Going the Wicklow Way

Having left at the crack of dawn (why am I always, always leaving at the crack of dawn despite my best efforts?!?!),

I'm back again after a gloriously lazy weekend in Wicklow with a houseful of friends, food, wine and sea views.

Fierce therapeutic, of course, and nice to make the place feel like home. Pleasing to be with other people who appreciate the small pleasures, and cracked up to see international types endearing themselves/bewildering locals to take pictures of gingerbread men and the like. Barely resisted the urge to avail of the five-finger discount in one of the town's amazing boutiques, well beyond my price range, of course. Lots of stomping, all the cobwebs blown out and returned clearheaded and sure as ever that London is not the place for me, but I think that's just going to be the way it is.

Did almost no reading while I was there, having just finished the fantastic The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa, a truly daft Dante-as-detective effort, and *gak* Mother Missing by Joyce Carol bloody Oates. Why I'm constantly subjected to Women's Writing (as opposed to writing by women) simply because I'm young and female is beyond me: as if you would feed a black freelancer almost exclusively Black Writing, mais bon. Silliness and entirely not my cup of tea, with women characters so objectionable, so catty, manipulative and stereotypically female that it was hard to drag myself past the opening scene. The Dante effort was fine but not worth discussing further, but the Agualusa! Fantastic. Absolutely gorgeous, gentle writing, unusual characters well developed, and several openly discussed and well-integrated themes. Based in Angola, it oozes light and heat, and has a lovely, rounded story about a 'seller of pasts' and how he falls in love. Absolutely superlative in its simplicity, and really rekindling an interest in contemporary African writing for me.

Now have a week off (use it or lose it holidays) and not enough to read! I might have to (gasp) read for pleasure! Shockin'.

London Days

So aside from the obvious reading, writing and whathaveyou, I spend more time in London outside than I have in any city in the world. I've lived long-term in four, so I think that this is pretty revolutionary. Most of it is to do with biking, which I discovered partially through necessity in Dublin. Whenever I reveal that I cycle through London most days, I'm met with astonishment- so dangerous, so nasty in bad weather, etc. I've found the eponymous small pleasures of this blog hard to come by in London, but cycling in London is something to smile about. Sure, Florence wasn't half bad either, for sheer beauty... but cobbles, ach. Although the tube goes practically everywhere, the buses are fantastic and the overground connects you to everything, public transportation here is hideously expensive and relatively time-consuming. I mean, Hell, I'm in work in less than fifteen minutes, and much more importantly, I could be home by 5.45.

The same was true in my last job, which had the (only) added benefit of a daily roundtrip down Regent's Canal.

It was all coots, geese and ducklings.






Good stuff, and sure beat Hampstead Road at rush hour, but you can't complain.

But the real benefit of cycling is being outside. You get to know your way around, you see things from a different perspective and after a few months, you've soaked up enough vitamin D to keep the SADs away at least through the other side of Christmas. It also gives you great, low impact exercise, which is, as we all know, the only kind of exercise.

The Bearded One has turned to cycling, but also to sport. This surprises me, as he was not a sporting type before, which suited yours truly grand. But, like myself, he finds that London gets to him, that our semi-subterranean flat lacks light and air in the wintertime, and so cricket, football, basketball and now baseball... all are to be played, watched and enjoyed. Nyeh, what the Hell.

My other new-found hobby since moving here, related to quality has been gardening. (See photo...) "You can afford to rent a place with a garden?! On a publishing salary?!?!?" Um, no. We have a slender slice of air and sky, sunk in the middle of North London between the converted flat at the back of a shop and the whitewashed brick wall of the picturesque row houses perpendicular to us.
It's fantastic. We love it- flowers, pots, palm tree, candles, tiny table and chairs, and a laundry line.


And, meet the real cause of this rant: my renewed appreciation for the natural world has spurred on a complete obsession with Bill Oddie's nature shows. Ok, ok, so many of you will tune out right about... now. Mais bon. It's true! He's lovely. And a conservationist, and genuinely enthusiastic about not just nature, but British nature. I find this encouraging. And now, oh, yes... Mini Oddie on your desktop, ALL THE TIME. I have no words. You need it. You want it. Doitdoit.

Independent Booksellers - query!

Hey there blogland. Two items here, and a shout out for help! I know I'm hardly coming down in visitors here, but if anyone can hear me...

I recently read a feature in one of the UK national papers about a group of independent bookshops who banded together to start a collective website. The idea was that punters order a book online, decide which of their local independent bookshops they wanted it to be delivered to, got an email when it arrived, and then walked in and bought it. The idea, of course, is to redirect some A*$zon users back into the physical bookshop, while offering the convenience of 24-hour internet searching.

Any thoughts, lads? I can't remember the name of this scheme, and I'd love to start sending you their way by way of click-thrus.

Meanwhile, Irish readers, get moving! The Guardian is taking nominations for good independent bookellers in Ireland for their database. I say the Exchange Bookshop in Dalkey and Readers in Dun Laoghaire- both south County Dublin, narf narf. Natch.

Autumn

A disgraceful amount of time has passed since my last post. I never thought I'd be quite this bad this early on, but there we be.

Succeeded in seeing only one preview for the Dublin Theatre Festival, Festen at the Gate. Odd to see a play which began life as a film, and one that has made the seamless move from a Danish to an Irish setting, but it was a very fine play. Not all of the actors were up to the task, or alternately, their direction clashed when they were pitted against eachother, but all in all a success. The physical 'choreography' of it on stage was very fine indeed, with at one point three or four scenes playing simultaneously on stage- physically overlapping without seeing eachother, juxtaposing the various relationships to great effect.

The scene is set as a family joins together in a large country house in Denmark/Ireland for a banquet in honour of the father's 60th. Having just celebrated my father's 60th in an old Dublin pub, I wondered whether we'd done him justice... until the banquet scene all went sour with the promised nasty revelation of a dark family secret. Dark is an understatement, mais bon.

It was also extremely funny: it was, as I've tried to highlight, a very well-staged affair, so there was often a physical comedy element to its presentation, be it slapstick or mock-balletic. This not to mention some very funny lines...

The new RTÉ arts show, cast out to the 11pm weekly slot (RTÉ supporting the arts, ha!) came into its own when covering the Theatre Festival soon after my return. I was glad of this, considering that their debut airing was a focus on public sculpture. You do the math: sculpture, radio, sculpture, radio... I mean, ok, maybe once you have a listenership, but your debut show?? Come on.

But I digress. One of the critics mentioned that he saw one woman walk out of Festen, and to be honest, I'm surprised it didn't happen at every show. I'm trying, here, not to reveal the revelation, but let's just say it's a bit topical to Ireland's current confessional culture.

I wasn't the only one who liked it, though I suspect my companion for the evening did not- the Guardian gave it 4/5 stars.

Dublin Theatre Festival

So, being third in a three-woman team, I didn't draw the lucky straw to Edinburgh this year. That said, if I were to go, with, say, The Bearded One, I'd rather it not be during the festival so that we might enjoy the city, or alternately, that I not be at the festival for work. Demanding, I know, but that's what publicity gals are like - or so I'm told.

Besides, it's the Dublin Theatre Festival that really gets me going, as it always somehow manages to up the ante. Dublin is an amazing city for theatre, it's true, but things tend to get a bit pallsy and nepotistic, with the same pairings of actors/directors or actors/playwrights cropping up again and again. Either that, or as happened to me in my last two years of university, absolutely everything I saw was laughably bad. Every single one. It was thespian death out there, folks, but since, the pendulum has swung back to the kind of theatre we're all comfortably used to, and some we're not. The festival is a bit of fresh air, and the rest of the year seems to draw a lot of energy from it.

So, Thursday will see me at an Irish adaptation of Festen, reviewed there for the West End production. No doubt the ever-present theme of abuse will hit the reviews, which like the constant insistence on all things Catholic gets trying, particularly when you're living in England, but I'm intrigued as to how the Dublin production will rework a Danish country kitchen drama.

And, if I can get the blasted website to accept my plastic, I'll fly solo to a matinee -a parkbench first- to see the topical production of The Exonerated. Always one for a gimmick, I'm only dying to see who shows up as a guest. Unsurprisingly, given the topic, Susan Sarandon was strutting her stuff in the New York show. On the downside, it's in (though it pains me to link to anything so hideous) here we go, it's Liberty Hall.

Reviews to follow.

Freelance aspirations

So in a recent e-ponder at my understandably none-too-impressed mother, I wondered exactly how much freelance reviewing and writing one would have to get before giving up the day job. This is, of course, a very naive train of thought, but Hell, that's what blogs are for.

I have found that freelancers spend so much time having to promote themselves and their abilities that they become unreliable narrators of how they spend their time, or alternately, they've been doing it for so long that they started in a time when things were very different. I would love to know more about the harsh realities of freelance features journalism and how one makes the leap. If you've already got a national broadsheet and a few major literary outlets under your belt, what's next? How do you up the ante from £40 or £60 pieces without ending up making coffee in a newsroom somewhere? Need it necessarily be a one-way ticket to the poorhouse and 60-hour weeks alone on your laptop? Will you always be faced with people asking if you never wanted a 'real career'? Will you cease to care? Ponder ponder.

Submitting to Peer Pressure

So, despite a groaning piles of Books I Should Be Reading Because I'm Paid to Do So, I went into the singularly unfriendly Camden Waterstone's to remind myself why indies are best and to buy Colm Toibin's Mothers and Sons. *will master accents and italics shortly, joy* Have a look at the master's own website, a bit cutesy but impressive nonetheless.

It's just breathtaking. The book that is, not his website. The short story is, as they say, your only man.

Much to my immense annoyance, I missed the William Trevor reading at the short story festival this weekend through a truly lame combination of fatigue, lack of funds and the lure of the Brick Lane Beigel Shop. That, and fear of meeting work folk I don't know well enough yet, but should.

So on a completely unrelated note, I'm compiling a Christmas list, one which includes precious few books (see above) but rather a list of passwords to the likes of the LRB, the New Yorker and a few other tools of the trade I would really rather like but, unsurprisingly, find that I cannot afford. I should probably do something bright like do alternate weeks of different mags with a £5 budget. That's a thought.

The Fish is Ill

I failed to point out earlier that my fish is ill. Fish are by no means equal to cats in terms of company, but one gets attached... am displeased.
(o} }} ><|

Greetings, Blogland

Being a thoroughly 21st-century gal these days, I thought that the time had come to start a blog. It will be, and hopefully remain, a fairly anonymous effort. My aim is to meet and greet some of the likeminded books bloggers, writers and critics whose work I've come across in the last year.

I make no promises to be regular in my posts, sociable in my nature, nor positive in my outlook, but I will try to keep it interesting and topical and include some photos of mine and others I like. Stealing images and words isn't nice, so try to avoid it, and I'll plan to do the same.