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July 2010
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What is your favourite month of the year?
I ask this because I suddenly realise that I don’t like July. This is very unreasonable of me. It might be something to do with everybody’s tiredness and crossness half way through the year, and before holidays begin.
In the garden things are wonderful. I have cabbages, courgettes, peas, salad, raspberries, strawberries and broad beans to eat, and runner beans and French beans ready soon. A few potatoes, while waiting for the main crop, and some very early and unseasonal sprouting broccoli. I do not understand why it has spouted…
But I love my garden. The roses, the campanula, the honeysuckle, the foxgloves. My cottage is unfashionably small, but it has a lot of outdoor space, which is the way I prefer it; less cleaning more gardening.
I garden for 2 hours a day in the summer – an hour in the morning, early, and an hour in the evening before supper. That is like having a gardener two full days a week. But love and gardening have a lot in common – you need to do some every day, not make up for it once a week.
I have just been up in Manchester at Carol Ann Duffy’s first Children’s Book Festival. What a brilliant idea!
Kids love books because they love being read to, and gradually they come to feel their own confidence with words. I think we need to give them that, so that they can find books later. The idea that kids will find books later, if they want to, flies in the face of all research on habit-forming in early life. What our kids come to know early stays with them later.
That counts for good habits and bad.
That counts for liking fruit and veg and real food, and it counts for books.
All we need to do is give them a good start –but that is so hard to manage.
I am not sure that our new government in the UK understands that children cannot be treated as ‘free choice’ citizens, We had a disturbing announcement from the not very intelligent Andrew Lansley this week about kids and eating. The message was – don’t force good food down their throats – that would be patronising.
We all know that the Tories love big business and that big business loves the illusion of ‘choice.’ But as kids get fatter and adults more obese, what does free choice really mean?
Trans-fats cannot be processed by the body and they interfere with digestion and metabolism. Yet they are not outlawed in Britain, as they are, say, in Austria, and the Government has dismissed calls to ban them.
Trans-fats were first put into soaps and candles where they stop the product disintegrating. In 1911, Proctor and Gamble realised they could use them instead of pig lard in food. Trans-fats are widely used in processed foods – particularly sweetened shelf-life foods like cakes and biscuits.
Would you want to eat this muck? No.
But the UK government says its fine…
All right – so here is my big question – how has Tony Blair been awarded a peace prize?
Oh and it comes with another $100,000 to add to the £20,000,000, yes that is pounds twenty million, that he has estimated to have earned since standing down as Prime Minister.
Tony Blair and George Bush took the world into war with Iraq. Tony Blair had no mandate from the British people to go to war, nor did he have the necessary UN Resolution.
How do you get a peace prize for starting a war?
OK, so Kissinger got the Nobel peace prize…
OK, the world is crazy.
Why do we have a bunch of guys at the top of the table who reward each other massively for war and for failure?
There is phoney Tony with his peace prize. There are the BP execs taking their vast salaries. There are the bankers bailed out by the tax payer, all grabbing their bonuses again.
And over here we even have the England football team, who can’t score goals but still get by on a £100,000 a week… and let’s not even mention their defunct and expensive so-called manager, Fabio Capello
Rewarding war and failure is very odd…
I met a film producer this week and she told me that women directors have to try much harder to get their first break – which we all knew – but that even a good film won’t guarantee them another try. A failed film, in box office terms, will kick them out. Men, she said, usually give themselves another chance…
Interesting…
But if the world is hard on women, god knows we are hard on ourselves too.
A lot of people have asked me why I haven’t written a book for a while and the answer is that I didn’t have a book to write.
I had a terrible two years, really helped by writing the kids’ book The Battle of the Sun, and then I met Susie and had all the amazement and terror of a new person, and I was doing commissioned projects and journalism, as well as rebuilding a house, and now I have begun again.
I am writing the thing that is part memoir part manifesto – by no means an ordinary or straightforward ‘look-back’. And I am writing a Hammer Horror.
If that sounds bonkers it might be, but it is a very scary novella about the Lancashire Witches.
Some of you might remember that I wrote a novella called WEIGHT, for the Canongate Myth series. I loved doing it, though it was subject-specific, and I think the little book is a good one.
So when I was offered the Hammer, I decided to say Yes to see where it would take me….
And there is a novel…. But something weird has happened. I can’t write it on the computer, so I am getting a new old-fashioned typewriter and it will be like a note-book that clatters.
I am trying to make a non-web, non-app, off-line space. I seem to need that for the book.
And one thing I have learned about books over the last 25years is that you do what they say….
I am going to Mexico quite soon – not for long – but in a way to settle something in my head. About love, of course, because that is where everything begins and ends….
And women have often been sneered at for knowing that, but money and power and war are not more important or more real than love – infinitely less so it seems to me.
David Hockney once said a great thing about his daschunds when he was asked if they knew they were being painted. He said they were on a higher plane than art, because even art was only an expression of love – and dogs know about love.
Art is love in 3D.
Music is love that we can hear.
I don’t care if this sounds silly or sentimental – it isn’t, because love is such a tough, scary, challenging thing. And the older I get the more certain I am that love is the deepest mystery we can explore.
And we explore it though our work, through our relationships, though our attitudes, through our politics. It isn’t separate to life; it is life.
Oh and Tilda Swinton in the movie I AM LOVE… see it. 
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