Martin Amis, Eat Pray Love & Ed Miliband.

Week Ending 26th September 2010

Martin Amis speaking at the Ham & High Literary Festival was brilliant.  Well it would have been if I actually had the strength to have gone on Monday night.  Oh Mart, STILL haven’t seen you in the flesh after all these years of reading your work and bet you were a treat discussing your latest masterpiece The Pregnant Widow.  Being ill is NO fun at all – really, don’t catch this awful weather changing, why have I caught this, I have been wearing a scarf since August, malaise.  It’s about as much fun as swine flu and I was one of those unlucky bastards who caught it nearly a year ago to this day.  I did wonder why earlier this week that even as a lover of the early night, I was hitting the buffers by 9pm, rock and roll that ain’t!  By Thursday I was completely floored.

Not only did I miss the erudite Mr Amis this week but also Wanderlust, Nick Payne’s play about sex and intimacy at The Royal Court on Thursday night which has had fantastic reviews and held in the intimate surroundings of the top floor amphitheatre.  The two lucky architect friends who I gave the tickets to said it was excellent and since I had booked the tickets months ago, the whole production as usual with The Royal Court is a complete sell out, ho hum, maybe I will do the unthinkable and queue one evening.  One of the reasons of living in London rather than the country which increasingly becomes a distant memory even after living the first eighteen years of my life in the middle of nowhere is the absolute wealth of amazing treats and not all cost a fortune.  Why is it that men all have this romantic notion of the open spaces, the Labrador and being self sufficient and women with the exception of a weekend at Babington, are secretly perfectly content with pavements?

The one thing that being ill ensures is that you don’t crave a drink after a stressful day.  Those first sips like nectar are all but a distant memory when you’re ill.  In fact it is now two weeks since I’ve experienced a Tony Blair moment as he confessed in A Journey who hit the carafe after a grueling day at the coalface, rather than the bottle apparently and perhaps the odd cocktail.

Reading the bitchy comments of the fashionistas gathered at Alexander ‘Lee’ McQueen’s memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral earlier in the week was a little unfair.  Thank god for the likes of Daphne Guinness who looked amazing, even though she had a little trip on her vertiginous heels.  Hip hip hoorah for fabulous English women like her (R.I.P. Isabella Blow) who are fashion pioneers and go against the David Cameron grain of everyone aspiring to resemble Gap Yah in identikit Boden by way of Parsons Green.

On the subject of politics, David Miliband had the shocker of his life when little Ed became the victor of the Labour party leadership.  Far from being Red Ed, which is a convenient moniker for the startled rabbit looking new leader, David is the one in favour of ID cards, CCTV and mansion tax which all are repellent if Labour is to steal a march on the spatch cock coalition.  It remains to be seen how the Manchester conference goes this week and whether Milli Vanilli have a Cain and Abel moment.

As the week closes, what better to cheer oneself up than being taken to Pizza East followed by a film at Rich Mix on Bethnal Green Road – this time Eat, Pray, Love which was of course quite surface compared to the book of the same name, although, Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem gave an entertaining performance.  I am thinking of writing Eat, Pray, Love the paradoy, Drink, F**k, Sleep, which would make a much more interesting cinematic experience.  Rich Mix were in the throes of celebrating Black History in the main hall on the way out of the cinema and as I smiled at the Jamaican lady on the stall with a jig in my step I knew I was on the track back to fighting fit and a busy week ahead.