Almost a week since I last posted, which is almost a record. The reason for this, of course, is that I have absolutely no news.

I have spent the week telling groups of 100+ students who neither care nor understand all about how to open a bank account in the UK. Yesterday I made my annual pilgrimage to the Chelsea College Art Show, which I think is the best show out of all of them in the University. i think this is mostly because it is the oddest. Firstly, it is scattered with apparent randomness throughout the Millbank building with paintings and sculptures in corridors and alcoves as well as galleries and even classrooms. Secondly, the work itself is wonderfully diverse, to the point that where one moment you mihgt be looking at a huge canvas ofa grizzly bear catching fish, and the next moment you're tripping over paintpots and boxes which seem to have been left in the middle of the floor, and you glance around sheepishly trying to discover if it's art or not, because you kind of feel you ought to know one way or the other, only you don't. Last year the oddest exhibit probably went to the Hole in The Wall, literally a big square hole in the wall (how did they get that one past the National Trust?) If that's art, my builder should enter for the Turner Prize, in which case we could be sleeping in the same room as a small fortune. (Yes, the hole is still there.) This year, the students have gone overboard (spot the pun as I go on...) and pushed the boat out (there I go again) on creating the Weird and Wonderful, with their major exhibit being a large boat with a woman living on board, apparently in solitary confinement. Said woman recently sailed round the world in said boat, so I'm told, but for the next few days she's stuck inside it and sedentary on the parade ground at Chelsea. You can't talk to her; you can't even see her. Maybe she isn't even there at all - I think that's why it's art.

Sitting at home. What am I doing?

That, by the way, is a line from The Secret Machines. Have given up on The Futureheads, but did manage to pick up "A Night at the Opera" for £3.99 in Woolworths, one of the nicer shops in what our guide for new students inexplicably calls "Elephant and Castle's vibrant shopping centre."

This review of "On The Third Day" in the Evenings Standard makes my review look positively glowing, so I thought I would share it with you as proof that it wasn't just out of jealousy that I thought Kate Betts' play was rubbish.

My publisher and I have managed to concoct this to go into my book (yes, I realise I am sounding pretentious, but I'm enjoying it.) Anyway, I rather like it:

"An expatriate of Yorkshire, Ann Spellman is a London-based humourist and Bradford City supporter who in her spare time works in a university. She has appeared on BBC4 and her work has been featured at the Laughing Horse Comedy Club and Soho Theatre."

It does stretch the truth rather. My "appearance" on BBC4 was as an audience member, giving it my best Joyce Grenfell and telling Muriel Gray that "Mrs Dalloway" was really rather good. The Laughing Horse at least got my name in Time Out but the slot lasted a mere seven minutes. As for Soho, well, I suppose that one is legit. Not sure what my boss (who doesn't look like Luca Toni) will think about the mere hobby status of my job, aside from the fact that it's not true, since I both love my job and seem to be solely responsible for various bits of exciting admin at the moment that have meant I have been staying late after work and spending my nights dreaming about visa corrections and talks for language students.

Oh What a Circus

The beautiful Luca Toni isn't playing this afternoon, although Italy is facing the Czech Republic, presumably in the hope they won't make such a hash of it as they did against the USA. Unfortunately, I'm stuck in an office in Elephant and Castle so won't be watching it. I almost videoed it, but then realised that would be a bit sad...

The new production of "Evita" is surprisingly good, although I was disappointed that Che Guevara seems to heve developed an American accent. Then again, Che Guevara's presence in the whole thing is a bit spurious given that at the time he was riding around Chile and Ecuador on a motorcycle with a less-gorgeous sidekick, curing lepers and looking suspiciously like Gael Garcia. One comment I must share with you, though, was that of the woman sitting in front of us who, after generally slagging off Eva Peron and saying how Britain was Great for "seeing her for what she was: a whore!" asked, "so...why didn't she marry Che Guevara in the end?"

Er..

Anyway, it's a toss-up between Garcia and Antonio Banderas, but whichever you choose, nobody else can match either of them on the Guevara front, except maybe the real thing, and he's a bit too, wel, dead to appear in a musical.

But really, if you get a chance, go and see it. The singing is good, the set is brilliant, and it doesn't drag on long enough to make you start looking at her watch (although it does take her a considerable amount of time to die, but then, it always does in musicals.)

The Third Day

"The Third Day" is the winner of "The Play's the Thing", Channel 4's gimmick to get new writing on the West End stage. That is to say, it's supposedly the best of 2000 entries.

Oh dear.

This is possibly the worst "professional" play I have ever seen. I admit that I went in prepared to be scathing, yet after a few of the earlier scenes I was ready to be swayed. The dialogue had been funny and clever, the characters endearing and interesting, and Maxine Peake is a brilliant actress. And yet it feels as though the writer has been given a book called "101 Tips for Writing a Play" and followed it to the letter. For a start, she's gone for the shock factor not once, not twice, but three times. In the very first scene, Jesus wanders in. Fine. I'm not averse to a bit of God now and again. But then there's the incest, not implied but shown graphically as Robbie tries to rape his older sister. And THEN said older sister starts self-harming, and eventually kills herself, with blood capsules galore pouring over the stage. All of this is interspersed with full-blown fights and shattering wine glasses. Why??

The best plays I've seen tend to be the ones without any kind of high drama or shock factor. "The History Boys" is my top favourite at the moment, and the gist is, here are some kids applying to Oxbridge, there's a bit of implied kiddy-fiddling at one point, and Frances De La Tour gets to say "c**tstruck", but good writing doesn't need melodrama. When one of the teachers is killed in "The History Boys" you don't see the death in all its gory detail. If you're a truly brilliant writer (as opposed to just "good", and the dialogue shows here that, to be fair to her, Kate Betts obviously IS good) you can work with anything and don't need to rely on shock tactics.

Someone had obviously also told her about Shakespeare's gravedigger and the like, because she obviously saw the need to insert some light relief during the scene where Claire has apparently come back from the dead and is fighting with her brother at what is supposed to be an Italian-restaurant-that-looks-a-bit-like-Da-Vinci's-Last-Supper. The result? Elvis, eating a packet of Doritos and at one point singing Happy Birthday. Confused? I'll say. There's off the wall, then there's rape and suicide, followed by off the wall. It was quite funny, but mainly in a bizarre sort of way, and, basically, it just didn't work.

Throw into this a painfully cliched opening speech (just before Jesus shows up) where a little girl announces "I'm in a boat" (she isn't) while dodgy images of waves that look like they come from that BBC "Coast" progranme crash around her, and you have a very amusing evening. Amusing, but annoying. As "new writers" Rachel and I sat there feeling peeved. What does this tell the world about "new writing"? It's amateuriash and overly-melodramatic. Best steer clear of it and stick to what you know.

It's a shame, because there were flashes of almost-brilliance at certain points. The chemistry between "Jesus" (Mike) and Claire was beautifully written and well executed by the actors, with some very clever and funny dialogue. His character was wonderful - just as you'd like to imagine Jesus being were he to turn up in Streatham, though you kind of know he wouldn't be and feel as thouhg you shouldn't be thinking like that (spot the ex-Catholic.) I thought some of the Bible references seemed a bit forced and cliche - would your reaction to someone you've just met getting blisters be to wash their feet, Mary Magdalene-style? But some of the jokes were good, and, as I said, that one character truly engaging. Claire's interview sequence, where she is, one presumes, "auditioning" for a job at the Planaterium, is also engaging, giving you a bit of insight into the character whilst making her seem fairly isolated and alone when you first meet her, which fits in well with what follows, yet still giving the audience a bit of humour.

So I'm not going to be overly-scathing of the writer, who can cetainly write, but I have to say that, as a finished article, I wasn't all that taken with her first play.

My tube is rammed on the way home by red-and-white-clad drunk men shouting "2-Nil!" at the tops of their voices. Put in context, we had just beaten those giants of the football world, Trinidad and Tobago, over three hours before. Get over it.

This town has dragged you down

Not impressed by the football so far. England "won", in the loosest sense of the word, that is to say, we didn't draw with those paragons of football excellence that are Paraguay because some unfortunate bloke on their team scored our one goal of the match for us. Hurrah for England.

As a result of my over-optimism, and Trinidad and Tobago's amazing 0-0 draw, I am currently fourth from bottom on our office predictor game on a measly 27 points, four points below my boss, who's doing rather well. The Italy-Ghana match was, in fact, the only one to which I have given my full attention, or at any rate, I have given my full attention to Italy's players, who are rather lovely. I can tell you everything about that match - who got a yellow card, who scored the goals, who was substituted for whom. Luca Toni and Andrea Pirlo, in particular, have my vote.

Of course, it's not only the gloriuosness of Italian men (although that's a big factor, I admit) that has set me searching for a way to move to Rome. There's the fact that London drags me down that bit more every day. Rome was absolutely the opposite, and while I realise I am at risk from sounding a little like My Catholic the idea of a three-month or so sabbatical teaching English or running museum tours for Americans (Why did they build the Colosseum right next to a main road?") is an attractive one. So, I've signed myself up for an Italian course where I work, and we'll just have to see what happens.

My life is so mundane at the moment that I don't have any news. I was furious, though, with America's empathetic response to the suicides of three of its prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, namely "it was just a PR stunt."

It might well have been. They're still dead.

England is Mine

I'm trying to get into this whole world cup thing. Really I am. A couple of days ago I found myself in Clintons holding a £2.99 flashing badge that read "proud to be English", but fortunately I thought "what am I doing?!" before I got to the till and put it back. Then I drew Poland in the office sweepstake and it seemed it was all downhill from there. Could have been worse, of course. One of my colleagues got Togo.

But then Lisa, who I work with, and I whiled away a long fire drill (and the hour that followed) meticulously predicting goals and winners and losers etc for a "World Cup Predictor Game". Our thorough and highly scientific calculations have led us to predict a Brazil-Germany final (hey, they're the home team, that's just the way it goes) with Italy-England fighting it out for third place. This would be fun, since my boss is Italian.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately for employee relations) the chances of our predictions coming true are, well, nil. We have been rather oventhusiastic with our score predictions, forgetting that so often games result in 0-0 draws. We have also predicted that over the course of the competition Britain will get 15 goals. This is quite obviously bollocks: last time they got 5. Where tonight's matches are concerned we've predicted 3-0 to Germany and 2-1 to Poland (I'm feeling rather loyal towards Poland for the time being.) So, depending on the result, my interest in the World Cup may both start and end tonight. (Although the viewing alternative is Big Brother, so I might persevere for a while longer yet.)

On a completely unrelated note, I think that this (follow the link and click on "Yorkshire Glossary") is one of the funniest things I have ever read in my life. It's a glossary of slang terms to help non-British doctors determine what their patients are trying to tell them. Among other things, it gives "melons" as a term for "breasts". When would you go to the doctor and explain you had a lump in one of your melons? And, not to put too fine a point on it, can it really be the case that vaginal discharge is such a hot topic of conversations in the pubs and hairdressing salons of Doncaster that it's been necessary to develop a (quite bizarre) slang term for it?

I'm still trying hard with the Futureheads. They are still averagely good.

So, in case you were wondering what the Cheesm was talking about (I presume you weren't), it's true, I am going to be (in the loosest sense of the word) "published". Loose, because my publisher is rather the Ryanair of the publishing world, that it to say, they don't get much from me, and I don't get much from them. This is a Good Thing in that nobody else is going to even look at a book of short stories about dead cats and Catholics whose ideal audience is probably retired people of that section of the middle classes who haven't quite progressed to the "we-have-an-aga" status, and who spend their days listening to Radio 4 and occasionally watching plays by Alan Bennett. Anyway, my publishers have conceded that this is quite niche, but that dead cats make them laugh too (that's a relief, I thought it was just me) and they are doing a small print run and have slightly oxymoronically told me that because I'm a new writer they can't afford to do any sort of marketing, but the book will be on Amazon and in various bookshops so they'll see how it goes. This seems bizarre, since nobody is going to buy it unless they know about it, and if none sell, they won't publicise it, so nobody will know about it.

Anyway, I am going to have to become a sales person for a while in order to encourage them to take "Home" which is much better than the first book. So I will keep you all updated. The other up-side of all this is that the book will be very cheap - £4.99 - so hopefully some people will buy it, if only for that reason.

Oh, and while I'm here, "Rooney undergoes metatarsal scan" is not news! Or, if you insist that it is, this is just as important.

News and Tributes

The trouble with the Futureheads was that their first album was good, and not just good in the "they're-worth-watching-might-produce-something-interesting-later-on" kind of good. Yes, there was a considerable amount of what can only be described (and I apologise for sounding like a pensioner) as "noise", but there was also a Kate Bush cover that managed to be even more bizarre than the original, their brilliant single "Decent Days and Nights", and among other averagely decent songs "Carnival Kids".

And so we came to expect too much. Wow, we thought, if that was their first album, what will the second be like?

Well, pretty much the same as the first one, without Kate Bush's talent for songwriting. "News And Tributes" again has a lot of noise, in between it's rather fine "Skip to the End" and the averagely decent title song and"Worry About it Later". So, really, it has its moments, but they are just moments.

I should point out that, were this the first album, we'd be greeting it with a fair bit of enthusiasm. It's good stuff, and I still like it (though I don't quite know what "post punk" is. Sounds like punk to me. Maybe it's the lack of safety pins.) It's just that I expected to like it more.

* * * *

There's still a hole in my bedroom wall. This is annoying.