I know these are a bit old, but they still made me snigger:

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM:
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.


AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other
to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when
the cow drops dead.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows. You go on strike because you want
three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows. You redesign them so they are
one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce
twenty times the milk.
You then create clever cow cartoon images called
Cowkimon and market them World-Wide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You reengineer them so they live
for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows. Both are mad.


AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don't know where they are.
You break for lunch. Life is good.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You count them and learn you have
five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42
cows. You count them again and learn you have 12 cows.
You stop counting cows and open another bottle of
vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you. You
charge others for storing them.

A HINDU CORPORATION
You have two cows. You worship them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them.
You arrest the newsman who reported the numbers.

A WELSH CORPORATION
You have two cows. That one on the left is kinda cute.

I hope this irony was deliberate:
I saw a leaflet advertising river "sightseeing" tours (NB SIGHTSEEING). They cost a mere £9, but, generously, (and I quote) "blind customers go free!" I wonder if sightseeing tours get much custom from visually impaired tourists?

Degrees of Madness

To brighten up your day, here are some of the more unusual courses you might want to study and which (for some unknown reason!) have appeared in clearing:

Equine Studies with Dance (dancing with horses?)
Equine Studies with Accounting (bookie training)
Equine Studies with Art (painting horses)
Fire Safety (no, really, it's a three-year degree!)
Hair Care Management (the "wash and go" degree!)
Irish with Italian (Catholic Studies)
European Studies with Food (Snails and pasta)
Food and Citizenship (table manners?)
Food and Criminology (How to commit murder by poisoning?)
Food and Human Resources Studies (bribe your staff with lots of chocolate)
Boatbuilding (how to win the Turner Prize)
Licensed Retail Management (how to run a pub)
Parliamentary Studies (Studying parliament)
Parasitology (studying parliament, focussing on the Tories)
Sheep Farming (how to get a job in New Zealand)
Sales Management (How to be an asshole)

That's enough for now, I think, but you get the picture.

There is still a big hole in front of our busstop, but this morning it contained two men in hard hats, having a nice chat and eating bacon sandwiches.

It seems I am stuck in a rut of writing about the same old stuff, namely What Film I Saw At The Weekend and The Pitfalls of Living in London. Well, having wracked my brains for some enlightening piece of news to share with you, I've decided today isn't going to be any different.

Although the hole in my bedroom wall has been illed in, there is now a big hole directly in front of my front door. When I say "in front" I mean roughly three inches from it, that is to say, if I open my door and absent-mindedly wander out into the street, as I tend to do, I am likely to fall in. It's quite a big hole, and when I came back from running on Saturday there was a man in a hard hat sitting in it, who grumblingly hauled himself out and dragged one of those blue plastic covers over it so I could safely get into my house, looking all the time as though I'd cleverly planned my run to coincide with his excursion into his hole, and thus pissing him off. I'm not sure what they're doing down there, although I assume it's something to do with the water, because we wole up on Friday morning to discover there wasn't any. Our bus stop is also still closed, with a huge empty pit in front of it which Camden seems to have given up on completely. This is Annoying.

So, the film of the week was "Nacho Libre", which I went to see not so much because I wanted to see "Nacho Libre", but because F wanted me to go away so he could finish hie dissertation. It was an odd film. The gist is a Mexican friar (who appears to have become a friar through no fault of his own) would much rather be a wrestler. So eventually, he goes off to become one, in secret (that is, he comes back to his monastery at night, nobody apparently having missed him in the meantime). He is fairly successful, and then, in a bid to impress the (slightly unconvincing) nun he has fallen in love with, he gives all his winnings to the monastery for the orphans who live there. Aw, bless. Nothing much happens with the nun, of course, she having made vows of celibacy and all that, though in one way or another everybody seems to live happily ever after.

I've worked out, alarmingly, I must spend around £150 a year on the cinema. I've seem 14 films so far this year... This is perhaps countered by the fact that, surely, the more films I see the fewer books I buy. I've just, however, finished reading Kazuo Ishiguru's "Never Let Me Go" (if you don't want to know the plot LOOK AWAY NOW.) This is possibly the only book that has ever given me proper nightmares. It's a clever idea, the basis being that the main characters are all clones who have been designed to donate their vital organs. It's a good book, and a good idea, but leaves all sorts of loose ends the writer doesn't remember (or bother) to tie up. For a start, there are all sorts of rumours early on about escapees (the clones all grow up in a sort of boarding school) meeting horrible deaths, but this is forgotten about: I would like to know if those rumours had any basis as well, and I suspect the characters, particularly as it's narrated in the first person so ostensibly one of the characters who brings it up in the first place, would like to know too. Then Ruth, a character who, in my opinion, is not much more than a conniving pain in the ass, has a bit of a tantrum and tells them all that they were cloned from drug addicts and prostitutes. Well? Were they? They never tell us that, either. Most of all, though, the "clones" give on average three donations before they die, and much of the book centres around their recovery from donations 1 and 2 etc. What I want to know is: why not just take all their organs out in one go? It seems to me a society callous enough to create a generation of clones in the first place wouldn't have any qualms over killing them off when it's time to do so and whipping their organs all out at once. (Note to self: IT'S ONLY A NOVEL.) Good book, though. If anyone wants to borrow it let me know, and I might actually feel as though I've got my £7.99's worth.

This annoyed me. Apparently the government now gets to decide which books schoolkids do and do not get to read in English for GCSE and A-Level, and the list of books that are likely to stay seems to be part of a devious plot to put all students off English Literature for the rest of their lives, and ensure they never pick up anything other than maybe Jeffrey Archer and, if they're feeling really adventurous, Jackie Collins.

I'm quite interested to know how exactly they arrived at this list. What they seem to have done is taken out all the books that are remotely interesting or representative and left the ones that are gloomy, dull and alien (with the exception of DH Lawrence, who in my opinion is all three, and, I'm happy to say, has been shown the door.) As far as I can remember, the books I most enjoyed at GCSE were the ones that were (in no particular order) funny, political, exotic (by which I mean not set in Yorkshire, down an East End side street or under a Greenwood Tree). Explicitly I loved "To Kill a Mockingbird", which was entirely relevent to a "modern" student in many ways, set in the USA (which is much more interesting than the Mendips, pretty though they are) and very funny. Not insignificantly, it was also, despite its depth, not a grindingly long read. This meant teachers could legitimately get us to read in our own time, and that there was pretty much something worth discussing on every page. The likes of Thomas Hardy and even (much as I would leap to her defence in any other context) Charlotte Bronte, however, ramble on for pages about the exact shade of a particular bit of moorland on the patricular Sunday in question which, while not irrelevent to the plot (it's called "pathetic fallacy", I seem to recall) it is neverthelss reminiscent of Arthur Ransome breaking off from a plot that was never all that interesting in the first place to tell you in minute detail how to tie a reef knot.

I would argue that a plethora of books largely about the rotten lives of working class people and the not-so-rotten lives of middle class people looking for husbands, while important, hardly introduces children to the breadth of experience available in "Classic" writing. Any writing about race (Mildred Taylor, Maya Angelou) seems to have disappeared (Harper Lee isn't on either list, so I'm not sure what's happening to her), and sexuality doesn't get a look-in. I suppose there's scope for the same old debates about women and how generally awful it is to be one, what with Charlotte Bronte, and I suppose if the Conrad book chosen is "Heart of Darkness" you can discuss racism and colonialism (and if you have a decent teacher, watch "Apocalypse Now" - wehey!) though I expect it isn't. Religion also isn't mentioned anywhere, which seems a bit daft to me. It seems that in today's climate, there's enough impetus in the outside world to get kids talking about these sorts of issues, and in doing so looking about how these books relate to the present. But that's why they're not doing it. Too touchy. We don't want to risk education becoming relevent, now do we?
It amazes me that most of these "Classic" wrtiters also seem to be Victorian. Decent writing didn't stop at the turn of the 20th century, nor was it few and far between before that. It does seem rather short-sighted. Maybe the government has scrapped the likes of Muriel Spark and George Orwell simply because it hasn't heard of them?

There are also some pretty damn significant writers who don't even have the priviledge of being scrapped, since they don't seem to be there in the first place. Where, for example, is Virginia Woolf? And as for Anne Bronte, nobody seems to have even heard of her!

My list would probably be (in no particular order):

"Oranges are Not the Only Fruit" (Jeanette Winterson), "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (Anne Bronte), "Mrs Dalloway" or "Orlando" (Virginia Woolf), "To Kill a Mockingbird" (Harper Lee), "Of Mice and Men" (John Steinbeck), "The Catcher in the Rye" (J.D. Salinger), "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" (Maya Angelou), "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry" (Mildred Taylor), "Jane Eyre" or "Shirley" (Charlotte Bronte), "A Passage to India" (EM Forster), "Heart of Darkness" (Joseph Conrad), "Brideshead Revisited" or "The Loved One" (Evelyn Waugh), "The Lord of the Flies" (William Golding), "Brave New World" (Aldous Huxley), "1984" (George Orwell), "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (Ernest Hemingway), "On the Road" (Jack Kerouac), "The Canterbury Tales" (Chaucer), "Far From the Madding Crowd" or "The Return of the Native" (Thomas Hardy), "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (Murial Spark), "The Great Gatsby" (F. Scott Fitzgerald), something by Alan Bennett (though this would probably be a play, unless they did "The Laying On Of Hands"), "Lucky Jim" (Kingsley Amis), "Other Voices, Other Rooms" (Truman Capote), "Frankenstein" (Mary Shelley), "Three Men In A Boat" (Jerome K Jerome. Well, why not?), something by Jane Austen, "Hard Times" (Charles Dickens. Reluctantly, though, as I hate Charles Dickens.)

So there you go.

I realise I have recently been what could almost be termed "optimistic" on this blog recently. However, I understand that this is not what is expected of me, so today I will endeavour to rant:

London bus drivers are, I have decided, the absolute lowest of the scum of London, so please view this as my tribute to those wankers. I apologise to the two or three drivers on the 24 route who are exempt from this. In fact, this post is dedicated specifically to 168 drivers, who have in my opinion ascended to new heights of tosserdom in recent weeks. Camden Council, in its infinite wisdom, and because it has money it hasn't managed to spend yet from our extortionate council taxes, have decided to close my bus stop and surround it with large holes and big red signs telling me not to fall into them. This has been going on for three weeks, which means I have to go (invariably this means "run") to the next bus stop, which involves crossing several roads en route. This morning I saw a 168 coming and managed to get there about 10 seconds after it did, and as it's doors were closing. I stood by the door and wave my card. The driver shook his head at me, closed the doors and drove off. Yes, it wasn't that he didn't see me, he actively chose to leave someone who had got to the bus stop in time for the bus stay, in the rain, at the bus stop for another 10 minutes. All I can say is I hope someone bombs your goddamn bus and you have to be identified by your dental records.

[And breathe...]

There is a long history to this, by the way. I'm not merely being vitriolic for fun. Well, not entirely. The 168 is renowned for not bothering to stop at busstops when you've rung the bell, ignoring you when you're trying to flag it down (this has happened to me three times) overcrowding the bottom deck and being particularly anal about the "buy before you board" rules (which other buses aren't). Then there was the experience I had when one driver claimed there was no money on my ticket. When I said I'd put some on that morning he replied "Oh, that's why it doesn't work, is it?" (ooh, well done, I can see that customer service training came in handy.) Almost a year later, if I saw him at the side of the road having, say, a heart attack, I would stop and have a good laugh before thinking long and hard about whether I could be arsed to get help.

I hate people.

Anyway, the upshot is that I was a whole 5 minutes later for work. As it happens this doesn't matter: it is now 9.30 and none of my colleagues have bothered to show up yet. (My boss is away this week, so maybe that's why.)

The only other news I have is that the Oldham Coliseum sent me the most damning critique I've ever had, calling "Graffiti" "banal", my characters "shallow", the dialogue "stilted" and saying "there did not seem to be any point to this play." After that tirade, the last paragraph began "I do not want to put you off writing plays" (you could've fooled me) and (get this) "with practice you may be able to produce good plays in the future." I should put them in touch with Hampstead. What's interesting about this sort of thing, though, is that I have sent the same play to three other theatres, all of whom said the dialogue and characters were good (Soho said "endearing", which is perhaps going a bit far) but criticised various other aspects of it. I think this is why I'll never be any good at theatre stuff - it's too damn subjective.

Have a good day :-)

There is a model of San Pietro on my desk (actually, on my boss's desk, where I am sitting and having delusions of grandeur today). It started off pink, then was blue for a few months. Today it changed back to pink. Like some sort of tacky, plaster-based Global Hypercolour model... This fascinates me. I am easily amused :-)

Speaking of Rome, I am feeling smug to see that it's one of the best value European destinations over the bank holiday. F and I (if he has finished his dissertation, which I suspect he won't have done) were planning some kind of long weekend away, and, where we were hoping to try somewhere new, I'd quite like an excuse to get my ass back to Rome so I can fill my rucksack with more balsamic vingegar and olive oil and other such potential terror threats they probably won't allow on the plane.

The problem with books is that I like them too much. I am being very liberal in my throwing away of stuff I "don't need" ("need" is a relative concept; I'd argue books are a great necessity) so that we don't have so much to carry when we finally move in a few weeks. I have even been lovely and charitable and dumped all these books/videos/clothes on Camden High Street's various charity shops. The problem? I am buying more to replace them. Charity shop books in particular are good value - I bought Private Eye's "The Secret Diary of John Major, aged 47 and 3/4" for £1! I am reading it now (and would recommend it) despite the fact that I have six books in a pile in the corner of my room that I am intending to get through at some point.

My hallway was cleaned last week. Yes, I was shocked, too. We stood in what felt like the vast open (fridgeless) space of our hallway and marvelled. I don't think I've ever seen it clean before. Maybe it was deliberate, now that they've finally driven us into moving out.

My audience feedback from Start Night was delivered to my inbox today. I'm quite glad, partly because most of it is positive (and much of what isn't is somewhat pretentious or, more amusingly, misspelt) but also because if it wasn't for this I wouldn't have anything to blog.

Those of you who didn't see it will probably find this all a bit dull, but those of you who did may like to agree or disagree (particularly those who work in theatre.)

'Lovely. Want to hear/ see more! Almost could hear Susie crying out between the lines “why didn’t you want me?”

liked your use of silence. I also liked the use of the psychiatrist as a way of hearing Susie’s thoughts. I liked how you slowly unravelled the mother.

Beautiful. When it started, I feared we were going to have yet another tedious retread of old ground, but I was hooked very quickly. Dialogue and character were superb and bolstered by exceptional performances. I definitely want to see a whole play.

Good structure- allowing audience to share more private moments with Susie. Cared for characters. Some dialogue a bit clunky.

Enjoyable- at times I felt it could be the tiniest bit contrived- something that was avoided by the brilliance of the actress Georgina Rich. I felt it could have been more real – I felt Susan’s monologues about her Catholicism were real and I genuinely felt how it affected her. This was something that stopped a hackneyed subject feel like I’d seen it before.

A lot of very big ideas to try and cover but not sure from this extract whether would flesh out to full length. Writer’s explanation helped me.

More tension to drive the story and keep the drama tight. Some really good moments but too long and drawn out with some obvious anti-preaching about Catholicism. You could tighten this up and cut a lot of words out to get to the tension there. Interesting class clashes but sometimes a bit obvious- maybe put more into subtext- e.g. tea was too in your face would be nice to see more emotional depth to Maria.

A very touching piece that had a very strong emotional arc. The characters were well defined and the subtext really emphasised the rising conflict. My only negative point is that this scene runs too long which causes the audience to loose their attention in parts.

Touching at the end but dialogue seemed more like an exploration of ideas rather than real dialogue. Theatricality interesting (of counsellor) but could be explored more.

Became a bit circular at times. Needs simplifying after hearing the discussion of what book ends this segment. Whose play is it?

Theme a bit shop worn and it was a bit laboured, but it picked up a little when the Catholic aspect branched. But I was still a little bored and feel some light relief needed. Get rid of Counsellor, it could all be said to mother.

Maria only used the names ‘Susan’ once? I feel it could have been used as more a device to change the complexion of the relationship between them. Good use of lighting to change from Counsellor to Mum. Has Susie (in the play) got a strong sense of belonging? - The loneliness of estrangement is real for adoptees?

Found this quite moving. Found ‘guilt tripping’ and ‘doorstep’ a bit clumsy. Do we need the Counsellor? Could the boyfriend fit the bill instead? Some powerful moments.

Balance between counsellor and dialogue is well measured. Susie could benefit from a more reactive state- being a bit more prickly when Maria is short with her (for example.)

Maria very strong character. Would have been more nice to have Susie given an even harder time to get info from Maria. Really made her work very hard, push her edge of comfort.

Any chance of painful death for people who leave their mobiles on? Actors still too far apart. Makes me want a cup of tea. Why are the actors afraid to go near each other?

Tension is built up beautifully- you can really feel the awkwardness. Susie is really nicely realised- sweet and quirky and nervy. Not sure whether counsellor works- the dialogue is interesting and insightful, but breaks up the tension of the scene.

Very moving realistic dialogue well rounded characters.

Good characters- especially the mother. Liked the device of the therapist. Felt quite long- would have liked It to be funnier( though some funny one liners). Could do with some editing. Not sure about the development of the scene- what changed from the beginning to the end- wanted something more. Some lovely bits of Catholicism and use of ‘flower’ and the girls’ name.

Very moving and poignant piece. I would very much like to see the full version professionally staged. Quick-switch structure between Susie/mother and Susie/Counsellor a very effective device which served very well as the play’s driving force. Very well acted-congrats to actresses.'

As for adopted people, the "loneliness of estrangement" is, for this adopted person, anyway, utter bollocks. It's worth noting, though, that the woman who said that was the one who got all wound up by Maria's use, or lack of use, of Susie's name. The consensus seems to be to keep the counsellor. Most people liked it and thought it was very theatrical, so I'll tke the commenst from the few who didn't as personal opinion (it also makes more sense in the context of the whole play.)

Spent last week in Guernsey, getting sunburned, helping with children's beach games and generally dealing with the type of snmall-minded insular people you get on islands like that. Apologies to the couple of Guernsey people reading this - you are exempted from that last comment - but if I EVER mae any suggestion that I might want to move back there you are to stop me, by force if necessary. In related news, I did my Joni Mitchell act in a talent contest, and was beaten by a Sugarbabe, a belly dancer, and two drunks who leapt up and down in a seemingly spontaneous routine to the track of "I like the way you move", and who looked like one of the acts at the end of an episode of 'Phoenix Nights'.