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...