not in the mood for blueberry pie

Oh, do you know, there is very little bookish to report tonight. I've been at work, and sleeping. Last night I had dinner all by myself in my favourite local Turkish restaurant, which once upon a time when I had more time I used to call my home from home - & there I spent a fine hour or more with some imam bayildi, bread, and 2 glasses of white wine, working on an essay. It's not a book review, and not commissioned, so it's a secret essay for now, because I will write it and then try to place it, and I can't disrupt my tiny new ideas. But I have hopes for it, if I can make it work the way I want it to.

I did the same at lunch time today, but not with nice food, but tomorrow of course I can't, because I will be at the bank, talking about my bank account yet again. I don't know how the bank employees do it: it is so boring.

So it's a new, virginal me lately (except for the coded reference to Richard Branson: what a bastard. He's appropriated a whole word of the English language! Shakeapeare, Milton, they gave us words - he's just taken one away.) - I've been writing and writing, except for when I'm working or sleeping. It's half term. My friends are mostly away, I think - I'm not sure, because no one's called me to say what they're doing (except for two of them, to both of whom many thanks!). Certainly Ms RS-D's phone isn't even ringing before it goes into voicemail. Mlle B is away. I can't be bothered to go to any poetry readings. I'm in a different zone. I think I have one new poem that's pretty good, and I'm reading lots of Ted Hughes (hmm, hence the strange mood, I hear you say - and I do think it will be a while before I can look at a sheep* in the same way again, after the dreadful shocks of Moortown Diary), and working on other things, and other poems, and dreaming a lot.

It's very strange with no kids.

I thought I might go see a movie tonight but there was literally nothing in London that I could bear the thought of going to. Not on my own, anyway, all the bloody, violent ones. And that Wong Kar Wai - his English début! (and what for, you might ask.) It just looks too painfully, unbelievably - well - just dreadful. God Almighty. I might have to do a whole blog post on it, but I won't see it. I'll have to write about it without having seen it, which of course Oscar Wilde would have said was the best way, and he didn't even know about this movie. My Blueberry Nights, how whimsical is that. Jesus. Bloody Norah, as you might say.**

And, no: before anyone says anything, it might not be better than I think without having seen it. Look at the cast! I don't even know what he could have been thinking of. Don't even get me started. Just do yourself a favour and rent In the Mood For Love.


* Warning: seriously. Dead lambs doesn't even begin to cover it.

** Oh! Delight! From the Guardian:

"If My Blueberry Nights is a love letter to US pop culture, it's also a valentine to its star. The film marks the acting debut of singer Norah Jones who headlines as Elizabeth, the self-styled "girl with a broken heart". Jilted by her New York boyfriend, Elizabeth lights out for territories in search of herself (or possibly some more blueberry pie). Along the way we get to see her smile, and cry, and pull an exquisite little frown that paints heartbreaking lines across that porcelain brow."

I wish I'd written that... Oh, but if I had, I'd have written it about Jude Law. And I can't wait till the Richard Curtis one comes out with Kenneth Branagh in it. Two Bores in a Boat. With a blonde girl called January.