The Flying Dutchman Rides Again

Have just come back from the most amazing lunch at locanda locatelli - mmmmmm! I wondered after all the incredible food we ate in Italy, if Italian food in England was ever going to be as good, but this really did top it all (and so it should with 2 Michelin stars!)

Perhaps this meal could be topped though, by the delights on offer at "International Evening" at school tomorrow, where all the loving parents are going with their offspring for an evening of international cuisine (everyone has to take a dish typical of their country - I made Yorkshire Parkin, after all, it's practically a different nation isn't it?) As one of the other mum's said "there'll be wine there, please come" I felt I could hardly refuse! Daddy was very sulky at the prospect, but I appear to have convinced him (again I think the lure of the wine could have had something to do with it, not to to mention my killer parkin of course!)

As part of International Week, tied in (as Princess O proudly told me) with Black History Month, the kids all had to go to school yesterday in their national dress (which could include football kit for the two children of purely English descent). Thankfully some old neighbours of ours who were from St Petersburg had given us a mini Russian folk outfit, so I forced Princess O into it and made her promise to say it was Lithuanian (not too much of a stretch) as her Grandma is from there. Of course when I overheard her telling someone at school, she spoke like Judas Iscariot declaiming Jesus, and whispered that it was from Russia. Oh if only we hadn't told her it was wrong to ever lie!

So, there's good news and bad news on the book front - out of the blue, I had an email from The Flying Dutchman a few weeks ago, asking if I wanted to meet up again to discuss book/film project (or at least the notional project!) Despite clearing my diary for the rest of my life, we have yet to actually meet up though. Grr, why is this whole thing so bloody hard?

Also, very interestingly, Harper Collins have decided to set up their own website for unpublished authors to post their manuscripts and allow readers to comment, with the view that the most popular will be turned into books. I intend to email them and tell them I've done it myself already! Hope they'll be suitably impressed.

It's a fair cop

A small and rather hilarious post script to being burgled and having our car stolen happened last Saturday night. I was driving back from a friend's wedding down in Hastings, on my own (or at least with Princess O asleep in the passenger seat) about midnight, getting very lost in the City after coming through the Blackwall Tunnel and taking several very annoying detours. Anyway, as I finally got myself onto the right road and thought that home was nearly in sight, I heard a load of police sirens coming towards me, which I (in my innocence) thought were on their way to some major crime scene.

Alas the crime scene they were on their way to, was me! Or so it transpired when one of the cars blocked me off and a strapping policeman took the car key from the ignition and told me I was under suspicion of driving a stolen vehicle! He told me that in the City they have automatic numberplate readers, and that my number plate had "kept flashing up" on their screen (that was all my wrong turns, trying to work out where I was going!) After about 20 minutes on the pavement, surrounded by policemen, giving them my little story about how the car had been stolen, but how it was now reunited with its rightful owner (ie me), I was allowed on my way.

They were all extremely kind to me, once it became apparent that I was in fact not the hardened car criminal they were after, but what pleased me most about the whole situation was that when I read the copy of my "stop and search" warrant, the physical description the policeman had given of me was 5'6'' (a good inch taller than I really am) and "slim" build - hurrah! In his eyes practically a supermodel (and let me tell you, he wasn't too shabby in the height and looks department either!)

I did also think afterwards that it was probably a good thing for them and their stastics to be able to include a white, middle class female in the number they have apprehended, to balance out the existing, very unfortunate bias towards young, (black) men. So at least some good came of the wrongful arrest, even if it wasn't actually catching the bastards who broke into our flat!

Which leads me onto my final thought on this little saga - we got the car back nearly two months ago, and Westminster police had kept it on their register of stolen vehicles (a minor administrative error to start with). In that time though, we have driven up to Yorkshire, to the airport, out to Oxford, plus all over London, and no other policeforce has noticed our "stolen car" or thought to stop it, until that is, I entered the City of London, where money pays for a much more sophisticated police force. It's a shame that the rest of the country doesn't exist under such great policing. If it did, perhaps we'd all be a little safer and better off.

And as if I needed an excuse for a glimpse of George Michael in a pleasingly tight policeman's get-up, here's "Outside", to remind us all that a man in uniform is always sexy.

Pride comes before a fall

All domestic smugness was replaced last night when I discovered a swarm of maggots in my sesame seeds! Urgh! It was so disgusting I nearly puked. Am going to have to have a full de-maggotting of all dry goods tonight too, as I'm sure there must be more lurking in the cupboard. Where do they come from? It was truly horrendous.

And on top of that Princess O is waking up every night because she's scared of the dark, despite the fact that she has a night light and now a Fifi and the Flowertots doll which lights up and sings a lullaby when you press its tummy. I'm at the end of my endurance with it, and I really don't know what to do next.

Even more depressing, I'm starting to feel a bit sick about all this website/Facebook malarkey with my book, being consumed by fear and self-loathing, that it's a stupid idea, will never work, that the book is crap anyway, etc, etc. Argh!

Domestic Goddesses R US

Am feeling a bit tired today, but totally smug after a ridiculously domestic weekend which included: hanging all my washing outside to dry on the line (doubt there'll be much more of that this year, and there's been precious little already); harvesting some vegetables from the garden (lettuce, tomatoes, courgettes and beans) then turning them into delicious homemade food for a picnic, supplemented by some extra veg from the organic box! (The culinary goodies were courgette fritata, middle eastern aubergine dip and green bean and tomato salad, yum!)

Took princess O to aforementioned picnic in Regent's Park with a couple of my friends - we had to pretend to be a family of donkeys which turned out to be slightly embarrassing walking around on all fours and munching on grass, but she loved being our keeper.

The culmination of the domesticity came only last night though, when I used the carcass of the chicken (organic naturally) that we had for dinner on Sunday evening and boiled it up with some more veg to make fresh chicken stock. I swear I had a moment of deep joy looking at the jug of fragrant amber as I put it in the fridge this morning. Trouble is, I'm so knackered by all this housewifery that I'm not sure I'm actually going to be able to manage to make anything with it before it goes off! (And as soon as I put it in the freezer I know I'll never remember to defrost it till it's too late.)

Anyway, it was quite pleasurable after a summer of childlessness and then being away on holiday, to just come home, relax and enjoy being a mummy again.

Thunderbirds are Go!

Wow, I've finally done it, the website is live. I can't quite believe how quickly it's all happened. One minute I was lying in bed desperately trying to think what I could do about getting this damn book published, the next I've got a fully functional website and a Facebook group with 50 members (which might not be much just yet, but give it time.)

My mind is now racing ahead on all systems to the next stage of the process, which is of course lots of PR! It's all slightly sick making as I'm generally not that comfortable with this type of self-agrandisement, but I'm trying to imagine it all in the third person, as though I'm talking about someone else, so I don't have to think about it too much.

Anyway, I emailed the local paper today to see if they'd do a story, and am also hoping work might come up trumps too. Could I be the next Jade Goody/Kerry Katona? Known for nothing more than their hideous ability to turn up on the front cover of any/ever magazine for doing nothing more than fart. I do hope not!

It all seems like a long time since I got back from holiday though (something I've failed to write about in my rush to get the website going, but it was the most utterly lovely week in Sardinia, which I would highly recommend to anyone looking for crystal clear sea, gorgeous beaches and absolutely delicious food! I can't remember being so relaxed in a very long time.)

And rather gratuitously (because in reality I completely fancy the guy in the ad) and to prove that I have, I think, mastered the art of adding pictures/film into the blog, I'm also putting in a clip of the "D&G light blue" TV ad, because if it isn't in Sardinia, it looks just like it (and D&G have a house on the Costa Smerelda in Sardinia, dontcha know, so it really could be.)

A cunning plan

Unbelievably I appear to have a hangover again, and it's Friday again - must be the fact that I only have time to blog on Friday afternoons when work is quiet, and when I'm hungover so I can't quite face too much work because honestly I don't go out that much, though it would certainly appear that way! (It's also the summer hols and the princess is away again, so I really feel that I have to maximise on socialising before real life kicks in again.)

Last night was just a relatively quiet evening in Soho (for once) with an old work friend, but in order to maximise upon child-free time, I'm also going out tonight with university friends and to a wedding tomorrow - I think my liver is going to be a swollen wreck by Sunday! And worst of all we're going on holiday the week after next so I'm supposed to be on my bikini-body diet and exercise regime (which is clearly not going too well after an immense jacket potato and cheese at lunchtime!) For a brief moment at lunchtime to day I did think I might go for a run to perk myself up, but then decided a nice lardy jacket potato would probably be more enjoyable. No pain no gain? Absolutely!

Anyway, to the point of my post... I had lunch on Wednesday with a girl I used to work with here, who is now a glamorous digital marketing type in order to discuss my latest (and possibly most brilliant) ploy to gain international recognition for my fantastic manuscript: I am going to launch a viral campaign on Facebook (oh I'm so down with the kids me)

One of my other friends (aren't I so lucky to have such a bunch of talented and helpful friends?!) is going to build me a little website where I plan to host the book, or at least a good part of it. Then via my cunning Facebook viral marketing campaign, I can spread the word (quite literally) and get lots of people to visit the website, read the book and comment on how brilliant it is, thereby providing an instant market for the publisher who won't need to do any more work to sell thousands of copies! Brilliant or what?

Of course these things never go quite according to plan, but here's hoping...

(And I'm off to get me a hair of the dog and fast!)

Is everyone weird?

I was wondering this yesterday after lots of emailing with one of my friends about her ex-girlfriend and how weird she'd turned out to be and it made me think about whether anyone is actually "normal".

I suspect the answer is no, but then I have always thought I was relatively normal, and most of my friends seem to be too, as are their husbands/boyfriends, but perhaps that's because we don't delve into each other's hearts of darkness too often. So maybe it's just that the more you get to know someone, the more you find out about their hidden neuroses, idiosyncrasies etc and uncover their weirdness. Though I still maintain that there is a scale of weirdness and this particular ex of my friend's is right up there!

There were some people out in Soho last night wearing their weirdness right on their sleeve though - the princess is away at her aunty's this week, so Mummy and Daddy have been cutting loose. (Oh my god, you don't appreciate how nice not having kids is until you've actually got them, by which point of course it's too late! But it does make the rare occasions alone oh so delicious - the 8am starts, the late nights watching films, the no rushing to the childminders the second work's finished.)

Anyway, Mummy went out with her work chums last night and drank her bodyweight in cheap rose and white wine spritzers and ended up at 3am in some dive on Brewer St dancing to hardcore techno with a Bulgarian Marc Almond-alike! I love those nights when you get to a certain point and wonder how the hell you ended up where you are and oh, why aren't you in bed? Sadly they are precious few these days, but I made the most last night.

Needless to say, today hasn't been the most productive at work, what with spending most of the day eating potato in some form (4 hash browns for breakfast, a plate of roast potatoes for lunch) and of course the inevitable dissections of the night and looking at everyone's photos (how did we manage before camera phones??)

We were talking about best hangover foods this morning, and someone said dairylea squares which to me seems akin to inviting yourself to give up and be sick, but the humble potato has always been my trusty friend, in whatever form it chooses to take, though I've been told by a reliable source that any yellow food will cure a hangover, which is why egg, chips and lard are always so good!

Ok, time for me to sign off - it's the weekend! I need to go home and have a speed siesta before getting in the car and driving a few hundred miles (not the ideal after 4 hours sleep) but my writing friend is accompanying me, so at least we can spend the evening discussing how crap our careers are and how we're misunderstood, tortured geniuses, and it's the publishers loss, not ours. Gaa.

pottermania

Well, I've just spent a very enjoyable couple of weeks gorging on Harry Potter in anticipation of the last book being published last weekend. I am pleased to say that I very carefully engineered it so that I had almost the whole of Saturday free to read it in one book-drunk frenzy so that I could get to the end before anyone spilled the beans on how it all turned out.

For once I was very pleased when Princess O appeared at the crack of sparrows next to my side of the bed, whispering very loudly "mummy, is it your morning yet?" And it was - we got dressed and down to the bus stop at an indecently early hour to catch the no 6 to Borders on Oxford St to purchase said book.

The trick of the peaceful day was firstly a sunny morning, and a Mr Men book for O, so we lay on a blanket on the lawn in the back garden reading next to each other (well I was reading, she was looking at the pictures), followed by a trip to the swimming pool with Daddy so Mummy could have some "quiet time" and then a very rainy afternoon so we could snuggle up on the sofa and watch Beauty & the Beast (twice) while I was frantically pacing through the pages of HP.

I've been thinking all week about the key to the success of Harry Potter and I think it's the fact that although many bad things do happen, it is a world in which you feel very secure and where you feel that nothing bad can happen to you. Plus of course the idea that it would be soooo cool to go to a school where you learnt to ride a broomstick and change yourself into a cat. I like the way that JK deals with death too - helping children to understand that these things happen, but also offering a way back; life after death in the form of a moving photo, a mirror, a portrait on a wall, whispers from behind a screen, or a stone which promises to return you from the dead.

At any rate, I'm quite sad to have come to the end of the series, and to have to return to my own, far less exciting life.

and p.s. I thought the Deathly Hallows was a complete return to form after the less than brilliant no's 5 and 6, and I know I'm an adult and that perhaps I shouldn't be enjoying it quite this much, but everyone's got to have somewhere to escape to after all. (Third space? Pah, just give me a book.)

Urgh

Well I had to finish the last post because it had been hanging around in my edit section for over a week, but let me tell you, today I feel utterly depressed, for reasons large and small:

1. Still no news from The Flying Dutchman and I'm just too embarrassed to email/call again as I've made the last two contacts and surely you have to know when someone's ignoring you?
2. Lunch with my dear writing friend whose book fate is getting even worse - knowing he's going through the same has not cheered me up much.
3. On a different subject, I am pining for another baby and for reasons too depressing to mention, it's just not going to happen anytime soon.
4. We got burgled last week (while we were all asleep upstairs) and the car was knicked along with various other things.
5. Some unspecific funk that's been hanging over me for weeks now.

Anyway, in an effort to jolly myself along, here's the synopsis for my book - I'd love to know what you think:

"No matter what you hope for, life doesn’t ever turn out quite how you expect it to: as friends Giles, Jo, Aimi, Simon and Max find out. At their heart is Katie Higgs, new mum, aspiring artist and incorrigible dreamer, who is suddenly in the last place she ever wanted to be when she is unceremoniously dumped by Max. Inspired by Alison Pearson’s “I Don’t Know How She Does It”, this is the story of how being a stay-at-home mum isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either, especially not when you’re single and unemployed; but how with wonderful friends, more than a few glasses of wine and a lot of soul searching, you can find your way again and even get the life you wanted after all."

Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I am going to attempt to weave several utterly unconnected strands together in this post and somehow prove their relevance. These are:

1. A research debrief I went to on Tuesday about online behaviour in the UK

2. My forray into the "blogosphere" yesterday

3. Virginia Woolf! (Who I have wanted to talk about for a week now)



So... on Tuesday I went to perhaps one of the driest research presentations in the history of research (and I've been to some pretty dull ones before I can assure you). There was one thing though which caught my eye, and that while men are far more likely than women to read blogs, and to comment on them, when it comes to creating them, the numbers of men and women are equal (it was around 10% of the online population each). This pleased me greatly, not least because I am a new member of the blogging community myself, but also because it seemed to prove an equality of creativity between men and women.

Knowing that part of being a blogger is being "connected" I finally also managed to spend some time reading other women's blogs - so far I'm totally in love with Drunk Mummy and Posh Mum (once again there will be a pause while I work out how in God's name I actually make links to their blogs). They are both fab and I really do feel like part of a mummy/writer community albeit very much on the peripherary.

Which brings me neatly onto my third point, Virginia Woolf. In "A Room of One's Own" she talks about the difficulty of women "creating" because of the lack of time, money and education afforded them, and the patriarchal society which holds them back, not to mention the onerous childcare duties which prevent any time for freedom of thought or expression.

It was interesting reading this 80 years on and thinking about the huge strides women have made (for example when she writes, women aren't allowed in a certain library in Oxford, this may still be true, but I feel that the essence of equality has at least changed for the better now.) Though of course we are constrained in completely different ways these days.

Overall though, all of these things made me proud to be a woman and to feel that maybe writing was a worthwhile thing to do after all.

Notting Hell indeed

Well, I finished Notting Hell, the book I've been reading over the weekend - for reasons of "self improvement" I have set myself a rota for reading which is that I must read one modern book and one classic before I can read a crap one (i.e. chick lit/mum lit that I secretly love so much and which my book most definitely falls into the genre of). If I didn't do this, I would read nothing but trash and my brain would melt.

So anyway, Notting Hell was indeed fairly hellish, I'm not sure whether the horrendously frequent mentions of private schools, the wonder of living in W11 with a communal garden and inumerable name checks of every designer item possible were meant to be a satiric reflection of the shallow narrow mindedness of the two protagonists, or were simply a reflection of the authors own views. I suspect the latter but wish the former. What particularly irked me was the fact the book (the author?) made the assumption that the only place to be in the world was W11 and that the rest of the world ought to be a. jealous and b. respectful of those who had attained such greatness. I have to say though, by the end of the book I was extremely glad not to live surrounded by such vapid, money and celebrity obsessed individuals.

Having said all that, it was a pretty compulsive and enjoyable way of whiling away a few hours without straining the grey matter too much. And I must also point out that as she is Boris Jonson's sister and clearly equally posh/wealthy, everything she's written clearly comes from first hand experience and perhaps it's just the way she sees the world because she's never had to sweat it like us proles.

I read this review of it in the Guardian online and thought it was fairly accurate (now a small interlude while I try and work out how to upload a link onto this sodding blog! Ok, it's added at the bottom in the "Links" bit - this is obviously not the optimum way of doing things but I MUST go!)

And I still haven't written anything about the far more wonderful "A Room of One's Own". That will have to wait till tomorrow as I have to go to a meeting now (and still no news from The Flying Dutchman re meeting re film - pah)

TGIF

Thank God it's the weekend is all I can say. This has been the most excrutiating of weeks - total sleep deprivation from the princess being ill, then daddy being ill, and mummy being left to be on call for both. I have been wondering if perhaps I could give Florence Nightingale a run for her money, sweeping around beds of fevered, screaming patients, competently attending and soothing them.

I am now practically hallucinating from a combination of lack of sleep and the fact that I've eaten so many jelly beans this afternoon to try and get through the huge quantities of very dull work I've been doing today.

And tonight Princess O is in her very first ballet performance of "Cygnet Lake" with her fellow baby swans in Nursery and Reception - can't wait to go and coo over them all in their sweet little swan outfits. Shame Daddy didn't fish the letter giving permission to do an evening performance out of his pocket until 8.30 this morning when he told me insouciantly that O had performing arts week next week at school! Argh! The permission slip should have been delivered back 2 days ago!

The tyrany of the school letter is omnipresent in our house already, and she's only just turned 4. In fact every time I seen one of those jauntily coloured missives telling me that "my child" needs to bring this, that and everything into school, or needs permission for something, or that so and so has been transgressing school rules, my heart sinks.

Of course the most important ones are the ones that never even reach home at all, lost in the wilderness of childminder's houses, school bags and men's pockets. And that is why on all but one non-uniform days, Princess O has turned up in full uniform, but on the last day of half term, we were smugly prepared for going back to school, only to find out from one of the other (lovely) mum's that there was still another day of holiday, for which we had no childcare.

Now, I really must go, a swift very cold glass of wine awaits in the pub on the way to the tube, in preparation for the gala performance of Cygnet Lake.

p.s. I've swapped the High Art of Virginia Woolf for Notting Hell, which is quite smug, but rather fun so far. I'll report more later.

The Writing Set

Eek, I really have to leave work, but feel that I ought to keep up with the blogging now that I've started. It seems that blogging is more than just writing and that I need to link to other blogs and websites, and write comments on them too, so I will try and come up with some things as soon as I get half a second to do a bit of browsing online.

Had lunch today (five pound noodles rather than white tablecloths at the Ivy), with my dear friend and co-conspirator in the whole writing/publishing circus. He is like me, a member of the writing damned: the proud possessor of an agent who never calls and an unknown list of rejections from publishers. Anyway, he made me laugh when he told me about going into the loo of a pub with his boyfriend for some hanky panky, and then emerging "discretely" to a round of applause from the whole pub, who had been running a sweepstake on how long it would take!

Still, it was nice to spend an hour agonising with him, knowing we're going through the same thing, and discussing all the tricks that we have both been up to in our quest to get published.

Feel I should make some comment too on the "historic events" taking place in the political world, as I believe blogs should also be topical and relevant. So... I have always thought, and this may very well be a clever trick of the light, that Gordon Brown had all the substance, while Tony Blair had all the style. I'm sure this isn't the case, but I am having a mini hopeful moment that great change for the betterment of the populace will sweep the country now as it was meant to back in 1997. I'll check in on these comments in a year's time to see how wrong I am!

I must say though that I actually feel utterly divorced from the whole process and that they (Gord and Ton) don't really care what we (the people) feel as long as they achieve their own aims of political power.

I've just finished reading "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf (more on that another time as I really must go now) but it's simultaneously made me feel very empowered and utterly insignificant, particularly as far as the world of men and politics goes.

What's new pussycat?

Not much, to be perfectly honest. I am trying to arrange a meeting with The Flying Dutchman, a film producer I met in a very random evening at Soho House a month or so ago, (check out my glam socialising/name dropping sweetie! I promise you it's not like that most of the time, indeed most of the time I am more likely to be found sorting out washing at 11pm than drinking cocktails and engaging in scintilating conversation with dashing young media types. More's the pity.)

So... my idea is simple but deadly cunning: the more demand there is for a thing, the more people want it. Now, I know that I'm not the first person to realise this, but I am hoping that by applying this principle to my book, I can encourage some lovely publisher that it might be worth their while printing it.

I'm also factoring in another important equation (all those years of studying science at school finally paid off), one of money and power. The money element of the equation goes: the more money people think they will make from something, the more they will pay for it. The importance part of the equation is more of a hierarchy - which may or may or may not hold true universally, but which I believe to be the general principal, and that is that films are more important than books. Or, to put it another way, the ultimate goal of any writer (or publisher) is to get the "film of the book" deal.

Now, I hope you're still with me because this is the fun bit: if I can persuade The Flying Dutchman that he thinks the book would make a good film, then surely it follows that the book would make money as a book? Ergo, publishing it would be a desirable and right thing to do. (Naturally the publishing of the manuscript would come at a slight premium if this were the case, but I'm sure I could be magnanimous in my negotiations.)

Thus far, arranging the date has been foiled at every turn (by sick children and international film festivals, I'm sure you can guess which problem belongs to which party), but I'm hopeful that next week it might finally happen...

In the beginning...

Once upon a time, in a faraway land (actually, right here in sunny England if you must know) there was a young girl named Daisy, who was a dreamy sort of a girl, the type prone to spending hours staring out of windows and wishing there was a fire-breathing dragon hoving into view instead of a blackbird and a couple of sheep. This girl was quite good at making up stories, and her imagination sometimes ran a little too far ahead of her rather prosaic life. In fact on a couple of occasions (and for "couple" please read "more times than I'd care to remember") her overactive imagination got her into a more than a spot of hot water.

Anyway, after a childhood of dreaming, the young girl grew up but there was still the little Daisy hiding inside her, the one who had a surplus of ideas and nowhere to go with them, wishing she could write them all down. So grown-up Daisy decided the nagging little Daisy had to be listened to, and she duly quit her job and began to write her first book.

That book wasn't quite the book it should have been (whose first manuscript is after all? And I don't want any witty repartee about 21 year old geniuses winning nobel prizes for literature at their first attempt), not to mention the fact that real life by this time had intervened in grand style (the birth of Princess O, and a return to work to name but a couple of things.)

The birth of Princess O sparked another little gem of creativity though, and book number 2 began to be written (late at night, in between working full time and looking after the aforementioned princess.)

So, here we are now: the book is written (and rewritten more times than I would care to remember), it has a title, and an agent to represent it, and yet.... it remains stubbornly not snapped up in a million-dollar-bidding-war-scramble by a number of top publishers, but instead, gathers metaphorical dust on my hard drive (and on that of my agent) while I wonder what to do next....

And it seems that the next that I have decided upon is entering the world of web 2.0 and the long tail, and starting a blog. So here begins the story of "Daisy Bennett and the Unpublished Manuscript".

I would like to assure you at this point that there will be laughter, tears, some romance (and dare I say it, maybe even a little sex) along the way, and of course a happy ending. But, dear reader, I am as much in the dark about these points as you are.