translator in Paris, working for one of the most influential editors of foreign literature in France. I had my name on the covers of books; I went to book launches and cocktail parties and met well-known writers, but the freelance life is not for the young. Sitting in a room, day in day out, with a typewriter for company can be soul-destroying and I got depressed. Also, the Royal Shakespeare Company was still calling my name, and, again, after five years, I left.

That was 28 years ago. In the meantime, my French editor has moved to another – just as prestigious – publishing house, and, guess what, I am now working for her again (me and Alain de Botton, in fact, but not together, unfortunately). It’s a rather strange feeling: it delights me and makes me slightly dizzy at the same time.

Some might say (my parents certainly did, every time) I deserve a slap for turning my back, at least twice, on things others would have given their eyeteeth to get.

See you next year! I’m only half joking: I have a challenging 300-page novel to translate and no idea yet how to pace myself – it’s so long since I last undertook such a huge amount of work. Years ago, of course, it would have been easy: I would have waited until a few weeks before the deadline before starting on it, and I would have been dead at the end. I am a different person now, thank goodness. Now, if x is the time it takes to do a first draft and y the time it takes to....

Tête à claques XIV

2007-07-01T14:16:00.000+01:00

I had been planning to slap Mariella Frostrup for a while, but, you know how it is… However, since my commenters have questioned her presence on the list of Slappees below, I don’t think I can put it off any longer.

Something like 15 years ago, she presented a programme on Channel 4 entitled The Little Picture Show. It was on very late at night – probably just before the preposterous Prisoner Cell Block H on ITV (I’ve always worked at night with the TV on, preferably rubbish so my brain doesn’t have to engage with it too much) and it was just as inane. I’m afraid I took an instant dislike to Mariella. Who was this blonde bimbo with a rasping, flirtatious voice who reviewed the latest video releases? She may have been saying interesting things, but I couldn’t get past the annoying, staccato voice. I was repulsed by it, but I carried on watching: the awful can very often be fascinating.

It went on for a few months, then she disappeared. I believe she was George Clooney’s girlfriend or something useful like that for a while. Much much later, when I thought I could escape her by not looking at those pages in magazines that show bleary-eyed celebs staggering out of night-clubs, she turned up on Radio 4 – of all places! Presenting a book programme! Aaargh!

So, anyway, it’s been years and she’s finally getting a bit better (I would have sacked her after her first interview: it was such a disaster). I listen to Open Book because anything about literature interests me, but it’s through clenched ears (I know, I know).

She really was nothing but a blonde girlie with a sexy voice, but she was given the chance to learn on the job, from scratch. So many others, more talented, never get a look-in. I know she’s not the only one but, hey, who says I have to be fair?

Oh, yes, there’s something else: this is what she said, when asked what she missed most about her old life (i.e. before babies, etc.), ‘I miss the sheer indulgence of it. I miss having time to sit in a café, drink a coffee and read a paper. But, what I miss most are those lost afternoons; the ones where you meet a friend for lunch, drink a bottle of wine and then decide to order another one because you have nothing else to do.’

When did you have a life like that?

I rest my case.

Update (19/07/07): I feel like taking back everything I said about Mariella. I’ve just heard say that she didn’t understand why adults read Harry Potter, since there were soooo many wonderful books for adults. I may have misjudged the woman...

A ragbag of aborted Slaps

2007-06-29T23:37:00.000+01:00

I have this little book. In it, I write down things that bother me, make me go Grrr!, get my goat, depress me. The idea is that each item might become a Slap at some point in the future. Except that most often I don’t look at it; I write about something I’ve just heard or read or that has annoyed me personally in the hour before sitting at my desk. So, here, in no special order, are a few things that might have become Slaps, but didn’t quite make the grade.

* One in 25 old people are abused in their own homes.
* Until now, when a woman had knee-replacement surgery, the prosthetic patella she would be given was modelled on a male one (and they are different, apparently). Someone has finally cottoned on that women might walk better with a patella that fitted their knee properly.
* One quarter of Russia is owned by 36 men.
* 11% of Mauritanian girls are force-fed because the men prefer fat women. Like in the case of female circumcision, it’s the older women who insist it has to be done.
* China’s fur trade.
* Earphones that get into a tangle all the time.
* A teenager planned to kill his entire family because he wanted to be adopted by a rich couple (he managed to kill his brother and sister).
* Women who are threatened by an all-women environment.
* Motorists who just get a fine for killing people.
* Mariella Frostrup.

Addendum (30/06/07): After listening to this week's Any Answers on BBC Radio 4, I have to add 'Phone-ins' to my list. I try not to listen to such unbelievably annoying programmes, but today I'm waiting for Arcadia by Tom Stoppard to start... just about... now. Aaaaah, bliss!

The greatest sin

2007-06-24T17:56:00.000+01:00

Do you know what it is – according to the Americans? It’s not being rich, filthy rich, obscenely rich.

If you’re not rich, filthy rich, obscenely rich, it must be because you’re not trying hard enough. Anyone, whatever their field of expertise, whatever their abilities, whatever their education (or lack of), whatever the state of their health; whatever the economic situation in their country, can earn oodles of money if only they apply themselves to that goal. No exception.

I thought that the American Dream thing had been debunked long ago; that it had become obvious to everyone that being determined, flexible and hard-working just wasn’t enough; that the world was now a very different place from what it was at the turn of the last century – it may have been true then, it certainly isn’t now.

But, no, it looks like this kind of thinking is still alive. Someone, whose comments weren’t exactly welcome, advised me today to work harder. Er, yes, I would if I could. I would if I wasn’t unwell. I would if there was work to be had – somewhere. But there isn’t.

Quite apart from being astoundingly arrogant, this attitude is staggeringly stupid. It shows a complete lack of understanding of the way the world works. Only someone who has had a sheltered life or who, like the person in question, earns big bucks working for an international bank* in a European city that has, if one is to believe Wikipedia, the best quality of life anywhere in the world, can still come out with this kind of crap.

Slap!

* Working in a bank: my worst nightmare!

Addendum (25/06/07): I love my hit counter: as well as telling me how many readers I have it tells me who reads me – those who can actually read and also those who can’t. You have been warned. LOL!