Great news! New photos smuggled out from the Self family compound show that Katie has finally been upgraded to a suitably sized room of her own:

Roomy
So I figured what the Internet could do really do with was a picture of a kitten!

Abbi and Munchkin
These things, yes, and yet more things too. There was a highly enjoyable and curiously rowdy Geek Corner which went on until about 4am. I got in a pub outing with Emma before she leaves for New York. Grace and I discovered The Big Book of Racism ‘The World in Colour’: my dad’s 1966 worldwide survey spectacular. (Sample insight: “The French, perhaps one of the most civilised and artistic of all races, are descended from unruly, primitive Gauls…”) We all commenerated Elisabeth Sladen’s shockingly premature death by watching School Reunion together and then laughing heartily at K9 and Company. And let’s not forget that I managed to give blood without doing an embarrassing semi-fainting routine!
I also packed in two of my absolute favourite local(ish) nights: the type of places which give me a very happy Londoner glow. First, a long-awaited return to the Tricycle with mum to see Brontë: a play about the three famous sisters and their wayward brother Branwell. It featured scenes from both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, so it turned out to have been good timing to have at least just read the latter. (Emily was depicted as being just about as, um, intense as her characters. She’s definitely not invited to my dead celebrity dinner party.) Second, on Thursday night I went for a fourth time to NewsRevue, this time with Grace, Oliver and Abi, where (*reaches for the cliché shelf*) a good time was had by all.
But, really, all of this ‘life’ stuff is just surface froth. Friends, family, love, laughter, even cute kittens? Mere diversions: baubles and trinkets to idle the time away until tonight. At the end of the day, only one thing really matters; only one thing really counts for anything at all. Doctor Who is back, guys
Today was not April 2011, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.
Rather some indeterminable point in the summer, I’d say, with both the smell of barbecues and the sound of Spotify-enabled garden parties working their way into the back garden as I sat outside (outside!), having lunch with Grace, reading Emma and generally feeling rather sunny and cheery. (Later on it was early 1981 instead, as I decided it had been ages since I’d watched some classic Doctor Who so forced dad and Katie through The Keeper of Traken, rekindling (false) memories of a time when TV drama was all about standing in one room together until you all decided to stand in another room together before realising that, no, maybe standing in the first room together was a better bet after all, and so on ad infinitum. We were also highly critical of Traken’s political structure.)
But enough about today: there are things in the past just waiting to be remembered! (Sorry – watching old Doctor Who does odd things to speech patterns.) First of all, a return visit to see The Room last Friday with Grace, Charlotte and newbies Tash and Alex. Good news: it’s still awesome. Even better news: it’s easier to heckle when you aren’t paralysed with first-time shock at how awesome it is. Hurray for The Room! And also hurray for Pizza Express the next night with Tash K, Emily, Grace, Saoirse and Joshua, because it was a lovely evening which concluded with personalised Saoirse-cards for us all being scribbled out over the table of a rather trendy bar in West Hampstead. (We know how to live.)
On Sunday night too many cool people to list gathered for a special screening of Strictly Ballroom, part of the Lexi cinema’s ‘Nomad’ season of pop-up cinemas. (Well worth checking out to see if there’s one coming round your way, incidentally, and like everything the Lexi does it’s all for a charitable cause.) Meanwhile, on Wednesday night I saw West Side Story at QPCS – an almost embarrassingly good school production, it must be said, and a sad reminder that younger generations have a terrifying habit of making everything you ever did seem rather rubbish by comparison. (And I’m not even talking about a decade here! Just think how jealous I’m going to be in the future…) Finally, because I know these kind of posts can be tedious to read, Tash K hosted a little birthday gathering last night. Out came the Pimms, if you were still doubting that we’ve skipped straight to summer, and very nice it was too…
For anyone still with me, I have a couple of things to enthuse about if you haven’t heard me yapping about them on Twitter already. Firstly: the brilliant Irkafirka illustrated one of my tweets the other day – this is definitely going up on my wall sometime. Secondly, I thought I would make some more noise about the long-running microfinance charity Kiva, which enables you to make small loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries. If you have a little bit of money spare to invest in international development (the minimum is only $25 – less than 20 quid) it’s a very well-designed and rewarding place to start. Finally, I’ve managed to go a whole day without having a substantive conversation with anyone about the merits and drawbacks of AV, which is a bit of a relief… (Referendum status: currently vaguely leaning towards Yes, although probably not for the reasons that lots of other people are. I fluctuate rather a bit, through. Your thoughts on a postcard to the usual address.)
Since Grace and I have a relationship vaguely based on a shared hatred for a film that neither of us had actually seen, we thought it might be a good idea to finally sit down and watch Eat Pray Love to ensure that it really was as bad as all that. So in a sense it’s reassuring to report that, yes, it was. The following is a necessarily condensed summary of the film’s most glaring failings, although the cumulative effect of awful scene piled on top of awful scene can only really be appreciated through your own personal viewing of what can be, perversely, a rather enjoyable collection of failure.
Warning: contains spoilers, if it is at all possible to ‘spoil’ Eat Pray Love.
Let’s begin with a plot description nicked from Wikipedia:
Elizabeth Gilbert (Julia Roberts) had everything a modern woman is supposed to dream of having – a husband (Billy Crudup), a house, a successful career – yet like so many others, she found herself lost, confused, and searching for what she really wanted in life. Newly divorced and at a crossroads, Gilbert steps out of her comfort zone, risking everything to change her life, embarking on a journey around the world that becomes a quest for self-discovery. In her travels, she discovers the true pleasure of nourishment by eating in Italy; the power of prayer in India, and, finally and unexpectedly, the inner peace and balance of true love in Bali.
…except this is all a massive lie. For a start, Elizabeth does not have ‘everything a modern women is supposed to dream of having’. High on the list of things which she conspicuously lacks are intelligence, charm, forethought or – critically – any interests whatsoever. She is also prone to the strange delusion that she is the first person ever in the history of mankind to get divorced or take a holiday. Because that, incidentally, is the second great lie of this synopsis: the idea that Liz ‘risks everything’.
She goes on holiday.
That’s it: a holiday. Don’t get me wrong – I’m all in favour of holidays – but someone who claims to be going ‘out of her comfort zone’ in order to eat in restaurants deserves instant and lifelong social ostracism. Weirdly, Liz receives the opposite, being instantly befriended by just about everyone she encounters despite, as previously noted, a distinct personality deficit. And oh, how she is mollycoddled beyond all belief, at one point receiving a round of applause for managing to order spaghetti carbonara from a menu. (Although apparently carbonara is a bit of an unknown quantity in Hollywood, illustrated as it is with a shot of red sauce.) And when she isn’t being indulged like a dying child, Liz nods vacuously at various pieces of empty and contradictory life advice thrown at her by a motley collection of Americans with dodgy accents: let go of love, love again, give up control, take control, strive for balance, forget about balance.
In fact, when you think about it, one of the most offensive implications of the film is that the world is staffed by such a loving network of wise Americans that during your life-changing travels around the world you barely have to speak to anyone local at all. But then the world as presented by Eat Pray Love totters on the brink of being a surreal parody of real life, partly when it comes to poor old Italy. Rome (fucking Rome!) has apparently been subject to a freak distortion in the fabric of space-time, flung back to an era with no running water, no advertising, little traffic and the lurking threat of malaria. Still, at least there she deigns to walk the streets: her time in India and Bali largely consists of ‘risking everything’ by staying in luxurious compounds. And praying.
Yes, let’s come to the prayer. It is extraordinary, really, because this is a film which manages to insult the intelligence of both believers and non-believers alike. On the one hand, the assumption that Liz needs constant sprinklings of ‘spiritual enlightenment’ goes entirely unquestioned, and (naturally) it proves just as astonishingly effective as the carrot juice (“better than antibiotics”) used at one point to treat what basically amounts to a bruised knee but is treated by a hysterical Liz as a near-death experience. (Note: if your doctor is commenting on the state of your cartilage whilst treating a graze, something somewhere is going badly wrong.) But whilst generic spirituality is served up on demand, it is never presented as anything other than a glorified therapeutic tool. Liz doesn’t actually believe in anything, or – if she does – we don’t learn about it, because Liz doesn’t ever actually talk about anything other than her self-help programme. Even when she bores her friends into donating money so that the Cute Poor People in Bali can build a house, she’s still talking about herself.
Oh, and since she dons a new outfit for each and every scene, we can only conclude that her tiny bag is bigger on the inside.
There is so much more I could mention: the ultra-lazy visual shorthand (career men can’t hold babies, enlightened people light candles), the all-pervading Orientalism, the concept of liberation through eating pizza, the concept of liberation through eating pizza which you can’t get in New York, the most confused discussion of feminism since the English Defence League went on Newsnight, some terrible dialogue (most notably when we suddenly learn that her plane leaves “in two hours”) and the implication that almost killing your own child is just about comparable in the calamity stakes to divorce, and that’s not to mention the fact that this whole disaster of film-making takes nearly two and a half hours to unfold.
But maybe I should be grateful. If you showed this film en masse to young children in schools and taught them all to never, ever live their lives like Elizabeth Gilbert, you might just transform the world into a better place.
~
And on a totally different note, after all this we went off to Caroline’s for a very lovely evening of drinks, dips, pizza and cake. Delicious cake, in fact, and what with Saoirse’s baking masterpiece I feel I’m on a bit of a roll with cake at the moment. If only I could crack whatever accidental system has arisen for encouraging my friends to bake I could be set for life…
Last night’s Geek Corner was particularly lovely, partly because I could afford to be an exceptionally poor host and rely entirely on Alex bringing wine and Saoirse bringing her latest and possibly greatest baking creation yet. (Yup, four years later and I’m still getting food out of this friendship.) So, partly because Amber requested some photos and partly because it was amazing and delicious, I present the ironic cake:

Wait, that slogan rings a bell…

Don’t cha wish your corners were geek like me?
Oh, and very excitingly, I got home to discover that I’d been spotted by a Seriously Prolific Blogger who I rather admire. What celebrity! By all means guys, bring on the long-focus lens and the cellulite circling – I’m totally ready for it.
Also, I think this photo is cute. (Even though I’m in it.)

Look at us, not smashing anything